Of the three options for the similarities between Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 and Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Genesis, the option that seems the most plausible is option number three. The first option, that Enuma Elish is based off of Genesis, has nothing to back it up other than one man's desire for it to be so. That effectively cancels it out as a realistic possibility. The second option, the exact opposite, seems more realistic. To back it up is the fact that there have been tablets containing parts of Enuma Elish conclusively dated to before 1,000 B.C. (Heidel 13), while the earliest writings believed to be part of the Bible are dated shortly after 1,000 B.C.E. (Harris 3)¹. But this theory does not explain the vast differences that separate the Bible from Enuma Elish.
A preexisting text that contributed to both the Bible and Enuma Elish seems to be
a logical deduction, satisfactorily accounting for both similarities and disparities. In Enuma Elish, light was created before there were celestial bodies to produce the lights (Tablet I:38). In the Bible, God created light, which separated night from day (Gen. 1:3-5). Three days later, he created the sun, moon and stars to produce light (Gen. 1:14-19). It would be too much of a coincidence to believe that two such peculiar and specific details could spring up in neighboring cultures without there being a single cause, i.e. an earlier text with the same occurrence. There are also irreconcilable differences between the texts. In Enuma Elish, there are a multitude of gods (Tablet 1:3-4, 10, 12, 14-16, 78, 81). In Genesis, however, there is only one God (Gen. 1:1-2). The difference in such fundamental beliefs sets the two works apart so that the first two options are all but impossible, leaving the third as the only logical choice.
¹Harris' B.C.E. is equivalent to Heidel's B.C.