That lectures, even on such an interesting subject, could lead to measures of such high state policy was a guarantee that the matter had passed beyond the circles of scholarship and research, and was become a matter of national concern. We could not afford to remain longer in ignorance of what had stirred our allies so profoundly.16
Just exactly what had Delitzsch said to the Kaiser and his court, and why did it have everyone from “bible believer” to “higher critical skeptic” so exercised that it required a letter from the Kaiser himself, in his capacity as “highest bishop” in the Lutheran Church, to quell?
If one glances at the short biographical sketch of Delitzsch in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, one begins to have some approximation:Friedrich Delitzsch specialized in the study of ancient Middle Eastern languages, and published numerous works on Assyrian language, history and culture. He is remembered today for his scholarly critique of the Biblical Old Testament. In a 1902 controversial lecture titled “Babel and Bible,” Delitzsch maintained that many Old Testament writings were borrowed from ancient Babylonian tales, including the stories of Creation and the Great Flood. During the following years there were several translations and modified versions of the “Babel and Bible.” In the early 1920s, Delitzsch published the two-part Die große Täuschung (The Great Deception), which was a critical treatise on the book of Psalms, prophets of the Old Testament, the invasion of Canaan, etc. Delitzsch also stridently questioned the historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible and placed great emphasis on its numerous examples of immorality. ...17
Clearly, Delitzsch’s program was a total one, as his work entitled The Great Deception implies, but that program was first enunciated in his lectures before the Kaiser and his court, the lectures which eventually became Babel and Bible.
Delitzsch himself put the matter this way at the very beginning of his first lecture:What is the object of these labours in distant, inhospitable, and dangerous lands? To what end this costly work of rummaging in mounds many thousand years old, of digging deep down into the earth in places where no gold or silver is to be found? Why this rivalry among nations for the purpose of securing, each for itself, these desolate hills — and the more the better — in which to excavate? And from what source, on the other hand, is derived the self-sacrificing interest, ever on the increase, that is shewn on both sides of the ocean, in the excavations in Babylonia and Assyria?
To either question there is one answer, which, if not exhaustive, nevertheless to a great extent tells us the cause and aim: it is the Bible.18
Observe carefully both what Delitzsch has implied, and what he has actually said here.
First, Delitzsch has implied that the excavations in Mesopotamia had a direct bearing on our understanding of the origins of our Judeo-Christian civilization and, to a lesser extent, the civilization of the Islamic world as well. But secondly, and more importantly, he has explicitly stated that the control of such excavation sites was a matter of great power rivalry, since it was precisely those nations that were aiming to control such sites across the Middle East, and that implies that there might be a hidden agenda at work behind the seemingly innocent purposes of archaeological digging. Just what that agenda may be will become more and more evident in a moment.
Delitzsch interlarded the actual published version of his lectures with a number of pictures that clearly pointed to some deep Babylonian-Assyrian-Sumerian origin or influence upon much of the stories of the Old Testament:May we point to an old Babylonian cylinder-seal? Here, in the middle, is the tree with hanging fruit; on the right the man, to be recognized by the horns, the symbol of strength, on the left the woman; both reaching out their hands to the fruit, and behind the woman the serpent. Should there not be a connection between this old Babylonian representation and the Biblical story of the Fall?19
He then reproduces this depiction of the impression of the cylinder-seal:
Babylonian Cylinder-Seal Depiction of the Fall of Man20
There were other suggestive artistic parallels between popular Christian imagery and ancient Babylonian and Assyrian art. For example, there was a depiction of Assyrian king Ashurbanipal slaying a lion, all too eerily similar to depictions of St. George slaying the dragon:
King Ashurbanipal Slaying a Lion21
The theme was repeated, in a different guise, with the god Ninurta/Marduk wielding powerful thunderbolts to slay a chimerical “dragon”:
Ninurta/Marduk Slaying the Dragon with Thunderbolts22
Delitzsch’s commentary is worth citing:It is interesting to note that there is still an echo of this contest between Marduk and Tiamat in the Apocalypse of John, where we read of a conflict between the Archangel Michael and the “Beast of the Abyss, the Old Serpent, which is the Devil and Satan.” The whole conception, also present in the story of the knight St. George and his conflict with the dragon, a story brought back by the Crusaders, is manifestly Babylonian.23
As I have argued elsewhere, the struggle between Marduk and Tiamat might actually be the dimly recollected memories of an actual cosmic, or interplanetary, war fought in very ancient times with extraordinary technologies.24 In Delitzsch’s time, with the discoveries of Nikola Tesla and other inventors already transforming the world, it would have been an easy step for the elites of those great powers to read the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian texts, and to conclude that they contained hints of a lost technology of vast power, and hence, one has one explanation for the possible hidden motivations of the scramble those nations showed to control the various archaeological sites.25
1. The Cuneiform Tablets and an Out-of-Place Name for God
But by far the most sensational piece of evidence and commentary that Delitzsch produced in his lecture was a set of cuneiform tablets.
What is there to be seen on these tablets? I shall be asked. Fragile, broken clay upon which are scratched characters scarcely legible! That is true, no doubt, yet they are precious for this reason: they can be dated with certainly, they belong to the age of Hammurabi,26 one in particular to the reign of his father Sin-mubalit. But they are still more precious for another reason: they contain three names which, from the point of view of the history of religion, are of the most far-reaching importance...27
...and here, he places a photograph of the tablets:
Delitzsch’s Photograph of Three Cuneiform Tablets Dating from the time of King Hammurabi28
What was of interest to Delitzsch — and therefore to us — were three cuneiform names that were the heart of the controversy between the famous Assyriologist on the one hand, and all the skeptical higher critics and biblical fundamentalists on the other:
The Three Cuneiform Names at the Heart of the Controversy29
Notably, the three names contained the root word “Ia” and in one significant instance, the name “Iave” or, to Hebraicize it, “Yahveh,” the very proper name of God, the mysterious “tetragrammaton” which was, according to the account in Exodus 3, spoken or revealed to Moses after the Exodus from Egypt some centuries later! In short, there was nothing special about the name “Yahweh,” or “Iave.”
2. The Documentary Hypothesis: Astruc to DeWette
One may get a sense of the enormous implications of Delitzsch’s discovery — at least for the biblical literalists of the period — by posing an obvious question: what was a supposedly uniquely Hebrew proper name for God doing in cuneiform texts manifestly much older than the book of Exodus, and in a very un-Hebrew, very Sumerian context?
But what of the problems it posed to the literary higher critics? Why did they take umbrage at Delitzsch’s cuneiform tablets? To answer that question requires a short excursion into a critical theory called “the Documentary Hypothesis,” or as it is also sometimes known, the “Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis” or the “JEDP theory. In its recognizable modern form, this theory holds that the first five books of the Old Testament — the “Pentateuch” or “Torah” — were composed from different underlying documentary “sources” indicat
ed by the four letters J, E, D, and P. The theory began in Enlightenment France with the observations of the French physician Jean Astruc.
Astruc noticed that in the Hebrew text of the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, each chapter referred to God by a different name, Elohim translated “God” in the Authorized version, was the name used in chapter one, and Yahweh translated “LORD” (in all capitals) in the Authorized version in chapter two. In order to account for this difference, Astruc reasoned that Moses, when composing the “creation accounts” (which he assumed both chapters represented), had in fact utilized two independent sources, or “documents.”30 In so arguing, he provided the metaphysical and philological first principle that would guide subsequent scholarship to elaborate the fully fledged Documentary Hypothesis: different Divine Names indicate the presence in the extant text of different underlying source material for that text.
By 1853, nearly a century later, the German critic Herman Hupfeld would extend this principle to its logical conclusion: differences within passages of overall style or vocabulary constituted a sufficient basis upon which to posit different underlying documentary sources from which those stylistic differences derive. With “the Astruc Principle” and the “Hupfeld Corollary,” a critical agenda of its own was emplaced and empowered, for now the various names of God could come, with a certain brazen and nominalistic elegance, to stand for something completely mundane rather than for some characteristic metaphysical property of God; they came, within the historical phenomenology of the hypothesis itself, to stand only for the source documents from which the final extant text was alleged to derive. The divine names, so to speak, were only the revelations of no-longer-extant source documents, which were the task of critical scholarship to discern and disentangle. And the Germans, more than anyone else, were the ones most busily engaged in this process.
It is worth pausing to consider the implications of all of this as possible manifestations of yet another agenda. By empowering the critic himself, with all his specialized tools of knowledge of the original languages, philology, and other ancient texts, a complete end run was done around existing ecclesiastical magisteria and doctrines, and additionally, the entirety of the Old Testament came to be viewed within such circles as the special creation over centuries of the Hebrew priesthood and elite, with the occasional bow to Egyptian origins for much of it.31
In any case, once the first two chapters of Genesis had been subjected to the “Astruc Principle” and the “Hupfeld Corollary,” there was nothing logically to prevent their application to other passages of the Torah.32 Indeed, it was Johann Gottfried Eichhorn who first extended Astruc’s criterion of the divine names as indicating separate source documents to the remainder of the book of Genesis and on into the first two chapters of the book of Exodus, in his Introduction to the Old Testament, published in Germany between 1780 and 1783. This work earned him his lasting epithet as being the “father of Old Testament criticism.”33 What was new with Eichhorn was the coupling of Astruc’s philological principle with the new assumption that Moses had not authored any of the Torah or “Five Books of Moses.” In other words, it was Eichhorn who in fact accomplished the empowerment of the critical scholar and the accompanying agenda, for if Moses did not author those books, and they were, on the contrary, the editorial compilation from sources made over time, then it followed that a massive task of historical reinterpretation and reconstruction would have to be undertaken. In Eichhorn’s case, the “ancient agenda” at work in the text was simple: he maintained that the ancient Hebrew theology had evolved or developed from a primitive polytheism to an advanced personal monotheism, an evolution that in turn implied a post-Mosaic date for the emergence of the Torah in its final textual form.
Once the Torah was no longer the work of “Moses,” or, to put it differently, one author, the way was then clear for critics to question the compositional, and therefore, the metaphysical and moral unity and integrity of the Torah. Indeed, as the elaboration of the Documentary Hypothesis proceeded throughout the late eighteenth century and all throughout the nineteenth, as the presupposition of unitary authorship collapsed, the discovery of textual, moral, and metaphysical contradictions within it grew in inverse proportion. With Eichhorn, then, we have Astruc’s division of two “sources,” the J or Jahwist source, and the E or Elohist source, extended to the entirety of the book of Genesis and on into Exodus chapters one and two.
One of the first to pursue the implications of Eichhorn’s abandonment of Mosaic authorship was Wilhelm M.L. DeWette in the first half of the nineteenth century. He maintained that the Book of the Law which was discovered in 621 B.C. during King Josiah’s reign, as recounted in II Kings 22, was in fact the book of Deuteronomy. DeWette argued that, since King Josiah and the high priest Hilkaiah were concerned to abolish localized sanctuaries and places of sacrifice and to centralize worship in the Jerusalem Temple, then, so his argument ran, the book which was “discovered” had in fact been deliberately composed for that purpose by an agent of the Temple, and its discovery was staged at the appropriate moment. For DeWette, the whole production, in other words, was in the service of a hidden agenda, namely, to centralize worship, thus solidifying the kingdom, and enriching the royal and temple treasuries. Readers of my previous book, Babylon’s Banksters, will recall that it was precisely in alliance with ancient temples that the ancient banking fraternity often hid its own agendas.34 But as we shall see in chapter three, there are possibly even more hidden, technological agendas at work in this maneuver. In any case, this pinpointed the date of the book of Deuteronomy to 621 B.C.35 With DeWette’s “discovery,” the third document, D for the “deuteronomist” document, had been found. We now have J, E, and D.
3. The Documentary Hypothesis: Hupfeld’s “Copernican Revolution”
With the work Die Quellen der Genesis (The Sources of Genesis) by the aforementioned Herman Hupfeld in 1853, the “Copernican revolution” in the history of the Documentary Hypothesis occurred.36 His contribution to the evolution of the hypothesis were three new principles of examination of the Torah, and a newly discovered source document, so it is worth taking some time to examine Hupfeld in closer detail.
The first component in Hupfeld’s “Copernican revolution” was that, by subjecting the previously isolated “E” document to a new philological examination, he discovered there were portions of “E” which, with the exception of the divine name “Elohim” itself, otherwise greatly resembled the “J” document in diction, style, and thematic focus. Thus, there were some portions of “E” which, in the historical scheme of the emerging hypothesis, appeared to be material as early as that of “J.” Hupfeld was obliged, therefore, to separate “E” into two further documents, an earlier “E” that resembles “J,” which he called “E1, and the rest of “E” which became “E2,” or more simply, the original “E.” There were now four documents, displaying more or less the following chronological order: E1EJD. It was this E1 that became the later “priestly” or “P” document, and it will henceforth be referred to as such. With this change in symbols, the order of documents now reads PEJD.
As if this were not already confusing enough, to this apparatus Hupfeld added a second, and perhaps the most important, principle in the arsenal of presuppositions of Old Testament criticism, for he maintained that the documents thus distinguished by the criteria of different vocabulary, diction, and interest had integrity; that is, they could not only be distinguished within the extant text of the Torah, but actually recovered and reconstructed as separate documents from that text. The text, in short, could be rewritten. (Talk about agendas!) This assumption was posited no doubt out of the perceived need on the part of Old Testament criticism to justify its increasingly radical reconstructions of early Hebrew history with a measure of “scientific” verifiability.
Thirdly, Hupfeld posited the existence of an “editor,” or Redaktor, designated as “R” in the growing non-propositional calculus of the critic, an “R who edite
d the portions of the text in “E” which resembled “J” which, according to the theory, should have belonged in “J” to begin with, except for the fact of the presence of the name Elohim and not Yahweh! If this is not confusing enough, it can be restated to make the confusion even more explicit: “R” lay behind the conflation of “P” and “E2” into “E.” This “R” was therefore truly a godsend, a literal Redaktor ex machina, for “whenever the theory ran into trouble with the facts or ran counter to the actual data of the text itself, the bungling had of R (the anonymous redactor) was brought in to save the situation.”37 This assumption of the redactor indicates the dialectical impasse into which the theory was quickly coming, for the discovery of “P” contradicted Hupfeld’s own assumption of the integrity and recoverability of the source documents; for if “P” which so closely resembled “J” in diction could only be posited by positing a redactor — who is introduced precisely in order to account for the resemblances between the “documents” — then the integrity of the source documents collapses, for that integrity is dependent upon the differences in style and vocabulary to begin with! In other words, Hupfeld’s redactor fills precisely the same function as an author utilizing sources, which is where the theory began.
4. The Documentary Hypothesis: Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen
Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda Page 3
