ted,
The verdure of the field he produced,
The lands, the marsh, and thicket,
The wild cow with her young, the young wild ox,
The ewe with her young, the sheep of the fold,
Parks and forests,
The goat and wild goat he brought forth.

The text at this point becomes defective, but we can still make out that
the clay as building material is created by Marduk, and that he
constructs houses and rears cities. Corresponding to the opening lines,
we may supply several lines as follows:

Houses he erected, cities he built,
Cities he built, dwellings he prepared,
Nippur he built, E-Kur he erected,
Erech he built, E-Anna he erected.

Here the break in the tablet begins.

The new points derived from this second version are, (_a_) the details
in the creation of the animal and plant world, (_b_) the mention of
Aruru as the mother of mankind, and (_c_) the inclusion of human culture
in the story of the 'beginnings.'

Before leaving the subject, a brief comparison of these two versions
with the opening chapters of Genesis is called for. That the Hebrew and
Babylonian traditions spring from a common source is so evident as to
require no further proof. The agreements are too close to be accidental.
At the same time, the variations in detail point to independent
elaboration of the traditions on the part of the Hebrews and
Babylonians.

A direct borrowing from the Babylonians has not taken place, and while
the Babylonian records are in all probabilities much older than the
Hebrew, the latter again contain elements, as Gunkel has shown, of a
more primitive character than the Babylonian production. This
relationship can only be satisfactorily explained on the assumption that
the Hebrews possessed the traditions upon which the Genesis narrative
rests long before the period of the Babylonian exile, when the story
appears, indeed, to have received its final and present shape. The
essential features of the Babylonian cosmology formed part of a stock of
traditions that Hebrews and Babylonians (and probably others) received
from some common source or, to put it more vaguely, held in common from
a period, the limits of which can no longer be determined. While the two
Babylonian versions agree in the main, embodying the same general
traditions regarding the creation of the heavenly bodies and containing
the same general conception of an evolution in the world from confusion
and caprice to order, and the establishment o