Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition

by L. W. King

In the passage of the Babylonian Epic, Enlil had already sent the Flood and had destroyed the good with the wicked. Ea thereupon remonstrates with him, and he urges that in future the sinner only should be made to suffer for his sin; and, instead of again causing a flood, let there be discrimination in the divine punishments sent on men or lands. While the flood made the escape of the deserving impossible, other forms of punishment would affect the guilty only. In Ezekiel the subject is the same, but the point of view is different. The land the prophet has in his mind in verse 13 is evidently Judah, and his desire is to explain why it will suffer although not all its inhabitants deserved to share its fate. The discrimination, which Ea urges, Ezekiel asserts will be made; but the sinner must bear his own sin, and the righteous, however eminent, can only save themselves by their righteousness. The general principle propounded in the Epic is here applied to a special case. But the parallelism between the passages lies not only in the general principle but also in the literary setting. This will best be brought out by printing the passages in parallel columns.

Gilg. Epic, XI, 180-194 Ezek. xiv. 12-20
Ea opened his mouth and spake, And the word of the Lord came
He said to the warrior Enlil; unto me, saying,
Thou director of the gods! O Son of man, when a land sinneth
warrior! against me by committing a
Why didst thou not take counsel trespass, and I stretch out
but didst cause a flood? mine hand upon it, and break
On the transgressor lay his the staff of the bread
transgression! thereof, and send famine Be merciful, so that (all) be not upon it, and cut off from it
destroyed! Have patience, so man and beast; though these
that (all) be not (cut off)! three men, Noah, Daniel, and
Instead of causing a flood, Job, were in it, they should
Let lions(1) come and diminish deliver but their own souls by
mankind! their righteousness, saith the
Instead of causing a flood, Lord God.
Let leopards(1) come and If I cause noisome beasts to
diminish mankind! pass through the land, and
Instead of causing a flood, they spoil it, so that it be
Let famine be caused and let it desolate, that no man may pass
smite the land! through because of the beasts;
Instead of causing a flood, though these three men were in
Let the Plague-god come and it, as I live, saith the Lord
(slay) mankind! God, they shall deliver
neither sons nor daughters;
they only shall be delivered,
but the land shall be
desolate.
Or if I bring a sword upon
that land, and say, Sword, go
through the land; so that I
cut off from it man and beast;
though these three men were in
it, as I live, saith the Lord
God, they shall deliver
neither sons nor daughters,
but they only shall be
delivered themselves.
Or if I send a pestilence into
that land, and pour out my
fury upon it in blood, to cut
off from it man and beast;
though Noah, Daniel, and Job,
were in it, as I live, saith
the Lord God, they shall
deliver neither son nor
daughter; they shall but
deliver their own souls by
their righteousness.
(1) Both Babylonian words are in the singular, but probably
used collectively, as is the case with their Hebrew
equivalent in Ezek. xiv. 15.

It will be seen that, of the four kinds of divine punishment mentioned, three accurately correspond in both compositions. Famine and pestilence occur in both, while the lions and leopards of the Epic find an equivalent in "noisome beasts". The sword is not referred to in the Epic, but as this had already threatened Jerusalem at the time of the prophecy's utterance its inclusion by Ezekiel was inevitable. Moreover, the fact that Noah should be named in the refrain, as the first of the three proverbial examples of righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. Daiches points out, not dissimilar.

(1) This suggestion is in some measure confirmed by the
Biblical Antiquities of Philo, ascribed by Dr. James to
the closing years of the first century A.D.; for its writer,
in his account of the Flood, has actually used Ezek. xiv. 12
ff. in order to elaborate the divine speech in Gen. viii. 21
f. This will be seen from the following extract, in which
the passage interpolated between verses 21 and 22 of Gen.
viii is enclosed within brackets: "And God said: I will not
again curse the earth for man's sake, for the guise of man's
heart hath left off (sic) from his youth. And therefore I
will not again destroy together all living as I have done.
(But it shall be, when the dwellers upon earth have sinned,
I will judge them by famine or by the sword or by fire
or by pestilence (lit. death), and there shall be
earthquakes, and they shall be scattered into places not
inhabited (or, the places of their habitation shall be
scattered). But I will not again spoil the earth with the
water of a flood, and) in all the days of the earth seed
time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and autumn, day and
night shall not cease . . ."; see James, The Biblical
Antiquities of Philo, p. 81, iii. 9. Here wild beasts are
omitted, and fire, earthquakes, and exile are added; but
famine, sword, and pestilence are prominent, and the whole
passage is clearly suggested by Ezekiel. As a result of the
combination, we have in the Biblical Antiquities a
complete parallel to the passage in the Gilgamesh Epic.

It may of course be urged that wild beasts, famine, and pestilence are such obvious forms of divine punishment that their enumeration by both writers is merely due to chance. But the parallelism should be considered with the other possible points of connexion, namely, the fact that each writer is dealing with discrimination in divine punishments of a wholesale character, and that while the one is inspired by the Babylonian tradition of the Flood, the other takes the hero of the Hebrew Flood story as the first of his selected types of righteousness. It is possible that Ezekiel may have heard the Babylonian Version recited after his arrival on the Chebar. And assuming that some form of the story had long been a cherished tradition of the Hebrews themselves, we could understand his intense interest in finding it confirmed by the Babylonians, who would show him where their Flood had taken place. To a man of his temperament, the one passage in the Babylonian poem that would have made a special appeal would have been that quoted above, where the poet urges that divine vengeance should be combined with mercy, and that all, righteous and wicked alike, should not again be destroyed. A problem continually in Ezekiel's thoughts was this very question of wholesale divine punishment, as exemplified in the case of Judah; and it would not have been unlikely that the literary structure of the Babylonian extract may have influenced the form in which he embodied his own conclusions.

But even if we regard this suggestion as unproved or improbable, Ezekiel's reference to Noah surely presupposes that at least some version of the Flood story was familiar to the Hebrews before the Captivity. And this conclusion is confirmed by other Babylonian parallels in the early chapters of Genesis, in which oral tradition rather than documentary borrowing must have played the leading part.(1) Thus Babylonian parallels may be cited for many features in the story of Paradise,(2) though no equivalent of the story itself has been recovered. In the legend of Adapa, for example, wisdom and immortality are the prerogative of the gods, and the winning of immortality by man is bound up with eating the Food of Life and drinking the Water of Life; here too man is left with the gift of wisdom, but immortality is withheld. And the association of winged guardians with the Sacred Tree in Babylonian art is at least suggestive of the Cherubim and the Tree of Life. The very side of Eden has now been identified in Southern Babylonia by means of an old boundary-stone acquired by the British Museum a year or two ago.(3)

(1) See Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, pp. 10 ff., and cf.
S. Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, t. II, pp. 386
ff.
(2) Cf. especially Skinner, Genesis, pp. 90 ff. For the
latest discussion of the Serpent and the Tree of Life,
suggested by Dr. Skinner's summary of the evidence, see
Frazer in Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway (1913), pp. 413 ff.
(3) See Babylonian Boundary Stones in the British Museum (1912), pp. 76 ff., and cf. Geographical Journal, Vol. XL,
No. 2 (Aug., 1912), p. 147. For the latest review of the
evidence relating to the site of Paradise, see Boissier, "La
situation du paradis terrestre", in Le Globe, t. LV,
Mémoires (Geneva, 1916).

But I need not now detain you by going over this familiar ground. Such possible echoes from Babylon seem to suggest pre-exilic influence rather than late borrowing, and they surely justify us in inquiring to what periods of direct or indirect contact, earlier than the Captivity, the resemblances between Hebrew and Babylonian ideas may be traced. One point, which we may regard as definitely settled by our new material, is that these stories of the Creation and of the early history of the world were not of Semitic origin. It is no longer possible to regard the Hebrew and Babylonian Versions as descended from common Semitic originals. For we have now recovered some of those originals, and they are not Semitic but Sumerian. The question thus resolves itself into an inquiry as to periods during which the Hebrews may have come into direct or indirect contact with Babylonia.

There are three pre-exilic periods at which it has been suggested the Hebrews, or the ancestors of the race, may have acquired a knowledge of Babylonian traditions. The earliest of these is the age of the patriarchs, the traditional ancestors of the Hebrew nation. The second period is that of the settlement in Canaan, which we may put from 1200 B.C. to the establishment of David's kingdom at about 1000 B.C. The third period is that of the later Judaean monarch, from 734 B.C. to 586 B.C., the date of the fall of Jerusalem; and in this last period there are two reigns of special importance in this connexion, those of Ahaz (734-720 B.C.) and Manasseh (693-638 B.C.).

With regard to the earliest of these periods, those who support the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch may quite consistently assume that Abraham heard the legends in Ur of the Chaldees. And a simple retention of the traditional view seems to me a far preferable attitude to any elaborate attempt at rationalizing it. It is admitted that Arabia was the cradle of the Semitic race; and the most natural line of advance from Arabia to Aram and thence to Palestine would be up the Euphrates Valley. Some writers therefore assume that nomad tribes, personified in the traditional figure of Abraham, may have camped for a time in the neighbourhood of Ur and Babylon; and that they may have carried the Babylonian stories with them in their wanderings, and continued to preserve them during their long subsequent history. But, even granting that such nomads would have taken any interest in traditions of settled folk, this view hardly commends itself. For stories received from foreign sources become more and more transformed in the course of centuries.(1) The vivid Babylonian colouring of the Genesis narratives cannot be reconciled with this explanation of their source.