Poetry is built upon two seemingly contradictory literary foundations; one of density or compactness, as the German word Dichtung well signifies, and the other of repetition. A poet repeats a word, phrase or motif to condense ideas into a small space.

My purpose in this paper is to suggest that there was in the Ancient Near East a literary convention of telling the story of the origin of mankind in a doublet. The first part of the story relates the creation of mankind in more general and abstract terms, whereas the second part of the story narrates it in more specific and concrete terms. The technique of bringing the two independent parts together into a unified narrative is quite similar to the way in which a bicolon in poetry is composed, namely, by the juxtaposition of two similar materials according to the principle of parallelism of the members. The difference is in the quantity of literary material. For this purpose, I would like to present three examples. A synoptic outline of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Hebrew stories is as follows:

The Sumerian story, Enki and Ninmah, describes the creation of man in two parts. These two parts of the story are parallel, being analogous to the two lines of a bicolon. If we label the members of this parallelism in respect to the key motifs of creation as,

A = Gods

B = Creation

C = Mankind

D = Decreeing of fate

E = Prescription of work to mankind,