by Bruce Feiler
When I first visited the Tigris and Euphrates, at the outset of my first journey exploring the Bible, I was shocked to learn of the Mesopotamian parallels to Genesis. I was also disturbed. If the stories were lifted from Sumerian sources, then touched up by biblical editors to serve their own purpose, perhaps that undermined the singularity of the Bible, and my faith. Avner pointed out that while the similarities are profound, one difference sets the biblical stories apart: The Sumerian tales have many gods; the Bible has one. His answer put my mind at ease.
Today, I have a different view. I still believe that the Bible’s one invisible, universal God is a qualitative difference and one primary reason why biblical religion survives and Mesopotamian does not. But I no longer fear that exploring the connection undermines the Bible, or my attachment to it. Instead, I see the diverse roots of the Bible as a strength, not a weakness. One recurring problem with the religions that grew out of the Hebrew Bible is that each has a tendency to believe its faith is unique, its interpretation of the text absolute, and its relationship with God so exclusive it has the right to harm those who disagree. The idea that the writers of the Bible were influenced by sources that predate their own suggests the Bible should be seen not as sui generis but as being in dialogue with other texts. And if scriptures can be in dialogue, surely the faiths that grow out of those scriptures can be in dialogue as well.
In that interplay, what the Bible chose to adapt from Mesopotamia is telling. Both traditions, for example, view water as primary, land as emerging out of water, and humans as emerging from land. Geography is primal. More important, even the idea that many believe began with the biblical prophets—social justice—shows glimmers in Sumer. One Mesopotamian epic advises people to worship their god every day, but also
To the feeble show kindness,
Do not insult the downtrodden,
Do charitable deeds, render service all your days.
Do not utter libel, speak what is of good report,
Do not say evil things, speak well of people.
These words could easily have been written by any of the Hebrew prophets.
The greatest concept the Bible shares with its Sumerian forebears is not Creation, the Tower of Babel, or the Flood; it is the understanding that humans yearn to make contact with their gods and need those gods to help them improve their lives on earth. That yearning for the divine cannot be excised from civilized society, as some skeptics suggest today; it is one of the primary expressions of civilized human society. To live in peace does not require the removal of religion from our lives; it requires the discovery of the beneficent elements within religion that have lived alongside the hateful ones since humans first began to make sense of their environment.
We arrived at the royal compound not far from the ziggurat, site of one of the most famous overreaches in archaeological history and backdrop to one of that discipline’s least likely love stories. The mounds are mostly covered over now and show little sign of the fanfare they created when they were unearthed in the 1920s. The limp feeling they invoke was best captured by Agatha Christie in her novel Murder in Mesopotamia, based on her visits to Ur during Woolley’s excavation. “I wondered what sort of palaces they had in those days, and if it would be like the pictures I’d seen of Tutankhamen’s tomb,” writes the narrator, Nurse Amy Leatheran.
But would you believe it, there was nothing to see but mud! Dirty mud walls about two feet high—and that’s all there was to it. Mr. Carey took me here and there telling me things—how this was the great court, and there were some chambers here and an upper storey and various other rooms that opened off the central court. And all I thought was, “But how does he know?” though, of course, I was too polite to say so. I can tell you it was a disappointment! The whole excavation looked like nothing but mud to me—no marble or gold or anything handsome—my aunt’s house in Cricklewood would have made a much more inspiring ruin!
Discovered in 1625, Tell Muqayyar was first associated with the Bible in the mid-1800s. Round-the-clock excavations begun by Sir C. L. Woolley in 1922 lorded over the field of archaeology for more than a decade. Woolley was a man of “slight build and no commanding appearance,” a colleague commented. “But presence, yes!” Braving shootings and looting, he pulled up lavish jewelry, silver weapons, and a four-thousand-year-old golden harp, an enlarged re-creation of which greets visitors to Nasiriyah today. When gold beads that Woolley discovered went missing, he announced that local workers would be paid a bonus every time one was found in the ground. Workers who had been selling them to local dealers quickly went and retrieved them; Woolley’s price was three times the market rate.
But Woolley’s greatest flair was public relations. He had what Christie called “the eye of imagination.” “While he was speaking I felt in my mind no doubt whatever that the house on the corner had been Abraham’s,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It was his reconstruction of the past and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also.” In 1929 he dug a one-yard-square pit, at the bottom of which he found extensive water destruction. His staff was underwhelmed; river overflows were common in Mesopotamia. But Woolley had other ideas, writing, “I was quite convinced what it all meant.” He asked his wife, Katherine, a former volunteer, who announced, “Well, of course, it’s the Flood!” She was referring to Noah’s flood, something hardly provable by a three-foot-wide hole. But the next year they expanded the dig to seventy-five yards wide, and Woolley announced that the Flood had covered an area three hundred miles long. “It was not a universal deluge,” he wrote, but it was the inspiration of the biblical story. Though he had no proof whatsoever for this connection, gullible newspaper reporters gushed over his discovery.
While Woolley and his wife were stealing the international spotlight from Ur, a more curious couple was stealing secret glances. In 1928, following the breakup of her first marriage and with nine novels already to her credit, Agatha Christie traveled to Iraq, alone and on a whim. She took the Orient Express from London to Damascus, then rode forty-eight hours on a six-wheel bus across the desert to Baghdad. After visiting friends, she traveled by train to Ur junction, where she was welcomed by Katherine Woolley, who had everyone on the dig read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “I fell in love with Ur,” Christie wrote, “with its beauty in the evening, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute.”
The following year she returned, and this time Leonard Woolley asked his deputy, the shy, twenty-six-year-old Max Mallowan, to chaperon Christie, fifteen years his senior. In her autobiography, Christie recalled their first meeting, in verse:
I’ll tell you everything I can
If you listen well:
I met an erudite young man
A-sitting on a tell.
He said: “I look for aged pots
Of prehistoric days,
And then I measure them in lots
And lots of different ways.
And then (like you) I start to write,
My words were twice as long
As yours, and far more erudite.
They prove my colleagues wrong!”
Mallowan accompanied Christie back to Baghdad, and along the way their car broke down in the desert. Impressed by her lack of panic, he followed her all the way to England and, with flowers in hand and a diamond in pocket, proposed. “Five thousand years ago is the choicest age I know,” he said.
And once you learn to scorn A.D.
And you have got the knack,
Then you could come and dig with me
And never wander back.
The two were married the following year, an unlikely desert romance that thrilled everyone who heard about it—except Katherine Woolley. The prima donna of Tell Muqayyar, whom Mallowan described as “dominating and powerful,” declared: “There is room for only one woman at Ur.” Christie was banned from the dig, forcing her husband to return a
lone. Sitting at home, the writer quickly wrought her revenge: the murder victim in Murder in Mesopotamia, who is described as a “queer woman,” “a mass of affectation,” and “a champion liar,” is based on Katherine Woolley. She is felled by a falling millstone.
Back at the base of the ziggurat, another group of U.S. soldiers had arrived. They were milling around, snapping photographs, and joking. Part of the 607th MP Battalion based in Grand Prairie, Texas, the men were serving their last day at Tallil following more than a year in the region. The next morning they would fly to Camp Doha, then home.
The leader was fifty-year-old Chaplain Steve Munson, a soft-spoken man with a small brown cross on his floppy desert hat. Like all chaplains, he carried no weapon. Instead he was shadowed by a burly sergeant, Adrian Buruma, who had a machine gun large enough for both of them. Chaplain Munson had a broad, welcoming face, covered in sunspots, that exuded a secure, serene confidence and all-Americanness that reminded me of Arnold Palmer.
Chaplain Munson entered military service in the 1970s, then left a decade later after being called into ministry with the Southern Baptist Church. He returned to uniform around the time of the first Gulf War and was now in the reserves. On a chain around his neck, next to his dog tag, he wore a medallion with a verse from Joshua. “I will be strong and courageous. I will not be terrified or discouraged, because the Lord God is with me wherever I go.” I asked him if it was true that there are no atheists in foxholes.
“When people go through a difficult experience,” he said, “they come to realize that there has to be more to life than what they think there is. A lot of times they find they can’t handle their stress. They can’t survive on their own. Then the door opens to be able to discuss with them how to develop a relationship with Christ.”
“You’re Southern Baptist,” I said. “Does that mean you’re evangelical?”
“We’re not allowed as chaplains to proselytize,” he said. “Instead you ask leading questions: ‘Why do you think you’re having stress?’ ‘Where do you think you might get hope?’ ‘Why did you come to me and not a friend?’ Usually they will give you the permission, which you need to be able to lead them into a relationship with God through Christ.”
I asked him if he had performed any baptisms in Iraq.
“We had a baptism overlooking the ziggurat,” he said. The soldiers took an ammo crate, lined it with plastic, then filled it with water. A half dozen men from different denominations received holy rites while a sergeant played “Amazing Grace” on the saxophone, black gospel style. “You just felt this overwhelming presence of the Lord,” Chaplain Munson said. “To overlook this site and think that somewhere in this area Abram may have walked.”
He paused. A twinkle leapt into his eye. “Now we hadn’t had a shower or bath in three weeks,” he said. “So afterwards we all looked at that crate and said, ‘Why let that water go to waste?’ So three or four of us jumped in, and we did rub-a-dub-dub three men in a tub.” He chuckled at the memory.
“I’d like to ask you about a difficult topic,” I said. “One difference between the first Gulf War and now is that 9/11 happened. The world has taken on an aura of religious conflict. Has there been any anti-Muslim feeling you’ve perceived among soldiers?”
“There has been a mixture,” he said. “For the most part, there’s not an anti-Muslim feeling, there’s an antiterrorist feeling. And there’s an understanding that there’s a difference between the common Muslim we meet every day and the right-wing fanatics. I’ve found over the years that soldiers are usually a little more educated on those things than civilians. They are here, experiencing this, and they know who is threatening and who is not.”
“So do you think in the same way the military was racially integrated before the rest of American society that the military is more sensitized to interfaith awareness than the regular population?”
“I think the tendency is yes,” he said. “Chaplains make it a point to make sure people understand and tolerate other faiths. Look at our worship services on Sunday mornings. We don’t have a Baptist worship service. We have a worship service. Since we’ve been here, our core group includes Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ.”
“So does denomination not matter anymore?”
“Oh, no. It matters, but we talk about it. And we never violate our core beliefs. We all believe in the Virgin Birth, we believe in the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We believe he died on the cross for our sins. We believe in the Second Coming. We would disagree on how to conduct a baptism, for example, but we all agree that baptism is an essential part of our faith.”
The afternoon was moving toward that hour when it was unsafe to be outdoors. The colors were warming toward the Agatha Christie palette: apricot, rose, blue, and mauve. I asked Chaplain Munson if he would offer us a farewell reading. He directed us toward the base of the stairs that lead to the top of the ziggurat.
We pulled out our Bibles. One curious aspect of Judaism and Christianity is that, for all the importance of the earliest biblical books to each faith, the actual religious worship of each tradition focuses more on the latter books of the Hebrew Bible—namely, the Prophets and the Psalms. Jewish Shabbat services include a reading from the Torah; the holiest prayer in Judaism, the Shema, comes from Deuteronomy and Numbers. But Jewish services also include a weekly reading from the Prophets, known as the haftarah, a custom that is believed to have originated when Syrian rulers in the late first millennium B.C.E. forbade the study of the Torah. The heart of the weekday morning service, the Amidah, comes from the Prophets and the Psalms; the same with the afternoon service. Nearly every service includes a reading of Psalm 20, which promises that God answers those in distress. “Now I know that the Lord will give victory to his anointed.”
The same emphasis applies to Protestant and Catholic liturgies. The New Testament is filled with references to the Prophets and replete with evidence that Jesus prayed using the Psalms. As recorded in the Gospel of Luke, the last words of Jesus, “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” echo a line from Psalm 31, “My fate is in your hand.” Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican church services all make systematic use of the Prophets and Psalms. One of the most famous prayers in Christian liturgy, the Sanctus, is built on a quotation from Isaiah 6: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” Many of the Psalms were set to music and have become the most memorable hymns in Christianity.
The reasons for this focus have largely to do with literary form. Beginning with the Prophets, the writing in the Bible becomes less dependent on narrative, which largely defines the Pentateuch, and more interested in poetry, oracle, and lamentation. The prophets take declarations from God and make transcendent proclamations about human behavior and the Lord’s magnanimity. Isaiah 6, for example, is actually set “in the year that King Uzziah died,” 742 B.C.E., when the prophet witnesses the Lord on his throne, surrounded by seraphim. But the seraphim’s exclamation, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” can easily be turned into a timeless prayer, as it was with the Sanctus, which has nothing to do with Uzziah.
The 150 psalms, which appear in the Hebrew Bible following the Prophets, take this literary evolution even further. They are direct prayers to God. Unlike the rest of the Hebrew Bible, in which God involves himself in life on earth and speaks, prods, cajoles, and reaches out to human beings, in the Psalms human beings reach out to God. The human yearning for contact with the creator, implied since the Garden of Eden, finally becomes overt. “Answer me when I call, O God,” pleads Psalm 4. “O Lord, my God, in you I seek refuge,” says Psalm 7.
Though the Bible attributes many of the Psalms to early Israelite figures, notably David, scholars agree that the writing of the Psalms likely began in the Babylonian Exile and continued for several centuries. This timing is significant. The Psalms reflect a time when the Israelites, removed from their land, become less interested in physical manife
stations of worship, like the Temple, and more interested in nonphysical worship, like prayer. Unlike sacrifices, which could be offered only in the Temple, and only by a priest, a psalm can be recited anywhere by anyone. While the bulk of the biblical narrative focuses on the Israelites as a nation, the Psalms speak for the raw, individual human heart. The Bible, which begins with the grandest act of all, creating the universe, has finally arrived at the most intimate act, an invitation for each person to speak directly to the divine. The essence of the biblical story—contact between humans and God—no longer happens exclusively to the people in the narrative; it can now happen for all of us. The Bible has ceased being merely the backstory of religion; it has become a central part of religion.
Which is one reason its influence still holds. When I asked Chaplain Munson what passages from the Bible spoke to him most while he was serving in Iraq, he mentioned Jeremiah 29:11, “For I am mindful of the plans I have concerning you, declares the Lord”; and two psalms, 16, “Protect me, O God, for I seek refuge in you,” and 91, which he called the soldiers’ psalm.
He flipped through his government-issue, desert camouflage Bible to Psalm 91 and prepared to read aloud. Before he did, I noticed a small notation on the top of the page, “3-09-03, Arifjan.” I asked him what it meant.
“We were stationed in Camp Arifjan on the night the war was supposed to begin,” he said. “We had been given the mission to secure the border where the Iraqis were expected to attack. The XO came to me,” he said, using the military abbreviation for executive officer, “and he was greatly concerned that if we were attacked, we would probably lose some soldiers. He asked me to lead a prayer with all the men, and I chose this psalm.” He began to read:
