History of the Jews Read Free Page B

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 asthe 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