Mark S. answered • 10/04/21
Seminary graduate, adjunct professor of religion, pastor 18+ years
The religions of the Ancient Near East all had an impact in Judaism in ways both great and small.
Some of the impact was superficial: for example, the names of the months in Hebrew and used in Judaism to this day are of Babylonian origin.
In other ways, the impacts are more substantive. The concept of the resurrection of the dead, which was embraced by Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism and subsequently by Christianity, is from Zoroastrianism. Likewise, the notion of an end-times conflagration between good and evil found in Jewish apocalyptic texts like the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Enoch, is heavily influenced by Zoroastrian thought and its dualism between good and evil.
Other ways are visible, but less clearly understood. The name of God found in many Israelite names—El—is the name of a Canaanite deity. That this chief Canaanite god should lend his name to the people Isra-El who worship a God named Y-h-w-h is surprising. This suggests an ancient connection between pre-Israelite religion and that of the Canaanites.
But perhaps some of the most important influence by ancient religion on Judaism is more subtle. Babylonian religion has proved influential in ways that are not as apparent on the surface.
The Babylonian creation myth involves the god Marduk overthrowing his sea-serpent mother Tiamat, slaying her and building the dome of heaven and the surface of the earth out of her corpse, which he has cut in two. He takes the blood of her consort Kingu and uses it to fashion a slave race that will serve the gods so that the gods may be "at ease." Later in the creation epic, one of the gods takes offense at something that Ishtar said in the council of the gods and decides to take revenge by drowning humanity in a world-ending flood. The god Ea tips off Utnapishtim who builds a large box in which he shelters his family and some animals and survives the flood.
These two stories were enormously influential on the Jews who were in exile in Babylon and the Book of Genesis, which came into final form after the Exile, bears the imprint of that exile influence. Genesis, too, opens up with a deity conquering watery chaos, although unlike the Babylonian epic, wherein the world is created through violence, in the Jewish telling, God subdues the great deep (Tehom, akin to Tiamat?) through the power of his speech: "Let there be light... let the waters be separated from the waters..." Further, God creates humanity not for bondage but to be the "image of God" in the creation as divine vice-regent.
In the Hebrew telling of the flood narrative, what had been the consequence of the fickleness of the gods is now presented as the consequence of human immorality. It was because of lawlessness, injustice, and violence that the world was flooded, making clear that the Hebrew God is a God who seeks right conduct and justice from the people.
Thus, the Babylonian religion has had an enormous impact on the Jewish faith, in that it provided a narrative structure and a foil for the values of ethical monotheism. Judaism was able to adapt Babylonian myth and reformulate it, both as critique of Babylonian religion, but also as an opportunity to present a starkly different portrait of the divine and of humanity's role in the cosmos.
