Patriarchs 2.1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 08, 2001
Abstract
No Contemporary References
George W Ramsey (The Quest for the Historical Israel) says:
Outright verification of the patriarchal stories is hardly to be expected. The happenings narrated in these stories are simply not the kind which would likely find mention in any public record.
Indeed they are not, because they are apparently personal stories, that could not have been seen as matters of state at the time. But this professor of Presbytarian Christianity whose book is as fair a survey as you will get from a Christian, cannot see that they are actually in the most public record that has ever been published, though they should not be. Believers will say it is God’s finger at work stirring human affairs once more, but reasonable people will see them as myths. The very point Ramsey makes classifies these stories as myths.
Genesis has no contemporary references. The names of Pharaohs are not given in the stories of Abram and Joseph, so offer no clues as to dates. T L Thompson and J van Seters have independently shown that nothing identifiable in the way of place names, ethnic groups, or individuals pertain to the period before the monarchy. None of the events of the Patriarchs or the Exodus can be found in ancient texts or in the earth. There is no archaeological proof of any migration into Canaan at that time, the evidence for any migration of Amorites is flimsy and Abram is not a nomad but a man who deliberately uproots himself—once and for all, not regularly—at God’s command!
Beersheba, Hebron, Shechem, Bethel and other places in the Promised Land did not exist as early as the supposed second millennium migrations. Some other places existed but were deserted at this time and were not reoccupied until the first millennium. The time when they were all occupied simultaneously was the first millennium. We have to conclude that none of the detail is traceable exclusively to the second millennium, and much of it demands a knowledge of later history. Genesis could have just as easily have been written in 500 BC and reflecting only the conditions as they were then known.
The allusions to later history in the patriarchal stories show that they were written with knowledge of it. Abram’s stay with the Philistines (Gen 20:1-18) is anachronistic. It could not have happened before about 1200 BC. The name of the Philistine ruler, Abimelech, is Semitic implying that the Philistines had been settled long enough to have assimilated with the local Semitic population. It implies a much later composition—in the fifth century BC not the eighteenth or earlier. Another notable anachronism is that Dan is mentioned supposedly 1000 years before it existed (Gen 14:14).
The story of the four eastern kings and the five cities of the Dead Sea (Gen 14) is mythical or thoroughly corrupted. Chedorlaomar is an acceptable name for an Elamite king (Kudur-lagomar), and Hurrian kings called Arriuka (Arioch) are known, and both could have been known by the Persians—the Elamites provided them with scribes and the Assyrian archives would have given information about Hurrian kings. Similarly Tidal might be any one of three Hittite kings called Tudhaliya, but Goiim is not a country but simply means “gentiles” and Amraphel, king of Shinar, once thought to have been Hammurabi cannot be identified, and nor can Ellasar, though it was once thought to have been the Babylonian city of Larsa. No period in history can be found when any coalition of these named kings was possible. Inasmuch as anything can be had from it, the only time Elam would have undertaken a joint mission with other eastern kings was under the confederation led by the Chaldian kings of Urartu against Assyria. The cities are all destroyed by God and no traces of them have ever been found. The real reason is that they were not there in the first place!
The slime mentioned is oil or oily pitch. Bitumen can be found in the Dead Sea but oil can be more readily found in the oil bearing regions of Mesopotamia. Ignition of oil saturated land or waterways might also offer an explanation of the destroying conflagration. Shinab, the king of Admah, is cognate with Sinabu in Babylonian, meaning the god “Sin is father”. Admah is the same as Adam, meaning red and mud, appropriate descriptions of the country of Mesopotamia. Gomorrha might be a corruption of Cimmeria, briefly allies of the Chaldians of Urartu. The chances are that a fragment of a story of an uprising in Mesopotamia has been transferred to the valley of the Dead Sea in Palestine. Since the story is presented as a rebellion against the thirteen year rule of the king of Elam, the scholars should be looking to cities that were possibly under the suzerainity of Elam, about the time that Persia became strong. Elam, like many other places in the ancient near east, suffered a 400 year “Dark Age” so the scholars have an excuse not to succeed Comment. But Elamites were certainly in the conquering armies of people like the Assyrians and the Persians.
The four kings are called kings of the east, but, in Judah, they would have been called kings of the north, the “eastern” invaders all coming from the north into Palestine. It is again a small clue that ties in with the association of Abraham with Syria. In Syria, there was an ancient city called Sidimu, and the eastern kings actually came from the east! Any alliance that could fit the situation was most likely an alliance of the Aramaean statelets against the conquering Assyrians. Josephus, in Antiquities (1:9 to 1:11), does not doubt that Sodom flourished when the Assyrians were dominant, and he readily has Abram fighting against them, thus repositioning him in history, compared with Genesis, from the second millennium to the first.
Sodom and Gomorrah in the mythological timescale of the Jewish scriptures were destroyed in the second millennium BC. R T Schaub and W Rast spent 15 years excavating about 30 ruins around the Dead Sea hoping to find Sodom and Gomorrah. Two towns to the south east of the Dead Sea had been spectacularly abandoned about 2350 BC. They were Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira, the latter of which was burnt up in a fierce conflagration in the season of the grape harvest for carbonized grape skins were found in the ashes. No human remains or small items were found, and the doorways at Numeira had been deliberately blocked with stones, so the people had had time to prepare for the disaster and to escape it with their belongings. Even so, they never returned. The ruined towns remained visible for centuries, looking as if they had been cursed by God. The biblical story could therefore have begun as an explanation of these ancient ruins that had passed into folklore.
But references particularly in the prophets (Isa 1:8-10; Ezek 16:46) give them a more contemporary sound, and it seems a more contemporary incident was set into the past using this old tale. Much of the bible has been written in this way, and the destruction of the cities of the plain meant in Genesis 14 and 19 might have really happened during the Assyrian period, or later still. In Ezekiel 16:46, Yehouah compares and contrasts Jerusalem with Samaria, a historical place, and with Sodom! Yehouah harangues Jerusalem for her harlotry and wickedness:
And thine elder sister is Samaria, she and her daughters that dwell at thy left hand, and thy younger sister, that dwelleth at thy right hand, is Sodom and her daughters.Ezekiel 16:46
Jerusalem’s elder sister, Samaria, lived to the north (to the left hand facing the rising sun), and her younger sister, Sodom, lived to the south. Samaria fell in the eighth century BC, but Sodom is supposed to have been destroyed by a catastrophe a millennium earlier. The biblical chronology has Sodom destroyed long before Samaria is founded! Moreover, here Sodom is younger than Jerusalem! Biblicists accept the biblical chronology that places Sodom in Genesis contemporary with Abraham, while this much more explicit passage putting Sodom contemporary with eighth century Jerusalem and Samaria is ignored. This Sodom is a city of a state neighbouring Jerusalem just as Samaria was.
Genesis seems to have omitted the true cause for Yehouah’s vengeance in Genesis 19, and put in a differently angled account of it in Genesis 14. Yehouah typically in the bible punished the sin of His people through conquest, and the conflagration that followed. The sin of the Sodomites is far from clear, although Christians always know these things, so what could it realistically have been? It is that the Jews had broken a treaty that Yehouah must have been called upon to witness because it was the practice of the time to invoke the gods to witness solemn treaties. Assyrian royal inscriptions described the situation of Genesis 14. A city or small country is forced into vassalage to the Assyrians. The king pays a heavy tribute, but later, perhaps at the death of the Assyrian monarch, he forms an alliance with like-minded rulers of neighbouring statelets and the enemies of the Assyrians, and refuses tribute. The outcome is that the Assyrian monarch arranges a punitive expedition, sets out against the allies, and savages them, extracting the tribute by force and deporting the people.
Assyrian punitive expeditions had been commonplace in the final decades of the eighth century. Tiglath-pileser, Shalmanesar V, and Sargon had all come south with armies to punish “sin”—the breaking of these treaties. Bera was a king of Sodom (Gen 14:2), and, by coincidence, Beerah was a prince of the Reubenites carried off by Tiglath-pileser (1 Chr 5:6) for wickedness similar to that of the Sodomites. Tiglath-pileser deported the three tribes supposedly east of the Jordan river, the Reubenites, Gad and Manasseh. Ezekiel 16 recalls “the captivity of the daughters of Sodom”, where “daughters” is used as part of an extended metaphor meaning the people of the city. They had been taken into captivity. Samaria had fallen, and the Transjordan too. Was this latter the place where the cities of the plain really were? It is at least a plain, which the coasts of the Dead Sea are not. A flaw in the idea that Sodom was destroyed by the Assyrians is that Assyrian sources do not refer to it, whereas they do mention Damascus, Hamath, Samaria, and Jerusalem. In reply, one can ask whether anyone had seriously looked, since the view that Sodom was destroyed a thousand years earlier is all pervasive. The Assyrians might also have had a different name for the city just as they had a different name for Israel (Bit Khumri), or the Jews might have given the city a false name out of the shame of it, as they did to shameful people. The colonists might have transferred the name of the northern town of Sidimu, already destroyed and legendary, to a southern one destroyed by the Assyrians in similar fashion.
At the end of the eighth century BC, Sennacherib sent a large army to punish the rebellious Aramaean kingdoms including Judah, eventually sieging Hezekiah in Jerusalem and extracting a large settlement by way of tribute, but first he destroyed 43 other cities in the region, often by fire, for sharing the sin—they had reneged on treaties witnessed by the gods. Dependent kingdoms that refused to pay the agreed tribute—the sinners of the Assyrian kings—were destroyed commonly by fire. So, the details of the military defeat of Sodom in Genesis 14 may have been inspired by Sennacherib’s Dead Sea campaign in 701 BC, confirmed archaeologically at Engedi, Qumran, and neighbouring sites. Father De Vaux found evidence that Qumran was an important place in the Assyrian period until about the seventh century BC, when it was utterly destroyed by fire.
Yehouah raining fire from heaven on the cities of the plain uses imagery popular with the Assyrian kings in their vassalage treaties. The gods of both sides are called upon to “let it rain burning coals in your land instead of dew”, if the vassal revoked the treaty unilaterally. Biblical disasters inflicted by foreign powers were typically punishments of Yehouah, for the biblical authors. Like the Romans at Carthage, Assyrian rulers razed rebellious cities, spread the site with salt and sulphur, and sowed their fields with thistles, leaving desolation. When, in Genesis 19, Yehouah rained fire and sulphur on the wicked cities and left them desolate, He had used the foreigner to serve up the punishment agreed by the parties to the vassalage treaties. The conquering Assyrians blamed the people’s own god for such punishments, as did the Persians. Thus, Rab Shakah, at the walls of besieged Jerusalem, said Yehouah told Sennacherib to punish Judah—Isaiah agreed.
The names of the kings aligned against the cities of the plains might simply reflect the cosmopolitan nature of Assyrian armies. According to the author of Isaiah (Isa 22:6), Elamites fought for the Assyrians. Contingents from conquered nations like Shinar, and Elam were at the Assyrian seige of Jerusalem in 701, and, Ezra says that Osnapper (Assurbanipal) later deported Elamites into Samaria. The four kings were perhaps generals of Sennacherib’s foreign contingents.
The object of the story, for the authors, is to establish that the “returner”, Abram, was wealthy and would pay tithes of a tenth to Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem (Salem) even though Jerusalem was supposed at this time to have been a foreign city having no connexion with Yehouah! Melchizedek is usually read as meaning “My King is Righteous” but since Zedek is the name of the planet Jupiter in Hebrew, and Jupiter is the God of Heaven (Zeus to the Greeks and Dyaus Pitar to the early Aryans), the reading is equally “My king is the God of Heaven”, that is the Persian god, Ahuramazda. It also allows Yehouah to be granted the title El Elyon, illustrating the syncretistic nature of the bible and the syncretistic intent of the Persians in propagating it. El Elyon was the name used by the Phœnicians of their high gods. Phœnicians were also Hebrews—they too lived in Abarnahara! In an equal way, Yehouah is called, by Abraham, El Shaddai (“Almighty”), drawing in to His worship some other group of Hebrews, and in Psalms 91:1 El Elyon and El Shaddai are joined in poetic parallel to equate the two titles.
The first Hebrew in the biblical scheme pays tithes to the foreign king and in return gets a blessing and apparently a Eucharist! This was the view of the rabbis in the Targums:
Now Melkhizedek, king of Jerusalem, brought out bread and wine, for he was ministering [or, “for he was a priest ministering in the high priesthood”] before God Most High.Tg Onq
Neither Abram nor his god, Yehouah, seem to mind this in the least even though Yehouah was to become noted as a jealous and petulant god. Christians would have burnt down this king’s temple rather than share bread and wine sanctified by a Pagan god, and any blessing by such a god would have been considered a curse. There has to be lessons here for somebody, but these people always know better than their supposedly holy books in the end! What is worth noting, though, is that a eucharist-like ritual was recorded in the most ancient of times, according to the bible itself. What then did Jesus institute at the Last Supper?
Both Abraham and Sarah speak directly to God, Sarah being the only woman to whom God deigns to speak. And the conversations are like those of the Greek Olympians. Abraham has to reason with Yehouah, and persuade him not to act hastily (Gen 18:23f)! Later, death is to be in “Abraham’s bosom”, surely strong evidence that Abraham was regarded as God! Moreover, Sarah is the half sister of Abraham, and the women of the patriarchs, Sarah and Rebecca, are shown in the bible as being barren, meaning they could not conceive. The modern assumption is that they were infertile, but they might have been originally virgin goddesses, like Ishtar and Pallas Athene, mortalized in a myth change. The gods and godesses of the ancient pantheons were often siblings. It seems likely that the Persians brought the Aramaean colonists from the Euphrates river with their traditional deities, but instructed them these gods had really been the men and women who had founded the Jewish nation. Yehouah was the Jewish God, but in restoring Him, it was their duty to “restore” the deified heroes and heroines to their “rightful place” in history!
Why then were ancient goddesses virginal? Myths are often justifications of customs and ritual and some holy women were barren out of choice—they could not have sexual relations with men because they were priestesses! Some priestesses in Babylonia, like Catholic nuns and Roman Vestal Virgins, were chaste—they took a vow of chastity that had dire consequences, if broken. The custom of chastity was justified because the myth of the goddess made her a virhin, and so too the priestesses had to be. Indeed the custom could go back into matriarchal times. The pharaohs of Egypt had their inheritance through marriage to their sister, and not in their own right. Here may be relics of an ancient matriarchal system expunged by biblical overwriting.
Deliberate mistranslations abound, as they do commonly in the scriptures, to show that Yehouah was always monotheistic. The “plain(s) of Mamre” (Gen 13:18; 18:1) is the oaks of Mamre in the Revised Version, but they are Terebinth trees which were used by their distinctive shape and perhaps properties to mark sacred shrines. The shrine existed before Abraham got there because they were marked by these trees, and here then Abraham set up his altar to Yehouah. Either these sites were, or had been polytheistic sites available for people to worship the god of their choosing, or this signifies that Abraham rededicated a Pagan site to his own god. It is again a reflexion of the El-Yehouah conflict. The same is true of the planting of a “grove” in Beersheba (Gen 21:33). A grove was an Asherah, a standing stone or pole that was worshipped as a god!
In Genesis 23:7, the Hittites were the people of Palestine when Abraham bowed to them. The way the bible’s authors use words like Amorite, Hittite, Horite, and Canaanite, not in an ethnic way but to describe people regionally (Gen 12:16; 15:20; 21; 23:3; 24:3), is typical of the last millennium BC use when the original people had disappeared or been absorbed but regions remained with their tag. The Assyrians used these names to mean respectively Syrians, Phœnicians, Palestinians and dwellers on the east bank of the Jordan river. The use of the words Aramaean and Chaldaean similarly imply a late composition. Yet even respectable historians will not see it, they are so beguiled by the perfection of the holy book. George Roux accepts what the bible says with a typical lack of critical acumen for an historian. He writes:
Abraham and his family came from Ur in Sumer to Hebron in Canaan, probably about 1850 BC, and there are good reasons for placing Joseph’s migration to Egypt during the Hyksos period (1700-1580 BC).George Roux, Ancient Iraq (1966)
Abraham’s Ur is certainly not the Ur in Sumeria, but is Urfa in Syria. And if this is the supposed date of the otherwise mythical Abraham, then it was quite impossible for him to have met any Hittites there, let alone Hittites that lived there. Hittite never conquered that far south:
Before the reign of Suppiluliumas there was no Hittite state south of the Taurus… the Syrian vassal states of the Hittite Empire were confined to the area north of Kadesh on the Orontes… although Hittite armies reached Damascus, they never entered Palestine itself. Of the neo-Hittite states there was none south of Hamath, and the latter did not include any part of Palestine within its territories, being separated from it by the Aramean kingdom of Damascus.Professor Oliver Gurney, The Hittites (1966)
The spies sent by Moses tell that Hittites (Num 13:29) lived in the Palestinian Hills. Who could they have been? Gurney finds that E Forrer has an explanation suitable for Moses, but still leaving Abraham in the lurch, and it is more of the usual biblicist harmonization than an explanation. Forrer cites a text that says Hittites from the city of Kurustamma in the north-east of Anatolia had gone to the “land of Egypt” in the reign of Suppiluliumas (conventionally 1380-1346 BC). The term “land of Egypt” includes the Egyptian colony Canaan but the information goes no further. So it is left to the harmonizer to decide that the Palestinian hills is actually meant and that therefore the bible is proved by history. Pseudo-historian, R K G Temple (The Sirius Mystery), takes this as sufficient proof of the bible and immediate begins to speak of “the Hittite emigration of which we have proof during the reign of Suppiluliumas went to Egyptian territory, and quite probably to Hebron”, and more securely still “the emigration to Hebron”. The extension of vague possibility into certainty is typical of pseudo-historians and biblical harmonizers alike.
Far better as an explanation is that these tales in Genesis are much later romances, written by or with the assistance of Ptolemaic priests. In Numbers 13:22, the name Talmai (Ptolemy) even appears! The anachronism of peoples like the Philistines and the Hitties are then automatically explained.
Nuzi Tablets
Biblicists have surprisingly uncritical outlooks. They judge that the accounts of the travels of the Patriarchs sound authentic historically, and immediately conclude that therefore they are. Given The Last Days of Pompeii by Lord Litten, they would conclude that it sounds authentic and so was a contemporary work of Pliny the Elder. It is an example of the “congenial context” argument popular among believers. If a biblical account has some features that allow it to be fitted into a historical context, it is taken as evidence that the account is true. The argument might have some power when the criteria are sufficiently unique, but they never are. All you can say about the context of biblical stories is that they are BC. Only a few like the Book of Daniel give information allowing a precise date and that date is 400 years after the date supposed from its contents.
In 1977, Italian archaeologists, quite unexpectedly—showing that archaeology can still be exciting and that there is still plenty new to find—discovered a huge palace archive, one of the oldest state archives in the world, containing 15,000 inscribed clay tablets. They revealed an unknown but mighty Canaanite empire in Syria and Palestine around 2400 BC. Its capital was at Ebla, 30 miles from Aleppo, an enormous city for the time with a population of 250,000 people. The tablets mentioned Hazor, Gaza, Lachish, Megiddo, Akko, Sinai, Jerusalem (Urusalima), and Damascus thus proving that this ancient city was even older than anyone had suspected. By coincidence, a mosque in Damascus was being renovated at almost the same time and an arch found beneath the floor was dated to the third millennium, matching the Ebla date.
Biblicists got excited when they found names such as Ab-ra-mu (Abraham), E-sa-um (Esau), Ish-ma-ilu (Ishmael), even Is-ra-ilu (Israel), and Da-u-dum (David) and Sa-u-lum (Saul). A king of Ebla was called Ebrum, whom the excavator of Ebla, Giovanni Petinato, identified as the biblical Eber. He might as well have chosen to identify him with Abram himself.
Biblicists also find proof of the travels of Abram in the tablets found at Nuzi and Mari in Assyria, concluding again that the patriarchal accounts are second millennium BC. Mari or Tell Hariri, the ancient Near Eastern city-state, is on the Euphrates River between Harran and Ur. By the sixth century BC, Mari was only a small village, but beneath it, palaces had been built one on another for over a thousand years, from the Pre-Sargonic to the Old Babylonian periods. The palace compound covers over seven acres. Around 2250-2100 BC, temples were to Dagan and Ninharsug. Temples to Ishtar and a ziggurat have also been found.
Twenty thousand tablets and a some inscriptions have been unearthed. The language of the texts is Akkadian, and they are from the time of the last three kings of Mari, from 1800-1750 BC, ending when Hammurabi conquered the city in the thirty-fourth year of his reign. Only a quarter of the texts have been published. Scholars have hardly scratched the data yet.
Biblicists were seeing parallels in names between Genesis and names in the Mari tablets all over the place, but all are now rejected. They even claimed to have found a tribe of Benjamin. There are parallels between the tablets of Mari and the information in Genesis pertaining to Abraham, but mostly they reflect what was common to the way of life and the language of Semites in the Near East for millennia.
Too often either the Biblical or the extra-Biblical evidence had to be forced to make the comparison convincing and even then it might be so general as to apply with equal force in the first millennium BC.P R S Moorey, The Bible and Recent Archaeology
Biblicists ignore entirely the fact that customs and habits changed only slowly until modern times. The same customs and and habits have been found in records from the time of the new Assyrian empire, almost a thousand years later. They cannot be used to support the truth of the story of Abraham’s wanderings, though dishonest evangelists still try, depending on their audience bowing to evangelical authority.
Biblicists point to the name “Ishmael”, the same as that of a son of Abraham by his slave Hagar, in the Mari texts, but will not comment on the absence of Isaac. In any case, the use of a biblical name does not prove the historicity of the biblical story, only that such a name was used. The authors of Genesis would hardly have used names that were obviously anachronistic like Darius or Ptolemy. They were diplomats or senior officials and would have had access to the records of Assyria and Babylon, so could have written a convincing fiction. That the names, “Serug”, “Nahor”, “Terah”, “Harran”, and “Laban”, for districts and towns near Harran occur at Mari simply shows that places had the same names for a long time.
A migration from Ur at the time of Abraham is feasible, but so it was both before and after, for millennia. The city Harran is found in the Mari archives of the eighteenth century BC, in the Cappadocian tablets of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BC, and in the early Babylonian itineraries, but still had the same name into the Roman period. The word “harranu” means “highway”, or “journey” in Akkadian, and the word “Padanu” also means “road” in Assyrian, showing that the city grew up and existed because it was on the caravan route. Harran and biblical Paddan Aram could have been the same place.
Mari texts confirm that trade occurred from Mari into Mesopotamia and to the Mediterranean, but who doubted it? Few people doubted that people could travel from Ur in old Sumer to Palestine. The question is whether the saga of Abraham is true history. Reiterating all the evidence from Mari that they traded with Ugarit, destroyed in 1200 BC, but beforehand a well known trading centre for caravan and shipping merchants, and with Ur is empty. The Mari tablets show that trade routes spanned the route taken by Abraham but that proves nothing about the truth of the bible story. The time people did move from Syria to Palestine was under the Persians.
Nor is anything proved by showing parallels between words used at Mari and in the Hebrew of the Jewish scriptures. Both are Semitic languages. There are many, many such parallels. A phrase in the texts is “by the god of my father”, the faith and religion of the patriarchs. But it is a neutral phrase used because the society was polytheistic.
The temple at Harran was to the moon god, Sin, who was also worshipped at Ur. If Abraham came from those places at that time then it is odds on that he too worshipped Sin. The name “Laban” means “white” referring to the white moon, “Sarah-Sarai” is “Sarratu” in Akkadian and means “princess” referring to the goddess Ningal, wife of the moon god Sin. The word “Baal” was not used by the patriarchs, though it appears at Mari. We can take it that the “returners” did not worship Baal but came across him when they arrived in Canaan.
Evangelists like to use these parallels even though they know they are meaningless because their flocks are ignorant and easily persuaded by a smattering of historical knowledge whether it is valid or not.
Much is made of Sarai providing a slave girl for her husband. The childless wife Sarai (Gen 16:1-4; 30:1-8) invites her husband to copulate with a slave girl so that she can have children. In ancient Mesopotamia, priestesses were permitted to procure slave girls for their husbands because priestesses were obliged to remain virgins. Genesis does not suggest that these childless women are priestesses—they are childless because they are old and infertile. Once you accept that these women might have been priestesses, you have to consider that these are stories adapted from myths used in these ancient religions.
The Albrightians thought they had found the biblical practice in the tablets found at Nuzi from early in the second millennium. Nuzi for some time seems to have been the capital of Mitanni, a nation named after its ruling class but otherwise identified with the Huri, Hurrians or biblical Horites. Harran was part of this country for some time before it was replaced by the rise of the Hittites. The ruling Mitanni were Aryans, possibly the same people, at an earlier time, as the Medes. “Abraham” sounds curiously like the Aryan god “Brahman”, offering as a possibility that Abraham was an god or ancestor of the Hurrians remembered in Harran.
In the Nuzi tablets, the law specified that a marriage favoured with children prevented a husband from taking a second wife but, when the marriage was childless, the woman could procure a slave girl as her husband’s concubine. The law seems to be to ensure that the husband has heirs not so that the wife can act as a mother to her slave’s children. And the inheritance reverts back to any natural children born of the wife even if they are younger than the children to the concubine. But in Genesis, the children of the slave woman are still considered as heirs and Sarah fears that the “son of the slave woman” will be “heir with my son Isaac”.
Moreover, the biblical law did not only pertain to a childless wife because Nahor takes a concubine even though his wife had given him eight children (Gen 22:20-24). Jacob’s wife Leah also presses him to take a concubine, though she too had children. The Nuzi tablets are records of marriage contracts so they are private agreements not civic law but none of them match the arrangements in Genesis.
The best that can be concluded is that they are of a type that was known at Nuzi, but also elsewhere in Mesopotamia and at a later date. Similar practices are attested in records from Nimrud in Assyria only a century before the “return from exile”. They suggest a Mesopotamian provenance for the practices and little more, but the strong links that the customs and language of the scriptures have with the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians puts their composition in the mid-first millennium BC.
The stories of Abraham and Isaac passing off their wives as sisters (Gen 12:10-20; 20:1-18; 24:1-11) has been found in the Nuzi tablets, the Biblicists said. More careful or more honest scholars have found these identifications spurious. The claim was that the stories in Genesis were half remembered cases of a Nuzi practice of men adopting their wives as sisters to improve their security and status. None of the tablets had any case of a man adopting his wife as a sister while she remained his wife. A man adopted a woman as his sister it seems to formalize a divorce to allow her to marry another man, not himself.
The hint of the Genesis tales is perhaps at the Egyptian matrilineal inheritance of kingship being adopted by the Patriarchs in Egypt from their mentors. It was an incestuous practice that the new God of Heaven would not approve of and, in a later recension, it was disguised as a ploy rather than an Egyptian practice too disgraceful for a Patriarch.
Incidentally, the practice of Christian translators to disregard the words of their God as too crude shows that they have no religious scruples in the least about altering the inspired words of God when it suits their prudish mentality. The example here is at Genesis 24:2 when Abraham says to his servant get a hold of “my testicles” and swear by them. The root of the word “testicles” is the same as that of “testify” and “testament” precisely because this is the well known ancient way of making a pact. What do those lovers of the words of God write?
Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh.
Christians are not squemish about their loving God when he is accepting young girls as a sacrifice or advocating murder, rapine and pillaging for His Chosen but for someone to hold another man’s testicles—that is too much for them to bear, so even God’s word has to be bowdlerized.
Biblicists have claimed that every element of the peculiar relationship of Laban and Jacob (Gen 29-31) was fully explained by a Nuzi tablet that was an adoption contract. The trouble is that the only part of the contract that was certainly matched in the Genesis account, that the adopted son should have no wives other than the ones agreed, was a universal specification over a long period in such contracts in the Near East. For the rest, Jacob had to work off the bride price of Laban’s two daughters—a total of fourteen years service—showing that he was not adopted by his uncle. Nor does Jacob ever regard Laban as his father—Isaac was his father and Laban his father-in-law and his employer. Jacob shows no desire to remain with his adoptive father as he should have—an adoption was intended to give security to both parties, the adopted in becoming the heir and the adopter in being provided for by his son.
Many of the supposed parallels of the Biblicists have only been achieved by a brazen bending of both the biblical and the external evidence to make them fit. J M Miller has compared it to the old tramp in Mutt and Jeff saying to his companion, “If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs… If we had some eggs”. The plain truth is that the Biblicists have neither ham nor eggs but still claim that they are having ham and eggs.
Rachel’s theft of the household gods looks close to a passage in a Nuzi contract that bequeaths the gods to a natural son, should one arise, rather than the adopted son. The implication of Genesis would have to be that Jacob had lost this part of his inheritance because Laban had had a natural son after adopting Jacob. Note the ham and eggs approach of making assumptions to produce the imaginary ham and eggs.
More reasonably, a god that has to be protected by an unclean woman sitting on it is not much of a god! The menstrual Rachel protecting the family gods made them look ridiculous compared with the God of Heaven, who was the one who did any sitting on people that had to be done. It can only have meant anything if the worshippers of family gods were being denigrated by the worshippers of the God of Heaven—when the Persian administrators set out to impose Ahuramazda on to the Canaanites.
Abraham’s purchase of a grave site from Ephron the Hittite (Gen 23) supposedly reflects Hittite feudal law, but such laws are general to feudal societies and “Hittite”, at the time of the Persian imposition, was synonymous with someone living in northern Canaan, whether Canaanite, Hittite or Aramaean. That will be what is meant because the incident closely resembles the “dialogue documents” of the New Babylonian and Persian periods that record negotiations of this type.
T L Thompson and J van Seters have shown that every instance used to justify the Patriarchal sagas from the Nuzi tablets is false. Each instance is explained better by Mesopotamian laws and customs of the first millennium BC not the earlier records, particularly the status of family law in these societies. From a meticulous examination of the biblical stories of Abraham and the other patriarchs, they had to conclude the stories were written in the fifth century during the Persian period. Oded Lipschitz of Tel Aviv University agrees that the circumstances described in the Abraham narrative applies to the Babylonian and Persian periods, the time of the return from captivity, when Judah was only Jerusalem and a small surrounding area. Many of the Persian colonists came from Urartu and northern Syria, into Yehud to set up the temple state, and they allegorized their migration in the patriarchal stories in which some of their own national heroes or gods represented themselves as people.
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Moses and Exodus
