Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
Exploring Genesis
The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
Staff for this book:
Robin Ngo, Megan Sauter, Noah Wiener and Glenn J. Corbett – Editors
Robert Bronder – Designer
Susan Laden – Publisher
© 2013
Biblical Archaeology Society
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Cover Image: De Agostini Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library.
© 2013 Biblical Archaeology Society
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Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
About the Biblical Archaeology Society
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Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
Learn More about Genesis with the Biblical
Archaeology Society DVD
Discovering Genesis:
and the Origins of the Biblical World
The Book of Genesis (or Bereshit in the Hebrew Bible) is a fascinating account of
ancient Israel’s earliest traditions regarding both its origins as a people and the
origins of the natural and human world it experienced. In the four-part study course
Discovering Genesis, the late David Neiman, professor of Jewish theology at
Boston College, expertly guides you through the book’s first 11 chapters—from the
story of creation to the Tower of Babel—to examine how the biblical writers grappled
with the fundamental questions and mysteries of the shared human experience:
Where do we come from? Who are we? What makes us different? How did civilization
come about? Why do we die? Drawing on recent findings in biblical studies, ancient
history and archaeology, Dr. Neiman also reveals the cultural, historical and linguistic
context in which the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah and the
Flood were originally written and understood.
Lectures:
The Polemic Language of Genesis
The Garden of Eden
The Genealogies of Genesis
The Flood and the Sons of Noah
Special Features:
Easy-to-follow lectures, illustrated with informative slides, helpful maps, stunning photographs and
explanatory video.
Throughout, Neiman reads and translates passages in Genesis from the original Hebrew.
Dr. David Neiman (1921–2004) was professor of Jewish theology at Boston College and specialized in a
broad range of fields, including archaeology, biblical studies, Jewish history and Catholic-Jewish relations.
He also organized Boston College’s Institute of Biblical Archeology and participated in nearly a dozen
archaeological excavations in Israel. He was the author of Domestic Relations in Antiquity (Little Acorns
Press, 1994) as well as a commentary and selected translation of the Book of Job (Massada, 1972). He also
wrote several important articles for the Encyclopedia Judaica. His lectures on the Book of Genesis were
delivered in 2000 at the University of Judaism in Bel Air, California.
Click here to Discover Genesis with the Biblical Archaeology Society DVD today.
© 2013 Biblical Archaeology Society
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Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
Table of Contents
V Introduction
by Robin Ngo
1 The Genesis of Genesis: Is the Creation Story Babylonian?
by Victor Hurowitz
17 The Creation Story from Enūma Eliš?
20 The Creation Story from Genesis
22 George Smith’s Other Find: The Babylonian Flood Tablet
24 Keep Reading
26 Why Did Joseph Shave?
by Lisbeth S. Fried
33 Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place?
by Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt
43 Abraham’s Ur—Is the Pope Going to the Wrong Place?
by Hershel Shanks
48 Where Was Abraham’s Ur? The Case for the Babylonian City
by Alan R. Millard
52 Authors
53 Notes
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Introduction
The esoteric stories and lost landscapes in the Book of Genesis present a great challenge for
historians. Biblical scholars and archaeologists have nonetheless been able to provide cultural
contexts for many of Israel’s earliest traditions. In this Biblical Archaeology Society eBook,
explore Mesopotamian creation myths, Joseph’s relationship with Egyptian temple practices and
the homeland of Abraham, the founding father of the world’s three great monotheistic religions:
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The Creation story from Genesis explains how the world was formed and how humankind was
created. Was this story heavily influenced by an ancient Babylonian Creation myth called Enūma
Eliš? In “The Genesis of Genesis,” Victor Hurowitz explores this question. A text which describes
the divine activities of the gods and the creation of man, Enūma Eliš includes many of the motifs
found in the Biblical Creation story. To what extent is there a relationship between these two
texts? In this comparative study, Hurowitz examines the similarities and differences between the
Babylonian myth and the Biblical story and sets them in the historical context of the ancient Near
East.
The story of Joseph in Genesis is well known. Sold into slavery by his brothers, Joseph ended
up in a prison in Egypt and there became known for his ability to interpret dreams. Summoned
from the dungeon to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph shaved before approaching the ruler of
Egypt. Most people in ancient Mesopotamia did not shave. Why, and what, did Joseph shave? In
“Why Did Joseph Shave?” Lisbeth S. Fried examines Egyptian ideas of cleanliness and purity.
These ideas may explain why Joseph had to appear hairless—and circumcised—before entering
Pharaoh’s palace.
In the story of Abraham, we learn how one man was called by God to become the founding
father of the Israelites in the land of Canaan. In Genesis, Abraham was said to have been born in
Ur of the Chaldeans. However, there were many places named Ur in antiquity. Where was
Abraham’s Ur? Sir Leonard Woolley claimed to have found it at Tell el-Muqayyar, now called Ur,
in southern Iraq. There, the British archaeologist unearthed evidence of royal burials, a ziggurat,
several temples and hundreds of golden baubles, weapons and vessels. Did Woolley actually
locate the patriarch’s native land, or was the famed excavator too eager to match the Biblical
account with his archaeological site? In “Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place?”
Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt describes Woolley’s excavations at Ur and the intrigue incited by his
identification of Abraham’s birthplace.
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Since Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavation of Ur in Iraq in the 1920s and 30s, his identification of
the site as the birthplace of Abraham became one of the most popular theories for where the
patriarch’s native land is located. The identification of Abraham’s birthplace received such
widespread acceptance that Pope John Paul II planned to visit Iraq as part of his tour of Biblical
sites to celebrate the new millennium. However, a careful reading of Biblical and ancient texts
indicates that this Ur might not be the patriarch’s hometown after all. In “Abraham’s Ur: Is the
Pope Going to the Wrong Place?” Hershel Shanks explores another popular theory for where
Abraham was born: in Turkey.
Hershel Shanks’s review of the case for a northern Mesopotamian site as the home of the
Biblical patriarch reopened the debate in the pages of Biblical Archaeology Review. In “Where
Was Abraham’s Ur? The Case for the Babylonian City,” Alan R. Millard lists the many strengths of
the traditional southern Babylonian location.
The articles in this eBook are a preview of the many Biblical stories and histories covered in
Biblical Archaeology Review, Bible Review and Archaeology Odyssey.
Robin Ngo
Biblical Archaeology Society
2013
© 2013 Biblical Archaeology Society
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Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
The Genesis of Genesis
Is the Creation Story Babylonian?
By Victor Hurowitz
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library
Hovering above the newly created earth, God fixes the “two great lights”—the golden sun
and the silver moon—in the heavens (Genesis 1:14–19). Since the discovery in the 19th
century of a Babylonian Creation myth with striking parallels to the Genesis account,
scholars have declared that the biblical tale of Seven Days of Creation has its roots in
Babylonian mythology. But, as Victor Hurowitz explains in the accompanying article, the
parallels between the Babylonian myth, called Enūma Eliš after its first two words (“When
above”), and Genesis 1 are limited. According to Hurowitz, Genesis 1 should not be
dismissed as a borrowed tale, but celebrated as a deliberate and skillful rewriting of earlier
accounts of how a Creator God goes about his buisiness.
On December 3, 1872, George Smith, a former bank-note engraver turned Assyriologist,
stunned the Western world by announcing that he had discovered a Babylonian story of a great
Flood resembling the well-known account of the Deluge in the Book of Genesis. Four years later,
Smith published a collection of Mesopotamian myths and heroic legends entitled The Chaldean
Account of Genesis (“Chaldean” being a synonym for Babylonian used in the Bible). 1 The book
included Smith’s own English translation and discussion of a Babylonian Creation myth and other
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mythological compositions that he had pieced together from cuneiform fragments discovered
during the preceding quarter of a century by the British excavations at Kyunjik, ancient Nineveh.
About the Babylonian Creation myth, Smith wrote:
The story, so far as I can judge from the fragment, agrees generally with the account of the
Creation in the Book of Genesis, but shows traces of having originally included very much more
matter.
According to Smith, the biblical account of the Seven Days of Creation (Genesis 1:1–2:4a,
also known as the Priestly Creation account,a quoted in full in the box) was simply an abbreviated
Hebrew version of a more ancient Babylonian tale.
By Permission of the Trustees of the British Museum
George A. Smith (1840–1876). An amateur Assyriologist, Smith was hired by the British
Museum to catalogue cuneiform inscriptions discovered by Austen Henry Layard at
Kyunjik (ancient Nineveh). He gained international attention when he announced his
discovery of a Babylonian Deluge story similar to the biblical account of Noah’s Flood. He
subsequently pieced together Enūma Eliš, which he dubbed “The Chaldean Genesis”—
“Chaldean” being a biblical term for “Babylonian.”
A century and a quarter after Smith made his astounding announcement, the Babylonian
Creation myth—now regularly called by its Akkadian name Enūma Eliš (after the first two words,
meaning “When above”)—is widely recognized for its great importance to the history of ancient
Mesopotamian religion. But for most Bible readers, the significance of Enūma Eliš (pronounced
eh-NOO-ma eh-LEESH) lies in its perceived connection to the Creation story in Genesis 1:1–2:4a
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and a few other biblical passages relating to the Creation and to a primordial conflict between the
Israelite deity YHWH and some vicious sea monsters.
The notion that the biblical Creation story depends heavily on Enūma Eliš is so entrenched
that most modern commentaries on Genesis mention the connection. Any compendium of ancient
Near Eastern texts related to the Bible will include Enūma Eliš. The curriculum for teaching Bible
in secular Israeli high schools has been revised to include the teaching of Enūma Eliš. Nahum
Sarna’s classic Understanding Genesis devotes four pages to the myth. 2 Alexander Heidel’s
widely used collection of Mesopotamian Creation myths, The Babylonian Genesis (written “not for
the professional Assyriologist but rather for the Old Testament scholar and the Christian
minister”), lends 58 pages to parallels between the Babylonian and biblical texts. 3
But was George Smith right? Was the author of the Genesis Creation account heavily
influenced by this ancient Babylonian tale? To answer this, we must first ask, What is Enūma
Eliš?
First and foremost, Enūma Eliš is a poem, consisting of 1,059 lines written in the Akkadian
language and inscribed in cuneiform on seven tablets. 4 The story that this great poem tells is a
myth; that is, it explains the world as a reflection of divine activities and relationships between
gods.
The poem begins on Tablet 1:
It is the timeless, mythic past when nothing existed apart from two personified masses of
water, Tiamat (sea water) and Apsû (spring water). These proto-divine male and female figures
engaged in an endless mingling of their waters that we might call the “Big Bang.” b Such dalliance
led inevitably to pregnancy (of both partners) and the birth of several gods. As time passed the
baby gods grew into big gods, who were a rowdy bunch, partying constantly at home, which
happened to be the watery realm that was the body of Tiamat. This wild behavior raised the ire of
Apsû, who, as typical of haggard fathers throughout time, decided to end it all and kill the kids
and the kids’ kids and their kids, too. He plotted the act with his vizier Mummu, but the dastardly
design got out, giving the young ones a chance to defend themselves, and, to be sure, one of the
younger gods, Ea, ended up killing his great-great grandfather Apsû, stripping him of his divine
regalia and building his own house on the body of his slain ancestor. Ea and his spouse,
Damkina, immediately moved in, and the two of them set about making love and having a baby:
Marduk.
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The newborn infant was no regular lad. Four pairs of eyes and four pairs of ears (compare the
four-faced creatures of Ezekiel 1:6) made him very attentive and gave him excellent peripheral
vision, but he grew up rapidly and became a bit obstreperous. His favorite game was throwing
dust into a set of four-winds (a present from grandfather Anum) and muddying up great-greatgreat granny Tiamat. This childish behavior may not have disturbed recently widowed and longsuffering Tiamat, but it did get on the nerves of the gods living within her; and they, playing on her
sense of guilt over having failed to come to the aid of her late husband, cajole and convince her
to take up arms and put an end to Marduk’s intolerable behavior and their consequent suffering.
In order to do the task, she has a certain Ummu Ḫubur (the name means “Mother Noise”)
produce for her a swat team of 11 raging, poisonous monsters at whose head she appoints the
god Kingu.
Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC
Vestiges of the four-faced Babylonian deity may be found in Ezekiel’s vision of a divine
winged creature with four different heads (Ezekiel 1). On a sixth-century C.E. silver-andgold liturgical fan, the heads appear, from left to right, as lion, man, ox and eagle.
Tablet 2. The younger gods, threatened by these scary beasts, fly into a panic and start
looking for someone to come to their rescue. Ea, who got word of the war preparations, first
approaches his grandfather Anšar (the deified horizon) and then daddy, Anum (the sky god), and
reports the dire situation, but they do not come to the rescue, so Chicken-Little style the whole
bunch of them ends up appealing for help from none other than the ultimate cause of their woes,
Marduk. Marduk opportunistically accepts the invitation on the condition that if he defeats Tiamat
and saves the gods, they will obey his commands. He will be their supreme, unchallenged ruler.
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Tablet 3. In order to conclude an agreement, an envoy named Gaga is dispatched to Laḫmu
and Laḫāmu (Anšar’s parents), and all the gods gather at a grand banquet with lots of eating and
drinking. When they are sufficiently inebriated, they ratify the agreement and enthrone Marduk as
number one god.5
Tablet 4. At the enthronement celebration Marduk is asked to prove the power of his word by
making a constellation vanish and reappear, which he immediately does. “He spoke with his
mouth, and the constellation disappeared; he spoke again with his mouth, and the constellation
was formed,” the text tells us. After this display of verbal creativity, the gods outfit him with royal
regalia, arm him and send him off to meet Tiamat. The myth reaches its climax in a decisive duel
to the death between champion Marduk and Tiamat. Marduk arms himself with a bow and arrow,
mace, net, four winds (probably the toy that Anum had given him as a child), and seven special
winds designed to get inside Tiamat and give her gas. He mounts a chariot drawn by winds that
can apparently move in all four directions.6 For armor and headgear, he dons terrifying divine
radiance, and, lest he be wounded, he also carries in his mouth an incantation, and holds in his
hand a plant for warding off poison. Fully suited and geared up, he goes off to find Tiamat. When
he meets her, they engage in a war of words and finally they lock in battle. At this point, Marduk
opens his net with the intent of bagging her in it and then “the wicked wind which was sneezing
behind him he directed into her face.”7 This is surely a thinly veiled way of saying that he broke
wind in her face. As if this were not enough, Tiamat opens her mouth wide to swallow the wind
dispatched from his rear but in the end she fills up with wind, developing stomach cramps and
constipation. Finally, Marduk shoots his arrow at her and splits her belly. 8 With Tiamat defeated
and, literally, deflated, the gods supporting her go into hiding and the 11 terrible monsters are
captured and led away. Finally, Marduk captures Kingu, the god who was leading the monsters,
and takes away the tablets of destiny that Tiamat had given him before the battle. The war over
and the enemy rounded up, Marduk returns to his captive, Tiamat, splits open her head with his
mace, and has the wind blow away her blood. He next splits open her body “like a drying fish,”
creates the heavens in the upper half, and establishes there a divine dwelling place, Ešarra,
which is the mirror image of Ea’s subterranean dwelling place, Apsû.
Tablet 5. At this point “Creation”—or, rather, the ordering of the known world—starts. Working
more or less from top to bottom, Marduk installs in the appropriate parts of Tiamat’s corpse the
heavenly bodies in the heavens, meteorological phenomena in the atmosphere, and mountains,
subterranean waters, the Euphrates and Tigris, the bond of heaven and earth, the netherworld
and the oceans in and on the earth. Marduk then celebrates his triumph by distributing trophies
and displaying vanquished enemies. He dons royal garments, and the gods declare him king and
accept his authority. He then proposes to build Babylon to serve as a lodging place for gods who
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go up and down between the subterranean Apsû and heavenly Ešarra (compare Genesis 28:10–
22, in which Jacob dreams of angels ascending and descending a staircase that reaches to the
heavens).9 The gods eagerly accept this proposal.
Tablets 6 and 7. But before Marduk carries out his plan, he decides to help relieve the gods of
their work by creating Man. Actually, creating Man is only his suggestion, for the actual act is
carried out by his father, Ea. The creation of Man is described only briefly and elliptically; we learn
only that Man was made from the blood of Kingu, who was slaughtered as punishment for having
led the rebel gods. Having created Man, the gods proceed to carry out Marduk’s plan to build
Babylon, and in particular its main temple, Esagila. The gods mold bricks for a year, and when
the temple is finally in its place as a rest stop between subterranean Apsû and heavenly Ešarra,
all the gods of heaven and the underworld sit down together at a grand dedication banquet. This
ceremony is another opportunity for reaffirming allegiance to Marduk and glorifying him by
proclaiming his 50 names along with intricate explanations of each one.
The poem concludes:
The [wo]rd of Marduk who created the Igigi-gods,
[His/Its] let them [ ], his name let theme invoke.
Let them sound abroad the song of Marduk,
How he defeated Tiamat and took kingship.10
How much does this strange and exciting tale really resemble the Creation account of Genesis
1:1–2:4a and other biblical references to Creation? What kind of relationship, if any, is there
between these texts?
The concluding couplet of Enūma Eliš, quoted above, suggests one of the most significant
differences. Here, as in many Mesopotamian works, the author explains to the readers what the
text they have just read is really about. In this case, he defines the entire composition as a hymn
or song in praise of Marduk, who created the great gods (Igigi), defeated Tiamat and then
assumed the throne. Compare this with the concluding line of the biblical Creation account:
Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created.
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(Genesis 2:4a, New Jewish Publication Society Version)
In short, Genesis 1 is about the Creation, while Enūma Eliš is about the creator. That’s why
near the end of Enūma Eliš, the gods bless Marduk, hero of the story, while at the end of the
Creation account, God, hero of the story, blesses and sanctifies the Sabbath, his final creation.
Further, in Genesis 1 God sees several times that what he has created is good, while in Enūma
Eliš the gods on several occasion express approval for Marduk and what he has promised to do
or has done.
The two stories also vary in tone. Genesis 1:1–2:4a is a tightly structured narrative, simple in
language but stately in elevated prose style and marked by use of repetition, formulaic language,
and command-fulfillment sequences (“God said, ‘Let there be’ ... and there was”), all of which
suggest divine planning, control and transcendence. Enūma Eliš, in contrast, is a dramatic
narrative poem in which tension builds and then is relieved again and again. Moreover, it is (in my
opinion) a comic-heroic work not lacking in frivolity. Though some refer to Enūma Eliš as the
Babylonian Genesis, this is an unfortunate appellation—encouraging readers to approach the text
with religiosity and reverence, when they might better bring a sense of humor and a taste for
adventure.
Nevertheless, from the Victorian period on, numerous scholars have attempted to draw
parallels between Genesis 1 and Enūma Eliš—especially Tablet V, on the ordering of Creation.
George Smith, in his Chaldean Account of Genesis, listed several, from the watery chaos that
precedes Creation (see Genesis 1:1) through Marduk’s and God’s satisfaction with Creation:
“And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:12, etc.).
In 1902, Bible scholar Friedrich Delitzsch offered one of the most famous discussions of the
Bible and Enūma Eliš in the first of his Babel und Bibel lectures, delivered before Kaiser Wilhelm
II.11 In this lecture Delitzsch solemnly announced that Babylonian sources preserved more
ancient and thus more original forms of full cycles of stories found in the Bible. Delitzsch
suggested that the biblical authors had transferred directly to YHWH, God of Israel, the heroism
of Marduk, god of Babylon, as known from Enūma Eliš. He offered a handful of biblical examples,
including Job 9:13, Psalm 89:10–11 and Psalm 74:13–15 (quoted here):
It was You who drove back the sea with Your might,
Who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters;
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It was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan,
Who left him as food for the denizens of the desert,
It was You who released springs and torrents,
Who made the mighty rivers run dry.
Delitzsch showed his audience a cylinder seal bearing a picture of Marduk with one large eye
and one large ear, standing on a dragon and holding a weapon in his right hand. This seal, which
had been discovered by German excavators, was cited by Delitzsch as the background for Isaiah
51:9–10 and Job 26:12–13, both of which describe the Lord striking down the sea monster Rahab
and piercing a snake or dragon.
Gods and monsters. A cylinder seal
shows Marduk with an enormous eye and
ear, standing on a sea monster.
Strikingly similar imagery appears on a
silver chalice excavated at ‘Ain Samiyah,
in Israel. The chalice depicts a Janusheaded figure with the hindquarters of
two bulls. An enormous serpent raises
its head toward one of the plants this
hybrid figure is holding.
According to Delitzsch, the Priestly author of the Creation account in Genesis 1:1–2:4a, in
contrast to the authors of Psalms, Job and Isaiah, tried to remove all mythological traces from his
text, yet he was not entirely successful. Trace elements of Babylonian myth could be found
throughout Genesis, said Delitzsch. For example, the light splitting the Deep (Hebrew Tehôm) in
Genesis 1 recalls Marduk splitting the watery goddess Tiamat.
Delitzsch was not saying anything new,12 but he created a sensation throughout Europe and
America by introducing the connection between Enūma Eliš and the Bible to the popular
consciousness, from the Kaiser on down. Delitzsch also gained attention and support for his
subjective, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian insinuations that Mesopotamian religion was on an
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equal if not higher level than that of the Hebrew Bible, and that the Bible contains no religious
truth of its own but is only an accumulation of shallow literature drawn from Babylonian texts. c If
the generation preceding Delitzsch used archaeological and Assyriological discoveries to prove
the truth of the Bible, from his time on the same evidence would be enlisted in demonstrating the
Bible’s inferiority.d
Alexander Heidel, in his well-known book The Babylonian Genesis, offers a clear summary of
the parallels (he calls them “points which invite comparison”) that Smith, Delitzsch and other early
scholars had detected:
Thus Enūma elish and Genesis 1:1–2:3 both refer to a watery chaos, which was separated
into heaven and earth; in both we have an etymological equivalence in the names denoting this
chaos [Hebrew Tehôm and Akkadian Tiamat]; both refer to the existence of light before creation
of the luminous bodies; both agree as to the succession in which the points of contact follow upon
one another; and in both cases the number seven figures rather prominently. And turning to the
poetic writings of our Old Testament literature, we find quite a number of passages which, like the
story of Marduk’s fight with Ti’âmat, treat of a conflict between the creator and various hostile
elements.
Casa Editrice Mistretta, Palermo, Italy
The Bible’s first and last days of Creation
exhibit the strongest parallels to the
Babylonian account. When God begins
his work, the earth is “unformed and
void, with darkness over the face of the
deep and a wind from God sweeping over
the water” (Genesis 1:1). God then
breaks up the darkness by creating light.
In Enūma Eliš, Creation begins with the
splitting of the watery chaos personified
by the goddess Tiamat. Further, the
Hebrew term for “the Deep” (Tehôm) may
be etymologically related to the Akkadian
name Tiamat. The 12th-century mosaic
artist who created both these scenes for
the Cathedral of Santa Maria Nuova in
Monreale, Sicily, unwittingly emphasized
the parallel when he took the phrase
“face of the deep” literally and gave the
watery chaos a face with undulant hair.
Heidel adds to this list the divine nature of the participants in Creation; creatio ex nihilo—
creation out of nothing; polytheism and monotheism in the respective stories; primeval chaos;
primeval darkness; creation of the firmament; creation of the earth; creation of the luminaries;
creation of plant and animal life; creation of man; the word of the creators; divine rest; the seven
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tablets and the seven days; and the general outlines of events in Enūma Eliš and Genesis 1:1–
2:3.
But Heidel concludes:
The similarities are really not so striking as we might expect ... In fact, the divergences are
much more far-reaching and significant than are the resemblances, most of which are not any
closer than what we should expect to find in any two more or less complete creation versions
(since both would have to account for the same phenomena and since human minds think along
much the same lines) which might come from entirely different parts of the world and which might
be utterly unrelated to each other. 13
What Heidel does consider striking, however, is “an identical sequence of events as far as the
points of contact are concerned.” In other words, of all the points mentioned above, only a few are
really highly similar, but these particular points appear in the same order in the respective
compositions. This indeed seems to be a strong argument in favor of dependence.
In discussing the possible connection between Marduk and the God of the Hebrew Bible,
Heidel noted that the idea of a primeval war between a god and the sea is an idea born in the
West and imported into Mesopotamia, so the Bible would more likely have borrowed it from closer
neighbors than the Babylonians. Here, Heidel relies on evidence in myths discovered at Ugarit
(on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria) a decade after the First World War (and ipso facto
unavailable to Smith and Delitzsch). Proof that this was indeed the case comes from the words
the Bible uses for the sea monster. On the fifth day of Creation, in Genesis 1:21, God creates
Tannîn, often translated “sea serpents”). This same creature appears as tnn, or Tunnan, in
Ugaritic myth:
Surely I fought Yamm [Sea], the Beloved of El
Surely I finished off River, the Great God,
Surely I bound Tunnan and destroyed (?) him.
14
The biblical Leviathan (Psalm 74) has its parallel in ltn (Litan), who battles god in another
Ugaritic myth:
When you killed Litan, the Fleeing Serpent,
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Annihilated the Twisty Serpent,
The Potentate with Seven Heads,
The heavens grew hot, they withered.15
Assyriologist Wilfred Lambert, who is preparing the eagerly awaited authoritative edition of
Enūma Eliš, notes that many of the parallels between the Babylonian poem and the Bible are so
common throughout Near Eastern literature as to be insignificant. 16 The watery beginnings of the
universe have parallels not only in other Mesopotamian Creation myths but even in Egyptian and
Greek texts and thus cannot be evidence of particularly Babylonian influence. The splitting of the
waters (in Genesis, on the second day) is uniquely parallel to the splitting of aqueous Tiamat in
Enūma Eliš, although the splitting of other substances is well attested in Sumerian, Akkadian,
Hittite, Egyptian and Greek myths. As for the third day, Lambert finds a Mesopotamian parallel to
the separation of the sea from the dry land, but it is not from Enūma Eliš. The most important
parallel Lambert finds is with the seventh day, the Sabbath. Man is created in Enūma Eliš to give
rest to the gods. If so, both Enūma Eliš and Genesis 1:1–2:4a climax with divine rest. 17 All told,
Lambert sees the connections between Genesis 1 and Enūma Eliš as relatively few in number.
The Bible’s first and last days of Creation
exhibit the strongest parallels to the
Babylonian account.
“On the seventh day, God finished
work that He had been doing, and
rested” (Genesis 2:2). Similarly,
Enuma Eliš, man is created so that
gods can get some rest.
the
He
in
the
Casa Editrice Mistretta, Palermo, Italy
As recent scholarship is making clear, simplistic comparison between Enūma Eliš and the
biblical tradition—as if the Bible were directly dependent on Enūma Eliš and it alone—is patently
untenable. And yet there is clearly some kind of relationship. Enūma Eliš appears to be one of a
range of sources that the biblical authors drew upon.
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But although Delitzsch and Smith dismissed this borrowing as naive and mechanical, I believe
something far more thoughtful and thought-provoking was taking place. The literary character of
Enūma Eliš itself offers an example of how and why the Biblical author drew on this source.
Enūma Eliš is on the surface a unified work with a clear, consistent plot and message. 18 Yet it,
too, adopted and assimilated numerous ideas and literary themes from earlier sources.
Oriental Institute, Chicago
With eyes in the back of his head (and on both sides, too), this four-faced deity may
represent the god Marduk, whose multiple eyes and ears helped him reign supreme over
the Babylonian pantheon. Wearing a horned cap, the god carries a scimitar and rests one
foot on a ram. The bronze statuette, dating to the early second millennium B.C.E., was
discovered by looters at Ishchali, in Iraq, and is now in the Oriental Institute, in Chicago.
Vestiges of the four-faced Babylonian deity may be found in Ezekiel’s vision of a divine
winged creature with four different heads (Ezekiel 1).
So, for instance, the notion of the creation of the gods and the world by sexual intercourse and
birth is already found in Sumerian sources. Young gods who prevent their parents from sleeping,
and, indeed, divine unrest and sleep deprivation are central themes in the Atra-ḫasis myth dating
to the Old Babylonian period (first half of the second millennium B.C.E.), with roots in the
Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninmaḫ. Marduk in Enūma Eliš has four eyes and four ears. This
reminds us of Ezekiel’s chariot vision, but more important is a bronze statue found near Ishchali
(ancient Neribtum, Iraq) dating from the Old Babylonian period representing an identically
endowed deity. If this statue is not Marduk himself it is without doubt a god of the same species. 19
The sequence of events of giving the Tablets of Destiny to Kingu, danger threatening the gods,
the gods’ panic, the appeal to several gods in search of a champion who will defeat the monster
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holding the tablets, and the eventual transfer of the Tablets of Destiny to the victorious champion
has a close parallel in the Akkadian myth about the god Ninurta’s defeat of the Anzû bird. 20 The
11 monsters in Tiamat’s retinue are also parallel to 11 monsters who fought alongside the Anzû. 21
The war between Marduk, with his army of winds, and Tiamat, who embodies the sea, has
parallels in earlier Western myths about a conflict between a storm god and a sea god. A Middle
Bronze Age silver goblet from ‘Ain-Samiyah, Israel, is decorated with a similar mythological scene
that the late Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin interpreted as the slaying of Tiamat by Marduk. 22
This scene is similar to one on a clay plaque from Khafaje, in eastern Iraq, of the Isin-Larsa
period (late third to early second millennium B.C.E.) showing Marduk slaying Tiamat. Creating the
cosmos by splitting the body of defeated Tiamat reflects Sumerian beliefs according to which the
world was created by splitting various primeval cosmic elements. Creating man by mixing blood
from a slain rebel god into the body of the man is rooted in accounts found in Atra-ḫasis and Enki
and Ninmaḫ. In Enūma Eliš, Babylon is built by the gods who mold bricks. A similar description
about the building of Nippur is found in a Sumerian hymn in honor of that city. 23 Finally, Marduk’s
50 names are somehow related to 50, the symbolic number of Ellil, the chief god in the
Mesopotamian pantheon.
Drawing of silver chalice excavated at ‘Ain Samiyah, in Israel. The chalice depicts (from
left) a Janus-headed figure with the hindquarters of two bulls. An enormous serpent raises
its head toward one of the plants this hybrid figure is holding. At right, two figures (only
one remains) originally flanked a rosette or sun with a human face. A second serpent
twists beneath the sun.
The late Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who discovered the cup in a shaft tomb dating
from 2200 to 2000 B.C.E., suggested the chalice depicts Marduk slaying Tiamat. Although
the identification is uncertain, the chalice attests to the widespread appeal—from Israel to
eastern Iraq—of accounts of gods battling fierce sea creatures. In the Bible, Yahweh takes
on not just the Deep, but Rahab, Leviathan and Tannîn.
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Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Strikingly similar imagery appears on a silver chalice excavated at ‘Ain Samiyah, in Israel.
The chalice depicts a Janus-headed figure with the hindquarters of two bulls. An
enormous serpent raises its head toward one of the plants this hybrid figure is holding.
Two figures (only one remains) originally flanked a rosette or sun with a human face. A
second serpent twists beneath the sun.
The late Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who discovered the cup in a shaft tomb dating
from 2200 to 2000 B.C.E., suggested the chalice depicts Marduk slaying Tiamat. Although
the identification is uncertain, the chalice attests to the widespread appeal—from Israel to
eastern Iraq—of accounts of gods battling fierce sea creatures. In the Bible, Yahweh takes
on not just the Deep, but Rahab, Leviathan and Tannîn.
Iraq Museum, Baghdad/Scala/Art Resource, NY
Gods and monsters. An early second-millennium B.C.E clay plaque from Khafaje, in
eastern Iraq, depicts Marduk splitting open the star-faced goddess Tiamat so that he can
create the world out of her watery body (note the waves that make up her skirt).
Strikingly similar imagery appears on a silver chalice excavated at ‘Ain Samiyah, in
Israel.On the chalice, two figures (only one remains) originally flanked a rosette or sun
with a human face.
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The author of Enūma Eliš is deliberately attributing to Marduk and Babylon acts ascribed to
other gods and cities in other myths. The author is stealing the thunder of these gods,
undermining them in favor of Marduk. When Marduk receives Ellil’s fifty names, he in effect
becomes Ellil. When the gods build Babylon instead of Nippur, Babylon becomes the new
religious capital. Most important, when Marduk defeats the 11 monsters that Ninurta fought in the
ancient Anzû myth, Marduk son of Ea, god of Eridu, in effect usurps Ninurta son of Enlil, god of
Nippur. Enūma Eliš is a story about Marduk that challenges a story about Ninurta. It reflects a
political-theological competition over primacy in the pantheon and supremacy of the capital city.
M. Amar and M. Greyevsky/Bible Lands Museum/Jerusalem
The seven-headed beast meets his demise. His lowest head droops from a wound inflicted
by the kneeling warrior-god, at lower left, on this 1.5-inch shell inlay from Mesopotamia,
dated from 2800 to 2600 B.C.E. The plaque is believed to depict the Sumerian deity Ninurta
slaying a seven-headed monster who was trying to take over the world. According to
author Hurowitz, the later tales of Marduk slaying Tiamat may have been conscious
rewrites of the Sumerian tales, in which the Babylonian authors made Marduk out to be the
new Ninurta. Similarly, the biblical authors may have improved upon aspects of
Babylonian myths to show that their God, Yahweh, could do everything a Near Eastern
god should do—and more.
These tales of Marduk spawned further debate. An ancient Babylonian commentary praises
Marduk;24 an Assyrian commentary satirizes him. 25 What appears to have been an alternate
Assyrian version of at least parts of Enūma Eliš—known only from some fragmentary manuscripts
found at Aššur—offers a competing version of events by replacing Marduk’s name with Anšar, a
name given to Aššur, chief god in the Assyrian pantheon. 26 Wall reliefs in the Akı̄ tu (New Year’s)
House built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib depict Aššur, not Marduk, riding his chariot and
vanquishing Tiamat.
The ancient Near East was full of conflicting claims to supremacy of this or that god or city
over all others. The Bible is part of this polemic. The biblical authors borrowed from foreign
Creation stories in order to make the best case possible for YHWH, God of Israel. They were
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participating in a contemporary international debate on the basis of data considered basic and
agreed upon by all.
For example, the preexistence of water may have been considered a “scientific” fact, common
knowledge. In Enūma Eliš this water is personified as Tiamat; in “monotheistic,”
“nonmythological” Genesis 1, the watery Deep is “just water.” Here, the biblical author is trying to
correct the record.
The view of the world as a bubble with water above and below was a commonly held
“scientific” truth at the time of the Bible, so it need not have been borrowed from a particular
literary source. This water had to be parted somehow in order to form the bubble, and authors
throughout the Near East had to decide how within the framework of their own beliefs. Marduk
does this by physically splitting Tiamat, the personified waters. Genesis 1 has God ordain a
firmament in the demythologized waters by simply speaking.
In Enūma Eliš, divine sleep deprivation is a constant problem. Tiamat and Apsû can’t sleep so
they try to kill their noisy kids. Man is created to give the gods rest, and Babylon is built to provide
a resting place for gods in transit on a cosmic journey. This idea is rooted in the Mesopotamian
myths of Enki and Ninmah or Atra-ḫasis.27 In Genesis 1:1–2:4a God “ceases” and sanctifies the
Sabbath, but in Exodus 31:17, a Priestly passage connected with the author’s Creation story in
Genesis, God “puts his heart at rest/is satisfied” (wayyinnāpaš).
It was common belief in the ancient Near East that a high god in a pantheon had to defeat the
sea and create the world. A god, whoever he might be, had to act in a godly manner and do godly
things! But the Priestly author of Genesis 1 gave the story a new spin. Rather than having God
vanquish rebellious monsters, he had God create them (compare Psalm 104:25 where God
creates Leviathan to play with), thus showing God’s superiority from the start.
In light of all this and more, it is impossible to accept today in a simplistic manner the claims of
Smith or Delitzsch that the biblical authors took the Babylonian Story of Creation, that is, Enūma
Eliš, and simply applied it to YHWH, God of Israel. The specific parallels are fewer than originally
thought, and even the best ones are not entirely certain. However, both the Bible and Enūma Eliš
are products of the ancient Near East, each accepting common beliefs and knowledge, and each
developing them in their own unique manner. They should be studied by modern scholars as
mutually illuminating not only for what they hold in common but for the unique ways in which each
presents their common heritage.28
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The Creation Story from Enūma Eliš
©The British Museum/HIP/The Image Works
The Creation story begins on Tablet 4 and continues on Tablet 5, which is, unfortunately, the
least well-preserved section of the epic. In this translation, brackets indicate gaps in the text. (The
photo shows Tablet 3.)
Tablet 4
... The Lord [Marduk] trampled the lower part of Tiamat,
With his unsparing mace smashed her skull,
Severed the arteries of her blood,
And made the North Wind carry it off as good news.
His fathers saw it and were jubilant: they rejoiced,
Arranged to greet him with presents, greetings gifts.
The Lord rested, and inspected her corpse.
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He divided the monstrous shape and created marvels (from it).
He sliced her in half like a fish for drying:
Half of her he put up to roof the sky,
Drew a bolt across and made a guard hold it.
Her waters he arranged so that they could not escape.
He crossed the heavens and sought out a shrine;
He leveled Apsû, dwelling of Nudimmud.
The Lord measured the dimensions of Apsû
And the large temple (Eshgalla), which he built in its image, was Esharra:
In the great shrine Esharra, which he had created as the sky,
He founded cult centers for Anu, Ellil, and Ea ...
Tablet 5
He fashioned stands for the great gods.
As for the stars, he set up constellations corresponding to them.
He designated the year and marked out its divisions,
Apportioned three stars each to the twelve months.
When he had made plans of the days of the year,
He founded the stand of Neberu to mark out their courses,
So that none of them could go wrong or stray.
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He fixed the stand of Ellil and Ea together with it.
Opened up gates in both ribs,
Made strong bolts to left and right.
With her liver he located the Zenith;
He made the crescent moon appear, entrusted night (to it)
And designated it the jewel of night to mark out the days.
Go forth every month without fail in a corona,
At the beginning of the month, to glow over the land.
...
He [Marduk] put into groups and made clouds scud.
Raising winds, making rain, making fog billow, by collecting her poison,
He assigned for himself and let his own hand control it.
He placed her head, heaped up [ ]
Opened up springs: water gushed out.
He opened the Euphrates and the Tigris from her eyes,
Closed her nostrils, [ ].
He piled up clear-cut mountains from her udder,
Bored waterholes to drain off the catch-water.
He laid her tail across, tied it fast as the cosmic bond (?),
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And [ ] the Apsû beneath his feet.
He set her thigh to make fast the sky,
With half of her to make fast the sky,
With half of her he made a roof; he fixed the earth.
He [ ] the work, made the insides of Tiamat surge,
Spread his net, made it extend completely.
He ... [ ] heaven and earth ...
From Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (New York: Oxford, 1989).
The Creation Story from Genesis
When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void, with
darkness over the surface of the deep (Tehôm) and a wind from God sweeping over the water—
God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God
separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called
Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from
water.” God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from
the water which was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse Sky. And there
was evening and there was morning, a second day.
God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may
appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters, He called
Seas. And God saw that this was good. And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seedbearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.
The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind
bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good. And there was evening and
there was morning, a third day.
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God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall
serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the
two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night,
and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to dominate
the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that this was good. And
there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the
earth across the expanse of the sky.” God created the great sea monsters (Tannîn), and all the
living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the
winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be
fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there
was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
God said, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature: cattle, creeping things, and
wild beasts of every kind.” And it was so. God made wild beasts of every kind and cattle of every
kind, and all kinds of creeping things of the earth. And God saw that this was good. And God
said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the
birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” And
God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created
them. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master
it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth and all the creeping
things that creep on earth.”
God said, “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree
that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food. And to all the animals on land, to all the
birds of the sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath of life, [I give]
all the green plants for food.” And it was so. And God saw all that He had made, and found it very
good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
The heaven and earth were finished, and all their array. On the seventh day, God finished the
work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had
done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all
the work of creation that He had done. Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were
created.
(Genesis 1:1–2:4)
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George Smith’s Other Find: The Babylonian Flood Tablet
By Permission of the Trustees of the British Museum
In 1866, George Smith, a British bank-note engraver, wrote a letter to the famed Assyriologist
Sir Henry Rawlinson, asking if he might have a look at the fragments and casts of Assyrian
inscriptions in the back rooms of the British Museum. Rawlinson agreed—thus initiating what
would become an unusually fruitful friendship between an eager amateur and the man who had
deciphered cuneiform.
Smith so impressed Rawlinson that the latter hired him in 1867 to help catalogue the
museum’s cuneiform inscriptions, including those excavated by Austen Henry Layard at Kyunjik
(ancient Nineveh) in the 1840s and 1850s.
In the accompanying article, Victor Hurowitz describes one of Smith’s most significant
discoveries: the Babylonian poem Enūma Eliš. But Smith’s most famous “find” in the British
Museum store rooms was undoubtedly the Epic of Gilgamesh, with its dramatic account of a
Great Deluge that threatened to wipe out humankind.
In his popular book The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Smith described the discovery: “I soon
found half of a curious tablet which had evidently contained originally six columns of text; two of
these (the third and fourth) were still nearly perfect; two others (the second and fifth) were
imperfect, about half remaining, while the remaining columns (the first and sixth) were entirely
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lost. On looking down the third column, my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the
mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no
resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the
Chaldean [Babylonian] account of the Deluge.”
According to a later source, Smith then “jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state
of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself.” The British
Museum has dubbed Smith’s Tablet 11, shown, “the most famous cuneiform tablet from
Mesopotamia.”
After he calmed down, Smith scoured the museum’s holdings for further fragments, and soon
found that his Flood tablet was the 11th tablet in a 12-tablet epic poem. On December 3, 1872, he
presented his findings to the newly founded British Society of Biblical Archaeology and
speculated that more of these tablet fragments remained buried in the sands of Nineveh.
Soon after, Edwin Arnold, owner of London’s Daily Telegraph, proposed that his paper
sponsor renewed excavations at Nineveh, with Smith at the helm. Smith, and the museum,
agreed.
Smith later wrote, “Soon after I commenced excavating at Kouyunjik, on the site of the palace
of Assurbanipal, I found a new fragment of the Chaldean account of the Deluge belonging to the
first column of the tablet, relating the command to build and fill an ark, and nearly filling up the
most considerable blank in the story.”
The copies of the Gilgamesh Epic discovered by Layard and Smith came from the world-class
library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.). The tales of Gilgamesh, the bold
warrior-king of Uruk, are much older, however; many of them date back to the Sumerian period
(third millennium B.C.E.). In the Old Babylonian Period (early second millennium B.C.E.), the
various adventures of Gilgamesh were strung together in a cohesive narrative, which was
rewritten many times. By the 12th century B.C.E., an 11-tablet version of the epic had emerged.
In the eighth century B.C.E., a 12th tablet describing the death of Gilgamesh was added to the
series.
The Flood story does not number among the original Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh. Rather, it
was inserted into the narrative in about the 12th century, and thus appears only in the 11- and 12tablet versions of the tale (called the Standard Babylonian versions).
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According to the tale, after the death of his beloved friend Enkidu, a disconsolate Gilgamesh
searches for ways to live forever. His quest leads him, on Tablet 11, to the immortal
Utnapishtim—often referred to as the Mesopotamian Noah, because he saved his family from a
devastating worldwide Flood. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that he, too, was once a mere a mortal
and a king, of Shuruppak-on-the-Euphrates. In his day, five of the gods plotted to send a Flood to
destroy humankind. One of the gods, Ea, surreptitiously informed the king, whispering, “Quickly,
quickly tear down your house and build a great ship, leave your possessions, save your life ...
Then gather and take aboard the ship examples of every living creature.” Utnapishtim finishes the
ship and loads his family and animals just in time: “Ninurta opened the floodgates of heaven, the
infernal gods blazed and set the whole land on fire. A deadly silence spread through the sky and
what had been bright now turned to darkness. The land was shattered like a clay pot. All day,
ceaselessly, the storm winds blew, the rain fell, then the flood burst forth, overwhelming the
people like war ... For six days and seven nights, the storm demolished the earth. On the seventh
day, the downpour stopped. The ocean grew calm. The land could be seen, just water on all
sides, as flat as a roof. There was no life at all.” The boat runs aground on Mount Nimush.
Utnapishtim sends out a dove, which flies right back, having failed to find land; he sends a
swallow with similar results. Finally, he sends a raven, which never returns. The waters have
begun to recede.
The gods convene and offer Utnapishtim and his family immortality. Having heard this tale,
Gilgamesh recognizes he has little chance of being offered the same, and he returns home to
Uruk to die.—M.D.M
Passages from Gilgamesh come from Stephen Mitchell’s new translation Gilgamesh: A New
English Version (New York: Free Press, 2004).
Keep Reading
Enūma Eliš has merited numerous scholarly editions, translations to modern tongues,
commentaries and studies; and the complete text is readily available for reading enjoyment. For
recent English translations, see Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood,
Gilgamesh and Others (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 228-277; and Benjamin Foster,
Before the Muses 1 (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1996), pp. 351-402. The translation printed in
“The Creation Story from Enūma Eliš” comes from Stephanie Dalley’s work.
Those bold readers who wish to consult the original Akkadian should see Wilfred G. Lambert
and Simon B. Parker, Enūma Eliš: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Cuneiform Text (Oxford:
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The Clarendon Press, 1966). In this edition Tablet 2 is presented in partially preserved form. But
see now F.N.H. Al-Rawi and A.R. George, “Tablets from the Sippar Library II—Tablet II of the
Babylonian Creation Epic,” Iraq 52 (1990), pp. 149-157. For additions and variants to Tablet 6
see the Neo-Assyrian manuscript from Me-Turnat (Tell-Hadad) published by F.N.H. Al-Rawi and
J.A. Black, “A New Manuscript of Enūma Eliš Tablet VI,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 46 (1994),
pp. 131-139. The fifth tablet, published by B. Landsberger and J.V. Kinnier-Wilson in Journal of
Near Eastern Studies 20 (1961), pp. 154-179, remains the only one with significant damage,
which is unfortunate because the missing parts describe the creation of the world. The
authoritative edition of Enūma Eliš, promised by Wilfred G. Lambert nearly 40 years ago, is still
eagerly awaited.
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Why Did Joseph Shave?
By Lisbeth S. Fried
Erich Lessing
A priest with a shaved head plays his harp before Inherkhau and his wife in this 12thcentury B.C.E. painting from the Workmen’s Tombs in Deir el-Medina at Luxor.
Everyone knows the Biblical story of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39–50). As a young lad he has
dreams that predict his dominance over his brothers and parents. In retaliation, his brothers
discuss killing him but instead sell him to traders who bring him down to Egypt, where he
becomes servant to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s guard. Potiphar’s wife finds Joseph
attractive and attempts to seduce him, but he rejects her. In return, she accuses Joseph of
making advances and has him put in prison. While there, Joseph interprets the dreams of two
fellow prisoners, foretelling their future. Two years later Pharaoh, too, begins to dream strange
dreams, and Joseph is brought out of prison to interpret them:
Then Pharaoh sent and summoned Joseph and they rushed him from the dungeon, and he
shaved and changed his clothes, and he came in to Pharaoh.
(Genesis 41:14)
Why did he shave? And what did he shave? And why does the text bother to mention it? I
propose that this bit of tangential information is provided by a Biblical author who was familiar
with the realia of the Egyptian court and of Egyptian mores. 1
Most people in ancient Mesopotamia did not shave. A relief from the audience hall of
Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh2 shows in exquisite detail the fall of the Judean city of Lachish
to the Assyrian armies in 701 B.C.E. It depicts the Assyrian king (whose head is unfortunately
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Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
defaced, though the beard is still visible), seated on his throne, receiving his chief minister
(perhaps the “Tartan” mentioned in 2 Kings 18:17) and other officers from his army. Behind them,
Jews from Lachish are shown bowing in submission. The Jews and the Assyrians are all in full
beard. Behind the throne, two eunuchs fan the king. Their clean-shaven appearance makes them
stand out.
In contrast to the majority of peoples in the ancient Near East, ancient Egyptians were clean
shaven. At least from the time of the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 B.C.E.), the custom among men
was to shave beard and mustache, and wear a false goatee on special occasions. 3 Foreigners
can be distinguished from native Egyptians in many Egyptian tomb paintings by the presence of
full beards, for example. In a mural from the tomb of Beni Hasan, a caravan of bearded foreign
traders brings eye-paint to Egypt (c. 1890 B.C.E.).
By shaving his beard, Joseph immediately transforms himself from a foreigner to an Egyptian.
This change foreshadows Joseph’s acceptance at court, as well as the fact that later Joseph’s
brothers will fail to recognize him, taking him for an Egyptian.
More than this, I believe not only that Joseph shaved his beard and mustache, but that he
shaved his entire body. In other words, I suggest that Joseph is depicted taking on the shaved
body of the priesthood.
In ancient Egypt, priests had to be physically pure (w‘b) before entering a temple.4 Indeed, the
very word for the most common category of priest is “pure one” (w‘b).5 Texts found on doors and
lintels of Egyptian temples dictate the requirements of those who would enter. A text on the door
of the temple of Horus at Edfu, for example, forbade those who were not “pure” (w‘b) from
entering.6
O prophets of the temple of Horus at Edfu, O powerful fathers of God, O Chaplain of the
Golden Falcon ... O, pure priest of the god at Edfu, and whoever enters through this door. Let him
keep himself from entering in a state of impurity, for the god loves purity more than a thousand
pieces of gold.7
On the side door of the same temple was the added injunction: “Oh priests ... you who enter to
the gods ... in the temple. Do not deal wrongfully, do not enter when unclean ...” 8
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Sennacherib, King of Assyria, receives
his minister who is attended by military
officers after the Assyrians defeated the
Israelites at Lachish in 701 B.C.E. Behind
the king stand the king’s servants, cleanfaced eunuchs, in contrast to the
bearded officers and the king. The relief
was mounted on a wall of the throne
room in Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh.
Erich Lessing
In Egypt, being physically “pure” or “clean” included having the entire body shaved. 9 Priests
are easy to identify in Egyptian statues and bas-reliefs. They are the ones shown with shaved
heads and beards. A tomb painting of Inherkhau, a foreman at the necropolis of Deir el-Medina
on the West Bank at Luxor (c. 1194–1156 B.C.E.), depicts a family grouping showing Inherkhau,
his wife and four small children. Another man is with them, presenting an offering table. According
to the Egyptian custom, he and the other man are beardless, but each is shown with a full head of
thick, black shoulder-length hair.10 Another scene shows him and his wife being serenaded by a
priest. In contrast to Inherkhau, the priest is shown with the shaven head and the shaven-butpainted eyebrow of the priesthood.
Part of being “clean” or “pure” was also being circumcised. Circumcision was common in
ancient Egypt and was required for the priesthood. The gatekeepers of the Isis Temple in Philae
were enjoined to admit only those who were “pure,” (w‘b), and to prevent “the donkey, the hound,
the uncircumcised (‘w‘) and the goat” from entering the temple.11 The custom of circumcision
goes back to earliest times.12 A puberty-aged youth’s circumcision is depicted in a scene from the
Sixth Dynasty (c. 2340–2140 B.C.E.) tomb of Ankh-ma-Hor at Saqqara. 13
Erich Lessing
Unlike the Egyptians who will receive these emissaries from Asia, the foreigners in this
caravan are distinguished by their dark beards. Depictions of foreigners and Egyptians
regularly feature foreigners with beards and Egyptians clean-shaven. This painting, shown
as a recreation and in the original, is located in the Beni Hasan tombs in Middle Egypt
overlooking the Nile and dates to approximately 1890 B.C.E.
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The laity and the unclean were not permitted to enter the temple. Perhaps because of their
monthly menses, women were considered impure at all times, and priests were expected to
abstain from sexual activity during the period of their priesthood. 14 A text from the temple at Edfu
admonishes the priests “not to frequent the place of women, not to do what should not be done
there.”15 Priestesses served as musicians and singers in the temple, but serenaded the god from
the doorway.16 Only male priests, the “pure ones,” could actually enter into the inner rooms of the
gods’ sanctuaries to feed, bathe and dress their cult statues. This was the situation from earliest
times, up to and including the Ptolemaic period. Herodotus, writing in the Persian period (484–
430 B.C.E.), tells us that, even in his day, priests who entered the temple were circumcised and
had the hair of their entire body shaved. They also abstained from fish. 17
They [Egyptian priests] are beyond measure religious, more than [those of] any other nation;
and these are among their customs: ... They are especially careful to wear newly washed linen
raiment. They practice circumcision for cleanliness sake; for they set cleanliness above
seemliness. Their priests shave the whole body every other day, that no lice or aught else that is
foul may infest them in their service of the gods ... They may not eat fish.
(Herodotus, History II:37)
During the Ptolemaic period, a fine of 1,000 drachmas was required of temple priests who
were found not to have been completely shaved.18
Egypt was not the only civilization that required those entering the temples to be completely
shaven. The Akkadian term gullubu, literally “shaven,” refers to a type of priest, 19 and the
installation ceremony of the high priestess of Baal at Emar (modern Syria) included a day set
aside for shaving her, probably her entire body. 20
A bare-headed priest in a leopard skin
assists Inherkhau and his wife (with
earring) as they make a libation in this
painting from the Workmen’s Tombs in
Deir
el-Medina
at
Luxor.
Borromeo/Art Resource, NY
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Even the Levites of ancient Israel had to be completely shaved in order to participate in the
sacrificial service:
Take the Levites from among the Israelites and cleanse them. Thus you shall do to them, to
cleanse them: sprinkle the water of purification on them, have them shave their whole body with a
razor and wash their clothes, and so cleanse themselves. 21
(Numbers 8:6–7)
If being shaven and circumcised was necessary before entering an Egyptian temple, then one
would expect it to have been necessary before entering into the inner chambers of Pharaoh’s
palace, since Pharaoh, too, was a god and his palace a temple. Pharaoh was primarily the god
Horus, the all-powerful owner of the soil and its resources, responsible for the overflow of the
Nile, the rising of the sun, as well as the birth of living beings and plants. 22 He was also the
physical son of the sun-god, Re, the state god of Egypt and the natural mediator between
mankind and the gods.23
Because of Pharaoh’s divine character, his palace was a temple. Although it contained the
normal qualities of an Egyptian home (living quarters, harem quarters, kitchen, bathrooms,
gardens) and the normal qualities of a state administrative center (offices, archives, treasuries,
libraries), the palace was primarily the sanctuary for the god-king. 24 It contained a chapel and a
cult platform for royal ceremonies when Pharaoh appeared in festivals, either alone or with other
royal gods: Horus (the divine form of himself), and Nechbet and Wadjet (patronesses and
guardians of Upper and Lower Egypt respectively).
That this degree of cleanliness (that is, circumcision, the removal of all body hair and
abstaining from fish) was required before entering the inner cult rooms of the palace is amply
demonstrated by the Victory Stele of King Piye. King Piye was a Kushite (Nubian) ruler who
conquered the Nile Valley in the late eighth century B.C.E. King Piye’s famous Victory Stele
recounts the submission of several Egyptian rulers to him:
At dawn the next day there came the two rulers of Upper Egypt and the two rulers of Lower
Egypt, the uraeus wearers, to kiss the ground to the might of his majesty [King Piye]. Now the
kings and counts of Lower Egypt who came to see his majesty’s beauty, their legs were the legs
of women. They could not enter the palace because they were uncircumcised (‘m‘) and were
eaters of fish, which is an abomination to the palace. But King Namart entered the palace
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because he was pure (w‘b) and did not eat fish. The three stood there while the one entered the
palace.25
The Art Archive/Dagli Orti
A puberty ritual, circumcision is performed on a youth in this relief from the tomb of Ankhma-Hor (2340–2140 B.C.E.) at Saqqara, ancient Egypt’s major necropolis. Circumcision
was mandatory for those expecting to take their seasonal turn in the temple priesthood.
Since the Israelites also practiced circumcision, Joseph was already “pure” enough in that
respect to visit the pharaoh.
Those who were allowed to enter the palace were thus distinguished from those who were not
allowed entry. King Namart could enter because he was pure (w‘b), implying he was shaved. In
addition, he was circumcised and did not eat fish.
Keys to entry to the pharaoh’s presence: circumcised, clean (that is, completely shaven),
and a non-fish eater, as explained in King Piye’s victory stele.
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The requirements for entering the palace to approach King Piye echo the requirements of
those allowed to enter the temples to approach the gods. Both those who would enter the
temples and those who would enter the palace needed to be circumcised and “pure” (wa‘ab), that
is, shaved. (Both needed to abstain from fish.) It seems possible, therefore, that, like the w‘b
priest entering the temple and like King Namart entering the palace, Joseph, too, would have to
have had his entire body shaved in order to enter the inner reaches of the palace where the king
held court. As for the requirement of circumcision, it was not a problem. Joseph had been
circumcised when he was eight days old (Genesis 17:12). 26
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Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate
the Wrong Place?
By Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt
Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia
Sir Leonard Woolley (1880–1960) bears aloft a small reconstructed lyre from the graveyard
of Ur, in southern Iraq, where the British archaeologist excavated hundreds of graves from
the third millennium B.C.E. A golden bull’s head (at right) decorated a much larger lyre
found by Woolley in one of the cemetery’s richest graves. The 4.5-foot-long Great Lyre, as
Woolley dubbed it, is part of a traveling exhibition of Woolley’s finds now touring the
United
States.
Woolley’s tendency to give grand names to his spectacular discoveries led him to claim to
have found Abraham’s hometown, Noah’s Flood and the tombs of various kings and
queens who ruled over Ur in its heyday—each of these identifications has since come
under
scrutiny.
Nevertheless, during his 12 seasons at Ur, the British archaeologist proved to be a
skillful—and creative—excavator. While excavating in the so-called royal cemetery,
Woolley found only the impression of the small lyre (shown at left) in the dirt; the wooden
bars had disintegrated. So Woolley inserted wooden sticks and wires into the holes and
then poured in plaster. When the plaster had hardened, Woolley cleared the surrounding
soil and revealed his lyre, with a decorative copper cow’s head and a shell plaque attached
to the sound box. Even the lyre’s ten strings were briefly preserved in plaster, although
they quickly disintegrated.
The ancient woodwork has perished, the metal has been stripped from the walls,” Sir Leonard
Woolley wrote in 1936. “The ruins which excavation lays bare are but skeletons from which the
skin and flesh have gone, and to re-create them in imagination we must use such evidence as the
ruins may afford, eked out by descriptions in the cuneiform texts. A king will boast how he
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overlaid the doors of a sanctuary with gold, and amongst the ashes on the threshold of a temple
gateway there may be found shreds of gold leaf overlooked by plunderers who sacked and
burned the building; a fallen scrap of painted plaster can give a hint as to the adornment of a
ceiling.”1
The ruins of Ur are as lifeless today as Sir Leonard Woolley described them two years after
his excavation of the site ended. But thanks to Woolley’s discoveries, we may conjure up a vivid
picture of life at Ur. The British explorer uncovered not just scraps of plaster and shreds of gold,
but entire vessels, headdresses and bull figurines made of the precious metal, ancient lyres,
copper weapons and tools, silver bowls, a stunning assortment of jewelry made of imported lapis
lazuli and carnelian, and more than 400 cylinder seals. He also unearthed a temple and ziggurat
dedicated to the local moon god Nanna; homes of the rich and the not so rich; nearly 2,000
burials, most of them simple, but 16 of them so elaborate that he identified them as the royal
tombs of Ur; and, most famous of all, a 12-foot-thick flood layer that he identified with Noah’s
Flood.
University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia
The ram of Abraham? Because it so beautifully recalled the offering made in Isaac’s stead,
Woolley identified this 17-inch-tall statue as “the ram caught in the thicket” of Genesis
22:13.
It probably served—along with its mate, now in the British Museum—as a stand for burnt
offerings during funerary rituals. Both sculptures were found, badly damaged, in the
“royal cemetery” tomb known as the Great Death pit, which contained more than 70
bodies. With a face of gold, ears of copper, horns of deep blue lapis lazuli, a fleece of shell
and a belly of silver, the ram is one of the most stunning artifacts from the graveyard.
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Eighty years have passed since Woolley began excavating, on behalf of the British Museum
and the University of Pennsylvania, at Ur, in Iraq, just southwest of the Euphrates and about 150
miles north of the Persian Gulf. But it is 150 years since the British Museum first showed interest
in the site. At that time, in the 1850s, it was known simply as Tell el-Muqayyar, “The Mound of the
Pitch.” The tell was named for a ziggurat, an imposing temple platform made of mudbricks, held
together with bitumen, or pitch, and approached by stairs on three sides. The ziggurat at Ur—the
best-preserved example from ancient Mesopotamia (see photo)—had remained at least partially
exposed ever since it was built during Ur’s floruit around 2100 B.C.E.
In the mid-1850s, the British Assyriologist Henry Rawlinson, newly famous for having
deciphered cuneiform, encouraged J.E. Taylor, the British consul in Iraq and an occasional
archaeologist for the British Museum, to explore the impressive remains of Tell el-Muqayyar.
Digging along the base of the second tier of the ziggurat, Taylor found cuneiform inscriptions (on
what are called foundation cylinders) that recorded a sixth-century B.C.E. restoration of the
ancient ziggurat by the Babylonian emperor Nabonidus (556–539 B.C.E.). The inscriptions
identified the site as Ur. Popular imagination linked it with Biblical Ur, the home of Abraham
(Genesis 11:31).
Despite Taylor’s find, interest in excavating the site was slow to develop. A few minor digs
were undertaken, but for the most part, Ur lay fallow while the British Museum directed its funds
to excavations of the Assyrian palaces in northern Iraq. It was not until World War I, when British
troops arrived in Mesopotamia, that serious thought was given to returning to Ur. In 1922 the
University of Pennsylvania Museum and the British Museum agreed to co-sponsor an excavation.
Any finds, they determined, would “be divided between the two Institutions by mutual
agreement.”2 Leonard Woolley, who had excavated Carchemish (in northern Syria) for the British
Museum and had dug in Italy and Nubia for the university, was named director. On September
26, 1922, Woolley set sail for Basra, the southern Iraqi port.
Woolley would spend 12 consecutive winters digging at Ur, from 1922 to 1934. His work
resulted in a knighthood, a radio show on the BBC, a handful of popular books, a 19-volume
technical report and, of course, the finds. The discoveries, he later wrote, “far surpass[ed]
anything we had dared to expect.”3 The artifacts were divided among the museums of London,
Pennsylvania and Iraq. Today, the famous Standard of Ur—four mosaic panels depicting a
military victory and celebration—resides in the British Museum, along with statuettes, precious
jewels, instruments, seals, gold vessels and game pieces. The artifacts sent to Baghdad have
been in storage since the Gulf War, when the Iraq Museum’s collection was put in hiding. Two
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hundred artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum are touring the United States
through May 2001 (the exhibition schedule appears in the box on p. 25).
Rising 60 feet above the surrounding plain, the elongated Tell el-Muqayyar measures about
4,000 feet from north to south and 2,600 feet across. Occupied for almost 4,000 years, from the
fifth to the mid-first millennium B.C.E., the city reached its zenith in the third millennium B.C.E.—
the period of the so-called royal tombs, the ziggurat and other major buildings.
“The first thing I did,” Woolley wrote about his initial forays at Ur, “was to dig trial trenches
which might give us some idea of the lay-out of the old city.”4 One long trench ran east of the
ziggurat; the second cut across what would later be identified as the cemetery.
Working with a team of 400, Woolley excavated extremely carefully for his day. When his
trench struck gold beads from rich graves during his first season, Woolley stopped work in that
area—for four years. “Our object was to get history, not to fill museum cases with miscellaneous
curios,” Woolley wrote, “and history could not be got unless both we and our men were duly
trained.”5 Only after years of labor (and learning) at Ur did Woolley resume his excavation of the
cemetery.
Searching
for
early
Ur,
Woolley
excavated
several
enormous
pits.
Arrayed along the edges and the stairs of
the pit are the Arab workers enlisted to
do the dirty work—in this case, removing
450,000 cubic feet of dirt. About 65 feet
below the surface of the tell, Woolley
found evidence of the earliest community
at Ur: sherds of pottery with simple
painted designs, mudbricks, stone tools,
clay sickles, spindle whorls, and a
handful of graves, dating to the fifth
millennium B.C.E.
University of Pennsylvania Museum
Archives
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In the meantime, Woolley concentrated on the ziggurat and the surrounding buildings, which
he determined were part of a walled sacred precinct that filled much of the northern half of the
mound. The surrounding wall had last been restored by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar
(605–562 B.C.E.).
Woolley dated the ziggurat and other major construction in the sacred precinct to the city’s
heyday, around 2100–2000 B.C.E., when Ur was the capital of an empire, now called by scholars
Ur III. King Ur-Nammu, the founder of the dynasty, initiated an ambitious building project to be
completed by his son Shulgi. They dedicated the sacred precinct on the top of the mound (on the
site of an earlier temple) to the Sumerian moon god Nanna and his wife Ningal, who were thought
to reside in Ur. In return for the gods’ protection, the kings of Ur built the ziggurat, which probably
supported a temple to Nanna, dwellings for temple priestesses and what may have been a
palace. An inscription from Ur records that the city walls built by Ur-Nammu were “like a yellow
mountain”—presumably referring to the ziggurat, which loomed above the surrounding plain. 6 UrNammu also refurbished the city’s harbors and dug canals on three sides.
It is this city of about 2000 B.C.E. that Woolley identified as Abraham’s home.
When the British mystery writer Agatha Christie visited the excavations at Ur in 1928, Woolley
himself took her on a grand tour of the site. (Apparently Woolley’s temperamental wife, Katharine,
had just read—and enjoyed—The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of Christie’s Poirot mysteries.)
Christie, who would later marry Woolley’s then-assistant Max Mallowan, admired Woolley’s ability
to conjure up life among the dusty ruins: “Leonard Woolley saw with the eye of imagination: the
place was as real to him as if it had been 1500 B.C., or a few thousand years earlier. Wherever
we happened to be, he could make it come alive. While he was speaking I felt in my mind no
doubt whatever that that house on the corner had been Abraham’s. It was his reconstruction of
the past and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also.” 7
Eric Burrows, a priest and epigraphist working at Ur, offered Christie a more sober, and
perhaps more balanced, understanding of the site. Burrows’s method as he guided the mystery
writer around the site was “entirely different” from Woolley’s. “With an apologetic air, he [Burrows]
described the big courtyard, a temenos [sacred precinct], or a street of shops, and just as you
became interested would always say: ‘Of course we don’t know if it is that really. Nobody can be
sure. No, I think probably it was not.”8
In a popular book, Woolley attempted to correlate the archaeological and historical evidence
from Ur with the scanty description of the patriarch’s life in the Bible: “Abraham,” he wrote, “did
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Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context
not come away from Ur empty handed. He brought with him a pride in his upbringing, in the
greatness of his city … He brought with him those stories of the world’s creation and of the Flood
which, moralised by his descendants, have been as history or as parable treasured by half the
world for four thousand years. He brought with him the laws of Ur and, handing them down
through the generations of his house, laid the foundations of that Mosaic code which is still the
Law of the Jews and has been professedly adopted by most Christian nations as the basis of
their own systems.”9
Woolley tried to quell any doubts about his identification of Ur as home to Abraham. When his
opponents claimed that Abraham would never have traveled so far and that the Biblical Ur should
be identified with Urfa, in southern Turkey, Woolley took the opposite tack: “The proximity of Urfa
and Haran was a strong argument against the former’s being Ur. The migration of Terah’s house
becomes rather ridiculous if the move were but for a dozen miles or so and the new home was
actually in sight of the old.”10
But Woolley was not interested solely in Ur in the time of Abraham; he also wanted to find the
city of Abraham’s ancestors.
In 1927, having become more confident in his team and in his own understanding of the site’s
stratigraphy, Woolley returned to the cemetery he had struck in his first season. In all, Woolley
discovered 1,850 graves: 660 from about 2600–2500 B.C.E. and the rest from about 2300 B.C.E.
Most of the earlier graves were simple: a 5- by 6-foot pit containing a single body, wrapped in
reed mats or placed in a simple wooden coffin. Clothing, a few personal accessories and simple
vessels made of clay or stone were among the only grave goods.
Sixteen of these early graves, however, were spectacular. These Woolley identified as the
royal tombs of Ur. Although the royal tombs differed in design, in most the body was placed in a
vaulted or domed chamber at the bottom of a deep shaft. Surrounding the body (either in the
chamber or in a pit outside) were the corpses of attendants (more than 70 in one case), the
skeletons of oxen beside the chariots that they once pulled, and abundant grave goods. The
wealth of imported goods attests to Ur’s primacy in trade. The most abundant metal in the tombs
was copper, believed to originate in the Oman peninsula, at the southern end of the Persian Gulf.
There were vessels of chlorite and calcite, which probably came from Iran; beads carved from
carnelian, known from western India; and seals, beads and other ornaments made of brilliant blue
lapis lazuli, which came from southern Afghanistan.
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A glimmering wreath crowned Queen
Puabi of Ur in death. Woolley discovered
this magnificent headdress clinging to
the crushed skull of Puabi, a 5-foot-tall,
40-year-old woman identified by a
cylinder seal found in her tomb. Made of
hundreds of delicate pieces, the
reconstructed headdress includes a long
gilded ribbon that stretched across
Puabi’s forehead and looped over her
ears, gold rosettes inlaid with lapis lazuli
and white paste, rings of gold, and
golden poplar and willow leaves dangling
from strings of lapis lazuli and carnelian
beads. Seven gold rosettes—called a
“Spanish comb” by Woolley—sprouted
from the back of the headdress.
University of Pennsylvania Museum,
Philadelphia
One of the richest tombs belonged to a woman named Puabi (or Shubad, as Woolley read her
name). On January 4, 1928, Woolley secretly notified his sponsors of his discovery by wiring
them a telegram in Latin: “TUMULUM SAXIS EXSTRUCTUM LATERICIA ARCATUM
INTEGRUM INVENI REGINAE SHUBAD … ” (“I found the intact tomb, stone built and vaulted
over with bricks, of Queen Shubad adorned with a dress in which gems, flower crowns and
animal figures are woven. Tomb magnificent, with jewels and golden cups—Woolley.”)
University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia
Woolley was so excited by his discovery of another massive tomb, belonging to a woman
named Puabi (he misread the name as Shubad), that he informed his sponsors in a
telegram written in Latin so that it could not be intercepted.
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Later, Woolley tried to envision the ceremony that would have accompanied such a mass
burial:
“Down into the pit, with its mat-covered floor and mat-lined walls, empty and unfurnished,
there comes a procession of people, the members of the dead ruler’s court, soldiers, menservants and women, the latter in all their finery of brightly-colored garments and head-dresses of
carnelian and lapis lazuli, silver and gold, officers with the insignia of their rank, musicians
bearing harps or lyres, and then, driven or backed down the slope, the chariots drawn by oxen or
by asses, the drivers in the cars, the grooms holding the heads of the draught animals, and all
take up their allotted places at the bottom of the shaft and finally a guard of soldiers forms up at
the entrance … The musicians played up to the last; then each of them drank from their cups a
potion which they had brought with them or found prepared for them on the spot—in one case we
found in the middle of the pit a great copper pot into which they could have dipped—and they lay
down and composed themselves for death. Somebody came down and killed the animals … and
when that was done earth was flung in from above, over the unconscious victims, and the filling-in
of the grave-shaft was begun.”11
University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia
A golden dagger—the metal too soft to be functional—was among the burial offerings in
the “royal cemetery.” Small round nail heads decorate the restored wooden handle and
the original blade—in imitation of the metalworking technique known as granulation.
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University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia
Woolley discovered this six-inch-tall tumbler resting beside the hand of Puabi. Made of
electrum (an alloy of silver and gold), the fluted vessel was created by hammering sheet
metal. The grave goods of Ur suggest that the city’s inhabitants were sophisticated
metalworkers, despite the region’s paucity of natural ores, which are generally found in
more mountainous regions.
Royalty, mass suicide and gold—only Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb could rival
the sensation caused by Woolley’s find.
© 1928 New York Times, reprinted by permission
Headlines in the New York Times proclaimed that Woolley had found a queen’s tomb
bearing “marvels of artistic work.”
But Woolley was not content with having found what he identified as the city of Abraham and
his ancestors. He also wanted to uncover evidence of Noah’s Flood. Having dug down 30 feet in
places to clear the cemetery, Woolley decided to continue digging in this area, hoping to find the
earliest civilization at Ur. He cut a pit, 75 by 60 feet in area, which eventually extended 64 feet
deep. The first 41 feet down contained the remains of cities—mudbrick walls, pottery, graves.
Directly beneath these occupation layers, however, Woolley detected a 12-foot layer of silt that
had been deposited all at once, sometime in the mid-fourth millennium B.C.E. Woolley identified it
as the Biblical Flood. During the Deluge, he speculated, the overflowing Euphrates had deposited
the soil here. Scholars today suggest that the deposit may well have been wind-swept sand or the
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silt from any one of the numerous floods of the Euphrates, which may or may not have inspired
the Biblical and Sumerian Flood stories. 12
Beneath the thick silt appeared a layer of mudbricks, ashes and potsherds, which Woolley
identified as a prehistoric, pre-Flood community. Beneath this, about 3 feet below sea level, all
traces of human occupation ended.
The year that Woolley dug his Flood pit was also the year the stock market crashed—1929. By
the early 1930s, funds for Woolley’s dig were drying up. The “possibilities of the site were nearing
exhaustion, at least for our generation,” the director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum
diplomatically informed Woolley in 1933.13 On February 25, 1934, the dig ended.
One year later, Woolley was knighted by King George V. In 1936 Woolley published a popular
account of his findings at Ur, named not for the site, but for the man he considered its most
famous resident: Abraham: Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins.
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Abraham’s Ur—Is the Pope Going to
the Wrong Place?
By Hershel Shanks
We inadvertently printed an incorrect draft of this article in our January/February 2000 issue.
The correct text follows:
Pope John Paul II is planning a millennium pilgrimage in 2000 that will take him to Bethlehem,
Jerusalem, Sinai—and Iraq! Why Iraq? Because that is where the patriarch Abraham was born—
at Ur.
But wait a minute. The Pope may be going to the wrong Ur. Perhaps he should be going to
Turkey.
More than 40 years ago, Cyrus Gordon, the eminent Biblical scholar and Near Eastern
polymath who recently celebrated his 91st birthday, argued that the commonly designated Ur, on
the west bank of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq, is not the Ur where Abraham was born. 1
I talked to the still-very-much-with-it scholar in a telephone interview at his Massachusetts
home. Gordon told me that before the middle of the 19th century, everyone located Ur in the
north, based on the only evidence then available, the Biblical text. 2 With the decipherment of
cuneiform, a southern Ur was identified in Iraq, an Ur that ultimately produced fabulous finds. As
a result, scholars changed their focus to the southern Ur. As Claus Westermann has remarked,
“After Leonard Woolley’s work at [southern] Ur, the idea that this great and ancient center of
civilization must have been ‘Abraham’s homeland’ captured the imagination.” 3 But in the Bible,
“there is no trace of any connection with Ur in the south; there is only the name.” 4
One thing seems clear: There was more than one Ur. Places named Ur, or something
linguistically close enough to it to be a candidate for Abrahamic Ur (such as Ura), have turned up
in numerous ancient inscriptions—at Ugarit (on the Mediterranean coast in modern Syria), at Nuzi
(in northeastern Iraq), at Alalakh (in Turkey about a hundred miles north of Ugarit) and, most
recently, in the extraordinary archive from Ebla (in northern Syria, east of Ugarit). The Ebla
tablets include references to places called Ur, Ura and Urau. Unfortunately, none of these
references can be located with precision, 5 but the findspots of the tablets indicate the cities were
most likely somewhere in central or northern Syria or southern Turkey—relatively near Haran.
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And Haran is where Abram, as he was then called, went with his father, Terah, after they left
Ur (Genesis 11:31). There is no dispute regarding the location of Haran, where Terah died
(Genesis 11:28–32).6 The ancient name has stuck to the site. 7 It is about 10 miles north of the
Syrian border, in Turkey, strategically located on the east-west highway that links the Tigris River
with the Mediterranean Sea. It was a major city in the Middle Bronze Age (first half of the second
millennium B.C.E.), the probable date of the patriarchal age, if we accept the position that there
was such an age, and such a person as Abraham. 8
Unfortunately, except for a small sounding, Haran has never been excavated. A major
expedition was planned by Harvard professor Lawrence Stager, but bureaucratic obstacles laid
by the Turkish government blocked the way. That was when Stager (and his financial backer,
Leon Levy) moved instead to Ashkelon, in Israel. (Ashkelon is now the most prominent American
excavation in the Holy Land.) What we know about Haran, therefore, comes mostly from
cuneiform archives such as the Nuzi tablets, which provide a vivid picture of life in Haran during
the Middle Bronze Age.
Perhaps the major objection to identifying Biblical Ur with the south...
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