Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 08, 2001

The Patriarchal narratives are ideology not history.

Professor P Kyle McCarter Jr

Chaldaeans

The patriarchal tales are propaganda. From the outset, Abram’s wanderings under God’s guidance would result in a great nation—in reality reflecting the Persian nation not the Jewish one. But the Persian administrators were flattering to deceive the people of the Hill Country of Palestine that they hoped to secure as loyal allies against their southern neighbour, the mighty and rebellious Egypt.

Dr Manfred Barthel, a German popularizer of biblical discoveries, can write, in What the Bible Says, this paragraph characterizing biblical “scholars”:

Abraham is the first historical figure who appears in the Old Testament. No scholar seriously doubts that there actually was such a person, even though there is not a single piece of independent evidence to prove that he ever existed.

So, we read Dr S H Hooke in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible writing:

There is no good reason for denying the existence of Abram as a historical person.

Have we any good reasons for denying the existence of Horatio Hornblower as a historical person? Well, of course we have but would we have in 3000 years time? Horatio Hornblower is fictional even if he seems to be recognisable in Horatio Nelson. The historian as opposed to the apologist will ask what reason we have to believe that Abram was historical and not mythical, and would have to agree with Barthel that there is none.

The expression “Ur of the Chaldees” is itself anachronistic, because Babylonians seem not to have been called Chaldaeans in Ur in the second millennium BC—it was New Babylonian language from a thousand years later when the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians were interested in transporting people to pacify their conquests. The route of Abram did mean something to the people that the Persians transported into Judah on the pretence that they were being “returned” to their original home! It was the route they took to Canaan, not any Amorite Abram a thousand years before.

Chaldees or Chaldaeans is the translation of the biblical name (Kasdim) of the people of Babylonia, and their astrologer-priests. Curiously no less than 46 of the 88 mentions of the Kasdim in the scriptures occur in Jeremiah, eight are in 2 Kings and another eight are in Ezekiel. These are unquestionably meant to signify the Babylonians because they are used often in poetic couplets in which Babylonian equals Chaldaean. Daniel has eleven occurences but at least eight are references to the Chaldaeans as Magi. Chaldee, the language of parts of Ezra and Daniel, was thought for a long time to have been their language, but that is simply a crude form of Persian chancellery Aramaic.

So we are left with a people, a presumed language and a priesthood that do not match the place where they were supposed to have existed. Yet historians have accepted what the bible says and have got themselves in the usual twist. Their response is a sort of historical equivalent of the archaeologist’s “disturbed strata”. They simply say that the origins of the Chaldaeans is uncertain, then proceed to give it. What they mean is that they do not know, but they are happy to give you a plausible guess. In a while these plausible guesses are accepted as fact, and the scholars think they have discovered something!

Their guess here is that the Chaldaeans were Semites from the Arabian peninsula who for many centuries, if not millennia, insidiously infiltrated, and occasionally raided, Babylonia until they were able to take it over from the Assyrians. Lutterworth’s Dictionary of the Bible (sub voce “Chaldaeans”) says the word Chaldaean was used to replace the expression “Sea-Land” from the ninth century BC—but the Sea-Land was still being called the Sea-Land in a copy of the Dynastic Chronicles being used in the reign of Ashurbanipal (c 650 BC).

Nebopolassar (625-605 BC) founded the neo-Babylonian dynasty, and passed the throne to his energetic and successful son, Nebuchadrezzar II (604-562 BC), who captured Jerusalem. This neo-Babylonian empire is what the bible terms Chaldaean. Consequently these kings are considered to have been Chaldaean, but there is not a shred of independent evidence that they were. The country seems to have been called Kaldu, but it is an assumption based on the bible that it was because some tribe called Chaldaeans had taken over the kingdom.

The truth is that no evidence has been found under these kings of any distinction between part of the population called Chaldaeans and another part called Babylonians. They wrote in only one language, doubtless supposed by the ignorant to have been Chaldaean, but it was the language that had been used in Mesopotamia by Babylonians and Assyrians for centuries. Professor John D Prince who was an expert on languages at Columbia University tells us that “no perceptible differences existed” between Chaldaeans and Babylonians, and their language “differed in no way from the ordinary Semitic Babylonian idiom which was practically identical with that of Assyria”.

The origin of the word “Chaldaean” is equally fanciful. It is supposedly from the root “kasadu” meaning “conquer”, supposedly because they conquered Babylon. Yet the Assyrians were writing about “Kaldu” three centuries before Babylonia was conquered. If the root was “conquer”, it cannot have been because they conquered Babylonia. Since the consonant change had already been made at the time of Adad-nirari III (811-782 BC), they must have conquered Babylonia even before because this Assyrian king already seemed to regard Babylonia as “Kaldu!”

Some early connexion with an actual Chaldaea is claimed when a rebel, Mardukabiliddinna (biblical Merodach-baladan), rose up against the Assyrian kings Sargon II (722-705 BC) and Sennacherib (705-681 BC), managing to gain control of Babylonia twice (721-710 BC and briefly in 703 BC). The connexion is that this man from the small city of Bit Yakin in the very south of Mesopotamia was called by Sargon both the “king of Bit Yakin” and the “king of Chaldaea”. So was Bit Yakin the capital of Chaldaea? Or was it simply that the king of Bit Yakin became the king of Chaldaea? One trouble with identifying Bit Yakin with Chaldaea came from Sargon’s successor, Sennacherib, who distinguished the Arabs of the desert and Aramaeans from the Chaldeans, yet our modern historians say they were indeed Arabs. What is more, when Assyria fell to the neo-Babylonian monarchs, it too was included in Kaldu!

There is an alternative to the identification of Chaldaean with “conquer”. It is that it comes from the root “chesed” (“hasid”) meaning “pious” or “holy”. The Chaldaeans were the Hasidim, the Holy Ones. The later Hasids of second century Judaea will have chosen the term especially for its meaning and its association with Babylon whence came Judaism originally. The hasids wanted a return to pure worship—that of the Persians not the Hellenized priesthood of the Sadducees.

For long, Babylonia was the country of temples. All the great cities of Babylonia had temples and were sacred places, so that the whole of Babylonia was thought of as holy, but especially after the legends of the creation and the rise of Marduk to the kingship of heaven had become elaborated. This explains why the Babylonians were also called the Chaldaeans—they were the Holy or Pious People. The chief city in renown and importance was Babylon, where the prime temple was Esagila, “the temple of the high head”, with a shrine called “the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth”.. This building was called by Nebuchadrezzar “the temple-tower of Babylon”, and is better known as the biblical “Tower of Babel”.

“Chesed” seems a particularly good root for the word as applied to priests, but it offers terrible problems to those historians who have already decided that the Chaldaeans were a tribe of scallies from Arabia. How did the scallies get to be the priests? Classical authors such as Herodotus (fifth century BC), Strabo and Diodorus (both first century BC) use the word to mean priests and astronomers, and, we saw the author of Daniel did too, writing in the second century BC.

Biblicists are familar, of course, with the idea of tribal people being appointed en masse to the priesthood. The caste of Levites supposedly emerged from a tribe of Israelites who showed a particular inclination to stand up for God. It is myth, but conceivably based on the myth devised by the Chaldaean priests that they derived from a tribe. The classical writers called the Magi of Iran a tribe too. Rather than seeing pious tribes being elevated in society by their devotion, it is safer to see the classical writers using the word tribe as synonymous with caste. The point about a tribe is that it is a group of related families and that is just what these ancient castes were. Their jobs—here the priesthood—in each case were passed on by hereditary.

Xenophon (Anabasis) says that there were Chaldaeans by the Black Sea:

These troops were Armenian and Mardian and Chaldaean mercenaries belonging to Orontas and Artuchas. The last of the three, the Chaldaeans, were said to be a free and brave set of people. They were armed with long wicker shields and lances… There have been tribes like the Carduchians, the Taochians, the Chaldaeans, which, albeit they were not subject to the great king, yet were no less formidable than independent… Then some independent tribes—the Carduchians or Kurds, and Chalybes, and Chaldaeans, and Macrones, and Colchians, and Mossynoecians, and Coetians, and Tibarenians.

It is a long way from the south of Iraq, so who were these northern Chaldaeans? Professor Carl F Lehmann-Haupt of Innsbruck explains that the people of Urartu (Hebrew Ararat, Van) called themselves Chaldini (a plural), and worshipped a god called Chaldi (Kasdi). It must be that the Black Sea Chaldaeans were these same people. The Urartians lived where the Hurrians used to live, and had a similar language. They will have been Hurrians, Urartu being the same word as Hurru. These mountain dwellers built fortresses on high crags throughout the highlands north of Assyria. They were excellent builders in stone, were economically strong, and worked well in bronze.

Urartu was what is now Armenia, a country that covers Armenia itself and parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Much of it is where the modern Kurds live, and the Kurds are the direct line of the people who lived there then, although interbred with subsequent peoples. The Gutu or Kuti lived in the middle reaches of the Tigris about 2000 BC, in Sumerian times, and were related apparently to the Kassites who lived to the east on the edge of the Iranian plateau. The Assyrian name of them, Kirtie, evolved into Kardi. The name of Babylonia used in the Amarna letters is Karduniash. The Armenians crossed the Caucasus in about 600 BC, pushing the Chaldians to the south so that they lived in what is now Kurdistan. The word “Kurd” is “Kald” with another common consonantal change.

British Museum catalogues seemed to be determined not to mention the Chaldians of Urartu, and bundle them together in descriptions as “the northern tribes”, while Assyriologists happily speak of Chaldaeans and Babylonians being in coalition when they otherwise consider them as the same people. It is like saying the Yankees and the Americans were allies.

Before the Chaldian country was called Urartu-Chaldia, it was called Naïri, a name that is suspiciously similar to the word Nahor meaning river. It suggests it was, or included, Aram-naharaim, the home of the patriarchs. A king of Urartu was actually called Aramu and fought Shalmaneser III (859-824 BC). A seated figure of this Assyrian king found at Ashur listed his conquests in “Akkad and Kaldu”.

Boris Piatrovski (The Ancient Civilization of Urartu, 1969) says that in the 700s BC the Chaldians ruled most of north Syria, meaning that Urfa and Harran were under Chaldian influence and probably had Chaldians among their populations. Tiglath-pileser defeated a coalition of north Syrian states under the the Chaldian king Sardur II at Commagene. Sardur fled to his mountain fortress at Van while the Aramaean states including Israel according to the bible (2 Kings 15-16) and Damascus were severely punished.

A Chaldian king called Ispiuni fought Adad-nariri and was successful enough to be able to found a Chaldean colony at Musasir, near Lake Urmia where he set up a stele. Urartu was the center of metal artwork from 900 to 650 BC. About this time, the Persians lived in this area, and were associated with these Chaldians. Persian art and architecture were forever influenced by this contact. The Urartians were the master canal builders, and portions of their great projects still remain. The Persians became experts on building subterranean canals and irrigation ducts, and either learnt these skills when they and the Urartians were neighbours, or they employed Urartian engineers.

A Chaldian king Rusus I built a new capital city and schemed against Sargon II. Here is where myth and history meet. Rusus formed a coalition against Sargon, and who should be among the allies but Mardukabaliddinna whom Sargon called a “king of the land of Chaldaeans”. Such confederations were a feature of resistance to the Assyrians, and are mentioned in the bible.

Rusus was successful and erected a stele which was deliberately broken by Sargon in a later attack, but was restored by Rusus II. Rusus eventually was killed or committed suicide when faced with attacks on two fronts from the wild Scythian tribe of Cimmerians coming across the Caucasus and Sargon planning to return to the fray (714 BC). Rusus II cleverly employed the Cimmerians to help him fight Esarhaddon (680-668 BC), but they were then allowed to pass through the land to the Anatolian plateau, where they became the biblical Gomer, showing, at least, that Genesis could not have been written before this time.

Esarhaddon’s predecessor, Sennacherib, erected many stelae giving details of his campaigns, many of which were against the allies. His first campaign in 703 was against that same Mardukkabaliddinna who had been deposed as king of Babylon by Sargon in 710 BC. The rebel reformed the coalition with Elam, Aribi, and Judah, but was defeated in less than a year. Sennacherib then fought the Medes, and the Kassites to the east (whose god was called Kaspi, compare Caspian Sea), the Cilicians, the Sidonians and Palestine to the west, sieging the Jerusalem of Hezekiah, the tribes of Urartu to the north-west, subjugated the marsh Arabs (considered as the Chaldaeans), crossed the Persian gulf in pursuit of these rebels, and subjugated the rebellious Elamites and Babylonians. It does not seem unreasonable that this was a continuous punitive campaign against the countries that had allied against Assyria.

Ashurbanipal (668-626 BC) was also confronted by the confederates. A ten sided prism dated to 636 BC gives an account of his early campaigns which include a defeat of Elam, one of the allies, in his fifth campaign and in his sixth campaign he fought a confederacy of Elam, the Arabs of the desert, Babylon and the Chaldaeans. Now Babylon was ruled by his own brother, Shamashshumukin, at the wish of their father Esarhaddon, and he had risen against his brother with the allies, yet Babylon is distinguished from Chaldaea, among the allies, and the Chaldaeans are plainly not the Arabs of the desert. Babylon was crushed and the king went on in further campaigns to destroy Elam and reduce the Arab tribes that had been part of the coalition. Moreover, an eight sided prism covers much the same ground as the later ten-sided one, but speaks of the submission of Rusas. One of these coalitions will have been in the author’s mind when, in Genesis, the four kings attack the five cities.

The Chaldians seemed to ally with the Medes when Cyrus went to subdue the Lydians (28 May 585 BC) on the river Halys. They then remained loyal members of the Persian empire, sheltering many conquered Medes and Persians when the empire fell. Jeremiah 51:27-28 gloatingly describes the coalition against Babylon of the Medes, Manni, Urartians and Scythians. Jeremiah knew about this coalition in 539 BC, so his book was written later than this date.

Linguistically and culturally the Chaldians were different from the Semites and the Indo-Europeans, though they obviously mixed with many of the latter coming across the mountains from the north, and ultimately with the Medes, and their language was said to be a dialect of Hurrian. Their closest cultural ties were with the Cretans and with the Etruscans.

Were these the Chaldaeans?

The scholars say “No”, but there is a clear possible point of confusion in the time of Sargon, when the king’s scribe could have mistaken the ally of the Chaldians, Mardukabaliddinna, as a Chaldian himself. The word Chaldaean, derived from “chesed” and applied to the priests and people of Babylonia, did not mean the Chaldians as a people, simply describing the nature of the Babylonians themselves and their priestly caste as pious, but the biblical authors confused the two.

The biblical authors confused them, but the link was the place of origin of the colonists into Yehud. They came from Urfa and Harran, places that were in the sphere of influence of the Chaldians of Urartu. It has to be considered whether “Ur of the Chaldees” actually was Urfa, a city that could quite easily have been held by the Chaldians for parts of its history. James H Platt in the Oxford Companion to the Bible says that the identification of Ur of the Chaldees with the Ur in Sumer, “is not universally accepted”, and that “some scholars have suggested it is Urfa”. He adds that Chaldaeans were one of five tribes that only became dominant in the late sixth century, implying that these “tribes” were castes, and Chaldaean must be identified with Magi.

Moreover, Ur, which normally means a city, took that meaning from the walls—it is a walled city or a fortress, properly. Because cities were small states that held land outside the walls, Ur came also to mean a “land” or “country”. It seems that the country of Agade, north of Babylon was called Uri—“The Land”—just as Israel is in the bible, and this seems to coincide with Aram-naharaim, at least in part. Eusebius refers to Ur as Urie. “Ur of the Chaldees” could convincingly simply mean “the country of the Chaldians”—Urartu. Artu looks like the Indo-European word for Order and Truth, which would mean the name of the country could have been read as the “Land of Truth”, a name that would have impressed Zoroastrians, and inclined the Medes to favour the Chaldians.

Mesopotamia is a Greek word meaning “between the rivers”, today taken to mean the whole of the country called Iraq because of the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris that define it. That was not its original Greek meaning, though. For Alexander’s generals, it was the northern part of the country, from roughly Seleucia or Ctesiphon—the point of narrowing between the rivers—to the Anatolian plateau which is their source. In other words, it covers the Syrian plain where the cities of Urfa and Harran are situated. The biblical translators are inconsistent as usual in often translating as Mesopotamia what is written “Aram-naharaim”, Aram of the rivers, but sometimes using the words untranslated as if they were a name, and sometimes translating them more or less literally as “Syria of the Rivers” or “Syria of Mesopotamia” (Septuagint). Nicolas of Damascus, a historian of the time of Herod and one of the sources used by Josephus, claims that Abram was a king of Damascus, a city in Syria. Justin Martyr had heard the same story. J W Rogerson, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible openly declares that Mesopotamia is “the equivalent geographical name” as Aram-naharaim. Stephen M Hooks, in the Lutterworth Dictionary of the Bible explains that the area meant by the name Aram-naharaim was the region between the Euphrates and the river Khabur, the precise place of origin of the family of Abraham.

In the apocryphal Book of Judith, Mesopotamia occurs three times, all in the potted history of the Jews given by Achior (Jud 5). The Jews are described as being descended from the Chaldaeans, who were polytheists, but the Chaldaeans worshipped the God of Heaven, and were obliged to leave their home and move to Mesopotamia. This God of Heaven is Yehouah and he then ordered them to go to Canaan where they settled and prospered.

This story was written when there was no ambiguity about the word Mesopotamia—in Hasmonaean times, when the Holy Ones or Hasids had come into Judah from Babylon. It meant the plain of Syria, so the Jews moved to the plain of Syria from Chaldaea. It seems much more likely that the Chaldaea meant was the one otherwise known as Urartu or Ararat than that it was another Chaldaea hundreds of miles south in the marshes by the Persian gulf. Perhaps these holy Chaldaeans became the caste of Babylonia priests and some went to Yehud.

So the colonists of Jerusalem—or some of them—might have been Chaldians from Harran, Urfa or even Urartu itself, placed in the privileged position of guardians of the new temple state. If others were Chaldaean priests (Magi) from Babylon, there is a basis for the confusion of later biblical authors.

• Harran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees (Gen 11:28).
• Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Harran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Harran, and dwelt there (Gen 11:31).
• And he said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it (Gen 15:7).

The Urartu-Chaldians were fond of the winged solar disc, the serpent, and bison in their art, and seemed to worship trees. Images of trees were guarded by various supernatural beings and beasts. The tree appeared on personal seals on Urartian correspondence, bronze cups, warriors’ bronze belts and helmets, monoliths throughout the land, and wall paintings and carved columns in palaces. The biblical legend of the fall of Adam might be Urartian.

What we seem to have are foundation legends of people from north Syria, around the modern city of Edessa—Urfu (Ur) and Harran—who were resettled in the Palestine hills. These people were Aramaeans but included Chaldians from Urartu, the country that had ruled them for a century or two, when Urfa was “Ur of the Chaldees”. Ancient stories about a real king Ebrum, over 1000 years before, were mythologized into a foundation myth of the people “across the river” (Eber-nari), and was taken by the deportees into Yehud when the Persians transported them into Palestine.

Ur to Canaan

The false chronology of the bible puts Abram’s migration 850 years before the monarchy, about 1800 BC. Some aspects of the story militate against such a date and none can be said unequivocally to confirm it. To accept the chronology of the scriptures is to accept the impossibly long lives of the early human beings. No doubt Christian and Jewish “scholars” will do this, but since the chronology is plainly symbolic, there is no need to.

For most of the third millennium BC, Canaanite and Syrian society was urban with magnificent Bronze Age cities, but, in the second millenium, the city structure collapsed and the people took to pastoralism. Abram’s story gives little indication of the existence of fortified cities or of a crisis causing their demise, unless it is Genesis 14, which looks more like an insertion to establish Abraham as a man of substance. For harmonizing apologists, the supposed Amorite invasion provided a convenient hook to the biblical story of the Patriarchs. Biblicists have associated Abram with this supposed movement of nomadic Amorites from Mesopotamia to Canaan early in the second millennium BC. W F Albright devised a series of refined classifications for the ancient Near East Bronze Age to suite his presuppositions about the Patriarchs.

The bible itself, though, does not suggest Abraham is part of a general migration. There is some evidence of a change in culture in Palestine in the early second millennium, innovations from Syria being noted, and Egyptian texts speak of movements of Asiatics called the “Amu”, identified as Amorites. The Egyptian Execration Texts are also said to mention princes of roving and settled bands of people with Amoritic names, though Roger Moorey denies they mention any Amorites (“The Bible and Recent Archaeology”, K Kenyon). The Amorites, around 2000 BC, were settled along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and no further west and south than Damascus. Nor are the cultural changes in Palestine so sudden that they could not have occurred by evolution or adoption rather than by invasion, or a crisis such as urban collapse.

The Amu of the Egyptian texts seem to be the Egyptian name of a people permanently residing in the desert areas who took advantage of Egyptian weakness, from time to time, to move in, but otherwise kept a healthily respectful distant but friendly relationship with Egypt. They might have been the Amorites in their Arabian homeland. A movement into Palestine and Syria from this area is not impossible and might have happened. The context might be congenial but it is not exclusive.

Bedouin tribes have lived in the area until modern times and any such chief could have served as the model of a nomadic founding father, but cannot be identified with the movement of a single family under Abram from Chaldaea. The fact remains that the story of Abraham does not fit the model. He was living with his own father as a family settled, not nomadic, in Ur, then deliberately moved to Harran, again settling so that it became the family’s new home, then again deliberately moving to Palestine to settle again after having a look at Egypt.

These movements are usually explained by Christians because the Patriarchs were semi-nomads following the seasonal pastures for their flocks, but not wandering freely, instead staying near towns so that before long they settled down like Lot and his family. It sounds convincing but anthropologists have found that pastoral nomads evolve from settled farmers not the other way round. Pastoralism evolves in marginal agricultural areas as an insurance against crop failure, which is not uncommon, since otherwise farming in such difficult country would be risky. The herds saw the farm through bad cereal years but otherwise the combination offered a greater variety of diet.

If any Amorite movements happened, they seem to have been only movements from the rural steppelands into the settled urban areas of the city states. Rather than migrating from Ur to Harran, the migrants seem to have migrated into Ur, Harran and other cities in Mesopotamia and Canaan. The Amorite invasions were simply a collapse of the urban economy—probably an ecological collapse caused by overintensive farming that forced a return to pastoralism when the soil eroded and degraded, and was unable to support the populations of the city states. This phase is now considered the final period of the Early Bronze Age—EBIV.

Some apologists have pointed to the use of tents as proof of nomadism but tents were commonly used by settled people in these times and were actually used for shelter more in the first millennium BC than in the second, according to Van Seters. Nor were the possession of flocks and asses any sign of nomadism. It should not need saying that settled people had flocks and asses as well as nomads. Only settled populations had slaves, nomads being travelling families, all related. Lest there be more argument, let the Jews and Christian believers read the contract between the Hebrews and the nomadic Ishmaelites (Gen 16:12;20:15;21:20-21) which shows the Hebrews as the settled population.

Thomas L Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (BZAW, 133; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974).

John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale, 1975).

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