Journey to Babel

One of the most famous stories in the Bible is also one of the shortest (surely). We learn that everyone on earth spoke the same language. Migrating from the east they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. (This constitutes an abrupt break after the end of chapter 10, in which Noah’s descendants multiplied into nations that covered the earth. The story of Babel clearly doesn’t follow - the compilers decided to insert it here.)

In Shinar the people decide to

build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

God comes down to see what they are up to, and finds it not good. With their “tower with its top in the heavens” the humans are once again trespassing on the divine, and making themselves guilty of hubris. Not only that, but apparently they have the potential to become very powerful, a great united force. God says:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.

With confusion reigning the humans stop building their city, and God scatters them to the winds. It is interesting that in this story humankind has potential so alarming that God has to step in to prevent it from being realised. It reminds one of how they were driven from Eden, since the possibility existed that they would eat from the tree of life, and become immortal. When they are within reach of what they should not have or achieve God acts to manoeuvre them away from it.

The story is obviously meant to illustrate how God puts in their proper place those who get too big for their breeches (and the origin of different languages). Its structure, as the Notes point out and I quote below, works to that effect. Maybe it’s the modern language (as opposed to the KJV’s), but I can’t help noticing how God seems to have to step in lest he loses control over his creatures. This God is not omnipotent, he is like the God from Eden, rather than the one of the first creation myth. Otherwise he could have prevented the situation from arising. But yes, I know, to approach the story from that angle involves not “speaking its language”, the language of myth.

The Babel story is constructed as follows (and I quote from the Notes):

“Forwards”	“Backwards”
the whole earth had one language	the language of all the earth (confused)
they said to one another	they will not understand one another’s speech
Come, let us make bricks	Come, let us go down,and confuse
let us build ourselves	which mortals had built
a city, and a tower	the city and the tower

The humans build, and God dismantles. It’s a powerful and economical way of telling the story; quite marvellous.

Babel is followed by a relook at/continuation of the Shem lineage. In this one ages are given for the patriarchs and, although God decided to limit the human lifespan to 120 years after the flood, these men live considerably longer. Not as long as the antediluvian patriarchs though: these ages range from Shem’s 500 to Abram’s 175. (Shem has his first child at a 100, but all the rest are said to have their first children at between 29 and 35 years of age.)

At the end of a list of descendants we get Terah, father to Abram (the tenth generation), Nahor and Haran; Haran became the father of Lot (he of the wife who made the mistake of looking back). All of these came from Ur, the land of the Chaldeans (in southern Mesopotamia). Haran never left it - he died there. Abram married barren Sarai, and Nahor Milcah. Terah intended to move Abram and his family, including Lot, to Canaan, but instead they all settled in the land of Haran “in the middle Euphrates region” (Notes).

And so the characters of the next great saga, that of Abram (Abraham), have taken their places.

Notes:

• Shinar is southern Mesopotamia or Babylonia, “the ancient land of Sumer” (according to the Notes). The grand old civilisations of Sumer and Babylon (and Egypt) somehow don’t make much of an impression in the OT - so far at least. Since they were the enemy their grandeur and achievements are downplayed or ignored.
• Note that God is once again not alone - “let us go down”.
• Babel is “the place of balal, Hebrew, “confusion”. (Notes)
• Abram means “the father is exalted”, and Sarai means “princess”. (Notes)
• Nahor became father of the Arameans, and his son Bethuel fathered Laban and Rebekah, who will take centre stage later in Genesis. (Notes)
• Lot became the father of the Moabites and Ammonites. (Notes)

Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1520 – 1569)

After the flood

Noah and his sons are told to be fruitful and multiply. And they now have a new relationship with other living things. Before, humankind had “dominion” over all other living things, and they (animals and birds at least) were even considered as companions for Adam. Now God tells Noah:

The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into you hand are they delivered.

To modern sensibilities this sounds a bit harsh. It does to mine anyway. I suppose it “explains” wild animals’ fear and reluctance to be near humans. It is easy to see how this relationship, set in place by God, can be used as justification for exploitation.

Also, humans need no longer be vegetarians:

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

There is one prohibition regarding the eating of meat though - they are not allowed to consume the blood of living things: “you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood”. This practice is followed to this day by Jewish communities; animals are exsanguinated before they’re slaughtered.

Another prohibition concerns murder:

Whoever sheds the blood of a human,
by a human shall that person’s blood
be shed;
for in his own image
God made humankind.

Humans always remain special having been made in God’s image - do humans therefore always partake of something of the divine? At any rate, the penalty for murder is death.

In the previous chapter (8) God told himself “in his heart” that he would never again destroy everything in a flood he now formally informs Noah of the covenant he is making with Noah, his descendants, in fact, with the whole earth.

Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

As a sign of the covenant between him and the earth, and as a reminder to himself of this intention, God creates a rainbow, a “bow in the clouds”.

Unfortunately God’s second attempt at a world populated by well-behaved human beings gets off to a bad start. Noah plants a vineyard and originates viticulture - and drunkenness. He partakes of too much wine, falls asleep drunk and naked, and is discovered by Ham. Ham informs his brothers of their father’s condition. Shem and Japheth display rather more filial compassion and integrity than their brother, and cover their father’s nakedness with a garment. To avoid seeing him in his embarrassing state they hold the garment between them and walk backwards to cover him.

Once Noah awakes he is furious with Ham. The Notes indicate that “the text also hints that sexual transgression (homosexual incest?) may have been involved, since when he woke Noah ‘knew what his youngest son had done to him’”. That is a pretty serious charge, and goes further towards explaining Noah’s subsequent curse of Ham than what Ham is specifically said to have done (telling his brothers instead of handling the situation with discretion). (And somehow Noah’s own indiscretion - getting drunk - is quickly forgotten!)

Not only will Ham be a slave, and the lowest kind of slave, to his brothers, so will the whole of Canaan (descendants of Ham) to the descendants of the others. In contrast Shem will be blessed by the Lord, and Japheth will be allowed to “live in the tents of Shem”. Japheth’s blessing somehow seems a bit lukewarm compared to Shem’s.

Genesis 10 contains the first postdiluvian genealogy, leading up to the Bible’s next hero, Abram (Abraham). The genealogy is intended to show the origins of different nations one comes across in story of the history of the Israelites, all of whom descend from Shem, Ham and Japheth. I will mention ones that caught my eye.

One of Japheth’s descendants is the nation of Magog, whose infamous king Gog turns up as an enemy in Ezekiel.

Ham’s descendants include Egypt, Canaan and Cush. Egypt became father to Caphtorim, from whom hail the Philistines, the traditional enemies of the Israelites. Canaan’s territory was said to spread in the direction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Cush is the father of Nimrod, apparently the first man on earth to become a “mighty warrior”. The “beginning of [Nimrod's] kingdom” was Babel, as well as Accad. From there Nimron went into Assyria and built Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire.

Shem’s most famous descendant is Abram, husband to Sarai, and later father to Isaac. Also in Shem’s lineage is Eber, who gave his name to the Hebrews.

Note that there are contradictions in the genealogy as to whom became father of which nation. The genealogy comes from the P and J sources. According to the P source Seba (Sheba in J) and Havilah are descendants of Ham. According to J Sheba (Seba in P) and Havilah originate with Shem.

Notes:

• Apart from the infamous Sodom and Gomorrah, Ham’s line is actually pretty illustrious for a cursed man’s. But there has to be some explanation in the OT for the traditional enmity between Abraham’s people and Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, the Philistines, and so forth.
• According to the Notes Nimrod’s name may be a distortion of “Ninurta”, “a Mesopotamian god of kingship and the hunt”, and “patrod god of the Assyrian kings”.
• Sheba (Seba in the P source) is the land from whom came the famous queen who visited Solomon.

Image: Noah’s Drunkenness by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 – 1564)

Water, water everywhere

Apparently the story of the flood is drawn from our old friends the P and J sources. This means that the story is actually a lot more confusing (and confused) than I remember. I guess the children’s Bible stories, which is where I would guess a sizable proportion of the Western population’s OT memories hail from, tend to leave out all the contradictions.

In Genesis 6 Noah is instructed to take two pairs of all animals, birds and creeping things. However, in 7.2 he is instructed to take seven pairs of all “clean” animals, and a pair of all “that are not clean”. No mention of creeping things, and apparently there aren’t unclean birds. Yet in 6.9 it is said that “two and two, male and female” animals, clean and unclean animals, birds and creeping things (6.8), went on board. At this point the composition of the cargo is an amalgamation of the two stories. There is no more mention of seven pairs of each.

After seven days God makes it rain for forty days and forty nights. (The actual date of the flood is the 600th year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month.) The flood is so stupendous that

all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters swelled above the mountains, fifteen cubits deep.

And all life on earth other than that in the ark dies by drowning, and the waters cover the earth for one hundred and fifty days. The flood is global.

The Notes point out that the flood “returns the earth to a state of watery chaos like the one before God separated the waters”. The flood is “a reversal of creation”. After a hundred and fifty days the waters abate,and “God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided”. This is an echo of the “wind from God” which “swept over the face of the waters” in 1.2, and which preceded creation. God is truly starting over.

The flood waters retreat over a period of many months: the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat in the seventh month, while (a bit confusingly) “the tops of the mountains” only appear in the tenth month. The Notes point out that the mountains of Ararat, “in Turkish Kurdistan (ancient Urartu”) are the tallest mountains in the Near East, hence a fitting place for the ark to be grounded.

The follow the famous sequence of the birds sent out to scout for land (as they are in the Gilgamesh flood story): first a raven, then a dove (twice), with seven days between each try. After its second journey the dove returns with “a freshly plucked olive leaf”, a sign that there is dry earth somewhere. The dove fails to return after being sent off a third time, another seven days later. Almost two months later, after spending more than a year on board, God instructs Noah to leave the ark:

Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and their wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh - birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth - so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.

As did the other Mesopotamian Noah, Atrahasîs, Noah offers a sacrifice to God (”of every clean animal and of every clean bird”) - “burnt offerings on the altar”. And as in the other story the offerings do not go amiss: Atrahasîs’ gods welcomed the sacrifice because it meant nourishment to them; God “smelled the pleasing odor” (which is similar thematically), and then says “in his heart”:

I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.

(In the next chapter this forms the substance of the covenant God establishes with Noah and his descendants.)

The nature of humankind has not changed, they are still inclined to evil, but God appears to accept that now. At least, he won’t react to it the same way again. Before, he regretted creating humans, now he regrets the wholesale destruction he visited on all living things in response to their transgressions. But all’s well between God and his creatures again.

Point to ponder: God says to himself that he regrets punishing the ground and all living creatures for the evil inclination of human hearts. He is determined never to go that far again, but it doesn’t preclude taking some other kind of action against humans for their sins. So, whatever punishment is meted out in future, the ground, other living creatures, and the cycle of nature are safe from destruction (”as long as the earth endures”).

Notes:

• Fifteen cubits - the height of the water above the highest mountains - come to 22 and a half feet.
• According to Wikipedia ravens “have high intelligence and are perhaps the smartest birds. Their intelligence might be on par with canids such as wolves and some breeds of Dog.”
• The reference to the “clean birds” of whom some are sacrificed indicates that there are unclean ones after all.
• Noah sacrifices a large number of animals indeed: he takes “of every clean animal and of every clean bird”. (This is only made possible by changing the number of animals to seven pairs of each kind, rather than just two. Only one pair of unclean animals is needed since they are not suitable to be sacrificed.)
• How did the humans and animals get down off the highest mountain in the Near East?
• The questions remain: why are humans inclined to evil, and why is God apparently powerless to change them?
• The new gene pool, although larger than the original, is still too small to ensure a viable continuation of humankind.
• There are a number of flood stories from Sumer, Babylonia and Greece, as well as the Bible. Livius.org has some great coverage of the various stories and their origins. They also compare versions in a handy table. According to the site it is speculated that there may have a been a historical flood in southern Babylonia in the twenty-eighth century BCE.

Image 1: The Flood by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 – 1564)
Image 2: The Flood by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (1609 – 1684)

Noahs, Noahs everywhere

There are a number of flood stories from Sumer, Babylonia and Greece, in addition to the Bible’s. Livius.org has some great coverage of the various stories and their origins. They also compare versions in a handy table. According to the site it is speculated that there may have a been a historical flood in southern Babylonia in the twenty-eighth century BCE.

Mesopotamian versions of the story of the flood (and of Gilgamesh) exist in both Sumerian and Akkadian. The Atrahasîs story is an Akkadian myth.

The Flood in The Story of Atrahasîs

Before the creation of humans the gods had to do all the work themselves. Having grown tired of their toil (digging out the Tigris and Euphrates) they decide to show their displeasure by launching an attack on the house of Enlil (”Lord Wind”, highest-ranked god along with An). Informed that the gods were not going back to work ever Enlil bursts into tears and offers to resign his position - being in charge of earth.

Enki (”Lord of the soil”) suggests instead that the birth goddess Nintur create man to do the work. The raw material used to create humans (clay made of divine flesh and blood) is procured by killing one of the gods, We-e, who originally came up with the bright idea to rebel. Womb deities tread the clay; 14 pieces are removed from it, and separated into 2 columns of 7 each. From these 2 columns of clay a male and a female embryo are fashioned. After 9 months Nintur delivers the babies.

After 1200 years there are so many humans that they are incredibly noisy, and Enlil can’t sleep. He gets the gods to send a plague, hoping to cull the humans back to a tolerable noise level. The wise man Atrahasîs, servant of Enki, appeals to Enki to help stop the plague. Enki tells him to get people to be less noisy, and to get everyone to worship Namtar, the god of the plague. Presently all the offerings and worship make Namtar feel too bad to carry on with the plague and it stops.

After another 1200 years humans have increased so much that the noise level is again intolerable. Enlil gets the gods to send a drought, by having Adad, the god of rain, withhold his rain. (The incredibly long-lived) Atrahasîs goes to Enki again, gets the same advice - about worshipping Adad this time - and pretty soon Adad makes it rain again.

When the noise level again rises to its previous levels all the gods withhold their bounty from humans,and famine and drought reign. But this plan is also foiled by Enki who “accidentally” cause humans to get hold of fish to eat.

Thoroughly cheesed off at the humans (not to mention Enki) Enlil decides to annihilate all the humans by means of a flood. Enki secretly warns Atrahasîs, who builds a huge boat. Atrahasîs explains this action to the town elders by saying that he was fleeing because of the enmity between his personal god Enki and Enlil. He loads all kinds of animals and his family. The storm lasts 7 days and 7 nights. Atrahasîs gives thanks for being saved by means of a sacrifice, and all the gods, who had gone hungry after the destruction of all humans (since offerings disappeared with humankind) again have nourishment.

In order to prevent humans from becoming a nuisance to the gods again Enki and Nintur come up with forms of birth control. Gods being gods, the birth control takes the form of:

• a supply of barren women,
• a demon (Pashittu) who kills children at birth, and
• new categories of priestesses prohibited from having children.

Better than wholesale destruction of all humans I guess.

Notes:

• Enlil equals “force”: he is the power in “growing weather”, administrator of earth and humans, and also the storm - he is capable of violence and destruction.
• Enki equals “cunning: he is the rival of Ninhursaga, one of the three ruling gods, the others being An and Enlil. He “persuades, tricks or evades to gain his ends”. Enki “personifies the numinous powers in the sweet waters in rivers and marshes or rain”.

The Flood in the Gilgamesh epic

The epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of the hero Gilgamesh and his beloved friend Enkidu, and the former’s search for immortality. Apparently there is a historical figure behind Gilgamesh, the ruler of the city of Uruk (Erekh in the Bible), circa 2600 BCE. The Third Dynasty of Ur celebrated Gilgamesh as their ancestor, and its court poets waxed lyrical about him around 2100 BCE. What Thorkild Jacobsen calls “the Gilgamesh Epic proper” dates back to 1600 BCE. It was written in Akkadian, and was preserved in copies dating back to 600 BCE, found in Ashurbanipal’s Nineveh library.

Gilgamesh journeys to the island of his ancestor Utanapishtim, in search of eternal life after his friend Enkidu dies. Utanapishtim tells him that he was warned about the coming of the flood by his lord Ea, and built an ark. Also in the ark, and saved from the waters, were his family and paired animals. Afterwards the gods bestowed immortality on Utanapishtim, grateful that he saved humanitity and the animals from extinction. Gilgamesh is terribly disappointed since Utanapishtim’s story means that his immortality was the result of a set of circumstances that won’t recur. After further adventures Gilgamesh accepts his mortality.

Notes

• Thorkild says that textual evidence suggests that the flood story was not originally part of the Gilgamesh epic.
• The Gilgamesh story features a serpent that steals the plant of rejuvenation.

Stories summarised and quotes taken from The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, by Thorkild Jacobsen.

The Greek version of the flood

According to Wikipedia the most detailed version of this story is to be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE).

The flood is sent by Zeus to destroy evil humankind, who indulges in human sacrifice and cannibalism. The Greek Noah is Deucalion, son of Prometheus (who stole fire form the gods), who builds an ark after being warned by his father. He and his wife Pyrrha sail around for nine days and nine nights, and land on mount Parnassus. In this myth the earth is populated by means of an act of magic. Deucalion and Pyrrha are granted a wish, and wish for the earth to be repopulated. They are instructed to throw stones over their shoulders, and these become men (from Deucalion’s stone) and women (from Pyrrha’s stone), who repopulate the earth.

Similar to the Bible flood myth, in which the descendants of Noah give rise to for all the OT nations, the descendants of Deucalion himself become the different Greek tribes.

No animals are saved in this form of the story.

Wickedness its own punishment

Genesis 5 opens with another list of descendants of Adam. (Adam is now used as a proper name for the first time, so say the Notes.) This genealogy is close to the one in 4 - they are speculated to be oral variants. Recurring or similar names are in bold; the age of death is in brackets:

First genealogy		Second genealogy
Father	Firstborn	Father	Firstborn
Adam	Cain	Adam (930)	Seth
Cain	Enoch	Seth (912)	Enosh
Enoch	Irad	Enosh (905)	Kenan
Irad	Mehujael	Kenan (910)	Mahalalel
Mehujael	Methushael	Mahalalel (895)	Jared
Methushael	Lamech	Jared (962)	Enoch
Lamech	Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-cain	Enoch (365)	Methuselah
		Methuselah (969)	Lamech
		Lamech (777)	Noah
		Noah (950)	Shem, Ham, Japheth

So in the first the line ending in Lamech springs from the criminal Cain, and in the other, from Seth, the replacement of Able. (The second doesn’t mention Cain and Able at all.) And in the first Lamech is a criminal himself; in the second he fathers the hero Noah. Enoch is singled out in Genesis 5 by the line “Enoch walked with God” (like Noah later),and unlike the others, who just die, it is said that “God took him”. As he had for Able, God obviously had “regard” for the pious Enoch.

Noah gets his name (derived from the word “relief”) because father Lamech says:

Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.

In Genesis 6 it is the turn of the divine beings to commit sin. The “sons of God” take mortal wives, adding to the multiplying humans. In response God shortens the lifespan of humans to 120 years. The Nephilim, the offspring of the sons of God and human women, are on the one hand “fallen ones” (the literal meaning of their name), and on the other “heroes … of old, warriors of renown”. (What they actually did “of old” is not elaborated on.)

God has now finally had enough of the “wicked” humans: “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually”.

I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created - people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.

It began with disobedience, progressed to lying and murder, and now the earth is described as “corrupt”, because “all flesh had corrupted its ways on it”, and “filled with violence”. It is a pretty terrible picture altogether, especially compared to Eden only a few chapters before. Only Noah is “righteous” and “blameless”, having “walked with God”, and for this reason God establishes a covenant with him. (The covenant is not detailed here.) So Noah is given instructions to build an ark for himself, his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, and for a male and female of every kind of bird, animal, and “creeping thing”.

Description of the Ark:

• Made of cypress wood
• Has rooms
• Covered inside and outside with pitch
• Length: 300 cubits (450 feet)
• Width: 50 cubits (75 feet)
• Height: 30 cubits (45 feet)
• Has a roof
• Has a door in the side
• Has 3 decks

In effect, God wants to start over, with a near clean sweep. The initial creation of humans, or perhaps the initial humans he created, turned out to be a failure, with a few exceptions. The enormity of the wickedness of all flesh justifies the drastic step to “blot it out” from the earth.

Notes:

• According to the Notes “[t]he long lives of the patriarchs before the flood (ten generations) are a sign of the greatness of the ancestors and their distance from the present era.” And here I was thinking they did that to fill up gaps in the genealogy.
• Also in the Notes it is posited that Lamech’s conspicuously “short” lifespan of 365 years may be related to the calendar.
• In this account, originating in the P text, “the animals go in two by two”. In the J text (Genesis 7), Noah takes 7 pairs of all clean and 1 pair of all unclean animals.
• Apparently the word “ark” (tebah) only occurs once more in the Bible; the baby Moses is put into a tebah (which there is translated as “basket”).

Point to ponder: Noah is said to be destined to “bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands”, but I can’t help thinking that building the ark, stocking it with living creatures and provisioning it, and then caring for the animals, etc. amount to a huge amount of work and toil.

Also, it must take quite a lot of mental agility and ingenuity to believe in the literal truth of the OT, given the conflicting accounts one encounters in it …

Image: The Animals Board Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 – 1625)