Genesis 1 was probably written in Babylon, not at the beginning
Ask where the Bible's first chapter comes from, and the natural guess is the beginning. Most scholars think it comes from near the catastrophe instead: written in Babylon, during the exile, by priests a long way from home.
Babylon told its own creation story, and the exiles heard it everywhere. In that telling, the world begins with gods at war, and the sky and earth are built from the body of a slain goddess. It was civic religion, recited at the new year festival, in the shadow of the greatest skyline anyone had ever seen.
Read Genesis 1 against that backdrop and it starts to sound like an answer. No battle. No rival gods. No struggle at all. One voice speaks, and there is light, and the world arrives in tidy, orderly days, with humans made in God's own image rather than as servants of the gods. Written under that skyline, the chapter reads less like a science lesson and more like quiet defiance.
Where to see it: read Genesis 1 and notice what is missing: no fight, no rivals, no chaos monster. Then look at verse 2 — the Hebrew word for "the deep," tehom, is related to the name of Tiamat, the sea goddess slain in Babylon’s epic. The old story is there, disarmed, in a single word.
Sources
- Exilic dating of the Priestly accountthe mainstream view
- Enuma Elishthe Babylonian creation epic; the Genesis 1 comparison is standard in the field
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