of “matrix”) that is aqueous in character; it starts with “the waters” as the generative matrix of things-to-be, things-to-come.
We may trace things even farther back. Tehom, the Hebrew word for “deep [waters],” itself stems from Tiamat, the Mesopotamian proper name for that primordial oceanic force figuring at the very beginning of the Enuma Elish, a tale of creation that predates the reign of Hammurabi (ca. 1900 B.C.). Tiamat is in place as an elemental matrix from time immemorial, and therefore creation must begin with her antecedent and massive presence.
When there was no heaven,
no earth, no height, no depth, no name,
when Apsu was alone,
the sweet water, the first begetter; and Tiamat
the bitter water, and that
return to the womb, her Mummu,
When there were no gods—
When sweet and bitter
mingled together, no reed was plaited, no rushes
muddied the water,
the gods were nameless, natureless, futureless, then
from Apsu and Tiamat
in the waters gods were created, in the waters
silt precipitated.2
Unlike Genesis, the Babylonian text does not mention earth, not even an earth “without form and void.” Nor do we find any gods—certainly not “God,” or Yahweh—much less any words by which a god could summon up creation. In this nameless scene, no one says “Let there be light.”
On the other hand (and here in contrast with Hesiod’s Theogony),3 in the Enuma Elish there is no chaos to start with, nor is there any primal separation between heaven and earth. All that is present is water: two kinds of water, salt and fresh, “Tiamat” and “Apsu.” Even Mummu, the originary mist, is aqueous. All begins with/in water. The gods themselves are created from it: creation occurs without creators. Instead of arising from a decisive act of scission, creation takes place with the imperceptible mixing of waters; everything begins with the merging of two regions of water in an elemental commixture. For Apsu and Tiamat are less the names of gods than of primeval places; they are cosmogonic place-names. “Bitter water” is one kind of place and “sweet water” another kind of place. When they merge, they create a common place—a matrix—for more particular places, including the places of particular gods.
The silty mass precipitated in the intermixed waters is the first definite place to emerge from the Apsu-Tiamat matrix, and it brings with it the naming of the first four gods. Place and name are here coeval.
Lahmu and Lahamu,
were named; they were not yet old,
not yet grown tall
When Anshar and Kishar overtook them both,
the lines of sky and earth
stretched where horizons meet to separate
cloud from silt.4
From the place of silt, “primeval sediment,”5 comes the separation of earth and sky. Lahmu and Lahamu, barely distinguishable from each other as names (except insofar as the former is male, the latter female), are overtaken by the more distinctly differentiated figures of Anshar and Kishar, gods of the horizons of sky and earth, respectively. The comparatively belated distinction of earth from sky constitutes separation between heaven and earth that we have observed elsewhere—most notably in Genesis, where God “separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.” Unlike the Old Testament account, however, the Enuma Elish explicitly builds the feature of horizon lines into the proper names Anshar and Kishar, remarking oxymoronically that these gods are found “where horizons meet to separate cloud from silt.” The oxymoron is merited: every horizon at once conjoins and separates. In particular, the horizon at land’s end both holds earth and sky together as two contiguous domains of the same surrounding space and teases them apart as two conclusively different regions.
That Anshar and Kishar are indeed decisively different places is confirmed by the fact that the immediately following generations replicate the earth/sky distinction that these two gods embody. Ami, son of Anshar, is the god of “empty heaven,” and he begets Nudimmud-Ea, god of sweet waters and of a wisdom that is “wider than heaven’s horizon.”6 Nudimmud-Ea in turn slays his aqueous ancestor Apsu when the latter schemes with Tiamat to destroy the clamorous gods who have been born to them. In so doing, Ea “sounded the coil of chaos and against it devised the artifice of the universe.”7 Then, in an action that would not have surprised the Freud of Totem and Taboo, Nudimmud-Ea builds a memorial to Apsu.
When Ea had bound Apsu, he killed him. . . . Now that his triumph was completed, in deep peace he rested, in his holy palace Ea slept. Over the abyss, the distance, he built his house and shrine and there magnificently he lived with his wife Damkina.8
The “artifice of the universe” here appears in the form of Ea’s palace-shrine, the first constructed dwelling place. The construction itself takes place over an abyss, and by this very fact it is a memorial to Apsu: apsu is the Semitic equivalent of Sumerian abzu, signifying “deep abyss,” “ocean,” and “outermost limit.” To build over an abyss is not only to create cosmos out of chaos. It is to bring constructed or “devised” place out of an unconstructed material matrix, and thereby to memorialize the matrix itself.9
It is out of this same abyssal matrix that Marduk, the ultimate architect of creation and the nemesis of Tiamat, is born from Ea and Damkina.
In that room, at the point of decision where what is to come is predetermined, he was conceived, the most sagacious, the one from the first most absolute in action.
In the deep abyss he was conceived, Marduk was made in the heart of the apsu, Marduk was created in the heart of the holy apsu.10
To be conceived in the abyss is to be generated in the matrix of creation—“in that room” where “what is to come is predetermined.” The depth of this matricial abyss is resonant with the depth of Tiamat, the depth of her womb (she is continually bringing forth new gods and monsters) and the depth of her oceanic being (Tiamat means literally “primeval waters,” including stretches of water, sea, or lake). “The coil of Tiamat,” the Sumerian gods admit, “is too deep for us to fathom.”11
It is precisely because Tiamat’s coil—her troublesome tumult—is too deep to fathom that Marduk must rise up against her. For Marduk can only deal with measurable depth. His confrontation with Tiamat is thus foredoomed: their difference is literally “cosmic.” The confrontation itself comes when “he surveyed her scanning the Deep.”12 He surveys her—makes her into an object of conquest—while she is embroiled in scanning something that never can become an object and with which she is ultimately identified. Precisely as an amorphous nonobject, that is, as herself the Deep, Tiamat can be conquered in a cosmomachia wherein the architectonic triumphs over the unstructured and the mastery of the matrix is asserted. If Ea is the first architect in this cosmogony—“archi-tect” signifying “first builder”—Marduk is the
