Dr. Dylan Johnson

So just as in the Eden narrative that this river springs up, however it forms.

Yes, yes.

And there, it's very explicit that the gods have to do this toil.

That is their responsibility.

They get angry.

They're about to cause a revolt until this older generation of gods says, well, why don't we just create somebody else to take over the toil?

Of course, which is exactly what the man does in the biblical narrative.

And so too, in the Atrahasis story, they create humanity for the purpose of doing the toil of the gods.

Tupshariku in Akkadian.

So it's a pretty bleak existence from the perspective of Mesopotamians.

What's the purpose of existence?

To toil, to work.

Kind of true though, isn't it?

So there's those similarities, very obvious.

The important point there being that all of humanity is created at the same time.

We have some essence of the gods within us, blood in the Mesopotamian tradition, breath in the biblical tradition.

No differentiation between gender though in the Mesopotamian.

It's all humanity is created all at once.

And the parallels don't stop there, but it's probably better to shift to a different narrative when we start to talk about kind of the second stage of creation.

So once we exist in the biblical narrative, the next stage is gaining consciousness, becoming that kind of human.