Jordan Peterson's contribution to Evolutionary Fall Theology

@ManiacalVesalius

So you think the Sumerian parallels found in Genesis is either illusionary, or exaggerated or in fact based on Egyptian legends?

I don’t see here any evidence of “substantial reworking” of the Pentateuch in the post-exilic period. All the ideas in your first point, traditions of the confusion of the languages, flood, etc, were in the common near eastern culture throughout the second millennium BC, if not earlier. The flood concept of Genesis’s primeval history probably derives from the Epic of Atrahasis (c. 1700 BC), the first story of the confusion of the languages comes from a story called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta dating to the late 3rd millennium BC, etc. Adam and Eve’s story also certainly has predecessors in the second millennium BC milieu, far earlier than the exilic period. See;

This Mesopotamian artifact, even though we don’t know its provenance, dates to the late 3rd millennium BC (probably c. 2200-2100 BC), and depicts a man and a women sitting around a sacred tree, reaching for its fruits. It’s currently housed in the British Museum. You ask me this in your most recent comment;

So you think the Sumerian parallels found in Genesis is either illusionary, or exaggerated or in fact based on Egyptian legends?

I’m not sure if these are precisely Sumerian traditions at all, nor are they Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, etc. I think these were common near eastern traditions shared in the broad, cultural milieu of the time, and that’s why all these stories (or variations thereof) pop up across all these cultures, usually in one form or another. Genesis wasn’t taking grabs from one specific nation or another, or one specific language or another, these are simply stories known throughout the broader region at the time that everyone would have known about (like how everyone today in the West, because of our cultural background, knows about the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent), and so we have these texts popping up that embed these traditions, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, Genesis, etc. This wasn’t a Sumerian story, this was a near eastern story.

Lastly, angels. For this discussion, I’ll concede that the angelic concept seems to have borrowed from Zoroastrianism. However, this borrowed concept of angels only seems to be present in later books of the Bible (like Daniel), and is not present in the Pentateuch where a different idea of ‘angels’ seems to be present. In other words, I don’t find this as evidence of reworking of the Pentateuch, and even if it was, this would hardly support “heavily reworking” as you put it. Anyways, this is quite apart from the main discussion.

I think, at this point, I’ve already been able to show that the Egyptian influence in the Pentateuch runs wide and deep, and that significant Egyptian traditions entered into Israel’s religion, not during the exilic or later periods, but in the late second millennium BC. Thus, it’s only proper to consider Moses’ name also being of Egyptian etymology, not Sumerian. I am not aware of a single word in the entire Hebrew Bible borrowed directly from Sumerian language, and so it would be quite an anamoly for Moses in specific to be that special one. Secondly, I’ve already enumerated how the influence of Sumerian language was very limited during Israel’s time, seemingly mostly limited to Babylonians preserving their ancient tradition, and therefore would not be exactly a good place to look for explaining the name Moses, especially when such a plausible option already exists in Egyptian.

@ManiacalVesalius,

Thank you for taking on some of the heavy lifting on the general issue of cultural and religious influences on the Pentateuch. Nicely done!

Let me offer some helpful clarifications:

  1. The issue of Angels was specifically brought up in connection to Genesis. In my view, Genesis is one of the most recent texts of the Pentateuch.

  2. Are you suggesting that, in your view, these ANE parallels are something that would have been more likely acquired in Egypt than during the Babylonian exile?

  3. You say you have “been able to show that the Egyptian influence in the Pentateuch runs wide and deep…”, but really, only in producing Israelites that have names with Egyptian origins. Egypt was in full blown “empire mode” over the Levant, and all the way up to the Syrian frontier, for centuries - - starting with the expulsion of the Hyksos, and ending with the entrenchment of their former enemies, the Philistines, who having been settled on the coast by Egyptian authorities, opted to take Palestine if they could not take the Egyptian homeland. If you are going to bring up the Amarna texts as some kind of rebuttal. During a time when the crown was minimally interested in Empire, the Amarna texts still show local chieftains highly oriented to Egypt, and the movement of even tiny forces changing the fate of an entire city-state… all the way up to Jerusalem and beyond. So when did Egyptian-derived names become popular in Canaan? Maybe centuries before the birth of Abraham.

But, really, I don’t have to convince you … because based on this writer, many more academics have already been convinced!

Below is a link to an early page in a book by Peter Enns:

Google Books Link: Peter Enns “The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say…”

Thank you for taking on some of the heavy lifting on the general issue of cultural and religious influences on the Pentateuch. Nicely done!

Why thank you!

It looks as if we’re going to talk about the dating of Genesis again. It appears as if our opinions diverge here – I view the Pentateuchal texts as productions from the 10th-6th centures BC, before the exile happened, whereas you view them as post-exilic (or exilic?). Before I move on (as I will show this is not a fundamental issue here), I will reiterate a number of the points I made regarding the dating of the composition of the Pentateuch, or at least the time in which the Egyptian influences made their way into the Pentateuch. I will simply quote myself from earlier;

I also have numbered reasons to believe that the Pentateuch, whatever form it contained, was originally written anywhere between the 10th-6th centuries BC, before the exile had happened, from literacy in Judah that, according to Finkelstein and others, may limit the final date to the 6th century BC, an actual fragment of the Book of Numbers dating to the end of the 7th century BC (search up the silver scrolls), and another thing I did not mention in my previous comment – there are many events from the 13th-10th centuries BC that have made their ways into the deuteronomistic history (DtrH), of which are beautifully recorded by a famous Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar here: (PDF) Archaeology and the Bible: Reflections on Historical Memory in the Deuteronomistic History. In : C.M.Maeier, Congress Volume Munich 2013 (Vetus Testamentum Supplementum), Leiden: Brill 2014, pp.347-369. | Amihai Mazar - Academia.edu
This makes it, for me, implausible to think that the composition of the Pentateuch could have been too much later.

And yet another reason to enumerate is the mentioning of the city Rameses (Pi-Rameses) a few times in the Pentateuch, such as, importantly, Exodus 1:11. Once the second millennium BC came to a closing, this city was no longer called Rameses, but was then referred onwards as ‘Tanis’. Yet, the more ancient name of Rameses for the city is preserved in the biblical records. This is an Egyptian influence that sprung in Israel in the late second millennium BC. For a host of reasons, I see the Egyptian elements in the biblical works originating in the late second millennium BC, and then making their way into the Pentateuch and other biblical books.

Indeed, to focus on one point, we do in fact have a portion of the Book of Numbers dating to roughly c. 600 BC discoverd in the 1970’s, by far the earliest physical fragment of any of the biblical books discovered, called the Ketef Hinnom inscriptions. Here’s a picture.

These manuscripts are now on display in the Israel Museum. I’m pretty sure this makes it completely unambiguous, whatsoever, that portions of the Pentateuch (or at the very least, what would become the Pentateuch) were already circulating in Israel before the exile. Nevertheless, the Egyptian influences, as I have shown earlier, can be traced back to entering Israel starting in the late second millennium BC. The influences I have shown go beyond many names, I’ve also pointed out that there are literally hundreds of Egyptian loanwords in the exodus and wilderness narratives alone. Go to pg. 52 in this paper;
https://www.bibleinterp.com/PDFs/Noonan.pdf

That’s quite significant in comparison to the precisely zero we have from Sumerian! Now, moving on to a question you had for me;

  1. Are you suggesting that, in your view, these ANE parallels are something that would have been more likely acquired in Egypt than during the Babylonian exile?

What I’m suggesting is that these stories of the man and women in the garden with the tree, the confusion of the languages, the floods, etc, were common near eastern stories and motifs common to all ancient near eastern societies and cultures. These weren’t Sumerian stories or Egyptian stories, they were near eastern stories that would have been inherited from generation to generation by anyone living in the general near eastern area. In other words, these stories would have been with the Israelite people from the very beginning of their emergence, and the fathers of the ‘founders’ of Israel would have known them, and the fathers of the fathers of Israel’s founders would have known them, and the fathers of the fathers of the fathers of Israel’s founders would have known them, etc. Everyone would have known them, just like everyone in Europe knows about the story of Adam and Eve – it’s not that the British got the story from the Germans who got the story from the Greeks, it’s simply that the story of Adam and Eve is part of the common cultural milieu of European and western society, so it’s no surprise that the Brits know it, and the Brits knowing it doesn’t at all imply that they took it from one particular culture, nor does Israel knowing of the flood story imply that they in turn took the flood story from one particular culture (like Sumer). The flood story (and other stories) were not cultural stories, they were multi-cultural stories.

So when did Egyptian-derived names become popular in Canaan? Maybe centuries before the birth of Abraham.

This is probably true, which is, again, why we should be looking towards Egypt rather than Sumer to explain the etymology of Moses name. Now, if there was no Egyptian word or name that was parallel to Moses (msh), I wouldn’t be saying this – but there is a very clear and important one in some of the most common names of Egypt, in the names of like half the pharaohs – mose, which means, to be born. Ptahmose, meaning born of the god Ptah, Ramses, meaning born of the god Ra, Thutmose, meaning born of the god Thut. Moses, on the other hand, retains this root without any polytheistic/gentilic overtones, for obvious reasons. This is such a good parallel from such a massive influence over the Levant in this entire period – Egypt itself – that it should be clear that this is where we should be looking towards for the etymology of Moses name (rather than the Sumerian word for snake priest, and I have shown that the influence of Sumer’s language over Israel is extremely negligble).

@ManiacalVesalius,

And now you are playing a semantic game. The cuneiform used by the Babylonians… and then inspiring scripts all over the ANE, with the exception of the Egyptians and the semitic populations who developed the Aleph-Bet systems. Cuneiform wouldn’t disappear until a century into the Christian Era.

Stories not based on Sumerian originals are easy to find. Sumerian stories that are not amplified later are hard to find. And identifying the differences between Egyptian lore and Sumerian/Akkadian legend is not particuarly labor intensive.

So what I see is you doggedly holding onto a few a hand-grips that don’t actually show what you think they show.

I acknowledge the antiquity of the silver inscriptions:

"Numbers 6:24–26 contains one of the central passages of Scripture, known as the “Priestly” or “Aaronic” Benediction:

The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn His face toward you and give you peace.

“Evidence for the antiquity of this passage has now been found. Excavations in Jerusalem in 1979–80 by Gabriel Barkay turned up two amulets dating from the late seventh century BC.”

@ManiacalVesalius,

This is actually the time frame we would expect to find the “raw material” for an Exilic “edit” of the “old religion” of Judah.

And finally, to conclude, you dip again into the Egyptian sense of the word “Ms”.

So… while you are clearly enamored with the beautiful correlation of Moses being brought up from the Nile,

you don’t have any appreciation for the following:

  1. The person known as Ms (which in Cuneiform used by Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians & Babylonians meant both Priest and Serpent), carries a Staff that can turn into the totem animal which in Genesis is identified with the author of lies, and inspiration for corruption of the entire world.

  2. Ms, the person who said he wouldn’t be believed by Pharaoh, and so he was divinely instructed on how to transform his staff into a serpent.

  3. Ms, now literally becoming the world’s newest High Priest of a Divine Serpent (the Akkadian symbol of the god Ea/Ya), not only demonstrated this power, but demonstrated his serpent power more proficiently than three of Pharaoh’s serpent men.

  4. Ms, the very genetic source of the Levitical priesthood, and yet his two sons have ongoing role, leaving it to a “semi-fictional” character whose name is apparently virtually identical to the Hebrew word for “Ark”, in which a section of “serpent stick” is stored. Note: The phrase “Sons of Aaron” almost certainly represents an older phrase “Sons of the Ark”.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Background Detail on the words for Aaron and Ark -
Strong’s Hebrew #175 = אַהֲרוֹן = 'Aharown
Strong’s Hebrew #727 = אָרוֹן = 'arown

which, interestingly enough, correlates oddly to the Jebustie custodian of the threshing floor bought by David:

Strong’s Hebrew #771 = אָרְנָן = 'Ornan

As well as a mix of other variants:
"ar-av-naw’, or (by transposition) אוֹרְנָה = ʼÔwrᵉnâh;
or אַרְנִיָּה ʼArnîyâhlemma אַנִיָּה missing resh, corrected to אַרְנִיָּה;
all by orthographical variation for H771; Aravnah (or Arnijah or Ornah), the Jebusite: - Araunah.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  1. Ms, the very man who encouraged the Hebrew to look to a “brazen serpent on a pole” (to find relief from the totem animal - the snake), not just in some random spot in the desert, but in Edom, near Oboth. Oboth is the plural form of the word “owb”, which means either “wizard” or the familiar spirits the wizard calls upon. Edom is also the land of Petra, where to this day the remains of a rather large coiled snake statue can still be seen!
    .
    [ Click on image to see person standing next to snake monument (showing scale) in black & white upper right image. ]

In the 1800’s David Roberts found a hidden entrance to a tomb under the snake carved on the roof of the squared outcropping. And inside the tomb, when they dug it out, there was no body, but there was a black painted rod… buried in the tomb, with a hidden entrance, under a giant carved snake. Draw your own conclusions.

  1. The next we hear of the serpent pole of Moses (Ms) is in the reign of Hezekiah:

2 Kings 18:1
Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem… . .

2 Kings 18:4
He [Hezekiah] removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves,
and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made:
for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it…

Burning incense was an act of devotion to a deity.

Assuming that this serpent pole, erected by Moses, had to have been continuously moved ever since that time.
It traveled with the people wherever Moses led them. Then after Moses died, Joshua must have continued to
march around with the Serpent Pole. Then during the period of Judges, someone somewhere watched over
the Serpent Pole, presumably a place having trouble with snakes.

After Judges, we have the period of Saul and David, and when David assumes the throne, we don’t know if the Serpent Pole goes with him to Hebron. Maybe it stays in Hebron during the successive reigns of 14 more kings, until we reach the 15th King: Hezekiah - - who rules during the last quarter of the 700’s BCE.

So what do we notice about the Serpent Pole? By the time of Hezekiah, people are burning incense to the snake.
The prophets Isaiah, and Joel and Micah… nobody seems to think there is a problem with a serpent on a pole in the midst of the kingdom, erected by what any Assyrian or Babylonian visitor would assume is a Serpent/Priest, since he hears his name is “Ms”, and that Ms even demonstrated his power with snakes.

If the New Testament didn’t compare Jesus to the serpent pole of Moses, I suppose there wouldn’t be much to talk about!

John 3:14 “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.”

The phrase “lifted up” is a veiled reference to resurrection.

If you want a more nuanced view, I regard most of the Pentateuch as pre-exilic, but Genesis 1-10 as exilic at earliest. See here for my reasons.

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Hmm? I have already said that the written language of Sumer survived all the way until the first century AD. What I was saying that has zero evidence is the transmission of any Sumerian words or names into the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a single word or name in the entire Hebrew Bible borrowed directly from Sumerian. This is in stark contrast to the amount of Egyptian words and names we have in the OT. Anyways, you were right, I guess I have to do a little more appreciating for the ‘correlation’ between the Sumerian ms and Moses. Back to this at a later point.

Regarding the Ketef Hinnom inscriptions (silver scrolls), you said;

This is actually the time frame we would expect to find the “raw material” for an Exilic “edit” of the “old religion” of Judah.

I simply don’t understood the connection you’re making here. How exactly are the Ketef Hinnom manuscripts ‘raw material’ for exilic editing of the Pentateuch (especially if, as per your view, the Pentateuch didn’t exist yet?)? It seems to me as if the silver scrolls are just like any other manuscript of the OT, except earlier. They certainly reveal that the Pentateuch, in some portion, was around in the pre-exilic period. So, questions I would have include the following: Who wrote Numbers 6:24-26? How much else of the Pentateuch was this figure responsible for writing? And when did he write it? Something else I found uncertain was this:

In the 1800’s David Roberts found a hidden entrance to a tomb under the snake carved on the roof of the squared outcropping. And inside the tomb, when they dug it out, there was no body, but there was a black painted rod… buried in the tomb, with a hidden entrance, under a giant carved snake. Draw your own conclusions.

I tracked down the picture you gave for this carved snake, and I found it was simply a blog travelling site and provided me no information about the carving itself. I found David Roberts Wikipedia page, and the entry mentions nothing of this finding either. Is this finding relevant at all? Before I can say anything of the like, I’ll need to know the location of the carving and its dating. Finally, I finally took to searching up the Sumerian word ‘ms’ to investigate it for myself. However, I found no results. So, I tracked down the Pennsylvanian Sumerian Dictionary, and enterred the word ‘snake’ to find the Sumerian word ms. And I found it. And there is something very startling here.

The Pennsylvanian Sumerian Dictionary (PSD) is a terrific resource. It actually lists every usage of each Sumerian word, ever, and how many times it was used in a every 500-year period of time. I’ll simply reproduce the chart the dictionary gives for the usage of this word over time;

I’d recommend going to the article on the dictionary itself: http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-frame.html
As you can see, the Sumerian muš was first used in the period between 3499-3000 BC, where it has 42 occurrences. Then, 2999-2500 BC, it has 52 recorded occurrences. Then, in 2499-2000 BC, it has 97 recorded occurrences. It seems to be increasing in use. However, all of a sudden, between all of 1999-1500 BC, there is only a single recorded occurrence of this word, and from 1499-1000 BC, the period when Israel was founded, it was not used once in Sumerian writing, and was never used subsequently. In other words, it looks as if the Mesopotamians had entirely stopped using and knowing this word at this point. Yet, your theory holds that not only would someone in Israel have known how the Sumerian language works, but they would have in fact known about this word and had specifically drawn from it when naming Moses. That sounds like quite a stretch to me, and I’d hate so sound like a broken record, but in this exact time period, the Egyptian language was thriving throughout the Levant like no other foreign language and the word mose was still being used widely. This new finding of mine, in my view, provides another serious setback to any claim that Moses name is of Sumerian origins, rather than of Egyptian origins, the position of most scholars in the field.

Thanks, that was an interesting examination, although I’m not personally convinced.

Feel free to point out any flaws in the reasoning and account for the facts in a different way.

Your examination is not flawed at all, it’s just that it isn’t the only available explanation. Indeed, your argument is rather good; the only OT references to the primeval history in Genesis (ch. 1-11) suddenly appear during and after the exile, which may indicate that this, or the period slightly earlier, is when they were composed. That reasoning works, but that isn’t the only explanation in town.

Firstly, your argumentation doesn’t rule out a pre-exilic dating of Genesis 1-11, simply because, by the same reasoning, I can posit that Genesis 1-11 was composed some time in the century before the exile (700-600 BC), and in the time afterwards and during the exile, these texts gained authority and they started getting quoted. Indeed, your argument would only rule out a dating significantly earlier than the exile. If I were to posit a dating of the primeval history in, say, 650 BC, it would fit fully well with the facts you’ve outlined.

Secondly, there are other possible reasons why these books wouldn’t be quoted until some exilic or post-exilic period of time besides that they didn’t exist. One explanation is that OT books, in general, appear not to quote each other at all until the exilic and post-exilic times. Why? Well, before the exile, the kingdom of Judah remained a nation (Israel was wiped out by the Assyrian in ~700 BC), however, after the exile, the Jewish people truly lost their independence in its entirety for the first time. How could God have chosen the Jewish people for this land if they had lost their exile? This may have been the reasoning, indeed, not only had they lost indepence but the Temple was destroyed. This might have spurred the Jews to begin starting to look back at their earlier predecessors and traditions and begin viewing them with more authority, and begin clinging to them more in order to give them hope and perseverance despite the fact that they’ve been entirely conquered. In other words, it could be that during the exile and later periods, the Israelite’s began taking their traditions more seriously and importantly.

Secondly, we may have archaeological evidence indicating a maximum dating for the entire Pentatuch by c. 600 BC. This archaeological data was only published last year (2016) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Israel Finkelstein among others. This research demonstrates, with new archaeological data, that literacy in Judah was much higher than previously thought in the 7th century BC, and therefore, would set the stage for the major compilation of biblical texts. In other words, I find c. 600 BC to be a good maximum dating for the Pentateuch (and DtrH), and therefore I’d place the compilation of the Pentateuch anywhere from the 10th-6th centuries BC (basically from when Israel became united until the exile).

Ok, what do you think explains all the evidence better?

But that wasn’t the only piece of evidence I presented. I presented multiple lines of independent evidence.

  1. Certain vocabulary in Genesis 1-3 is used elsewhere only in books written during the monarchy or later. A couple of terms in Genesis 1-3 are found in Sumerian literature, though they are not found anywhere else in the Bible.
  2. Certain names appear only in Genesis 1-11 and books written during or after the Babylonian exile.
  3. Some names appear as personal names before the exile, but as place names only during or after the exile.
  4. Some verses in Genesis 1-11 use place names which help date the text. In particular, several verses in Genesis 10 indicate the chapter could not have been written until after the reign of Solomon.
  5. The text of Genesis 1-11 has a number of strong literary parallels with various Mesopotamian texts which were written very early, long before the birth of Moses. These texts were not available to the Hebrews until the exile.
  6. None of the genealogies from Genesis 12 to the end of 2 Kings go back any further than Abraham’s family.
  7. None of the books from Genesis 12 to the end of 2 Kings show any knowledge of Adam, Eve, the garden, the serpent, the fall, Cain and Abel, the flood, or the tower of Babel, the sabbath memorializing the creation (Moses explicitly says the sabbath memorializes the exodus from Egypt), or any of the events of Genesis 1-10. It’s not merely that these chapters aren’t quoted, it’s that most of the Old Testament shows no knowledge of them at all.

There is a lot of data there to be explained, and I don’t think a composition date in the seventh century does this efficiently.

How does this explain why none of the books between Genesis 12 to the end of 2 Kings show any knowledge of Genesis 1-10? Are you saying that for over 1,000 years, those chapters of Genesis were known but weren’t “taken seriously”?

I have read that article. It’s great, but it doesn’t present any evidence that Genesis 1-10 were written before the exile. Nor does it even argue that. In fact one of the authors, Finkelstein, believes that the composition of Genesis “continued into the Persian period, until at least the fifth century B.C.E.”, way past your own “maximum dating for the entire Pentateuch”.

Firstly, while you want me to place Sumerian on the same etymological level as Egyptian - - I would suggest that the proper comparison between Egypt’s influence on the Bible is the role that parts of the Afro-Asiatic linguistic tree had on the Bible (the Babylonian of the East Semitic branch combined with the Aramaic of the Northwest Semitic branch):

Most people are not aware of the older connection between Semitic and Egyptian language. The “unity” between them came at a time when the northern coast of Africa enjoyed more temperate weather and vegetation. Words like “yam” were shared, and meant “ocean” or just “big water”. And when the desert divided northern Africa and the Levant into isolated pockets of humanity, divergence in the language followed.

The fact Sumerian is an isolate, and nowhere on any of these linguistic branches, should pretty well explain why Hebrew priests had little intention of parading their knowledge of foreign languages around, unless required by the topic.

You say there is " zero evidence is the transmission of any Sumerian words" - - well, this is what we are disputing, right?

You seem to be implying that my proposal can only be true if Sumerian words are casually found in the Bible as well, to corroborate my proposals about “Edom”=“Iddim” and “Cherub” “Ker”-“Ub”. I think in both these cases, the etymologies I have outlined make more sense that the traditional explanations. Would Jefferson just randomly sprinkle Greek into his proclamations when he can use all sorts of French words that people know?

Why would a Hebrew scribe make casual use of Sumerian pronunciations, when everyone who could possibly know cuneiform is more familiar with the Semitic/Akkadian pronunciations? And yet, ironically, I do think the scribes unwittingly did just that when they coined the word “Cherub”; for 2000 years, Bible scholars have been looking for the perfect answer to where that word comes from. And they are still debating it, because they haven’t gone back far enough - - to Sumerian, kept alive by the Babylonian priests.

But Lo! @ManiacalVesalius, I think there is one example of exactly what you are looking for from me - - the use of Sumerian that seems obviously Sumerian, but has been purposefully veiled. You may have skimmed right over this particular verse in Isaiah with Yahweh doing the speaking:

Isaiah 54:9 “For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth…”

In 54:10, we get the following clarifying comments:
“For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.”

What an interesting euphemism! “… the waters of Noah…”! How puzzling! Certainly the waters that swept away life forms by the thousands are not Noah’s at all … but Yahweh’s waters! Noah had to contend with them. Noah had to build an Ark. We could say the Ark is Noah’s. But can we really affirm the phrase “Waters of Noah”?

As you know, the pagan ANE awarded the waters of the world to the care of the Sumerian deity, Enki, later to be renamed Ea, by the Semitic Akkadians. Written in cuneiform, Enki is a two-syllable word: “(e)N K(i)”, where I have put the vowels in parenthesis.

When considering the flood stories originating out of Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian literature, I have marvelled at the diversity of the names of the “hero figure” who builds the boat that saves a human remnant from drowning:

One name is:
1] Ziusudra = Sumerian: 𒍣𒌓𒋤𒁺, lettered ZI.UD.SUD.RA2 or pronounced Ziudsuřa(k) “life of long days”;
[Note: Recorded in Greek as: Ξίσουθρος Xisuthros. A late version of The Instructions of Shuruppak refers to Ziusudra.]

2] Zin-Suddu of Shuruppak = Sumerian: 𒍣𒅔𒋤𒁺, lettered ZI.IN.SUD.DU
[Note: listed in the WB-62 Sumerian king list recension as the last king of Sumer prior to the deluge. He is subsequently recorded as the hero of the Sumerian flood epic. He is also mentioned in other ancient literature, including
The Death of Gilgamesh and The Poem of Early Rulers.]

3] Akkadian Atrahasis (“Extremely Wise”);

4] And the Akkadian Utnapishtim (“He Found Life”).

5] And lastly, of course, we have the Biblical hero of the flood story, whose name in English is Noah.

In Hebrew, Strong’s Hebrew # 5146, but not pronounced “Noah” in Hebrew - - but:

Pronunciation
No’ - Akh

Why should the hero’s name be Noah? It doesn’t look anything like the earlier names assigned to this hero. Certainly this is evidence that Biblical dependence on the pagan literature is more flawed than I admit?

It’s a name that is supposed to be derived from the word for “Rest”. Why would the puzzling phrase “Waters of Noah” even appear on the pens of those who wrote Isaiah?

But don’t you see it? The phrase is actually “Waters of No-Akh” ! And in writing, the semitic practice of writing just the consonants seems to tell us the whole story:

“The Waters of N(o)(a)K” < < For centuries years, scribes trained in cuneiform have been reading this Sumerian myths that presented the world from this view . . . but more like this:

“The Waters of N.K.”!

Now this sentence makes sense. For Sumerians, the world’s waters have always belong to Enki, and then they became “the waters of Ea[/Yah]”.

@ManiacalVesalius

I’m not sure you are the person we need to convince. There are always those content with the status quo explanations.

Jonathan’s full catalog of justifications is certainly quite extensive. And you have acknowledged the logic of some of his assertions. For other readers, I provide two paticularly good paragraphs:

Jonathan and I differ on the Pentateuch. He says he thinks it is mostly pre-exilic, while I think the reverse. The “fabulous” nature of much of the Patriarchal material seems more in keeping with the Hellenistic (or even Persian) taste for the “fantastic”. The Wrestling with God story is about as dramatic as it gets, where the hero is certainly wrestling with a deity just minutes before he assumes his duty as the rising sun. At its heart, it is a pagan pre-exilic story, that gets a new dressing when the Persian-inspired scribes get to it.

Leviticus, part of the Pentateuch, has lots of Persian parallels in terms of “clean” and “unclean” practices. Exodus presents the Levite priests as wearing cut-off trousers as part of their elaborate priestly garb. Nobody in the ANE had anything like what the Levites wear - - except the long-legged trousers of the Magi.

The use of the Strong’s Hebrew #1270, barzel, for “iron” is also very convincing. Used at least 73 times in the Bible,

But more than 10% of them are in Deuteronomy… which is supposed to be even before the beginnings of the Iron Age most anywhere in the ANE. Deuteronomy 4:20 even says God refers to Egypt as an “iron furnace” of trouble to the Hebrew - - at that time a fairly unlikely use of that term for Egypt.

Leviticus and Numbers, have 3 unlikely uses of the word:
Leviticus 26:19 refers to a changed world, where the Earth is as brass and the Sky is as Iron.
Numbers 35:16 spells out the specifics of capital punishment if someone dies: “If he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a muderer…” I wonder what the fellow is if the man is smited with a brass tool? Clearly this text is written at a time when nobody even remembers using tools of brass, instead of the now common tools of iron.
This is easier to see than in the example of Numbers 31:22, where the list of things that will survive fire includes “the brass” and “the iron” things.

Genesis 4:22 is wildly out of place naming Tubalcain as an instructor “in brass and iron”. If he was the instructur in working iron, his students all quit doing so as soon as he died.

Looking at your seven pieces of evidence, not all of them argue for an exilic or post-exilic date. Point 1, for example, notes that the vocabulary in Genesis 1-3 is used elsewhere “only in books written during the monarchy or later”. Well, for one, the monarchy was founded c. 1000 BC. Secondly, we don’t have any books predating the monarchy, so who is to claim that this vocabulary didn’t exist before then? We certainly don’t have a biblical book dating to the 11th century BC to show us what pre-monarchic vocabulary looked like.

Point 2 is similarly weak. Again, just because not every name in the entirety of the Pentateuch is attested in an extra-Pentateuchal source until the exile or after doesn’t at all indicate that those names weren’t around at the time. What’s worse is that we simply don’t have many texts outside of the Pentateuch written in the pre-exilic period in general (there’s Amos, 1 Isaiah, and a few others), and so we really don’t have a large sample of names at the time to say which names did or did not exist before the exile.

Most of your other points suffer from this as well. Point 4, if true, helps date the Pentateuch after the reign of Solomon – but that’s c. 930 BC and later, this hardly proves that the Pentateuch was written after 586 BC (date of exile). I also find point 5 confusing – whose to say that the Israelite’s didn’t know about the Mesopotamian near eastern stories until the exile? What evidence is there for this?

As I said earlier, most pre-exilic documents don’t quote earlier ones in general, this isn’t exactly an exception with the Pentateuch. Anyways, after looking at this a little more, there seems to be another problem with this argument. That is to say, only four books of the Old Testament are pre-exilic, besides the deuteronomistic history. Those are Amos, Hosea, Micah, and ch. 1-39 of Isaiah. The first three are extremely short in length and so it’s not problematic that they don’t refer to Genesis 1-11. Isaiah 1-39 doesn’t reference Genesis, but neither does Isaiah 40-66, written during and after the exile. So it’s not surprising at all that we don’t find references to Genesis 1-11 in these books. The Deuteronomistic History refers to the Sabbath system, where the Israelite’s work for six days and then rest for one, which is arguably based off of the creation week in Genesis 1.

So really, in the end of the day, the argument makes sense, but it’s not very convincing. It’s heavily reliant on the fact that we have very little pre-exilic material to work with, and the argument tries to point at holes in our understanding of pre-exilic Israel and say “uh huh, there’s something missing that should’ve been there otherwise!” Sorry, but I’m not personally convinced.

We have a range of texts showing us what pre-monarchic vocabulary looked like. For a start, we know it wasn’t even Hebrew. We know that Genesis 1-11 uses vocabulary which didn’t even exist before the late monarchy, and it has an abundance of exilic vocabulary. I’ll write more later, but you need to deal with the facts in the text.

The fact Sumerian is an isolate, and nowhere on any of these linguistic branches, should pretty well explain why Hebrew priests had little intention of parading their knowledge of foreign languages around, unless required by the topic.

Well, that doesn’t particularly make sense, since the Hebrew priests wouldn’t have known Sumerian to begin with. And, since Sumerian is so isolated, doesn’t that yet again help in showing that the Hebrews simply wouldn’t have known anything about reading it? In the 7th century BC, Ashurbanipal, one of Assyria’s last emperors, bragged about being able to read the difficult Sumerian language. There was no educational system in Judah that could have possibly educated people in the Sumerian language, meaning there was no education in Judah at all in the Sumerian language, which seems to imply know one knew it. After the fall of Sumeria itself, the study of the Sumerian language was usually reserved for Babylonian schools interested in studying their ancient traditional stories (such as how a modern American might engage in the study of Hebrew to be able to read the Old Testament). There was, in contrast, no such thing in Israel. There was no mechanism for an Israelite to actually learn the Sumerian language. There is not one Sumerian inscription to ever have been discovered in Israel. Why? For the same reason there aren’t any Sumerian inscriptions in the land of the Philistines – no one could read it and there was no one to tell them how. This provides another significant reason, which I have not touched on before, to continue showing why Moses is not of Sumerian etymology.

I’d also hate to sound dismissive, but Noah is certainly not of Sumerian etymology. A quick check with Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary reveals that the origins of the name Noah (no’-akh) is already known. It’s derived from the Hebrew word nuach (noo’-akh) which means ‘rest’ or ‘repose’.

We have a range of texts showing us what pre-monarchic vocabulary looked like. For a start, we know it wasn’t even Hebrew. We know that Genesis 1-11 uses vocabulary which didn’t even exist before the late monarchy, and it has an abundance of exilic vocabulary. I’ll write more later, but you need to deal with the facts in the text.

I was actually thinking of mentioning that, since I think it fits better with my position. Hebrew did not appear out of nowhere, it gradually evolved from other Semitic languages, and most of the vocabulary in Genesis 1-11 seems to be at home with the vocabulary of its preceding Canaanite/semitic languages. There certainly is no evidence to show that certain vocabulary in Genesis 1-11 only appeared during and after the exile, otherwise you haven’t mentioned this evidence. I don’t think the silence of our very small corpus of pre-exilic literary works attests good evidence for this claim.

Can I ask what you’re basing this on? We have a range of evidence for this. I cited just some of it. This isn’t an argument from silence, it’s an argument from direct evidence.

I mean, I don’t know if you provided much direct evidence at all. As I understand it, the argument goes like this: in our pre-exilic biblical books, certain vocabulary words are not attested that are in Genesis 1-11, but these are then mentioned in our exilic and post-exilic works, and so Genesis 1-11 is an exilic/post-exilic work. By that very logic, if I find a handful of vocabulary words in the entirety of Genesis 12-50 that don’t appear in our few pre-exilic works, I could use this same argument to claim that Genesis 12-50, too, is exilic/post-exilic. I’m sure neither of us would be willing to accept this argument.

If you could demonstrate that some vocabulary in Genesis 1-11 didn’t exist before the exile, then that would be something else. However, an argument from silence can’t demonstrate that. This is why I say that your argument might give an indicator, but definitely not a proof or serious evidence for why we should date Genesis 1-11 to the exilic/post-exilic period. In my view, I date the Pentateuch to the pre-exilic period since I can find a large number of traditions in this work that originated in the pre-exilic period, some of them unknown in the exilic/post-exilic period. I’m not sure if I have any specific proof from Genesis 1-11, though.

Something that most of us will have to come to is that there’s no serious evidence, one way or another, to be able to date Genesis’ primeval history. We can make tentative estimations at best. I think this is something we’d be able to agree on.

@ManiacalVesalius,

I think your first 2 sentences are “dogs that don’t hunt.”

Scribes taught to write Cuneiform were taught the Sumerian pronunciations, as well as the Akkadian/Babylonian pronunciations.

It’s not very different from “sacred process” we put our seminary students through (for centuries?) when we teach them Greek. They learn the names of the Greek letters. They learn the sounds of them. They learn what the Greek words sound like in the LXX. And they learn what they mean when translated into Latin.