History of the Jews Read Free Page A

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 theBabylonians 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 moreimportant, 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