Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer

The Flood

Borrowings - Arks

Borrowings

While the Jews and Christians were antagonistic to Mesopotamian civilization, I can think of a number of reasons why they were also deeply influenced by it. 

i. Many of our most basic concepts — such as numbers (base ten and base sixty, the length of a second, the degree of a circle, etc.), writing, legal codes, cities, and religion — take their earliest forms in Sumer, and are from there passed on to the civilizations of Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria. 

ii. The Semitic languages, including Hebrew (the language of the Jews), Arabic (the language of the Qur’an) and Aramaic (probably the language of Jesus), descend from Akkadian and Assyrian:  

While language may not determine the structure of religious belief, it has a deep influence on perception, feeling, thinking, and expression. Even if we disagree with a concept from a parent or sister language, we see this concept in terms of a very similar language structure. The articulation of our disagreement is likewise couched in the same nexus of language, thought, emotion, culture, and history.

iii. Jewish notions of law, so crucial to the writings attributed to Moses, appear to have Mesopotamian roots. If one believes that God gave the ten commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, one might wonder if God hadn’t given earlier commandments to Ur-Nammu in the 21st century BC and to Hammurabi in the 18th century BC. Even the phrase an eye for an eye is found in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. One overwhelmingly important fact is that these early Mesopotamian codes are extant, whereas we have no proof of equally remote Jewish legal codes. Here, for instance, is the 21st C. BC Code of Ur-Nammu from the Istanbul Archeological Museums, next to the 18th C. BC Code of Hammurabi from the Louvre:

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Arks

iv. Many ideas and stories in the Bible appear to be derived from Mesopotamia. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the story of Noah’s Ark. One big difference between the flood stories is that the Mesopotamian story always has a polytheistic context. Also, the Mesopotamian god Enlil doesn’t bring the flood because men are wicked but because they’re making too much noise. Yet the main structure and many of the details remain similar:

- humankind is faced with impending extermination by flood

- one man (Ziusudra in Sumerian, Utnapishtim in Akkadian/Babylonian) is warned to build a pitch-covered boat several stories high (Noah is warned by God directly, Utnapishtim is warned by the god Ea in a dream) 

- Utnapishtim and Noah send out birds (among these a dove and a raven) to see if there’s land

- the boat lands on a mountain (Nisir or Ararat)

- they offer sacrifices and are blessed

Some argue that the Mesopotamian versions corroborate the biblical narrative, yet they may also have the opposite effect by suggesting that the Jews borrowed this story A) without acknowledging its source, or B) without being aware of its source. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this complex area, yet I’d like to explore several reasons why the biblical version might be indebted to the Mesopotamian. I’ll couch these in terms of objections and counter-arguments.

One could object that the Mesopotamian and Jewish versions came from the same series of events but were transmitted separately, one in a polytheistic and another in a monotheistic context. Yet concrete evidence of Mesopotamian transmission goes back far earlier than any evidence of the Jewish story. The standard full version of the Epic of Gilgamesh includes the flood story in detail and was written at the end of the second millennium by the priest Sin-lique-unninni. This 12-tablet version of Gilgamesh combines and alters elements of previous versions. This version is also extant, that is, it still exists. It can be directly verified. Earlier versions of the same flood story can be found in the Akkadian Atra-Hasis and in the Sumerian Eridu Genesis, both of which can be found on fragments dating from about 1600 BC. There are also numerous cuneiform fragments which corroborate the popularity of the Gilgamesh and Flood stories, and many scholars believe that Gilgamesh was probably a real king who ruled in the early third millennium.

By contrast, most scholars agree that

1) The Bible was certainly written after the twelfth century BC. According to Brettler in the annotated 2018 New Oxford Bible, the first major version of the first five books appears around or immediately after the 586-538 BC Babylonian captivity.

2) There’s no historical or archaeological record of early biblical figures and events. The first mention of Israel seems to be the Merneptah Stele, c. 1208 BC.

3) The earliest extant biblical record can be found in the Dead Sea scrolls, which date from around 300 BC. 

In regard to 2) above (the lack of historical evidence for early biblical events) archaeologists, Assyriologists and Egyptologists haven’t found evidence of early biblical figures or events (by which I mean those found in the Torah or Pentateuch, i.e., in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The well-publicized theories of David Rohl, which try to match biblical and archaeological records, aren’t accepted by most scholars. Rohl tries to verify Jewish history by placing the exodus earlier in the second millennium or (more controversially) by shifting forward the dates of the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BC) and the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC).

My point here isn’t so much that the early events in the Torah lack historical evidence (which they seem to) as that the monotheistic flood narrative in the Torah lacks pre-Classical Jewish textual evidence. Even if one were to verify the story of the Exodus (within the conventional timeframe or by changing Egyptian chronology), this would still have little bearing on the origin of the Noah narrative.

As far as we can tell, Mesopotamian writers didn’t borrow from Jewish stories about Yahweh and Noah, yet the legendary Moses (the traditional author of the Torah) borrowed from the Mesopotamian story about Enlil and Utnapishtim. My question is less, Did Moses ever live in Egypt? and more, Why would Moses, brought up in Egypt, write like a Babylonian? Even if we dispense with the unlikely idea that Moses alone wrote the Torah, we’re still left with at least two questions: Why did the authors of the Torah borrow so deeply from Mesopotamian myth, especially the Flood myth? And why didn’t they acknowledge their borrowings? I write especially the Flood myth because they also borrowed a host of other things — Creation myths, legal codes, a power struggle of gods, astronomy, etc. — as I will argue throughout this chapter.

The short and most obvious answer is that Babylon was where the Jewish canon was structured, as in the previously quoted point made by Metzger: “In 586 BCE […] a large population of Judahites were deported and forced to live in the city of Babylon. There, they continued work on the earliest books of the Old Testament, augmenting, editing, and revising ancestral stories, and systemizing the religion that would later be called Judaism.”

Yet this doesn’t answer the question Why didn’t they acknowledge their borrowings? I can think of three reasons: i. they would naturally see their borrowings as self-evident at the time — but not later, after cuneiform’s eclipse (at which point they may have lost a clear sense of what exactly had been borrowed); ii. they saw the Mesopotamian religion as inferior and wanted to separate their religion from it; iii. they wanted to claim an originality for their theology, especially for their radical notion of monotheism.

In regard to the lack of early Jewish versions of the Bible stories, one could object that the Jews may have written on papyrus scrolls or parchment documents at a date much earlier than the 3rd century BC Dead Sea scrolls (the use of Egyptian papyrus and parchment goes back to the 26th and 24th centuries BC). These early writings may have decomposed while the more durable clay cuneiform tablets survived. This argument could also be applied to original Jewish accounts of the Flood that were handed down orally. Yet in either case we have no concrete proof and we have no outside corroborating evidence. If, in the future, archaeologists find a third millennium BC monotheistic version of the flood story deep beneath an Egyptian pyramid, or in some obscure sunken room of the famous library of Nineveh, then we could argue that the polytheistic story was a take on the monotheistic one. Yet so far it seems the other way around. 

This doesn’t mean that the extermination - warning - flood - boat - survival - bird - mountain - sacrifice - blessing story can’t have an even more distant source, oral or written. Yet given that we presently believe Mesopotamia to be the birthplace of writing, it’s unlikely that it would be written down in a language that pre-dated Sumerian.

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Next: The Exegete & the Philologist

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