Assessing the Bible: The Broadness of the Ancient Near Eastern Context

 Some interesting ideas on the Ancient Near Eastern context of the antiquity of the Bible. It shows us all just how extensive the need is for broadening and deepening our looking into the Bible's culture, religion, and history. While intimidating, without question, it is also exhilirating to see so much to do and learn and share.... Below is an excerpt from a new book (actually a series of 4 volumes that are simply staggering and stunning in their scope. ( W. W. Hallo, &  K. L. Younger (1997). The Context of Scripture (xxvi). Leiden; New York: Brill.) I have recently acquired and eagerly dipping into its pages. I have kept the footnote pagination beginning at number 45. Why rework the numbers when they are already in place anyway right? I know they are highlighted, but don't click on them. I have put all the sources at the end in endnotes. The numbers look like they link, but they don't. I have given the references below however. I have better things to do with my time right now than renumber footnotes beginning at 1 - GRIN! Enjoy, I think there are insights by the millions awaiting the students of the ancient scriptures.

The Akkadian Sargon Legend is sometimes cited as a possible source of the Moses birth legend, though with little justification.⁴⁵ It is in Sumerian, a product most likely of the neo–Sumerian period (ca. 2100–1800 BCE in linguistic terms), while the later text is in Akkadian, quite possibly commissioned by Sargon II of Assyria (722–705 BCE; KAS says - This was Isaiah's era if that helps give some context) or at least intended to celebrate his earlier namesake. The Sumerian text is, of course,

not included in ANET, (Pritchard's fine 2 volume set "Ancient Near Eastern Texts) but as now known it includes at least one passage that bears comparison with a biblical pericope. (KAS says - a pericope is a portion or paragraph of a larger writing, a smaler part or sample so to speak)

Lines 53–56 as translated by Cooper read:

In those days, writing on tablets certainly existed, but enveloping tablets did not exist;

King Urzababa, for Sargon, creature of the gods,

Wrote a tablet, which would cause his own death, and

He dispatched it to Lugalzagesi in Uruk.

As both editors noted, “Line 53 parodies the famous passage in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta 503ff.”⁴⁶ — a passage, it may be added, not without its own echoes in the biography of Moses.⁴⁷ What was quickly pointed out by others, however, was that the motif of a king dispatching a potential rival to a third party carrying instructions to that party to put the rival to death so that the messenger becomes the means to his own demise, corresponds to a familiar folklore motif,⁴⁸ with echoes not only in the Bible but also in classical literature and even in Hamlet.

In the Iliad, Bellerophon was sent to the king of Lycia with a similarly deadly message. In 2 Samuel 11, King David rid himself of Uriah with a message that Uriah carried to David’s general Joab. These parallels have been recognized in varying degrees by Herman Vanstiphout,⁴⁹ Veronika Afanas’eva,⁵⁰ and especially Bendt Alster.⁵¹ They show that the Uriah pericope is made up, at least in part, of traditional literary topoi or folkloristic motifs, and justify the inclusion of the newly recovered Sumerian legend in the discussion of the biblical treatment of the theme.

The most recent treatment of the Uriah pericope well illustrates the use and usefulness of ancient Near Eastern parallels for the understanding of biblical texts — if only by showing the danger of ignoring them. In “Nations and nationalism: adultery in the House of David,” Regina M. Schwartz uses the pericope to condemn not only David, his people, and all his progeny, but those who have repossessed the City of David and the land of Israel in his name to this day.⁵² The study fails, not because of its political overtones, but because it presumes the historical validity of the episode, utterly ignoring its literary character. Where but in the Bible could one find national literature preserving the materials for so scathing a self–examination? And within the Bible, where more so than in the “court history of David” in 2 Samuel? And what if the author has not written history, but woven a traditional story of the “deadly letter” into an imaginative recasting of the succession narrative? Familiarity with the motif and its antiquity would at least suggest this alternative possibility.

The Sumerian Sargon Legend well illustrates the vertical component we have spoken of, depending as it does quite clearly on the earlier Sumerian Epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, and echoed as we have seen by the later stories of Uriah in 2 Samuel and Bellerophon in the Iliad. But it also illuminates the “horizontal” context of any given text. Its focus on royalty in general, and on the spectacular rise to power of Sargon of Akkad in particular, is of a piece with the literary and ideological interests of the Ur III and Isin I dynasties of the neo–Sumerian cultural era (ca. 2100–1800 BCE).

It allows us to raise the same question as one which has repeatedly been raised with regard to comparable biblical material, namely: can we, in fact should we, separate literary and ideological considerations in assessing ancient sources? Can we and should we divide our sources strictly into literary and historical ones?

I have long pleaded for using literary and historical sources to illuminate each other — treating literary sources as precious aids in reconstructing history, and reconstructing history as the essential context for literature.⁵³

Endnotes

⁴⁵

Brian Lewis, The Sargon Legend: a Study of the Akkadian Text and the Tale of the Hero Who Was Exposed at Birth (ASORDS 4; 1980); cf. ANET 119; Hallo, The Book of the People, 47f., 130f.

ANET

J. B. Pritchard, Editor. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3d ed. with supplement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.

⁴⁶

JAOS 103 (AOS 65) 82. For this passage see below, p. 546 and G. Komoróczy, “Zur Atiologie der Schrifterfintlung im Enmerkar–Epos,” AoF 3 (1975) 19–24; but more recently H. L. J. Vanstiphout, “Enmerkar’s Invention of Writing Revisited,” in Studies Sjöberg, 515–524.

⁴⁷

Hallo, BP, 48f., 183f., with earlier literature.

⁴⁸

K 789 in Stith Thomson’s Index.

⁴⁹

H. L. J. Vanstiphout, “Some Remarks on Cuneiform ecritures,” in Studies Hospers, 217–234, esp. pp. 224, 233, n. 65.

⁵⁰

V. K. Afanas’eva, “Das sumerische Sargon–Epos. Versuch einer Interpretation,” AoF 14 (1987) 237–246. According to Alster ZA 77:171, Afanas’eva already made her views known at the RAI in Leningrad in 1984.

⁵¹

B. Alster, “A Note on the Uriah letter in the Sumerian Sargon Legend,” ZA 77 (1987) 169–173; idem, “Lugalbanda and the Early Epic Tradition in Mesopotamia,” in Studies Moran, 59–72, esp. pp. 70f.

⁵²

Critical Inquiry 19 (1992) 131–150. My thanks to Jacob Lassner for calling the article to my attention.

⁵³

Cf. most recently Hallo, “The Limits of Skepticism,” JAOS 110 (1990) 187–199, esp. pp. 189f. with nn. 20–41.

Hallo, W. W., & Younger, K. L. (1997). The context of Scripture (xxvi). Leiden; New York: Brill.

Comments

[Maria]

Hi Friends,

I Find Absolutely FREE PlayBoy & Penthous

http://www.girlsupdates.com

If I find something else I'll inform you.

Best Regards,
Maria

[Charles]

Dear Mr Shirts,
I read somewhere else that you've mentioned something to the effect that Rosicrucian was once or still is the heart of Christian mysticism. Could you expand on that idea ? Or give me some pointers to study this further ?
Thanks.
Charles