Commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible, such as Genesis, Proverbs, or the Psalms, often refer to the "ancient Near Eastern background" of the flood story, the law about a goring ox, or references to sea monsters. Without more explanation, this can give the impression that the cultures around Israel all held the same beliefs, leaving biblical writers to accept or reject them.
The ancient Near East included the Sumerian city-states of the late fourth millennium BCE, the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Hittites of Anatolia, the cities of Syria and Canaan, and the Persians who conquered Babylonia in 539 BCE. Some of these cultures were separated by two thousand years, as well as by geography and language.[1] The writers of the Hebrew Bible belonged to this world and drew on different parts of it at different times in Israel's history. These inherited traditions continued to evolve as biblical writers and their neighbors adapted them to their own concerns.
Differences Between Cultures
Even a tradition shared throughout the region could vary considerably from place to place and over time. The legal formulas in Aramaic deeds of sale, for example, developed over at least two thousand years, with differences in practice between periods and regions.[2] Treaty formulas and curses also passed between cultures and became part of local practice. By the seventh century BCE, some that may have begun in Assyria were no longer recognizable as Assyrian.[3] Belief in a solid sky above the earth was widespread, but accounts differed over what the sky was made of and what held it up.[4]
Egyptian and Mesopotamian ideas about kingship differed even on whether the king was human or divine. In Egypt, Pharaoh was understood as a divine being and a force of nature, while in Mesopotamia the king was a human chosen to serve the gods, whose will he had to learn through omens and oracles.[5]
There was no single Egyptian account of creation either, since different cities gave the leading role to their own gods. At Heliopolis, Atum brought forth the nine gods known as the Ennead; at Memphis, the craftsman god Ptah gave physical form to a thought or spoken command; and at Hermopolis, the sun god Re was born from an egg in the waters of chaos. Egyptians preserved these accounts alongside one another without treating them as contradictions.[6]
The Evolution of Traditions
The flood story in Gilgamesh was itself a later addition to the epic. Mesopotamian flood traditions were already popular long before the Old Babylonian period and appear in the Sumerian account of the Deluge and the Akkadian Atrahasis, but the Old Babylonian author of Gilgamesh did not include one. The story entered the epic in the later standard version, which had taken shape by around 1000 BCE.[7] The editor traditionally identified as Sin-leqe-unninni added the flood hero's account along with a new prologue and epilogue, presenting Gilgamesh as someone who returned from his travels with wisdom from before the flood.[8]
Enuma Elish, the Babylonian poem honoring Marduk, also evolved as it was adapted for Assyrian use. In a version probably composed under Sennacherib, Marduk was replaced with the Assyrian god Assur, and Babylon with Baltil, a ceremonial name for the city of Assur. This version seems to disappear from the surviving records under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, when Babylon was restored and the standard text came back into use.[9]
Israel Between the Empires
Israel's location on the land route between Egypt and Mesopotamia brought it under the influence, and often the control, of one power or the other for much of its history.[10] Egypt dominated the region from about 1450 to 1200 BCE, while Assyria began taking control of Israel and then Judah from 745 BCE. Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 586 BCE, followed by Persian rule from 538 to 332 BCE.[11]
The Egyptian influence on Proverbs is especially apparent in the collection at 22:17–24:22, whose "thirty sayings" echo the thirty chapters of the Instruction of Amenemope. The Hebrew author adapted its warnings against oppressing the poor, moving boundary stones, and exhausting oneself in pursuit of wealth, though many sayings in the collection have no Egyptian counterpart.[12] Most of the parallels occur in Proverbs 22:17–23:11, with a closeness not found elsewhere in the book. The author very likely worked from the Egyptian text, adjusting it to Israel's geography and belief in one God.[13]
The law about a goring ox in Exodus 21:28 is almost identical to one in the Code of Hammurabi, which appears to have provided a model for this group of laws in the Covenant Code. The penalties differ when an owner knows that an ox is dangerous and it kills a free man: the Code of Hammurabi requires a fine, while Exodus 21:29 makes the owner liable to the death penalty. Exodus also requires the ox to be stoned and forbids eating its flesh, adding a religious concern absent from the Mesopotamian law.[14] Israelite writers could have encountered these laws under Assyrian or Babylonian rule in the first millennium BCE, long after Hammurabi's reign.[15]
Deuteronomy closely follows the form of treaties that kings under Assyrian rule had to copy and recite. These began with an account of past events, demanded exclusive "love" for the Assyrian king, and included witnesses, curses, and instructions for public reading. The curses in Deuteronomy 28 closely resemble Assyrian ones, but the loyalty an Assyrian king demanded for himself is directed to Yahweh.[16] Whether this amounts to borrowing remains disputed. Hittite and Assyrian treaties differ from each other in their themes, and Deuteronomy differs from both to a similar degree.[17]
In the Baal Cycle from Ugarit, the god of death recalls Baal's defeat of Litan, "the fleeing serpent," "the twisty serpent." The writer of Isaiah 27:1 applies the same descriptions to Leviathan, the Hebrew form of the name, but places the battle in the future. The addition of "on that day" and the change in verb tense turn a story about the beginning of the world into a prediction of what is still to come.[18]
Egyptian and Canaanite traditions appear together in Psalm 104, which resembles the Great Hymn to the Aten so closely in places that its writer very likely knew the Egyptian hymn. The same psalm includes Leviathan, a figure from Canaanite tradition, while Psalm 29 describes Yahweh with the language of storms used for Baal.[19]
Want to learn more about this? Storm Deity
Shared Practices and Different Beliefs
The flood accounts in Genesis and Mesopotamian literature share several details, including the release of birds from the boat, but differ over the kind of boat, how long the flood lasts, who survives, and what happens to the hero afterward. They also differ in how they describe the gods: the Mesopotamian gods quarrel among themselves and send the flood partly to control human population growth.[20]
Israel's worship without statues of its god also had precedents among its neighbors. Early West Semitic worship generally used standing stones to represent deities, a practice Israel shared. The later Israelite ban on divine images went further, since no explicit prohibition of this kind is known among the other Semitic peoples of the ancient world.[21]