There is no book in the world about which more has been written than the Bible, and perhaps there is no portion of the Bible which has given rise to a larger literature than the Book of Genesis. Every word in it has been carefully scrutinised, now by scholars who sought to discover its deepest meaning or to defend it against the attacks of adversaries, now again by hostile critics anxious to expose every supposed flaw, and to convict it of error and inconsistency. Assailants and defenders had long to content themselves with such evidence as could be derived from a study of the book itself, or from the doubtful traditions of ancient nations, as reported by the writers of Greece and Rome. Such reports were alike imperfect and untrustworthy; historical criticism was still in its infancy in the age of the classical authors, and they cared but little to describe [pg 019] accurately the traditions of races whom they despised. It was even a question whether any credit could be given to the fragments of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phœnician mythology or history extracted by Christian apologists from the lost works of native authors who wrote in Greek. The Egyptian dynasties of Manetho, the Babylonian stories of the Creation and Flood narrated by Berossus, the self-contradicting Phœnician legends collected by Philo Byblius, were all more or less suspected of being an invention of a later age. The earlier chapters of Genesis stood almost alone; friends and foes alike felt the danger of resting any argument on the apparent similarity of the accounts recorded in them to the myths and legends contained in the fragments of Manetho, of Berossus, and of Philo Byblius.
All is changed now. The marvellous discoveries of the last half-century have thrown a flood of light on the ancient oriental world, and some of this light has necessarily been reflected on the Book of Genesis. The monuments of Egypt, of Babylonia, and of Assyria have been rescued from their hiding-places, and the writing upon them has been made to speak once more in living words. A dead world has been called again to life by the spade of the excavator and the patient labour of the decipherer. We find ourselves, as it were, face to face with Sennacherib, with Nebuchadnezzar, and with Cyrus, with those whose names have been familiar to us from childhood, but who have hitherto been to us mere names, mere shadowy occupants of an unreal world. Thanks to the research of the last half-century, we can now penetrate into the details of their daily life, can examine their religious ideas, can listen to them as they [pg 020] themselves recount the events of their own time or the traditions of the past which had been handed down to them.
It is more especially in Babylonia and Assyria that we find illustrations of the earlier chapters of Genesis, as, indeed, is only natural. The Semitic language spoken in these two countries was closely allied to that of the Old Testament, as closely, in fact, as two modern English dialects are allied to each other; and it was from Babylonia, from Ur of the Chaldees, now represented by the mounds of Mugheir, that Abraham made his way to the future home of his descendants in the west. It is to Babylonia that the Biblical accounts of the Fall, of the Deluge, and of the Confusion of Tongues particularly look: two of the rivers of Paradise were the Tigris and Euphrates, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, and the city built around the Tower which men designed should reach to heaven was Babel or Babylon. Babylonia was an older kingdom than Assyria, which took its name from the city of Assur, now Kalah Sherghat, on the Tigris, the original capital of the country. It was divided into two halves, Accad (Gen. x. 10) being Northern Babylonia, and Sumir, the Shinar of the Old Testament, Southern Babylonia. The primitive populations of both Sumir and Accad were related, not to the Semitic race, but to the tribes which continued to maintain themselves in the mountains of Elam down to a late day. They spoke two cognate dialects, which were agglutinative in character, like the languages of the modern Turks and Fins; that is to say, the relations of grammar were expressed by coupling words together, each of which retained an independent meaning of its own. Thus in-nin-sun is [pg 021] “he gave it,” literally “he-it-gave,” e-mes-na is “of houses,” literally “house-many-of.” At an early date, which cannot yet, however, be exactly determined, the Sumirians and Accadians were overrun and conquered by the Semitic Babylonians of later history, Accad being apparently the first half of the country to fall under the sway of the new-comers. It is possible that Casdim, the Hebrew word translated “Chaldees” or “Chaldæans” in the Authorised Version, is the Babylonian casidi, or “conquerors,” a title which continued to cling to them in consequence of their conquest.
The Accadians had been the inventors of the pictorial hieroglyphics which afterwards developed into the cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing; they had founded the great cities of Chaldea, and had attained to a high degree of culture and civilisation. Their cities possessed libraries, stocked with books, written partly on papyrus, partly on clay, which was, while still soft, impressed with characters by means of a metal stylus. The books were numerous, and related to a variety of subjects. Among them there were more particularly two to which a special degree of sanctity was attached. One of these contained magical formulæ for warding off the assaults of evil spirits; the other was a collection of hymns to the gods, which was used by the priests as a kind of prayer-book. When the Semitic Babylonians, the kinsmen of the Hebrews, the Aramæans, the Phœnicians and the Arabs, conquered the old population, they received from it, along with other elements of culture, the cuneiform system of writing and the literature written in it. The sacred hymns still continued to serve as a prayer-book, but they were now provided with interlinear translations [pg 022] into the Babylonian (or, as it is usually termed, the Assyrian) language. Part of the literature consisted of legal codes and decisions; and since the inheritance and holding of property frequently depended on a knowledge of these, it became necessary for the conquerors to acquaint themselves with the language of the people they had conquered. In course of time, however, the two dialects of Sumir and Accad ceased to be spoken; but the necessity for learning them still remained, and we find accordingly that down to the latest days of both Assyria and Babylonia the educated classes were taught the old extinct Accadian, just as in modern Europe they are taught Latin. From time to time, indeed, the scribes of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar attempted to write in the ancient language, and in doing so sometimes made similar mistakes to those that are made now-a-days by a schoolboy in writing Latin.
The Accadians were, like the Chinese, pre-eminently a literary people. Their conception of chaos was that of a period when as yet no books were written. Accordingly, a legend of the Creation, preserved in the library of Cuthah, contains this curious statement: “On a memorial-tablet none wrote, none explained, for bodies and produce were not brought forth in the earth.” To the author of the legend the art of writing seemed to mount back to the very beginning of mankind.
This legend of the Creation, however, is not the only one that has been recovered from the shipwreck of Assyrian and Babylonian literature. Besides the account given in the fragments of Berossus, there is another, which bears a striking resemblance to the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis. [pg 023] It does not appear, however, that this last was of Accadian origin; at all events, there is no indication that it was translated into Assyrian from an older Accadian document, and there are even reasons for thinking that it may not be earlier—in its present form at least—than the seventh century b.c. We possess, unfortunately, only portions of it, since many of the series of clay tablets on which it was inscribed have been lost or injured. The account begins as follows:—
1. At that time the heavens above named not a name,
2. Nor did the earth below record one:
3. Yea, the deep was their first creator,
4. The flood of the sea was she who bore them all.