The Bible and the spade

Front matter

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Shere ee Bont =

Lente v

Contents

PAGE Excavators and Excavations ; 9 The Babylonian Story of the Creation . ; uO The Garden of Eden . : Q1

The Babylonian Story of the Flood 26 The First Appearance of the Semites. . 84 The Tower Babel . 40 Ur of the Chaldees_. : . 44 Harran . . 49 Amraphel and Ghedseidomer Oe Rachel’s Household Gods . aD Semitic Strangers in Egypt 2 OS Pharaoh of Egypt. . 60 The Land of Goshen . . 62 The Birth of Moses and Sargon . 66 Rameses II . 68 Marempthah’s Monuments . HAD AE b- Sinai Cee The Laws of Pacunciabs naa ‘The Origin of the Sabbath . . 85 The Tel el-Amarna Letters . . 88 Gezer and the High Place . . 94 The Long-lost Hittites SS ae The Corner Stone of Jerusalem . 105. The Royal Quarries . : . 108

Shishak of Egypt. ELS

Chapter II The Babylonian Story Of The Creation

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1: 1.

In the year 1845, while the Frenchmen, Botta and Place, were excavating from the ruin mound of Khorsabad the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon and its wonderful treasures, Austin Henry Layard, a young Englishman, was hunting in the Tigris valley. ‘The beautifully sculptured slabs from the walls of King Sargon’s palace, and the mysterious cuneiform inscriptions interested him intensely and, believing that Nineveh should yield similar objects, he began to dig into the ruins of that old city. Though Botta had excavated there and had failed to find anything of value, Layard and his successors revealed the palaces of two of the greatest of the Assyrian kings. The story of his discoveries is told in his charmingly written book, “Nineveh and its Re-. mains.” One of the palaces belonged to

STORY OF THE CREATION 17

Assurbanipal, the last great king of Nineveh, who ruled Assyria from 668 to 626 B. C. Even Assurbanipal was an archeologist, for he sent his agents to the older cities of the south to collect clay tablets, or to copy their ancient inscriptions. In his royal palace he stored vast collections of these books of clay, a library estimated to contain not far from one hundred thousand volumes. In 606 B. C., when Nineveh was captured and deserted, the clay library was buried in the ruins of the palace. Layard found it, and weeks were spent in removing it and in boxing it up to be sent to the British Museum, where it is now treasured.

After the tablets from the Nineveh library had been taken to the British Museum, and scholars had learned to read the writing upon them, they were found to embrace a great variety of subjects. There were the business documents of the people, records of the court and of the state, psalms and hymns, stories, proverbs and poems; in short, the literature of a great people. Some of the tablets bore stories of the creation of the world, and _ it seems that the stories had been copied from more ancient tablets. From just what age and place the originals came, no one knows, yet it seems that in a remote antiquity, probably before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, the - Babylonians were familiar with the stories. Unfortunately the tablets upon which they are recorded are fragmentary, and here and there only the thread of the narrative may be obtained. Were the tablets complete, their translation would occupy a volume of considerable size, for one of the stories covers seven large tablets, like so many volumes of a book. Its opening lines are as follows: :

When the heavens above were not yet named,

And the earth beneath bore no name,

Then, in the beginning, the abyss of waters begat them,

And the chaos of the deep bore them all.

The waters were not yet gathered together ;

The fields were untilled, and the marsh lands bare.

None of the gods had yet appeared;

No name did they bear; no destiny had they fixed ;

Then were the gods created.

In the continuation of the story we read of the long wars fought by the newly created gods, until finally the victorious Marduk smote the goddess Tiamat in twain, and spreading out one part of her body, he formed the heav-

STORY OF THE CREATION 19 ens, with the other part he created the earth. The other monsters, which he slew, he transformed into the signs of the zodiac. A later fragment of the story continues:

He established the stations for the great gods;

The stars also, and the constellations, he fixed in their places.

He ordained the year and divided it into seasons ;

The twelve months he arranged according to the

In the midst of the heaven he placed the zenith. Nannar, the moon-god, he brought forth and instructed to rule the night.

A fragment of another Babylonian story of the creation contains the following lines:

No temple of the gods had yet been built in a sacred place;

No reed had grown; no tree had been planted;

No brick had been laid; no building erected ;

No house had been built; no city founded. ... .

The ocean had not yet been created. ... .

The world was all one sea... . .

At length there was a movement in the sea.....

Marduk constructed an enclosure about the waters;

He formed dust and heaped it up at the sides of the enclosure.

He created mankind,

And the potter goddess with him created the seed of mankind.

He created the beasts of the field, and the living creatures of the dry land. ;

The Tigris and the Euphrates he formed... . .

And gave them good names.

The grass, the reed and the forests he planted;

The green things of the field he produced.

The wild cow and her young, the wild ox calf,

The ewe and her young, the lamb of the fold,

The meadow and the forest;

The goat and the wild goat he brought forth. . . .

Bricks he fashioned. |

Houses he erected, and cities he built.

Does a relationship between the Babylonian and the Hebrew stories of the creation exist? That is a question for the critic to discuss. It is only certain that the long stories of the creation were recited by the Babylonians, and in the days of Abraham they must have been known to the people who crossed the desert, and who were later known as the Hebrews.

Chapter III The Garden Of Eden

And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Genesis 2: 8.

Of all theological controversies none has called forth more diverse theories than those relating to the location of the Garden of Eden. To find the home of primitive man has taxed the ingenuity of theologians and travelers of every generation. ‘The second chapter of Genesis explicitly states that two of the four rivers of the garden were the Euphrates and the Hiddekel of Assyria, a name by which the ancients called the Tigris, yet Eden has been located in widely separated parts of the world; in Armenia, in India by the Ganges, in Egypt, in the Sinaitic Peninsula, in the African Mountains of the Moon, in Labrador, at the North Pole, and one theologian has identified it with the entire earth.

The author of the story of the Garden of Eden, however, certainly had in mind some part of the Mesopotamian valley, and in searching for its site, a study of the Tigris and . Euphrates is essential. Six thousand years © ago the rivers did not flow in their present beds. Rising in Armenia, they follow their ancient channels until they enter the alluvial plain of Babylonia, but from Bagdad to the Persian Gulf their courses are constantly changing. Some years ago the Kuphrates left its bed north of Babylon, and after converting hundreds of miles of the desert into swamps, returned to its old course at Samawa, a week’s journey to the south. From the town of Koot, on the lower Tigris, a canal, called the Shatt el-Hai, crosses Babylonia to the Euphrates not far from the ruins of Ur; according to the Arabic historians, the canal marks the course of the Tigris of a thousand years ago, when the rivers flowed together a hundred miles above their present confluence. The shores of both streams, undermined by the current, are constantly caving and shifting.

Moreover, the Tigris and Euphrates bring down from the mountains a vast amount of silt, which they deposit at their mouths, and it is estimated that the Persian Gulf is now growing shorter a mile in every thirty years. All

Atone THE EUPHRATES

THE GARDEN OF EDEN 23 of the country south of Bagdad was thus formed, and there was a time when the Persian Gulf extended over all of Babylonia, when the sites of the cities, now far inland, were beneath the sea. It is therefore uncertain where the ancient rivers used to flow, or where they met, or if by separate mouths they reached the Persian Gulf. |

The Pison and Gihon, two of the rivers of Eiden, may not be positively identified with any existing streams, yet the author may have had in mind two great canals, which the ancients called rivers, and which they distinguished by names. The bed of one may be traced along the edge of the plateau to the west of the EKuphrates; another ran along the foot-hills of the Persian Mountains, parallel _ with the Tigris; possibly they were the Pison and the Gihon of the Bible story.

About a hundred miles north of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Kuphrates unite to continue southward in one stream, is a place which the natives call the Garden of Eden. There they point out a “tree of knowledge,” and tell tales of a crafty serpent which still lingers about its roots and plays with the village children. ‘True it is that no spot could be better adapted to the needs of primitive man. ‘There the Arab finds shelter in the shade of the tall date-palm. The fresh dates | are his favorite food; dried, he grinds them to flour for his bread; from their juice he makes a sweet drink and vinegar, and his arrack and sugar; he crushes the fruit to make his jam or butter; with the tree trunk he builds his house, and with the leaf blades he braids his baskets and dishes; with the leaf stems he fashions his chairs, his bed and his boat, and from the fiber of the tree he spins his twine or weaves a coarse cloth for his clothing. Even the date stones he feeds to his camel. A Persian poet has said that the date-tree has three hundred and sixty-five uses, one for each day of the year.

That the Babylonians possessed the story of the Garden of Eden, similar to the biblical story, is certain; a few fragments from the Nineveh library, so small and mutilated that they are almost illegible, are supposed to be a part of a tablet recording it. However, during the excavations at Nineveh, there appeared an impression of an ancient seal distinctly’ referring to the story. In the center of the little picture is a date-tree; to the right of the tree

THE GARDEN OF EDEN 25 is a man; to the left a woman, and behind the woman is a serpent standing erect on its tail. It is possible that in some Babylonian ruin a tablet containing the complete story may be found.

Chapter IV The Babylonian Story Of The Flood

And tt came to pass after the seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. Genesis 7:10.

In the year 1872, after the tablets from the Nineveh library had been taken to the British Museum, George Smith, who in his day was the greatest of Assyrian scholars, took up the fragment of a broken tablet and read these words:

I released a dove; it flew about, but finding no resting place, returned.

They were familiar words, and so significant that their appearance on the little fragment of clay overcame Mr. Smith; he recognized all that the words meant, and fell senseless to the floor. He had discovered a Babylonian aie of the flood!

The discovery was heralded throughout the world, and at once a London paper, the Daily Telegraph, provided funds to send Mr. Smith

STORY OF THE FLOOD 27 to Nineveh in search of the missing fragments of the tablet. In the chamber of the palace of Assurbanipal, where the library was stored, Mr. Smith found the fragment he most desired. Since then other excavators have discovered other copies of the same story, and at last the narrative has become fairly complete.

The Babylonian account of the flood is the eleventh of the twelve chapters of a great epic poem, which may well be compared with the Odyssey of Homer. Like the Greek epic, it is a collection of independent stories woven together; it professes to record the deeds of a national hero, whose name is generally pronounced Gilgamish. The home of the hero was the biblical Erech (Genesis 10: 10), a city now represented by the lofty mounds of Warka in Southern Babylonia. Each of the twelve chapters of the poem was written in several columns on a single clay tablet about eighteen inches long, and the chapters or tablets were numbered or connected as are the volumes of a modern book. None of the tablets has escaped mutilation; even the larger parts of some of them are missing, yet enough of the poem has survived to convey its general outline. ‘The entire story is so long that its complete translation, if it were possible, would form a volume of considerable size; in brief its outline is as follows:

The city of Erech was besieged by the tyrant Humbaba, and was hard pressed. Gilgamish, the hero of the story, drove away the tyrant, delivered the city and became its king. Though he had saved the city from the tyrant, his own rule became so oppressive that the dissatisfied people prayed to be delivered from him. In answer to their prayers, a monster named Eabani was created to destroy him. Although Gilgamish and Eabani were destined to be enemies, a deep friendship arose between them, and together they made war against the tyrant Humbaba, and slew him.

The beautiful Ishtar, the goddess of love, fascinated by the brave Gilgamish, fell desperately in love with him, and proposed marriage. Her proposal was scornfully rejected, and in revenge, the enraged goddess persuaded her father to create a bull to destroy him. Gilgamish, with his friend Kabani, made war

on the bull and killed it. More angry than ever, Ishtar then sent against them an insect with poisonous sting. Eabani was stung, and

Mount ARARAT

STORY OF THE FLOOD 29 he died; Gilgamish was also stung, yet while suffering extreme pain, he wandered about the world in search of relief. His wanderings led him among strange peoples, and his experiences were as trying as were those of Odysseus. Finally he was told that he could find relief only in the abode of the dead, beyond the world-encircling ocean, where no mortal but one had ever gone.

The journey to the abode of the dead was long and difficult, but at last upon its shores Gilgamish met Pirnapishtim, the mortal who, like himself, had crossed the waters of death. To him he related the object of his coming. When the story of his wanderings was ended, he begged Pirnapishtim to relate how he, though still living, had come to dwell among the dead. The reply is the Babylonian story of the flood. When Pirnapishtim’s story was finished, Gilgamish was bathed in sacred waters, and, healed, he returned to his home in Erech.

Though the entire Babylonian story of the flood is of interest to the scholar, parts of it are mutilated, and the following selected passages will suffice for comparison with the biblical story. It begins:

O Gilgamish, I will tell thee a wonderful story.

Thou knowest the city of Shurippak on the ©

Euphrates?

It was corrupt, and the gods decided to destroy it with a flood.

Ea, the god of wisdom, confided their plans to me. *¢ Thou man of Shurippak, build a ship; Forsake thy wealth and save thy life. Take living beasts of every kind into the ship. Measure its proportions well, and into the sea shalt launch it.”

The description of the Babylonian ark is given in detail. Each of its seven decks was divided into nine rooms, and smeared within and without with bitumen. The ark was finished, and the story of Pirnapishtim continues as follows:

I collected all the silver I possessed ;

I collected all my gold;

I collected the seed of life.

I took every thing into the ship— :

My slaves, my handmaids, the beasts of the field,

The wild animals of the plain, the sons of the

people;

I took them all in.

The god Shamash appointed a season and said:

“In the night I will cause the heavens to rain; Enter the ship and close the door.”

The evening of which he spoke came;

STORY OF THE FLOOD 31

I watched the approaching storm;

I entered the ship and closed the door. ....

The deluge covered the surface of the earth. ....

In a single day it rose above the mountains,

And like a battle it rushed upon the people.

A brother heeded not his brother;

Men would not help each other.

Six days and nights passed ;

The wind and storm were overwhelming.

On the seventh day at dawn, the wind ceased ;

The storm, which had smitten the earth like an earthquake, was quieted.

I looked out upon the sea;

All mankind had turned to clay;

Like reeds their corpses floated on the water.

Grieved, I sat down to weep.

At the approach of the seventh day I sent forth a dove;

It flew about, but finding no resting place, returned.

I sent forth a swallow;

It flew about, but finding no resting place, returned.

I sent forth a raven;

It saw the carrion on the waters,

It waded about to feed, but did not return.

I released the animals, and they went in all directions.

Like the biblical narrative, the Babylonian story ends with an account of the first appearance of the rainbow, and with the decision of the gods never again to destroy the world with a flood.

Instead of sending a flood, let lions devour mankind.

Instead of sending a flood, let tigers diminish mankind.

Instead of sending a flood, let famines smite the land.

Instead of sending a flood, let pestilence consume the people.

The Babylonian. and Hebrew stories so closely resemble each other that evidently they are related. The fact that the Babylonian story appears as a part of a longer poem indicates in no way whether the story is based on fact or not, for once it was complete in itself; later, during a period of literary activity, it was united with other stories to form a great, national epic. |

It is often stated that the Hebrews borrowed the story from the Babylonians, or that the Babylonians borrowed it from the Hebrews, yet it can hardly be said that one can borrow that which is one’s own. Babylonia was the birthplace of the Hebrews; the scenes of the first two thousand years of their history

STORY OF THE FLOOD 33 were along the Euphrates, and the stories of the creation, of the Garden of Eden and of the deluge, belonged to them as much as to the Babylonians. The stories of King Alfred belong not only to the English; they belong also to the English colonists wherever they have gone. Thus Babylonian history and Iliterature, until the days of Abraham, was the only history and literature the Hebrews had. It is then not correct to say that the Hebrews borrowed the story from the Babylonians; it was the story of their own people, the story they carried with them when they left their native land to cross the desert.

Chapter V The First Appearance Of The Semites

And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. Genesis 11: 2.

In the book of Genesis we are told that Shem, the son of Noah, was the ancestor of all the Semites—the Babylonians, Assyrians, Arabs, Hebrews, Phoenicians and_ kindred tribes. The original home of these sons of Shem, so the popular impression has been, was the lower Euphrates valley, for there the scenes of the early Bible stories are laid. Recent excavations have shown that Babylonia was not the original home of the Semites; they were once strangers, fighting to possess the land, just as later the Hebrews fought to possess Palestine, for, as they journeyed east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, or Babylonia, and they dwelt there.

In nearly every Babylonian ruin into hich the excavator has dug, as Nippur, Fara, Tello

FIRST APPEARANCE OF SEMITES 35 and Bismya, there have appeared numerous stone and clay objects inscribed with a non- Semitic, cuneiform language. Moreover, some of the tablets with this strange language, which scholars have called Sumerian, bear an interlineal Assyrian translation. The appearance of the two languages on the same tablets gave rise to a heated controversy; some maintained that a non-Semitic people, known as the Sumerians, once occupied Babylonia, and were conquered by the Semitic invaders. Others argued that the strange cuneiform writing was but a secret writing invented by the Semitic priests, and that no earlier people ever lived in Babylonia.

Though the controversy may have seemed trifling, it was of extreme importance to the Bible student. It asked if the Semites, or the ancestors of the Hebrews, were the first people to live in Mesopotamia, or if at some earlier time, as strangers to the land, they conquered the country and adopted its civilization. It asked if the old Hebrew institutions are of Semitic origin, or if they may be traced back to the earlier civilization of the Sumerians. It repeated the old catch question, “Where did Cain get his wife?”

Bismya is a group of mounds in central Babylonia, marking the site of the most ancient _ Mesopotamian city yet discovered. It was © excavated by an expedition from the University of Chicago, of which the author was the field director. An account of the remarkable discoveries made by the expedition may be read in the book, “Bismya, or the Lost City of Adab.” Excavations in the lowest strata of the temple mound revealed objects so ancient that no date can be assigned to them. Upon those ruins, about 4000 B. C., was built a large temple in which were discovered marble statues, bronze and stone tablets, and vases bearing the names of kings, or inlaid with ivory and bright stones. ‘The art represented by these objects marks that age as one advanced in civilization. The many inscriptions were all in the Sumerian language; not one was in Semitic. | |

At a still higher level in the same mound was found a piece of gold bearing the name of the Semitic king Naram-Sin; near it were the large, square bricks of his father, Sargon. The appearance of the Semitic bricks and inscriptions above the Sumerian ruins, sug-

ie spite Pah i. : a coo

FIRST APPEARANCE OF SEMITES 37 gests that a Sumerian city had been conquered and occupied by Semites.

In another mound of the Bismya group, representing a residential section, there appeared several seal impressions with the name of the Semitic Sargon, and numerous contract tablets written in the Semitic language. The mound undoubtedly marked the site of a Semitic quarter of the city. In still another mound numerous contract tablets were discovered bearing Sumerian inscriptions.

At Tello were discovered statues inscribed with Sumerian. The head of the statues is always round; the face is full and beardless; the nose is short, the chin square, and the features are decidedly not Semitic. Such also was the head of the statues found among the Sumerian ruins at Bismya and at Nippur. From a later age from Bismya there comes a small, alabaster head of an entirely different type. The face is long and thin, and the nose is strikingly Semitic; the narrow chin, slightly receding, is covered with a pointed beard, and the upper lip bears a mustache. Into the large eye-sockets ivory balls were fitted, but their pupils of stone are missing. A glance at the head shows it to be Semitic; undoubtedly it comes from that early age when the wandering ancestors of the Hebrews conquered the © Sumerians of Mesopotamia.

Who these Semites were, or whence they came, the ruins of Babylonia have not yet told us; we may only be certain that Shinar, or Babylonia, was not their first home. Just as twenty centuries later their descendants conquered Palestine, so they conquered Babylonia. They occupied the Sumerian cities; they worshiped in the Sumarian temples; they adopted the Sumerian literature; they copied the Sumerian art, and they wrote their language in the Sumerian wedge-shaped characters. Sargon, whose date was long supposed to be 3800 B. C., but who may have lived a thousand years later, seems to have been their first great king. F’rom his time traces of the Semites appear with increasing frequency, and the Sumerian language and customs gradually disappear, until only the bilingual hymns and psalms of their temple service remained.

Along the northwestern edge of the Bismya mounds, at the outer base of the city wall of Sumerian bricks, were thousands of clay sling-balls, which had been hurled against the city in Sargon’s time. The civilized Sumerians,

FIRST APPEARANCE OF SEMITES 39 clad in armor, fought with spear and shield. The sling was the weapon of the early Semites, and their sling-balls of burned clay tell of the capture of the city, and of their first appearance in the world’s history.

Chapter VI The Tower Of Babel

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. Genesis 11: 4.

In nearly every Babylonian desert village is a watch tower, with summit reaching high above the flat roofs of the houses at its base. In times of danger a watchman stands guard upon it, ever searching the horizon for an approaching enemy. In times of peace the tower is a landmark to guide the wandering villagers back to their homes. Such purposes has the tower served since the day the Semites entered the land of Shinar, and with bricks of clay constructed the Tower of Babel.

When the European traveler first entered Babylonia, he was impressed by the ruin of an immense tower of unburned bricks, called Akkerkuf, three hours to the west of Bagdad. Its height at once suggested the story of the Tower of Babel. When the traveler ventured from Bagdad further into the desert, to the

THE TOWER OF BABEL 41 site of Babylon, he found to the west of the Euphrates another tower so immense that it seemed like a mountain, and at once called it the Tower of Babel. Buirs, the modern name it bears among the Arabs, is a corruption of the ancient name Borsippa, the city in which it stood. The city is now represented by two mounds. One, comparatively low and with a level surface, contains the ruins of the palace in which Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, sought refuge when Babylon fell. Burs, the _ other mound, rises one hundred and fifty-six feet above the plain. Its sides are so steep that to climb them is fatiguing, and projecting from the summit is an insurmountable mass of brick masonry, now split in twain by lightning.

Herodotus, who described the tower as it was in the days of the Greeks, said that it consisted of seven stages, like seven square boxes, each of a different color, and each standing upon a larger stage beneath. Stairs led from stage to stage on the exterior from the ground to the summit, where there was a small shrine and the statue of the chief god of Babylon. The excavations by Sir Henry Rawlinson of half a century ago partly confirmed this description, for he discovered six of the stages;

the seventh, at the top, had been worn away — by the weather, and in the ruins about its base were fragments of bricks glazed with different — colors. The encasing bricks of the tower were stamped with the inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, its restorer.

Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon,

The restorer of the temples Esagil and Ezida, The first-born son of Nabopolassar,

King of Babylon.

While excavating at the base of the mound, Rawlinson found in a niche in its corner a cylindrical object of clay covered with wedge-shaped writing. The inscription had been placed there by Nebuchadnezzar, just as now objects are deposited in the corner stones of modern buildings; it recorded these words: ©

The tower of Borsippa, which a former king erected and completed to the height of forty-two cubits, whose summit he did not finish, fell to ruins in ancient times. There was no proper care of the gutters for its water; rain and storms had washed away its bricks, and the tiles of its roof were broken. The great god Marduk urged me to restore it. I did not alter its site, or change its foundation walls. At a favorable time I renewed its brick work and its roofing tiles, and I wrote my name on the cornices

THE TOWER OF BABEL 43 of the edifice. I built it anew as it had been ages before; I erected its pinnacle as it was in remote days.