I am currently reading about the history of Mesopotamia. An interesting topic when we relate it to the stories in Genesis. As always when diving into a new field, the findings inspire me. I wanted to share something of that inspiration with you and give a possibility to learning together. Probably does not interest all but it may be that some are interested.
I wrote already something about the flood in another thread, although that thread was about another topic (Flat earth theories). As the other thread was about another topic, I decided to create a thread for the topic.
My question about this is since the pre flood kings in the Sumerian King’s list match the genealogies of Genesis 5 having their own versions of Adam, Abel, Enoch, and Noah, I’m assuming these Sumerian hero kings and the ones in Genesis are the same historical people but that would make the historical people that Genesis is based on pagans wouldn’t it?
Reading the Genesis stories about Noah’s flood and what happened after that got a new viewpoint after I started to read about the history of the ancient cities and towns of Sumer, Akkad and Babylon.
After the Noah’s Flood, there is a short description of what happened to the children and grandchildren of Noah. One son of Ham was Cush and one son of Cush was Nimrod, who is described as a mighty hunter/warrior.
Genesis 10:10 tells that “The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Uruk, Akkad and Kalneh, in[d]Shinar.[e]11From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir,[f]Calah12and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah—which is the great city.” (NIV)
Uruk and Kalneh (usually interpreted to be the same as Nippur) were ancient cities that started as villages during the fifth millennium BC and grew into cities during the fourth millennium BC.
Akkad (Agade) was the town that Sargon selected or built to be the ruling center of the Akkadian empire, somewher around 2330-2300 BC.
Babylon was a small town during the Akkadian rule. It was established around 23th century BC.
If all these cities existed at the time of Nimrod, he should have lived after the 23th century BC.
An interesting detail is that the story of the tower in Babel comes after the story of Nimrod, in Genesis 11. As Babylon is mentioned already in the earlier story, it suggests that all the stories in Genesis 1-11 are not arranged in a temporal order. Rather, they may be a collection of separate ANE stories that were selected and compiled with the purpose to tell a grand message about the works of the true God to the people of the polytheistic ancient world, in a way and language they could receive.
What Genesis 11 tells about Babylon is that it was founded by people coming from the east, from Elam (current Iran). Either they were from the tribes of the east or they were originally Sumerians that had an influential role in Elam during that time. Research suggests that people from early Sumerian cities established trade outposts in Elam/Iran and gradually became a dominant force in that area. For the grand story, that is just a sidestep that may shed a bit more light about the ancient context.
That Genesis and the Sumerian king list (pre-flood) would talk about the same persons is an interpretation that probably would not get support from the historians. Anyhow, an interesting suggestion.
The people in the area were basically polytheists. That is also what the Genesis tells about the city and culture from which Abram/Abraham started his journey. It is told that God called Abram and he left the polytheistic culture behind to follow the true God. Further stories in Genesis reveal that the relatives of Abram had ‘housegods’ even after that time.
The city (Ur) was known as a place with a temple dedicated to the Moon god.
The people in the general area believed in a mixture of Sumerian and Semitic gods. In the ancient Sumerian pantheon, the highest god was Enlil. In the Semitic parts of Mesopotamia, the highest god was called An. During the dynamic history of developing beliefs, An got a higher position than Enlil. The people mentioned both Enlil and An when they appealed to the highest gods but set An at the top.
Well, what does get support from the Ancient Near Eastern scholars is the the genealogy in Genesis 5 is a polemic against the Sumerian Kings List. It has the first ruler Alulim which is similar to Adam (Adam is also similar to a Sumerian figure called Adapa), you’ve got Dumuzid the Shepherd king whose also a god associated with shepherds and short lifespans (Abel), you’ve got the seventh king, who like Enoch is associated with the sun and is taken into heaven to learn the secrets of the gods, and then you’ve got the last king of Shuruppak (a city associated with a great flood layer) who built an ark and saved humanity from the flood brought down by the gods.
These are clearly similar or the same characters as in Genesis 5. I don’t think that ancient people just made up fictional kings from thin air and oral traditions preserve things very well so I think these people serve as a historical reference point for the two lists. The Bible depicts the line of Adam starting with Enosh I think as “calling on the name of YHWH” so it depicts this specific line of people as following the God of Israel or his Mesopotamian equivalent which I think would be An. It could also be that the Bible records a more faithful story about this. It after all did remember Eden in the Persian Gulf Oasis so it has a long memory.
Scribes of the ANE world could invent mythological characters or write about mythologized persons.
Whatever is true, the Sumerian king list is the only list of influential pre-flood persons outside of Genesis. As such, it is the best (only) available non-biblical text source. How we interpret the list is another matter.
It is possible that the biblical stories can be more accurate - I can support that idea. What is written on cuneiform tablets is the version that an elite scribe had heard in his social circles. There probably were other versions of the ancient history circling in the society but these were not written down by the scribes. Overall, the ANE texts were not texts written to describe everything. They only wrote what was relevant for a small elite of rulers, administrators, religious leaders and rich people.
Well, they could have but I have a theory about myths. I think oral traditions of what are taken to be historical events in mythology record something real always, it always has a basis in fact. It’s just wrapped up in hyperbole, symbolism, and the dreamlike atmosphere of myth like a mythical telephone game. Archeology keeps catching up with myth. They used to say the Hittites and their iron chariots didn’t exist because they were only found in the Bible, they used to say that Troy was a mythical city. They were wrong. Even the Romans descending from the Trojans has its basis in a later than the Trojan war orientalization of the Italian Peninsula where Anatolian technology and culture deeply influenced people like the Etruscans.
This is entirely possible; a theological order is actually more likely. From one perspective the first eleven chapters are a set of answers to “How Did We Get Here?” in the sense of the situation the readers found themselves in.
Or use real persons in mythologized lists. The phenomenon of “ancestor claiming” may play a part in such genealogies, linking people by blood who weren’t actually related, using well-known figures/names to make a point.
I think ‘always’ is a too strong claim because even a single exception would refute that claim. ‘Usually’ would be a more conservative choice.
What may become a problem with mythologized history is that the story may evolve to something that loses all contact points to historical reality. The start of the story-weaving may have roots in something historical but the story evolves through decades and centuries towards spheres where the historical links become a limitation and may be replaced with more entertaining or purpose-driven (propagandistic) inventions.
At that point, we can ask what is the difference between ‘mythologized history’ and ‘[pure] mythology’?
Another difficult question with mythologized stories is that how can we separate these from instructive stories, stories that have been invented with a specific, instructive purpose?
The instructive stories are not ‘false’ or ‘wrong’ - they may fulfill perfectly the original purpose that was to teach a valuable lesson. The arrow hits the mark - until a listener with a completely different worldview hears the story and does not understand it correctly.
I return to the question of how should we interpret the pre-flood lists of rulers or important persons? Are they history, mythologized history or invented (‘fake’) stories?
The lists might be (mythologized) history if two assumptions are true:
(1) there was a massive and destructive flood in the history; and
(2) there were rulers or influential persons before the flood.
These assumptions seem fully realistic, suggesting that there are potential links to something that happened in history.
The lists seem to include details that do not sound realistic.
The ages may be numerological rather than numeric, so probably do not give information about the actual ages or spans of rule.
The extent of the flood may be told with hyperbolic expressions:
All except one family died does not necessarily mean that every single soul perished in the known world
Everything drowned may not mean that every treetop remained below the water for the whole duration of the flood
Even the expression that the whole (known) world drowned leaves open the question of what was included in this known(/civilized) world? For example, the Sumerians/Akkadians described the inhabitants of the eastern hills (Gutians) like uncivilized barbarians that were hardly worth the note of being humans.
The claims of what the influential persons achieved or how their offspring were the inventors and founders of various known groups do sound exaggerations if we compare that information to what the archeological data tells.
In the Sumerian king list, immediately after the flood the rule shifted to another city, which suggests that the rulers of this other city had survived.
Taken together, this seems to point towards mythologized history.
Differences in the names are less problematic because it was common that influential heroes were given different names in other cultures or empires. For example, ‘Ziusudra’ (a Sumerian name) was called ‘Atrahasis’ in early Akkadian sorces and ‘Utnapishtim’ in late Akkadian stories. He was also called with the name of the city ‘Shuruppak’, reflecting a system where the rulership was tied to a city, rather than to a family. If some tribe called him ‘Noah’, that would fit well to the general context.
Interestingly enough I’ve read that the leading candidate for the flood was this flood layer found in Shuruppak of a massive overflowing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that happened about 2900 BC. This flood separated the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr period from the Early Dynastic period. I used to think the Persian Gulf flood was a candidate for the great flood because the Persian Gulf Oasis was Eden, but the flooding was far to gradual and took place over too long a period of time for it to work.
While the Sumerians were pagan (polytheistic), it could be that they did know of the true God but didnt have a personal relationship with Him, and He was instead worshipped alongside other gods. It appears that El and An may be related. AI notes:
Historians and linguists note that the concept of a supreme sky god evolved across the ancient Near East:
The Evolution of “El”: In ancient Canaan (where Abraham migrated), the supreme creator and sky father god was named El. Historians consider Canaanite El to be the cultural equivalent of Mesopotamian An.
The Biblical Integration: When Abraham encounters Melchizedek in Genesis 14, God is referred to as El Elyon (“God Most High”). The Hebrew Bible frequently uses “El” and “Elohim” as titles for the One True God, directly absorbing the old West-Semitic vocabulary for the supreme sky deity but stripping it of its polytheistic traits.
If the “supreme sky deity” brought the rain and therefore the flood, then Noah was also listening to the true God.
I think it would be the whole world known to Noah. Likewise Lot’s daughters thought they were the only three people still alive after Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.
For sure. However, I also see the patriarchs as types based on the meaning of their names and the geneological record as the common decent of all life. When they begot children is a numeric base that is multiplied by 365K.
I agree that the most likely location for the Garden of Eden is now submerged in the Persian Gulf. The gradual flooding of the Gulf is represented by God driving mankind out of the Garden. Adam and Eve in the Garden are types representing mankind as a whole and not individuals… Adam’s name means ‘mankind’ and Eve means ‘mother of all living’.
With the geneologies starting in Genesis 5, an individual named Adam is then being recorded who then corresponds to Alulim, the first king of Sumer.
Even polytheistic cultures seem to share the belief that someone is higher in the hierarchy than any other god. The top position may have been pictured like a king in a pantheon, or as a more fundamental difference between the top vs. the other gods. Some cultures share a belief in a higher god/spirit that created or acts behind the other gods.
The early names for the highest god may have been simply words that the culture chose. The names used differed between the regions but the general concept behind these names was shared.
As long as everything depended on what humans could and would think, it is natural that there were a diversity in the beliefs about the highest god. Only a revelation from God Himself, directly or through a messenger, could give more accurate knowledge about the true God.
We can only speculate where the ‘original’ Garden of the ancient stories was. It may have been a name for a mythical place of instructive stories, or it may have been mythologized history about a real place in history. If it was a real place, most speculations position the place crudely around that region, either somewhere that is now submerged or somewhere in lower Sumer (nowadays in Irak). If the site is not currently submerged, it might have situated somewhere close to the ancient Sumerian town called Eridu. For example, Carol Hill places Eden at or near Eridu in her book ‘A worldview approach to science and scripture’.
Eridu appears to be an interesting place. It belongs among the oldest known Sumerian places and had a special status in the oldest stories. Like many of the oldest places, it was inhabited during the prehistoric period (fifth millennium BC, called the Ubaid period). What separated it from sites like Uruk and Nippur (both mentioned in Genesis, assuming that Kalneh is another name of Nippur) was that it did not grow into a large city during the fourth millennium. The architecture and plan of the town did not change as in the growing cities. It has been suggested that Eridu remained as something like a cultic or religious center, rather than turning into an administrative center when the religious (‘temple’) and secular (‘palace’) rules separated.
Gardens seem to have been important in that era and area, both for cultivation and religious purposes. The gardens for cultivation were probably gardens of date palms, with other plants growing beneath the palms (for example, later gardens might have included pomegranates). The temple areas, especially those with a ziggurat, were sometimes described as containing a holy garden/gardens. Flowing water from springs or other sources were an important feature of the temple gardens both practically (watering the plants) and symbolically. Sumerians learned to direct water with structures like canals and dams quite early in history because that was essential in a landscape where the floods came during the ‘wrong’ time and summers may have been dry. How the water was guided to flow in and from the garden was symbolic. Hill claims that the idea of four streams flowing from the temple was a symbol of the streams watering the four corners of the earth.
Early Sumer seem to have included a mixture of people from different backgrounds. Nomadic herdsmen with a Semitic heritage may have been in the area even before the farming Sumerians arrived from somewhere (nobody knows where they came from).
Farming and herding have been in conflict throughout the known history because they are competing forms of land use. In southern Sumer, that conflict was probably not bad because most people lived close to marshlands and fish was a key component of the diet. Because the soils suffered from a salinization problem, cultivation was mainly limited to along the rivers. The other areas could be used for herding. Also the fallows of agricultural fields were used for herding. Because of the salinization problem, old Sumerian rules dictated that half of the agricultural fields needed to be left as fallows, with cultivation only every second year.
The conflict between Cain and Abel may include echoes of the old conflicts between farmers and herders.
With suitable spectacles, we may find apparent links between what the Genesis tells and what happened in the prehistorical Sumer. To be honest, we need to keep in mind that the apparent links are interpretations, not demonstrated facts.
