Tag: Babylon
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The Bible and Babylonian Myth (ii)
My previous post showed how the Hebrew Bible writers made use of the Babylonian myth ‘Enuma Elish’ in finalising their own great national epic, and how the conflict between the god Marduk and the goddess Tiamat, hinted at in Genesis 1:2, finds clear parallels in the books of the Psalms and Job. In the Babylonian…
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The Bible and Babylonian Myth
The scrolls of the Hebrew Bible most probably reached their final form after the Israelites’ 6th century BCE return from exile in Babylon. While there, they’d have encountered the ‘Enuma Elish’, the Babylonian myth of creation and the rise of the storm god Marduk to become the chief of their gods. In those days, the…
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Good Old Abraham
Unlike the beginning of the book, containing mostly myth, Genesis 12-50 is mainly folktale and legend. It focuses on four ‘heroes’ from the past – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. From a literary viewpoint, chapters 12-36 contain a series of individual episodes, gathered round each of the first three of these ‘heroes’, and strung together…
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The Tower of Babel – We’ve been Warned
In Genesis 11, the last chapter of its opening ‘primeval history’ (an oxymoron) section, there’s the story of the Tower of Babel. Why does it appear here? In 587 BCE, the remaining southern Israelite kingdom, like its northern counterpart previously, was defeated and most of its people taken into exile in בָּבֶ֫ל (babel) which is…
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‘Once Upon a Time’ (ii) Enuma Elish
As I noted in my 1st post on this theme, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains many echoes of far older, interesting and amusing creation myths, flood stories and epic poems which, because used to train scribes, were widely spread in location and time across the ancient near east. The Hebrew writers/editors used a number of…
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What do we owe the first philosophers?
We owe the very first Greek philosophers a debt of gratitude. It’s true that they learned much, in the way of mathematics, from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia – geometry from the Egyptians and arithmetic from the Babylonians – but the Greeks introduced something new and different. What contributed to its emergence? The…
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WHY is there a Bible Story about Abraham?
On the face of it, there’s a mystery here! If God were looking for someone to be the ‘father’ of his chosen people Israel, why would he choose Abraham, who lived far away in the city of Ur in Babylonia (modern day Iraq)? Later on, in the Book of Joshua, it’s clearly stated that “Abraham…
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