The Ark Before Noah

by Irving Finkel

  This acknowledgement of manuscript sources anticipates a literate readership that – theoretically at least – could follow them up, and seriously reinforces the authority and historical reliability of the ‘published’ account. There are many of these umbral works, which also seem to include poetry. Here are some of their titles: The Book of Jasher, The Book of Songs, The Book of the Wars of the Lord, The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, The Book of Shemaiah the Prophet, The Visions of Iddo the Seer, The Manner of the Kingdom, The Book of Samuel the Seer, The Acts of Solomon, The Annals of King David, The Book of Nathan the Prophet, The Book of Gad the Seer, The Prophecy of Ahijah, The Acts of Uzziah, The Acts and Prayers of Manasseh, The Sayings of the Seers, The Laments for Josiah and The Chronicles of King Ahasuerus.

  This makes quite a bookshelf. Its importance in the context of Arks and Floods is this: we can see explicitly that at least part of the biblical text was distilled out of existing written sources, and extracts were put to new purposes within the context of the biblical message. This compositional process underlies the creation of the biblical text as a whole: the narrative incorporates very diverse types of records, oral and written, that were available to the compilers for the Great Work. The same principle will operate for the Flood Story.

  What written resources were likely to have been available in Jerusalem prior to the arrival of the Babylonians in 597 BC? Scrolls will have existed with, at a minimum, the following contents:

  Shelf 1. Court chronicles from Israel and Judah

  Shelf 2. Royal correspondence

  Shelf 3. Political writings; treaties; trade matters; censuses

  Shelf 4. Court poetry; songs; proverbs

  Shelf 5. Cultic protocols; sacrifices; temple administration

  Shelf 6. Prophetic writings

  Shelf 7. Any other business …

  Material of all these kinds is incorporated into the historical books of the Old Testament. The probability is that writing proliferated at the court of Judah as it does everywhere, and the singular preoccupations of biblical authorship preserve only parts of a far bigger whole. Certain royal privileges might have been accorded to King Jehoiachin on the wearisome road from Jerusalem to Babylon; what we can be sure of is that the heritage Hebrew scrolls cannot have been torched by Nabuzaradan’s men but must have been taken with them too. Otherwise there would be no Old Testament.

  Israelite refugees being deported: on the road from Lachish after the city was sacked by Sennacherib’s army in 701 BC, long before the Babylonians did the same to the Judaeans at Jerusalem.

  (picture acknowledgement 11.3)

  Judaeans Encountering Babylon: The Tower of Babel

  The Judaean exiles approaching the city in 597 BC, and again those in 587 BC, will have glimpsed the Tower of Babel from a long way off, for the great stepped temple tower or ziggurat that reposed in the centre of Nebuchadnezzar’s capital attained a height of well over seventy metres, its base measuring ninety-one square metres. The ever-growing profile against the horizon must have struck awe into all those who approached the city. It is perhaps hard to imagine the impact of that skyscraper on outsiders who saw it for the first time; there was no building in Jerusalem that could have prepared them for the sight.

  Building the Tower of Babel in about AD 1754, showing the making of bricks. Artist unidentified.

  (picture acknowledgement 11.4)

  The Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis is no literary conceit invented for didactic purposes. The great building was slap bang in front of them, built as high as possible to facilitate contact between the king of Babylon – favourite of the god Marduk – and Marduk himself. The ziggurat was a ladder to heaven to allow the king’s voice, confident, intercessional or pleading, the best chance of being heard. We are not well informed about the exact use of the building or of the small temple that reposed on top, but its function as a royal ‘hot line’ to heaven is beyond dispute.

  The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is one brief, nine-verse episode but the tower has in some measure loomed over human society with its sombre message ever since.

  Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.’ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

  Genesis 11:1–9

  There can be no doubt that the composition of this passage was the consequence of the physical presence of the Judaeans in Babylon. The ‘land of Shinar’ referred to reflects the old Sumerian name for southern Mesopotamia, Sumer. The overweening ziggurat was, as described, built of brick and mortar. The whole city in fact was built of clay bricks, thousands upon endless thousands of them, some glazed, many stamped in cuneiform with Nebuchadnezzar’s name and titles. Unimaginable numbers had been used to build the ziggurat itself, intended by Nebuchadnezzar’s architects in every way to surpass what any predecessor had ever achieved.

  In the context of Genesis we can discern two distinct components in this story. One, since the principal phenomena of the world are being explained, answers the question, Why are there so many languages in the world? Many children, bewildered by unfamiliar tongues in the street or on the bus, ask the same natural question today. The explanation is that the super-abundance of mutually unintelligible languages is punishment by God: men should have understood what they could and couldn’t do. The intrusion of humans into the kingdom of heaven like so many intrepid firemen clambering up the steps would be intolerable. To Hebrew sensibilities the urge in any man for physical proximity to heaven was blasphemous. The moral lesson is strict and unforgiving, and is a direct illustration of the Hebrew mind at work. The child’s naive question is turned round, and used to underwrite a deeper message.

  There is, moreover, disdain and reserve running under this text for the ‘them’, who are the Babylonians. For the construction of the arrogant building was an alien episode in earlier times that was none of the Hebrews’ doing but which was seen as responsible for how things had become in the world. The Judaean view is that the Babylonian tower, what it stood for and the religious ideal it embodied was sinful. The Hebrew text thus embodies detachment from, if not hostility towards, the state cult of Marduk.

  There is a further point. The Hebrew term for the ‘tower’ in the expression Tower of Babel is migdal. This word is certainly correctly translated as ‘tower’, but in the usual meaning of the word a tower is – more or less – straight-sided, even if its base is wider for stability, as in a lighthouse. The profile of the Babylonian ziggurat, however, is opposite. It seems quite probable to me that the building’s very profile will have suggested to the Judaeans that the ziggurat was unfinished. If the building was really meant to be a tower that would reach from earth to heaven, it would have looked as if the work (or the funding!) had run out in the early stages. The top was nowhere near the clouds and the whole operation hardly got off the ground. To the Hebrew mind the Babylonians’ tower work must have been brought to a halt by a divine hand. This brief passage, so familiar and often so swiftly read over, can thus be seen, in the context o
f the first unwilling Judaean presence in the city, to be pregnant with highly intelligible meaning.

  Nebuchadnezzar’s capital was then the world’s greatest city. The king was all-powerful, his empire was huge, his riches inexhaustible and on the whole life was stable. The city itself was the jewel in the crown; it was dedicated to and under the protective eye of Marduk, the greatest of the gods of Babylon, who had vanquished the forces of darkness as described in the Epic of Creation, establishing the world as it should be and setting up Babylon for ever as his cult home. The king was his agent on earth.

  Judaeans Encountering Babylon: Immigration, Culture and Writing

  To understand the incorporation and presence of Babylonian traditions within the Bible we must consider the religious and psychological state of the Judaeans who first encountered the towering capital that was to be their home. They were an entire community of, so-to-speak, enforced refugees, bodily transported from a ruined capital into that of an alien and vastly superior country. Berated by their prophets for their sacrilegious behaviour, reeling from long-threatened and unimaginable punishment, and carrying but a fraction of their wealth and possessions, they finally arrived at the gates of Babylon as displaced persons.

  We still know next to nothing of what happened to this incoming population. We know that the more skilled found places at the capital, while great swathes of immigrants were no doubt relocated outside the main cities to wherever they were most needed. One group of Judaeans in particular can be followed through Nebuchadnezzar’s city gate with the help of the so-called Palace Archive tablets. These itemise prosaic items like oil, barley and other commestibles for the support of people brought from across the Babylonian Empire, including the young king Jehoiachin from Jerusalem and his entourage, who were thus ‘guests of the state’:

  30 litres (of oil) for Ja’ukin, king of Judah

  2½ litres for the five sons of the king of Judah

  4 litres for the eight Jahudeans, ½ litre for each.

  Royal provisions: Babylonian ration list mentioning Jehoiachin by name.

  (picture acknowledgement 11.5)

  Also included in these records are Judaean carpenters and boatmen, just as are described by Jeremiah as being among the deportees. Later, things improved a bit for Jehoiachin:

  And in the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, Evil-Merodach [Amel-Marduk] king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, graciously freed Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison. And he spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat above the seats of the kings who were with him in Babylon. So Jehoiachin put off his prison garments. And every day of his life he dined regularly at the king’s table, and for his allowance, a regular allowance was given him by the king, according to his daily needs, as long as he lived.

  2 Kings 25:27–30

  This Amel-Marduk was Nebuchadnezzar’s crown prince and unenviable successor, who managed to rule for only two years, 562–560 BC, before he was assassinated. According to the Chronicle of Jerachmeel, compiled by a French rabbi in the twelfth century AD from sources unknown to us, the prince, then called Nabū-šuma-ukīn, was thrown into Jehoiachin’s prison by his father because of a court conspiracy. (This episode is not recorded in the Bible, but a cuneiform tablet from Babylon exists with Nabū-šuma-ukīn’s poetic appeal to the god Marduk written in that prison; later he took what was to be his throne name, Amel-Marduk, ‘man of Marduk’, in gratitude for his rescue.)

  Following the Judaeans further is impossible, given our present archaeological and written resources. Some personal names in the records appear to be Judaean, or Hebrew, but this can be uncertain evidence.

  We can make certain observations on another level, however. Given the Babylonians’ utter destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and city in 587 BC the Judaean deportees must have found themselves with nothing substantive at all to define their culture or hold their identity together. They had lost their political and religious capital, spelling the end of their ancient line of kingship, descended from David. In addition, they now had no cult centre to provide the focus of their religious life, which meant no cult practice; the complex round of worship, sacrifice and liturgy that had been practised in the Temple for endless generations was brought to an abrupt end.

  In principle the Judaeans’ religious life was supposed to sustain itself without images of their god to provide a physical focus of worship. Their religion, at least as it is transmitted to us, when free of the adulterations so bemoaned by its prophets, was essentially monotheistic, vested in a single omnipotent god who could never be seen. The second Commandment – Thou shalt have no other gods before me – is no flat statement that there are no other gods; if anything, the language can be taken to reflect that there may well be other gods but they are for other nations. Theirs was a male god with no name, no wife and no children. The religion of the Judaeans, therefore, especially out of its normal context, was purely conceptual, dealing in the intangible and unsupported by comforting likenesses and paraphernalia. Unlike the Babylonians all around them the Judaeans had no divine statue resident on a divine throne who would accept their offerings and hear their exhortations, staring down from above with the assurance of a wise parent. The religion of the Old Testament Hebrews from its inception differed crucially from that of all its predecessors and contemporaries, in the abstraction of the Hebrews’ god to a concept, remote and invisible, with no graven image, and no surrounding family. No other religion of antiquity could have survived focused exclusively on one god who could never be seen. Once they arrived in Babylon the Judaeans had little beyond this highly elusive abstraction to exemplify their belief or give structure to their displaced identity.

  If we imagine a Babylonian and a Judaean immigrant in friendly conversation in that market, in other words, the latter would have no answers at all to perfectly natural questions such as: What is your god called? What does he look like? Where does he live? Who is his wife? How many children does he have? At the same time, there were significant religious changes under way in Babylon throughout the period of the Judaean Exile. There had been an evolving idea that the Babylonian state god Marduk was not so much king of the gods – his traditional status – but rather the one single god who mattered. For the best part of three millennia the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia had served a profusion of gods great and small, but in the period of these Neo-Babylonian kings we can see a new monotheistic framework evolving out of this rich pantheistic background. Consider the message of this innocent-looking little theological text:

  Urash is Marduk of planting

  Lugalakia is Marduk of ground water

  Ninurta is Marduk of the hoe

  Nergal is Marduk of war

  Zababa is Marduk of battle

  Enlil is Marduk of lordship and deliberation

  Nabu is Marduk of accounting

  Sin is Marduk as illuminator of the night

  Shamash is Marduk of justice

  Adad is Marduk of rain

  Tishpak is Marduk of hosts

  Ishtaran is Marduk of …

  Shuqamunu is Marduk of the trough

  Mami is Marduk of potter’s clay …

  Monotheism in the making: structuring Marduk theology.

  (picture acknowledgement 11.6)

  This is a truly remarkable document, for in it we witness theological innovation in process, fixed in time. A theologian is speculating that Marduk is ‘really’ the only god, expressing this by the proposition that fourteen major and ancient gods, independent deities with their own temples, cult and followers, are but aspects of Marduk, his offices, so to speak. This text does not stand in isolation. There are similar ‘syncretisms’ laid out for Zarpanitu, Marduk’s wife, and their son Nabu, making what in other contexts might be called a divine trinity, and there are longer theological disquisitions in the same vein.

  Marduk’s unique status as the god under Nebuchadnezzar undoubtedly pav
ed the way later for a similar development with the Moon God, Sin, under Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon before the Persian period, who had been brought up by his rather formidable mother as a hardcore Moon God devotee. There was tension aplenty between the Marduk priesthood and the devotees of Sin, sufficient for Cyrus, the incoming conqueror, to take advantage of it. Prior to this period it is hard to point to any sign of religious hostility or prejudice in Mesopotamian society that has found its way into written expression. Foreigners were foreigners; one kept on one’s guard and probably despised their ways, but no one ever declared hostility to a person of ‘another religion’ on those grounds. Everyone knew of and believed in many gods, and divine newcomers were welcome; statues of foreign gods were imported after successful warmongering as a matter of course, to be installed in the temples of Assyria or Babylonia. Gods from outside, like foreign magic, could be powerful, especially if they had belonged to powerful enemies, and with a new seat and cycle of sacrifices they would hopefully transfer their loyalties. In due course their names were even entered, barbaric-sounding though they might be, in official god lists. It is only with the promotion of exclusive monotheism that religious intolerance can be the consequence, and Babylon in this very period saw the emergence of such monotheism for the very first time in Mesopotamian culture.