The Bible and the Ancient Near East

The most repeated form of this comparison is linguistic: that tehom, the deep of Genesis 1:2, is the demythologised corpse of Tiamat, the Babylonian goddess of chaos. A. H. Sayce wrote in 1894 that the Hebrew tehom is the Assyrian word for the deep, which in the Assyrian poem had become a mythological being, Tiamat. Friedrich Delitzsch went further and held that Israel's poets and prophets transferred Marduk's battle with the sea monster to the LORD.

David Tsumura answers in Creation and Destruction (2005) that the common West Semitic word for the sea is yam. In his reading this takes away the ground for Hermann Gunkel's link between Enuma Elish and Genesis 1. Gerhard Hasel reported in 1974 that Alexander Heidel had shown on philological grounds that tehom does not derive from Tiamat. Hasel reported too that both words, with the Akkadian word for the sea, come from one Common Semitic root. Tsumura adds that tohu wabohu in Genesis 1:2 means a desolate and empty place, and he sets aside the older reading of it as a primeval chaos in need of ordering.

On Tsumura's reading the link between tehom and Tiamat is the weakest of the parallels, and the stronger likenesses are those in the table above, which neither side usually leads with.

In 2008 a member of the public brought the British Museum a Babylonian cuneiform tablet from around 1850 BC, now known as the Ark Tablet. It carries detailed instructions for building a vessel to survive a flood, including its shape, a large round coracle. It also tells how to bring the animals aboard in pairs, strikingly close to Genesis 6:19 to 20. Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum, published it in The Ark Before Noah (2014).

It is the strongest recent addition to the side of the parallels. It shows the two-by-two motif in the Mesopotamian tradition at a very early date. Its vessel differs from the ark, since a round coracle and a three-decked rectangular box are different objects that solve the same problem.

The historic conservative reading holds that the flood traditions across Mesopotamia and far beyond it are the residue of one real event, kept with least corruption in the inspired Genesis account. The Babylonian versions, on this reading, show a later drift into polytheism. John Gill held it in his Exposition of the Old Testament (1748 to 1763), where the flood stories of the nations, the Chaldean Xisuthrus among them, confirm the flood of Genesis.

That is a judgment of faith, made on grounds that comparative literature alone does not reach. The critical alternative, which Karl Budde credited to Friedrich Delitzsch in the notes of Babel and Bible (English 1903), reads the flood of Genesis as dependent on Babylonian myths.

David P. Wright's Inventing God's Law (2009) argues that the Covenant Code depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi, against the common view that the likeness came down through oral tradition. In his reading literary dependence is the only viable explanation, and the source was used in the Neo-Assyrian period, between 740 and 640 BC.

Kenneth Kitchen had set Hammurabi's laws among the law collections long compared with the laws of the Pentateuch, in “The Fall and Rise of Covenant, Law and Treaty” (1989). The others he named there are those of Ur-Nammu, Lipit-Ishtar and Eshnunna. He held that the Sinai covenant joins the much older law tradition to the treaty form of the late second millennium, a fresh and distinctive formulation.

This is a live scholarly dispute between people who have read the cuneiform, and a reader's choice of the more congenial conclusion will not settle it.

Kitchen also argues from the history of the form for an early date. The full six-part form, above all the historical prologue, marks second-millennium Hittite treaties. First-millennium Neo-Assyrian treaties, of which the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon are the standard example, drop the prologue and lead with curses. If Deuteronomy runs the second-millennium sequence, the argument goes, its form fits a late second-millennium composition, which is to say one of the age of Moses.

Moshe Weinfeld's Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (1972) answers from the curses, which link Deuteronomy with the first-millennium Assyrian treaties. Dennis McCarthy's Treaty and Covenant (Rome, revised 1978) denied the relevance of the second-millennium treaties.

That Deuteronomy has the shape of a treaty is broadly agreed across the confessional and critical divide. The date drawn from that shape is contested, largely along the confessional lines already in place before anyone counted the parts. A parallel that establishes a form does not by that establish a date, and the discipline applied to Gilgamesh applies here in the direction less comfortable for a confessional reader.