Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer
More Zero Sums
Silly Stories - Philology - Astronomy
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Silly Stories
Leaving out the context of Ancient Mesopotamian ancientness encourages us to look at the Bible as if it were entirely original — for instance, as if there were no previous Babylonian legal codes dealing with morality and shekels, or no previous Sumerian and Akkadian stories dealing with arks and cubits. Leaving out such a large chunk of Near Eastern history also allows the early Hebrews to look uncommonly advanced in their thinking. We get hints of this in the following passage from Enns’ Genesis for Normal People:
When the Babylonians told stories about angry gods conspiring against each other and cutting each other in half, the Israelites did not respond, “Oh, you Babylonians and your silly stories. Don’t you know all this talk about the gods is just plain primitive?! Don’t you know that there really is no solid structure above the earth keeping the water at bay? Don’t you know that the stars are actually billions of light-years away, that the earth is a round ball and revolves around the sun, and that the universe is expanding at an amazing rate? Really! I mean, get with it!”
Instead the Israelites used the view of the universe they shared with their contemporaries to make a unique declaration of faith: “Our God, regardless of what you might think of us, a captured people, is not weak. He is, in fact, stronger than all your gods put together.” Later, in the exodus story, we will see one other rallying cry for the Israelites: “Not only is he the ‘creator’, but he is the ‘deliverer’, too.”
Silly is a relative term when talking about the realm of religion, where virgins give birth, yogis levitate, saviours walk on water, bodhisattvas incarnate, seas part, etc. However strange the gods of Mesopotamia may seem, from a realistic, practical, and eventually scientific point of view, they are part of a very strange parade of figures no one has captured on camera. The notion Enns voices — mutedly through his fictionalized Jews — that Mesopotamians talking about their own gods is silly or primitive is on par with the notion that one’s own God is stronger than all the other gods put together. Neither makes any sense, not just because of Hinduism (I will return to this below), but also because a dogmatic insistence on any religious truth is absurd, when billions of religious people believe in different things and none of them is subject to verification. The insistence on monotheism could even work against Christianity, given that it contains a Trinity and a Mother of God, all of which might sound suspiciously polytheistic to Muslim iconoclasts.
It's also difficult to understand why the fictionalized Jews would imply that the Babylonians were somehow behind in a scientific or astronomical sense, given that Enns says "the Israelites used the view of the universe they shared with their contemporaries." The Jews and the Mesopotamians clearly had some unscientific notions about the Earth, yet in this context one should keep in mind that the Babylonians were the most advanced astronomers of their day:
A numbering system based on sixty was used, a sexagesimal system. This system simplified the calculating and recording of unusually great and small numbers. The modern practices of dividing a circle into 360 degrees, of 60 minutes each, began with the Sumerians. [ref. to "Time Division," Scientific American, 3 July 2019]
During the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Babylonian astronomers developed a new empirical approach to astronomy. They began studying and recording their belief system and philosophies dealing with an ideal nature of the universe and began employing an internal logic within their predictive planetary systems. This was an important contribution to astronomy and the philosophy of science, and some modern scholars have thus referred to this novel approach as the first scientific revolution [ref. to D. Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology, 2000]. This approach to astronomy was adopted and further developed in Greek and Hellenistic astrology. Classical Greek and Latin sources frequently use the term Chaldeans for the astronomers of Mesopotamia, who were considered as priest-scribes specializing in astrology and other forms of divination.
Only fragments of Babylonian astronomy have survived, consisting largely of contemporary clay tablets containing astronomical diaries, ephemerides and procedure texts, hence current knowledge of Babylonian planetary theory is in a fragmentary state [ref. to Asger Aaboe (1958), "On Babylonian Planetary Theories," Centaurus 5 (3–4): 209–277, 1958]. Nevertheless, the surviving fragments show that Babylonian astronomy was the first "successful attempt at giving a refined mathematical description of astronomical phenomena" and that "all subsequent varieties of scientific astronomy, in the Hellenistic world, in India, in Islam, and in the West … depend upon Babylonian astronomy in decisive and fundamental ways." [ref. to A. Aaboe, "Scientific Astronomy in Antiquity," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, May 2, 1974.] (from Wikipedia)
For agnostics or scholars of comparative religion, Enns' position in regard to Mesopotamian cosmogony is difficult to grasp or agree with. He downplays and downgrades the Mesopotamian narratives, and yet 1. he admits that the Jews borrowed deeply from the way the Mesopotamians saw the universe (in Genesis for Normal People he writes that "It’s really inconceivable that Genesis would open up with anything other than an ancient view of the world"), and 2. he praises the way the Jewish version gains in depth when seen in the context of Mesopotamia: the biblical "story is subtle, challenging, and artistically composed; the theology is deep and, against the ancient backdrop, staggering." It's possible he means that the Jewish version is staggering in its departure from (and/or its adaptation of) the earlier versions, yet this is a bit hard to see since he spends considerable time explaining the complex Ancient view of the cosmos.
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Philology
What makes Enns' downgrading of Mesopotamian cosmogony clear is what might make a philologist shudder: one can be nourished and strengthened by the roots of a tradition and then take a superior attitude to those roots. This is nothing new, however, since it's long been a staple of dogma in the three main Western religions: Abrahamic superiority resides in 1. its unique shift from polytheism to monotheism and 2. its innate superiority of monotheism over polytheism.
1. In the present Mesopotamian context, the first point ignores that Marduk too was in the process of becoming a supreme God. This raises the possibility that the Jews were following a larger trend already in motion. This possibility can be found, albeit briefly, in Akhenaten's 14th C. BC Egypt, where the sun-god Aten became the supreme and only God. This brief possibility becomes a possible trend when one looks eastward to Persia, which was adjacent to Mesopotamia and which used cuneiform script: Zoroaster’s Ahura-Mazda operates within a polytheistic context, yet he is the ‘uncreated’ sky-god Creator, he upholds truth, he battles the arch-fiend Ahriman, and he leads everyone toward a final redemptive scenario that anticipates Origen's universal redemption.
2. In the more general context, and in the specific context of the virtue of inclusivity Enns praises repeatedly in How the Bible Actually Works, the point about monotheistic superiority is deeply problematic. It omits that polytheistic cultures gave us Plato & Aristotle, Homer & Virgil, Socrates & Aurelius, Ovid & the Vedas, the Mahabharata & the Ramayana, the Renaissance, etc.
It also assumes three things that don’t really make sense: 1. that polytheism doesn't have its own subtleties and depths; 2. that the complex universe can't have a complex religious equivalent; and 3. that polytheism doesn't have unifying features. In terms of unifying features, one might note the spiritual energy sought by pantheists and mystics, Aurelius’ Stoic view of Nature and universal mind, and the transcendent Infinity of Brahman (in Hinduism) and the Absolute (in Buddhism). One might also note that the goal of mystical union or yoga is most pronounced in Hinduism, a religion in which one god or goddess often merges with the next, and where concepts like the Mother Goddess and Brahman take everything, literally everything, and see it in terms of Infinite Godhead.
(In terms of social or political unity, one might also note that it's rare for Hindus to start a crusade or jihad over which version of the Infinite is the one you choose to worship. I don't, however, want to put too fine a point on this last idea, since Hindus have insidious divisions of caste, theological disagreements, and also a recent trend toward politicization and religious intolerance.)
Moreover, the view that monotheism is inherently superior to monotheism relies on an absurd reduction of religions to a deity count, as in: Judaism - from many gods to 1 and only 1 God; Islam - from many gods to 1 and only 1, and we mean only 1 (and no icons); Christianity - 1 God, but also a Trinity comprised of a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, in addition to a Virgin Mary or deified Mother of God, archangels, hosts of angels, a devilish fallen angel, and quasi-deified saints; Buddhism - many deities but also zero, and a full void that is 1; Hinduism - at least a million deities, but also a 3-in-1 Trimurti (Brahman, Vishnu, & Shiva), a 2-in-1 duality (Shiva/Shakti, various versions of Visist-Advaita Vedanta or qualified non-dualism, etc.), and a completely non-dual 1 (Brahman). Again, in regard to Hinduism the concept of Brahman allows for a multitude of gods, philosophies, and religions, and yet all of these are subsumed and superseded by one Infinity. One of the subtleties involved in this form of polytheism is that the overarching concept of God or Brahman makes it impossible to insist that one tribe, one group, or one cultural, ethnic, historical, and/or geopolitical concept of God is the only one.
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Astronomy
Enns’ account of Hebrew astronomy is also difficult to understand, and seems to operate along the same zero-sum lines.
1 + -1
Remember in the first chapter where we mentioned that Genesis sometimes has a Babylonian feel to it? If Genesis was indeed shaped largely as a response to Israel’s trauma in Babylon, we shouldn’t be surprised to find hints of that here and there—with maybe a jab or two taken at their captors in the process. For example, Israel’s Babylonian captors were big on astrology, and the sun, moon, and stars might have been gods (though scholars are not certain about that). What is clear is that the heavenly bodies were thought to tell the future to those skilled enough to know how to read them. But for the Israelites, the heavenly bodies served no such function.
Instead they were “for signs and for seasons and for days and for years” (v. 14). That means they were passive agents that served God by marking time, not by predicting what is to come. In fact—though this takes us a bit from the focus of this book—the time that the heavenly bodies mark is not when winter begins or when it’s time to go to bed. They mark the time of Israel’s liturgical year. “Season” is the same word used in the Pentateuch to refer to the “appointed times” of Israel’s religious festivals, commanded by God (one example is Exodus 23:15). In other words, the heavenly bodies are put into place by God to keep track of how the Israelites are to worship him. Compared to what the Babylonians and other ancient peoples thought, Israel’s God knocked the heavenly bodies down to size.
What I understand from this is that the Babylonians had weird ideas about astrology (perhaps they saw stars as gods), and they used astronomy stupidly, to tell the future. The Hebrews on the other hand used astronomy intelligently, to mark the time of their liturgical services.
-1 + 1
There are at least three problems with this: 1. It’s the Babylonians who made the mathematical and astronomical advances, not the Jews (see the above long quote about the historical importance of Babylonian astronomy); 2. Predicting the future may sound odd yet prediction is a large part of how astronomical math works (they focused on “studying and recording their belief system and philosophies dealing with an ideal nature of the universe and began employing an internal logic within their predictive planetary systems”); and 3. even if we’re critical of the things Babylonians used astronomy to predict, it doesn’t mean that the Jewish uses were any better. They certainly weren’t any more universal, since they were used to predict their own festivals.
So, the cosmos is put in place to keep track of how the Jews are to worship their God. Israel’s God “knocked the heavenly bodies down to size” by making them serve a liturgical calendar. Does this make any astronomical sense? It seems, rather, another version of the Earth as the still centre of the universe, a notion that remains completely at odds with astronomy as we understand it from Copernicus to Hubble. That is, the same astronomy, the same mathematical study of the heavens that was born in Mesopotamia.
Wouldn’t it make sense to say that the biblical account has its merits, but isn’t necessarily better or more true than the Mesopotamian? In this way, the currents of the past could blend together, instead of fighting each other. In this way, 1 + 1 = 2.
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