Tiamat

“Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him. He drove in the evil wind so that she could not close her lips. The raging winds filled her belly; her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.” — Enuma Elish IV

Tiamat is arguably the single most important entity for understanding the biblical creation narrative, because she never truly disappeared from it. The Hebrew word tehom (“the deep”) in Genesis 1:2 — “darkness was upon the face of the deep” — is a direct linguistic cognate of Tiamat (Enuma Elish I-IV; Genesis 1:2). In the Enuma Elish, she is the salt-sea personified: primordial, feminine, fertile, and terrifying. She births the gods from her union with Apsu (freshwater), but when her children grow rowdy and murder Apsu, she raises an army of monsters — serpents, dragons, the mushussu, scorpion-men — and appoints Kingu as her general (Enuma Elish I). Marduk defeats her and creates the cosmos from her corpse (Enuma Elish IV). This “Chaoskampf” (chaos-battle) motif is the backbone of the Bible’s own monster-slaying passages: Leviathan (Ps 74:14, Isa 27:1), Rahab (Isa 51:9, Job 26:12), and the Dragon of Revelation 12. Tiamat is the mother of all biblical sea monsters (Enuma Elish; Psalm 74:14).