"Enūma Elish" and Priestly Mimesis: Elite Emulation in Nascent Judaism

2 The Cuna natives of Panama are a notable and interesting success in this regard, having preserved their distinctive identity into the twenty-first century in the face of European colonialism.3 A powerful image of their mimetic response to colonialism is found in Cuna dress: the men are inclined to wear European attire with coats and ties, while the women wear traditional dress, with their nose-rings, vivid and strikingly beautiful blouses, and head coverings. Suitable descriptions of the intertextual relationship might include "allusion," "imitation," "influence," and "echo," with the added dimension of deciding whether the weaker textual links-the so-called echoes-are deliberate or unconscious.51 would like to skirt the thorny detail of defining these terms by laying out the central claim of my study: that in some important respects, the Priestly Pentateuch is what Gerard Genette has called a "mimotext," which imitates specific Mesopotamian textual traditions for polemical reasons.6 Whether the evidence for this in certain cases is best described as an "allusion" by P, or "influence" on P, or an "echo" in P is not something that matters so much.