llowing, the period of Hammurabi."
What does seem clear is that the existence of the Envma Elish text is consistent with the view of Max Weber, who studied the origins and development of various religious traditions, that overarching the creative human enterprise is the tendency toward making the universe increasingly thinkable. Myth and sacred scripture are a projection of this quality. But either secular or spiritual writing presupposes the rational faculty in the writer, which precedes the organization and reduction of thought. It is, indeed, the presumption of a tendency toward rationality that engages Weber's exploration of meaning in general and the basic social structure that provides a frame in which meanings can be explained. Rationality, also rationalism, is a concept central to Weber's explanation of how virtually all social structures of history have developed. For Weber, rationality is that invisible force, process, and (most important) attitude whereby a society moves away from impulses, superstition, and emotion that probably cannot be controlled by mankind and toward social structure and organization. When a rationalist attitude is at work, so is a practical response to what human capability cannot easily control. That does not mean religion cannot be irrational and disorderly, as the persistence of myth, philosophy, and mysticism shows. As Weber himself notes, many different "rational conclusions" (Weber 324) have been drawn by many different societies in the world. But the conceptual exercise of ordering experience by way of explanation, however mystical or practically implausible the result, is itself an index of the impulse toward rationalism.
The narrative content of Envma Elish provides a plausible explanation for the found condition of the universe in 20th-century BC Babylonia. It begins with a theogony that may serve as an example of the connection between spiritual generation of cultural belief and human e...