by Paul Johnson
Not that the Jewish God is in any sense identified with nature: quite the contrary. Though always unvisualized, God is presented in the most emphatic terms as a person. The Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, is at pains to draw a distinction between the despised pagan peoples, who worship nature and nature-gods, and the Jews who worship God the person, warning them ‘lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them’.9 Moreover, this personal God, from the start, makes absolutely clear moral distinctions, which his creatures must observe, so that in the Jewish version of early man moral categories are present and imperative from the very beginning. This again differentiates it sharply from all pagan accounts. The prehistoric sections of the Bible thus constitute a kind of moral fundament, upon which the whole of the factual structure rests. The Jews are presented, even in their most primitive antecedents, as creatures capable of perceiving absolute differences between right and wrong.
The notion of a moral universe superimposed on the physical one determines the treatment of the first truly historical episode in the Bible, the description of the Flood in Genesis 6. There can now be no doubt that some kind of huge inundation did occur in Mesopotamia. The first corroboration of the Biblical account took place in 1872 when George Smith of the British Museum discovered a version of the Deluge in cuneiform tablets found by A. H. Layard in 1845-51 at Kuyunjik in the library of the Palace of Sennacherib, confirmed by further tablets found in the Palace of Ashurbanipal.10 This was in fact a late-Assyrian version, interpolated at the end of a much earlier epic known as Gilgamesh, which deals with an ancient Sumerian ruler of Uruk, in the fourth millennium BC. Before the Assyrians, both the Babylonians and the distant Sumerians treasured memories of a great flood. In the 1920s, Sir Leonard Woolley found and excavated Ur, an important Sumerian city of the fourth and third millennia BC, which is mentioned in the Bible at the very end of its prehistoric section.11 While investigating the earlier archaeological levels at Ur, Woolley made prolonged efforts to unearth physical evidence of a dramatic flood. He found an alluvial deposit of 8 feet which he dated 4000 to 3500 BC. At Shuruppak he came across another impressive alluvial deposit, and an 18-inch one at a similar stratum at Kish. But these datings, and Ur’s, did not match.12 Surveying the various sites which had been explored by the early 1960s, Sir Max Mallowan concluded that there had, indeed, been a giant flood. 13 Then in 1965 the British Museum made a further discovery in its deposits: two tablets, referring to the Flood, written in the Babylonian city of Sippar in the reign of King Ammisaduqa, 1646-1626 BC.
The importance of this last discovery was that it enables us to focus on the figure of Noah himself. For it relates how the god, having created mankind, regretted it and decided to drown it by flood; but Enki, the water-god, revealed the catastrophic plan to a certain priest-king called Ziusudra, who built a boat and so survived.14 Ziusudra was undoubtedly a real person, king of the south Babylonian city of Shuruppak about 2900 BC, in which capacity he figures in the earliest column of the Sumerian king-list. At the site of Shuruppak itself there is evidence of a phenomenal flood, though the dating does not correspond with Woolley’s flood at Ur.15 The saviour-figure of Ziusudra, presented in the Bible as Noah, thus provides the first independent confirmation of the actual existence of a Biblical personage.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between the Biblical presentation of the Flood and the Babylonian-Sumerian epics. Noah, unlike Ziusudra, is a moral figure, anchored firmly in the scheme of values which the Book of Genesis identifies from the very beginning. Moreover, whereas the Gilgamesh story recounts isolated episodes lacking a unifying moral and historical context, the Jewish version sees each event as involving moral issues and, collectively, bearing witness to a providential design. It is the difference between secular and religious literature and between the writing of mere folklore and conscious, determinist history.
Moreover, not only is Noah the first real man in Jewish history: his story foreshadows important elements in Jewish religion. There is the Jewish god’s obsession with detail, in the construction and loading of the ark. There is the notion of the one righteous man. Even more important, there is the Jewish stress on the supreme importance of human life, because of the imaginative relationship of man to God, which occurs in the key verse 6 of Genesis 9: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.’ This might be termed the central tenet of Jewish belief, and it is significant that it occurs in conjunction with the Flood, the first historic event for which there is non-Biblical confirmation.
The passages dealing with the Flood also contain the first mention of a covenant and the earliest reference to the land of Canaan.16 But these themes recur far more emphatically when we progress through the post-diluvian king-lists and reach the patriarchs. We can now return to our question about Abraham’s identity and provenance. What the Bible says, in Chapters 11-25 of Genesis, is that Abraham, originally Abram, ultimately descended from Noah, migrated from ‘Ur of the Chaldees’, first to Haran, then to various places in Canaan, travelling to Egypt in time of famine but returning to Canaan and ending his days at Hebron where he made his first landed purchase.
The substance of this Biblical account is history. The reference to the Chaldees is anachronistic since the Chaldeans did not penetrate southern Mesopotamia until towards the end of the second millennium BC, and Abraham is dated much earlier, closer to its beginning. The Chaldeans were inserted to identify Ur to readers of the Bible in the first millennium BC.17 But there is no reason at all to doubt that Abraham came from Ur, as the Bible states, and this already tells us a lot about him, thanks to the work of Woolley and his successors. To begin with, it associates him with an important city, not the desert. Hegelians like Wellhausen and his school, with their notion of determinist progression from primitive to sophisticated, from desert to city, saw the Hebrews originally as pastoralists of the simplest kind. But the Ur Woolley excavated had a comparatively high level of culture. He found there, in the grave of ‘Meskalamdug, Hero of the Good Land’, a superb helmet made in the form of a wig from solid gold, the locks of hair in relief, and a religious standard for religious processions, decorated with shells and lapis lazuli. He found too a giant ziggurat, the temple raised on multiple platforms which, it is fair to conjecture, inspired the story of the Tower of Babel. This was the work of Ur Nammu of the Third Dynasty (2060-1950 BC), a great lawgiver and builder, who had himself portrayed on a stele, a fragment of which we possess, as a workman carrying a pick, trowel and measuring-dividers.
It is likely that Abraham left Ur after the time of this king, and so carried within him to Canaan tales of the ziggurat to heaven as well as the much earlier Flood story. When did he make this voyage? Dating the patriarchs is not such a hopeless task as was once supposed. In Genesis, antediluvian datings are, of course, schematic rather than actual but genealogies are not to be despised, any more than the other early king-lists of antiquity. The pharaoh-lists provided by such sources as Manetho, an Egyptian priest who lived in Hellenistic times, c. 250 BC, enable us to date Egyptian history with reasonable confidence as far back as the First Dynasty, 3000 BC. Berossus, a Babylonian priest who corresponds roughly to Manetho, gives us a similar king-list for Mesopotamia, and archaeology has unearthed others. If we examine the lists of ante- and post-diluvian names in Genesis, we find two groups with ten names on each, though the datings vary as between the near-original Hebrew Massoretic text, the Greek Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. These groupings are similar to non-Biblical literary records and the Biblical ‘long’ datings are akin to lives of the Sumerian kings before the flood at Shuruppak. The earliest king-list gives only eight antediluvian kings, but Berossus has ten, fitting the Genesis pattern. The link between the two is perhaps Abraham, who brought the tradition with him.
It is difficult to anchor the Mesopotamian king-lists, like
the Egyptian, in absolute time, but the consensus is now to date Sargon and the Old Akkadian period to 2360-2180 BC, the lawgiver Ur-Nammu and the Third Dynasty of Ur to the end of the second millennium or the beginning of the first, and Hammurabi, who is unquestionably an authentic statesman and law-codifier, to the precise regnal period of 1728-1686 BC. The evidence suggests that the Genesis patriarch narratives belong to the period between Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi, the outside limits being 2100-1550 BC, that is the Middle Bronze Age. They certainly cannot be later, in the Late Bronze Age, because that would date them to the Egyptian empire of the New Kingdom, and the patriarchal sections make no mention of an Egyptian imperial presence in Canaan. Albright struggled with the problem of Abraham’s dating for most of his professional life, pushing him backwards and forwards between the twentieth century BC and the seventeenth, finally concluding that he could not have lived before the twentieth or after the nineteenth. This dating seems reasonable.18
The ability to give a rough dating to the patriarchs enables us to relate them both to archaeological records and to the various literary archives which have now emerged from Bronze Age Syria and Mesopotamia. These last are important because they enable us not only to confirm but to explain episodes in the patriarchal stories. The archaeological finds include the investigation by Kathleen Kenyon of roadside tombs outside Jericho, which resemble the cave-tomb burials described in Genesis 23 and 35:19-20, and Nelson Glueck’s archaeological survey of the Negev, which uncovered many Middle Bronze Age settlements of the patriarchal type.19 Glueck noted that many of these settlements were destroyed some time after 1900 BC, which confirms the hints of ravaging we get in Genesis 14.
The literary finds are very considerable and suggestive. In 1933 A. Parrot excavated the ancient town of Mari (modern Tell Harari) on the Euphrates 17 miles north of the Syria-Iraq border, and found an archive of 20,000 items.20 This was followed by the transcription of a similar archive of clay tablets at ancient Nuzi, near Kirkuk, the city of the Hurrians—the Horites of the Bible—who formed part of the Kingdom of Mitanni.21 A third archive of 14,000 tablets was discovered at Ebla (modern Tell Mardikh) in north Syria.22 These archives cover a large span of time, those at Ebla being somewhat before the time of the patriarchs, those at Nuzi, sixteenth, fifteenth century BC, being somewhat after, while the Mari tablets, end-nineteenth century BC to mid-eighteenth century, coincide closely with the most probable dating. Together they help us to create a picture of the patriarchal society which illuminates the Bible text. One of the strongest objections to the contention of Wellhausen and others that the early Bible books were compiled and edited to suit the religious beliefs of a much later age has always been that many episodes in them do no such thing. They embody customs which were evidently strange and inexplicable to the later editors of the first millennium BC who, in their reverence for the text and traditions handed down to them, simply copied them out, without any attempt at rationalization. Some passages remain mysterious to us, but many others are now explicable in the light of the tablets.
Thus both the Ebla and the Mari tablets contain administrative and legal documents referring to people with patriarchal-type names such as Abram, Jacob, Leah, Laban and Ishmael; there are also many suggestive expressions and loan-words related to Hebrew.23 Moreover, these unknown litigants of the early second millennium BC faced exactly the same kind of difficulties, arising from childlessness, divorce, inheritance and birthrights, as their Biblical namesakes. Abraham’s despairing plan to make one of his retainers his heir, for lack of his own, and his proposal for the adoption of Eleazer as heir-presumptive, reflect closely Nuzi practices. Nuzi also produces exact parallels with Abraham’s dealings with his wife Sarah and his resort to her maid Hagar as a licensed concubine as a result of Sarah’s failure to have a child—and, indeed, of the unhappy domestic consequences which followed. Nuzi marriage contracts, indeed, specifically provide for these contingencies. One Nuzi tablet attests the sale of birthright by an elder to a younger brother in return for three sheep, just as Esau transferred his to Jacob for a mess of pottage.24 A Nuzi tablet also provides an instance of the binding power of the oral disposition of property, in the form of a death-bed blessing—thus illuminating the remarkable scene in Genesis 27, when Jacob and his mother Rebecca conspire to deceive his father, Isaac, and get his dying nomination as heir. Most strikingly of all, perhaps, the Nuzi archives explain the baffling Biblical account of Jacob’s relations with Laban, which we now know to have been a common adoption problem. The heirless Laban adopted Jacob as his son, as well as his son-in-law; then he had sons of his own. A tablet from Nuzi reads:
The adoption tablet of Nashwi, son of Arshenni. He adopted Wullu, son of Pohishenni…. When Nashwi dies, Wullu shall be heir. Should Nashwi beget a son, he shall divide equally with Wullu, but Nashwi’s son shall take Nashwi’s gods. But if there be no son of Nashwi then Wullu shall take Nashwi’s gods. And Nashwi has given his daughter Nuhuya as wife to Wullu. And if Wullu takes another wife he forfeits Nashwi’s land and buildings.25
The Nuzi tablets show that family gods were like title-deeds, with symbolic legal value: we now understand that Rachel stole Laban’s teraphim-gods to redress what she felt to be an unfair legal provision. The Mari tablets, again, give examples of the legal ritual of confirming a covenant by slaughtering an animal, just as Abraham confirmed his covenant with God in Genesis 15:9-10.26
We can thus begin to place Abraham and his descendants in their true historical context. At the end of the third millennium BC, civilized international society was disrupted by incursions from the East. These invaders caused great trouble in Egypt; and in settled Asia, archaeology reveals an absolute break in continuity in towns such as Ugarit, Byblos, Megiddo, Jericho and old Gaza, indicating pillage and abandonment.27 These peoples, moving from Mesopotamia towards the Mediterranean, spoke West Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is one. A particular group is referred to, in Mesopotamian tablets and inscriptions, by the ideogram SA.GAZ, or as Hapiru, Habiru. Late Bronze Age Egyptian sources also speak of Abiru or Habiru. By this term they were not referring to Bedouin or desert-dwellers, who existed then as now, for they had a different term for this category. Habiru seems to have been a term of abuse used of difficult and destructive non-city-dwellers who moved from place to place. They were not regular tribes, migrating regularly with the flocks according to the cycles of the seasons, as they still do today in parts of Asia Minor and Persia. Their culture was superior to most desert tribes. Precisely because they were not easy to classify, they puzzled and annoyed the conservative Egyptian authorities, who knew exactly how to deal with genuine nomads. Sometimes they served as mercenaries. Some held jobs as government employees. They worked as servants, or as tinkers and pedlars. They were donkey-folk who moved in caravan, or merchants. Sometimes they acquired considerable wealth in the form of flocks and followers: then they might endeavour to settle, acquire land and form petty kingships.
Each group of Habiru had a sheikh or war-chief, who on occasion could launch an attack with as many as 2,000 followers. When they got the chance to settle and build, their leader called himself a king, and they attached themselves to the great king of the region. Apart from Egypt, a centralized autocracy of immemorial antiquity even in the nineteenth century BC, no king was powerful on his own. Hammurabi of Babylon had always ten or fifteen kings in attendance. It was a matter of fine judgment for a regional monarch whether to allow Habiru kings to settle and become (in effect) feudatories, or to beat them off.28
The same dilemma confronted petty local kings, already settled, who had formed part of an earlier wave of immigrants. Abraham was the leader of one of these immigrant Habiru groups, a substantial chief, with ‘318 trained servants born in his house’. In Genesis 12 we see him dealing with a major authority, Egypt; in Genesis 14 he and his men serve as mercenaries with the petty King of Sodom. His relations with settled authorities, large and small, always contain an element of unease and are marked by deceptions, such
as his repeated pretence that his wife Sarah is his sister: we now know from the tablets that a wife with the legal status of a sister commanded more protection than an ordinary wife.29 Pasture was limited; water was often scarce. If a Habiru group flourished in settlement, its very wealth became a source of conflict—an almost uncanny adumbration of later Jewish problems in the diaspora. Genesis 13:6-11 shows Abraham and his nephew Lot obliged to separate: ‘And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together; for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together.’ Genesis 21:22-31 shows Abraham, at Beersheba, involved in a dispute over water-rights with the men of Abimelech, the local king, a dispute resolved by a covenant sealed by animal sacrifice. Abraham’s relations with Abimelech, though sometimes tense and always legalistic, were peaceful. It was sometimes in the interests of the settled kings to tolerate the Habiru, as a source of mercenaries. But if the ‘strangers and sojourners’ grew too numerous and powerful, the local king had to tell them to move on, or risk being overwhelmed himself. Thus we find Abimelech telling Abraham’s son, Isaac: ‘Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we.’30
