Was the Bible copied from ancient texts? In this live stream, Billy Carson argues that it was: the opening chapters of Genesis, he says, reuse and lightly rework stories first written on Sumerian and Babylonian clay tablets. He compares the creation account with the Enuma Elish, Noah's flood with the Sumerian flood story and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Cain and Abel with the Sumerian debate poems, in the first part of a planned four-part series.
The question matters to believers and skeptics alike, because the parallels are real and have been debated since the nineteenth century. What is contested is what they mean. Carson calls the borrowing plagiarism and reads the tablets as a record of real events; most historians see a shared literary world that the biblical writers knew, drew on and answered.
What the video covers
The premise (from about 4:50)
Carson frames the series as a source study: he reads from a slide deck built, he says, on mainstream academic sources, so viewers can check each claim. This episode covers the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh and a lesser-known group of Sumerian tablets he calls the debates, which he connects with Cain and Abel.
Religion, fear and spirituality (from about 10:00)
Before the texts, Carson explains why the question matters to him. He argues that much religious practice is driven by fear of eternal punishment rather than love, and says his study of ancient texts convinced him that "heaven and hell is a state of mind."
Sumer, polytheism and Egypt (from about 28:10)
Carson dates Sumerian civilization to about 4500 BCE and argues that its stories are far older than the tablets, since older copies of the same stories keep turning up. He ties the popular belief in a 6,000-year-old Earth to the age of the Sumerian records. The Sumerians were polytheists; the biblical tradition became monotheistic. To explain that shift he turns to Egypt: the pharaoh Akhenaten, at the urging, he says, of Amun Ra, launched a one-god religion, had other gods' images defaced and was driven out with a large following. In his opinion Akhenaten was most likely Moses. He adds that the pyramid builders were paid workers, not slaves.
The Enuma Elish and Genesis 1 (from about 36:15)
Carson reads the epic's opening lines, in which heaven and earth are not yet named and the primeval Apsu and Tiamat mingle their waters before any god exists. He gives his own reading of Tiamat as a water-bearing planet destroyed in a collision, its remains forming the asteroid belt and a fragment re-forming as Earth.
The parallels he walks through are concrete. Both accounts begin in watery chaos, and the Hebrew word for the deep in Genesis 1:2, tehom, is related to the name Tiamat. Both God and Marduk create by ordering chaos rather than from nothing, separate the upper and lower waters and set lights in the sky. Genesis unfolds over seven days and the Enuma Elish over seven tablets, with humans created on the sixth day and in the sixth tablet. The differences matter too: God makes humans in the divine image to care for the earth, while Marduk has them made from the blood of a slain god to do the gods' work. "Somebody took the story from the ancient tablet and they began to remix a little bit," Carson concludes.
He then turns to Babylon. Marduk names his city Bab-ili, "gate of the gods," and Carson links its ziggurat to the Tower of Babel. He identifies the God of that episode with Enlil. He also claims an older version of the epic named Nibiru where later copies name Marduk.
Gilgamesh, the Eridu Genesis and the flood (from about 44:10)
Carson describes the Noah story as a small part of the much larger Epic of Gilgamesh and reads from the Sumerian flood account known as the Eridu Genesis. There the gods decide to destroy humanity, and Enki, defying them, warns the hero Ziusudra, whom Carson equates with Noah, to build a boat. He cites the Ark Tablet as describing a round vessel and says its instructions called for local livestock and seed, not a pair of every animal on Earth.
In Genesis a single God decides on the flood and then promises never to repeat it; in the Mesopotamian accounts as Carson tells them, several gods decide, some plead against it, and they weep over the destruction. Ziusudra is granted lasting life, which Carson reads as a greatly extended lifespan, while Noah stays mortal.
The debates and Cain and Abel (from about 53:40)
The third comparison uses the Sumerian disputation poems. In the Debate between Sheep and Grain, the sky god An creates the goddesses Lahar (sheep) and Ashnan (grain), who quarrel over whose gift matters more until Enki and Enlil declare Ashnan the winner. In the Debate between Summer and Winter, the brothers Emesh and Enten, one tied to vegetation and the other to livestock, argue until Enlil settles the matter and they reconcile.
Carson sets these beside Genesis 4:1–16, where the farmer Cain kills the shepherd Abel after God favours Abel's offering, and the brothers never reconcile. He points to Cain's fear that others will kill him as evidence that "Adam and Eve were not the first people on this planet," and retells his reading of Adam as the Adamu, a genetically engineered first man, with Enki as the serpent who gave humans knowledge. That reading is set against the texts in [Who Were the Anunnaki?](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory).
Wrapping up part one (from about 59:05)
Carson summarizes: the oldest tablets date to around 2300 BCE and the Genesis chapters he compared are largely remixed from them. Knowing this matters, he argues, because history runs in cycles and "the past is prologue." Later episodes will bring in the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead, the Mahabharata, the Vedas and the Emerald Tablets.
Key takeaways
- Carson argues that the early chapters of Genesis rework older Mesopotamian stories rather than recording original revelation.
- He matches Genesis 1 with the Enuma Elish point by point: watery chaos, tehom and Tiamat, divided waters, lights in the sky, and seven days against seven tablets.
- He equates Noah with the Sumerian flood hero Ziusudra and cites the Ark Tablet's round vessel as an older version of the ark.
- He reads the Sumerian debate poems as an earlier form of the rivalry between Cain and Abel.
- His central interpretive move is to read the tablets as history about the Anunnaki, not as myth.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position is that the similarities are too many and too specific to be coincidence. In his view the Torah drew on Sumerian sources, its editors reshaped a polytheistic story into a monotheistic one, and the tablets preserve the older, more accurate version. He reads the gods of those texts as the Anunnaki, real beings who ruled early humanity, and presents the series as an invitation to check his work: "I always bring the receipts and tell you my sources that way you can go research for yourself."
The texts behind each step are covered in [the Enuma Elish pillar](/the-enuma-elish-explained-seven-tablets-of-creation), [the Epic of Gilgamesh pillar](/the-epic-of-gilgamesh-explained-the-story-the-flood-tablet-and-why-it-matters) and [the Sumerian tablets pillar](/the-sumerian-tablets-explained-what-they-are-and-what-they-say).
What mainstream scholarship says
Scholars agree the parallels are real but do not describe them as verbatim copying. The consensus is that Genesis belongs to a shared Ancient Near Eastern literary tradition, with common motifs of creation from watery chaos, a great flood and law codes (the Laws of Hammurabi closely parallel parts of Exodus 21–23). Most historians date the writing of Genesis to the first millennium BCE, long after the Mesopotamian texts, and see its authors writing in dialogue with them, reusing familiar material while recasting it: Genesis 1 calls the sun and moon simply lights, not gods. Tehom and Tiamat are generally treated as cognates from a common Semitic root, and Alexander Heidel's The Babylonian Genesis (1942) argued against direct dependence on the Enuma Elish.
The flood is where the link is clearest. In 1872 George Smith, reading tablets from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, recognised Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh as a flood story complete with a boat, a mountain landing and birds sent out to find dry land. The older Atrahasis epic, edited by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard in 1969, is where the gods send the flood because human noise disturbs them, the motive Carson attributes to Gilgamesh. Irving Finkel, who translated the Ark Tablet, describes a giant round coracle, but his reading also has the animals boarding "two by two."
Several other claims fall outside the consensus. Egyptologists record that Akhenaten promoted the sun disc Aten and had Amun's name erased, and the Akhenaten–Moses idea goes back to Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939). The 6,000-year age of the Earth comes from biblical genealogies, such as Archbishop Ussher's 1650 chronology, not Sumerian dating. In the Enuma Elish, Nibiru is one of Marduk's fifty names, and the planetary reading of Tiamat comes from Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976). Carson's point that the pyramid builders were paid workers does match excavations of the Giza workers' settlement.
Watch, read and go deeper
The audio edition is on the podcast episode page. For the source texts, start with [the Enuma Elish pillar](/the-enuma-elish-explained-seven-tablets-of-creation) for the creation epic and [the Epic of Gilgamesh pillar](/the-epic-of-gilgamesh-explained-the-story-the-flood-tablet-and-why-it-matters) for the flood tablet. [The Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki) gathers Carson's wider work on the Sumerian gods.
Frequently asked questions
Was the Bible copied from the Epic of Gilgamesh?
Not word for word. The flood story in Genesis 6–9 shares a run of details with Tablet XI of Gilgamesh and the older Atrahasis epic, including a divine warning, a boat sealed with pitch and birds sent out to find land. Most scholars see Genesis reworking a widely known Mesopotamian story; Billy Carson argues it was copied and remixed.
What is the Enuma Elish and how is it like Genesis?
The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation epic, written on seven tablets, in which Marduk defeats Tiamat and builds the world from her body. Like Genesis 1, it begins in watery chaos, separates the upper and lower waters, sets lights in the sky and creates humans. Unlike Genesis, it is a story of conflict among many gods.
Who is Ziusudra?
Ziusudra is the hero of the Sumerian flood story often called the Eridu Genesis. Warned by the god Enki, he builds a boat, survives the flood and is granted eternal life. He corresponds to Atrahasis in the Akkadian epic, Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh and Noah in Genesis.
Is there a Sumerian version of Cain and Abel?
Not directly, but Sumerian disputation poems such as the Debate between Sheep and Grain and the Debate between Summer and Winter stage rivalries between farming and herding. Billy Carson reads them as forerunners of Cain and Abel; scholars treat the farmer-versus-shepherd theme as a shared motif rather than a single source.
Sources mentioned
Carson reads from the Enuma Elish (his opening lines follow L. W. King's 1902 translation, The Seven Tablets of Creation), the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Eridu Genesis, the Ark Tablet and the Sumerian disputations between Sheep and Grain and between Summer and Winter, alongside Genesis 1, 4 and the flood and Babel chapters. He names the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Mahabharata, the Vedas and the Emerald Tablets for later episodes. Further reading: George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876); W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (1969); Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah (2014).
