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351 24 / Ecology in a Biblical Perspective 2000 We have become accustomed, in both Judaism and Christianity, to attribute to the Bible the origin of everything good and evil. Needless to say, such an attitude has no basis in fact: the world was not a barren wasteland before the writings of the Bible. Nevertheless, it has become the conceit of the Western religious tradition to imagine that the Bible came to bring light to those in utter darkness and to write God’s word on the tabula rasa of humankind. It should therefore not be surprising that ever since the publication of Lynn White Jr.’s seminal article,1 the Bible, in particular the Hebrew Bible, has stood accused of teaching us to kill the earth. White’s article has been refuted hundreds of times on many different grounds, not the least of which are the many articles showing that the Bible simply doesn’t support the “conquest of nature” theology that was imposed upon it a few hundred years ago.2 Despite all the refutation, it remains constantly cited whenever people once again discover that there is an earth and that the Bible has given us some problems with it. THE BABYLONIAN CREATION STORY I would like to take a different path, and tell a story from prebiblical ancient Babylonia that gives us a good indication of what a prebiblical Near Eastern view of the relationship of God and the earth was like. The story has a long history. Our copy was written around 1550 B.C.E. This copy is probably not the original composition, for the copyist tells us that he is a junior scribe.3 The story had at least a thousand-year history and we find tablets from a thousand years later that contain parts or all of this text, which we call the human Atrahasis epic, and they called, “When the gods act as humans.” 352 Theologies I The story begins when there was an earth, but before the creation of humankind. It is a primordial history of humankind, and tells us of the defining characteristics of that prehuman world: the gods had to work. They had to work because they had to eat, and since this text was written in Iraq, the work that they engaged in was digging irrigation ditches. Seven gods seized power and became the administrators, and everybody else worked at backbreaking labor for a very long time. They were, of course, gods: the irrigation ditches that they produced were the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and the dirt from the excavation piled up as the mountains of Iran. But even for gods, this was a lot of work, and they got very tired of it. One day, one of the gods (whose name is not given)4 instigates the others and calls them to strike, and the gods decide they do not want to work anymore; they are going to create a disturbance. In the middle of the night, they set fire to their pickaxes and their spades, and they march to surround the palace of the chief administrator, the god Enlil. The watchman sees them and rouses the vizier; the vizier rouses Enlil, and he immediately wants to set the defense and defeat these rabblerousers . The vizier halts him, reminding him that “these are your sons.” They call a council of the seven power wielders. Anu, the god of heaven, comes down and the god of the subterranean world, the wise god Enki, comes up, and they decide that they need to find out what is happening and why the gods are doing this. One can imagine this story as an early D. W. Griffith movie, or better , a Pete Seeger song, because when the council tells Enlil to find out what is happening, he directs his servant to find out who started it. But when the servant goes and asks who proclaimed this rebellion, who started this revolt, then (to the strains of “Solidarity Forever”) all the gods answer, “We all did, every one of us declared rebellion.” When this word is brought back, Enlil, the very personification of power, says, in effect, “Well, we gotta break the strike, let’s just go in and mash a few heads and set an example of our power.” The heaven god, Anu, admonishes that the council has been hearing the worker gods groaning and muttering in the pits for a long time and that they should find a solution to...

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