Berossus and Genesis

[rgprice]

rgprice, are you claiming that the only possible source for Genesis 1-11 is Berossus and other Greeks?

I'm saying the evidence is decidedly against there having actually been any long-term connection between Semitic culture and these Mesopotamian stories that goes back into the 5th or 6th century and later.

So if these stories came to the attention of the "Hebrew scholars" in the 5th century or later, then how would that have happened, if not via Berossus or other Greek sources derived from Berossus?

Again, many scholars agree that Genesis 1-1 shows knowledge of the Sumerian Flood Story, the Atrahasis Epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian King List, Enuma Elish and The Poem of Erra, among others.

So, how might "Hebrew scholars" have gained knowledge of these stories at some point between the 5th and 3rd centuries, if not from Berossus (or sources derived from Berossus)?

[StephenGoranson]

As long as you consider Hebrew writers incapable without Greek prompts you are free to consider otherwise unfathomable. Maybe don't expect all to take your word for it. 5th century Berossus? For your book perhaps find an editor.

[rgprice]

As long as you consider Hebrew writers incapable without Greek prompts you are free to consider otherwise unfathomable. Maybe don't expect all to take your word for it. 5th century Berossus? For your book perhaps find an editor.

It has nothing to do with "Greek prompts". From all the evidence we have, these narratives existed in two known forms: 1) cuneiform tablets, most of which are dated to the second millennium BCE and come from eastern Mesopotamia and 2) Greek versions of the stories that began to appear in the 4th century BCE. But the writing from Berossus provides a Greek translation of every single one of the sources used in Gen 1-11 all in one writing.

Additionally, as far as I know, all of the Greek translations originated from Babylonian writers who had experience with the cuneiform and knew Greek as a secondary language.

So what is the proposition? How, supposedly, were Hebrew writers accessing these stories in the 5th or 4th century BCE? You think they somehow were reading cuneiform tablets? Where did they get the tablets? How did the learn cuneiform? Why did they have an interest in it?

What is the model for how Hebrew priests/scholars came in contact with these narratives, took an interest in them, and crafted them into an account of the origins of the world? Why did they choose ancient Mesopotamian stories to do with this? Why not use Canaanite/Israelite creation stories?

If you claim that the Canaanites/Israelites were the ones to adopt these Sumerian/Akkadian stories, then why is there zero evidence of them in the archaeological/literary record?

That's the problem here. There is no indication, from any source at all, of these stories having an impact on Semitic culture prior to the 3rd century BCE, none. There are no images of Noah or the Ark, no images of Adam and Eve, no images of the Tree of Life or the serpent, etc. BUT.. once you hit the 3rd century BCE, then you do find such images and/or stories.

So its an explosion, all at once, of an interest in Adam, Eve, Eden, Noah, that we can see evidence of starting in the 3rd century BCE. Then we have the Enoch writings, which center around Gen 1-11, and the Gnostics which focus on Gen 1-11, and Jewish communities throughout the diaspora where we find an interest in Gen 1-11 and the Noah story. We find sermons on Noah, etc. But yet, prior to the 3rd century there is total silence and not only that, there is total silence from Gen 12-Deut 31. There is no indication that the writers of the rest of the Torah knew anything about Adam, Eve, Noah, etc.

So how do you explain that?

[neilgodfrey]

https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/e-bo ... _smyth.pdf

There can be no doubt about the opening lines of Genesis derive from Babylonian understanding. The case for Greek dependence is not as obvious, convincing or conclusive.

I don't think you meant that particular link to be included. It is outright apologist nonsense -- using texts from Corinthians and Isaiah to interpret Genesis 1:1. There is nothing comparable to the Genesis 1 creation narrative in the Babylonian literature. But there are Greek counterparts to almost every verse.

[Secret Alias]

What can be the response to that? Tohu and tiamat. Bohu and behemot. But the Greek is more similar. Why? Again normally in fields where objectivity is possible linguistic dependence is a strong indicator of cultural relation. But not here ...

https://books.google.com/books?id=wcLYA ... th&f=false

[Secret Alias]

And what a crazy universe we must live in that "it isn't crazy" to suggest as Pete does that Christianity was invented in the 4th century rather than the 1st and the Jews have a similar conspiracy behind their books. Again what can be said about the likelihood of both these proposals. And let's not forget Jesus wasn't a historical person. What a fascinating place the world is! My experience is that life and the universe is pretty boring. But what do I know I guess

[neilgodfrey]

https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/e-bo ... _smyth.pdf

There can be no doubt about the opening lines of Genesis derive from Babylonian understanding. The case for Greek dependence is not as obvious, convincing or conclusive.

What can be the response to that? Tohu and tiamat. Bohu and behemot. But the Greek is more similar. Why? Again normally in fields where objectivity is possible linguistic dependence is a strong indicator of cultural relation. But not here ...

https://books.google.com/books?id=wcLYA ... th&f=false

That's the second link to a book over 100 years old that you've thrown up. You'll need to sit down to take this in, but other members of the scholarly community have made some progress in the last 50 years:

This is from

• Day, John. God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament. Cambridge University Press, 1985, pages 49-51

There remain to be considered a few Old Testament passages in which Yahweh's control of the cosmic waters at time of creation is alluded to but where all thought of conflict has disappeared and in which there is no longer a trace of personality within the waters. That is to say, a process of demythologization has taken place and Yahweh's control of the waters has simply become a job of work. The most prominent example of this is in the well-known account of creation in Genesis 1.

. . . . .

V. 2, which describes the primaeval state of the world consisting of the chaos waters, has evinced much discussion. The word translated ‘deep', in Hebrew tehom, is philogically related to the Akkadian Tiamat, the chaos monster whose name means ‘sea’, defeated by Marduk in connection with the creation of the world as narrated in Enuma elish. It should not be held, however, as Gunkel and many after him have maintained, that Hebrew tehom is actually derived from Akkadian Tiamat. If this were the case, as Heidel and others have noted, we should expect the second Hebrew radical to be ' not h, and the word to have the feminine ending h. Rather, both tehom and Tiamat are derived from a common Semitic root. Moreover, the word occurs similarly as thm or thmt in Ugaritic to denote the cosmic waters . . . . Again, ‘the deep’ in Gen. 1:2 is not a divine personality hostile to God; rather it is here used to denote the impersonal watery mass which covered the world before God brought about the created order. At the same time, however, it is probable that the fact that the word almost always lacks the definite article in the Old Testament is a remnant of the time long past when the term did denote a mythical personality. The quasi-personal nature of tehom is most apparent in Gen. 49:25 and Deut. 33:13, where we read of 'the deep (tehom) that crouches beneath’, the verb rbs 'to crouch ’ employed here being commonly used elsewhere of animals, including the mythical dragon (Ezek. 29:3). In so far as tehom's mythological background is concerned this is not Babylonian at all, but rather Canaanite, as the Old Testament dragon passages show, a point which some scholars still have not properly grasped.

Moreover, it is improbable that the account of creation in Gen. 1 is dependent on Enuma elish at all. So far as the order of creation is concerned, the parallelism is not very remarkable: in both we have the common order of splitting of the sea (Tiamat/tehom), creation of the firmament and the earth, luminaries and man. However, the differences are significant in that the account of creation in Enuma elish makes no reference to the creation of the vegetation, sea creatures or other animals, all of which are mentioned in Gen. 1, whilst Gen. I makes no reference to such things as the creation of the clouds and the mountains, which are explicitly alluded to in Enuma elish.

You will also want to catch up with page 50 in

• Rad, Gerhard von. Genesis: A Commentary. Philadelphia : Westminster Press, 1972

where the 100 year old books you have given us links to are discussed:

There has been an increasing disinclination to interpret the concepts contained in v. 2 in terms of the mythological conceptions of neighbouring religions. The Hebrew word for “primeval flood” (Mom) probably has a linguistic affinity with Tiamat, the Babylonian dragon of chaos. A more direct connection, amounting to a “borrowing,” cannot be assumed. Nor can it be assumed that the Hebrew bohu goes back to the Phoenician mother-goddess Baau. Bohu is a noun (always connected with tohu) which means emptiness, desolation. Tohu is connected more with the concept of the wilderness or even with the wilderness itself (Deut. 32.10; Ps. 107.40, etc.). So it is inappropriate to suppose, as has long been the case, that P had to resort to strange and semi-mythical conceptions to elucidate the primal state of chaos. The concepts used in v. 2 arc cosmological keywords which were the indispensable requisites of Priestly learning. The relationship of Gen. 1 to Babylonian mythology now looks quite different from the way it did to the generation of the “Babel-Bibel” conflict at the beginning of the century.

And

• Sarna, Dr Nahum M. The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis. 1st edition. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001.

p. 3

These myths about a cosmic battle at the beginning of time appear in the Bible in fragmentary form, and the several allusions have to be pieced together to produce some kind of coherent unity. Still, the fact that these myths appear in literary compositions in ancient Israel indicates clearly that they had achieved wide currency over a long period of time. They have survived in the Bible solely as obscure, picturesque metaphors and exclusively in the language of poetry. Never are these creatures accorded divine attributes, nor is there anywhere a suggestion that their struggle against God could in any way have posed a challenge to His sovereign rule.

This is of particular significance in light of the fact that one of the inherent characteristics of all other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies is the internecine strife of the gods. Polytheistic accounts of creation always begin with the predominance of the divinized powers of nature and then describe in detail a titanic struggle between the opposing forces. They inevitably regard the achievement of world order as the outgrowth of an overwhelming exhibition of power on the part of one god who then manages to impose his will upon all other gods.

The early Israelite creation myths, with all their color and drama, must have been particularly attractive to the masses. But none became the regnant version. It was the austere account set forth in the first chapter of Genesis that won unrivaled authority. At first it could only have been the intellectual elite in ancient Israel, most likely the priestly and scholarly circles, who could have been capable of realizing and appreciating the compact forms of symbolization found in Genesis.

You insisted that the Genesis account is from Babylonian influence. I appeal to the above authorities(!) to posit the contrary.

Now.... if the Judeans were unlike any other people and utterly unique, then they may have created an entirely new literature without any other cultural influences. Perhaps they were inspired by God. Or .... just maybe, if one dares to expand one's horizons, one just might see that the authors of Genesis 1 were not hermetically sealed from the rest of humanity after all but were, indeed, influenced by another culture not yet considered (except by scholars of the Septuagint and a few innovative minds in more recent (let's say 30) years.)

[StephenGoranson]

rgprice wrote, in part, above:
"... There is no indication, from any source at all, of these stories having an impact on Semitic culture prior to the 3rd century BCE, none. There are no images of Noah or the Ark, no images of Adam and Eve, no images of the Tree of Life or the serpent, etc. BUT.. once you hit the 3rd century BCE, then you do find such images and/or stories."

rgp, you write with many emphatic sentences. But some issues are debatable, imo. If Berossus could read a language, maybe others, with a more similar second language than Greek, could too, even if we do not now know their names. And we don't have the complete text of Berossus.
Influences may come from various sources (it's not necessarily all or nothing). But some relatively small populations can be creative and have traditions too. Such as Armenians and Tibetans.

Do you have references to non-Semitic and then-unparalleled images of Adam, Noah, etc, from 3rd century bce?

[Secret Alias]

I still see modern scholarship reference the tohu and bohu concepts (= sea monsters). Not only my friend Robert Cargill but too many to name https://books.google.com/books?id=V20NB ... at&f=false. You treat the sources who like as conclusively disproving the scholarships you don't like but that's not true. The original point was whether a direct connection with Babylonia is more widely accepted as opposed to an indirect link through Berossos. That point still stands.

[Secret Alias]

The argument here seems to be (a) whether Berossos or (b) Babylonia and direct influence of other cultures in the region in which Jews/Samaritans lived should be responsible for the creation of the Torah. I am not persuaded that Berossos was a direct influence on the Pentateuch as the documents themselves where written before Berossos.