The Oxford History of the Biblical World by Michael D. Coogan Read Free Book Online

creation of humans out of a mixture of clay and the blood of a slain god, so that they would do the necessary work of construction and dredging canals, or, as
Enuma Elish
puts it, so that the gods might enjoy a life of leisure. Humans would not only maintain the essential irrigation channels, but also build the houses of the gods—their temples—and prepare their meals—the sacrifices.
    The Bible itself begins, appropriately, with an account of the origins of the cosmos and of civilization that is largely mythological. Much of the material in Genesis 1–11 is clearly related to ancient Near Eastern accounts of origins, and mythological language is used throughout the Bible.
    The ancient Israelites did not live in a cultural vacuum. From prehistoric times on Palestine was linked by trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, and one or the other politically dominated it for much of the period from the mid-third millennium to the late first millennium BCE . Biblical traditions also relate how some of Israel’s ancestors, and later some of Israel itself, spent considerable time in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Thus, while Israelite literature and religion as preserved in the Bible and as uncovered by archaeologists have many distinctive features, in their lives and in their writings the Israelites inevitably shared perspectives with their ancient Near Eastern contemporaries. They were familiar with other cultural expressions and freely adopted and adapted them in articulating their own specific formulations.
    The marvelous epic of
Gilgamesh
provides one example of the interrelationship of ancient Near Eastern cultures. The earliest forms of the epic are from Sumer, where it seems to have originated in the late third millennium BCE as an account of the adventures of an actual king of Uruk, who had lived a few centuries earlier. Subsequently, different writers and cultures freely expanded and revised the epic,much like the treatment of the Arthurian legend in European literature. Tablets containing all or at least parts of the epic have been found in ancient libraries throughout Mesopotamia, with the latest dated to the second century BCE , as well as in the Hittite capital of Hattusas in central Asia Minor and at Megiddo in Israel. Gilgamesh himself is mentioned by name in the Dead Sea Scrolls and by Claudius Aelianus, a Roman who wrote in Greek in the early second century CE . This chronological and geographical spread testifies to the myth’s extraordinary popularity, and it is no surprise that scholars have detected themes from
Gilgamesh
in both the Bible and the Homeric poems. But the same spread also makes it impossible for us to determine precisely which version was being read at a given time.
    Gilgamesh
was not the only widely known ancient Near Eastern text. Similar examples of literary proliferation abound, and collectively they demonstrate a shared repertoire throughout the ancient Near East, including biblical Israel. It is rarely possible to establish a direct link between a specific nonbiblical source and a part of the Bible, both because of the random nature of discovery and because of the complicated processes of composition, editing, and collection that finally produced the Bible. Still, the cumulative evidence shows that most biblical genres, motifs, and even institutions have ancient Near Eastern parallels.
    Like other accounts of origins, the early chapters of Genesis relate the beginnings of a world in which agriculture is practiced and urbanism soon develops. Yahweh God plants a garden in Eden from which flows a river with four branches (Gen. 2.10—14). Two are the Tigris and Euphrates, and another is Gihon, the name of the spring that was ancient Jerusalem’s principal source of water. The symbolic imagery of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem both informs and is informed by the description of the Garden of Eden. This garden is Yahweh’s plantation, in which like a country gentleman he regularly strolls in the