Review of ‘The Ark Before Noah’ by Irving Finkle, and Further Thoughts
There is an all too common stance toward ancient history and texts that is prejudiced against the Bible and Christianity. It can be seen in the so-called ‘Renaissance,’ and more so in the so-called ‘Enlightenment’: from the Italian poet Petrarch naming the whole medieval period with its soaring cathedrals as ‘the Dark Ages,’ to the Romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, with its obvious obsession toward ancient Greece and Rome. It is there in the liberal ‘theology’ of nineteenth century Germany, disparaging and dispensing with biblical truth, and casually dismissing its historicity. These professors’ claims and theories turned out to be – and ever more so by the year – utterly unfounded, as the archaeologists dug up the very cities that didn’t exist, and read of the mythical Israelite kings, their battles, and decisions in very substantial clay tablets and stone stele from under the sands. And yet, there exists still, a bias against the Bible, to render it at least less-historical than other historical sources, to weigh it as less foundational a text, as construction and composite more than as source and inspiration.
Some of this bias can be found in Irving Finkle’s book on a recently discovered cuneiform ‘ark’ tablet, which does in many ways give a quite fascinating tour of ancient Mesopotamian writing. He introduces the reader to the tablets and the method of pressing the stylus into the unbaked clay, to the various surviving near-Eastern accounts of the flood and ark, animals to be saved ‘two by two,’ and birds sent to find dry land. The biblical book of Genesis also contains these details. However, the other flood accounts include details such as round coracles, taking treasure on board, and one of the pantheon, Enki, warning of the flood through a reed wall – as Genesis does not. Finkle then gives his theory of how the Bible took shape under the pressures of Babylonian exile.
It is in in this latter section that the worldview in which the whole book is couched is unveiled. Finkle, an expert reader of cuneiform tablets from the vast collections of the British Museum, prejudices the Babylonian origins of the ark and flood story, over the Hebraic. He imagines how the Judeans taken into exile in the 6th century BC would have assembled the Bible from their own and also Babylonian cuneiform texts, desperate to preserve and make sense of their identity and their history, painfully dislocated as they were in a foreign land. In this situation, he envisages the flood stories of Babylon influencing the story of Noah in Genesis. He even suggests that increasingly monotheistic interpretations of Marduk and the Babylonian pantheon of gods may have seemed, generations hence, somewhat synonymous with Jewish monotheism.
Such theories are not uncommon, and other writers have gone much further – even claiming Jewish monotheism as only formed in Babylonian captivity. These kinds of ideas display the tendency to belittle the Bible source and to render Babylon with something of the prestige of ‘Babylon the Great’ that the biblical writers wrote explicitly against. The biblical evidence against such theories is strong. The Old Testament prophets, writing in both the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and both before and at the start of their exiles, all undeniably and steadfastly share the same monotheistic faith in Yahweh, with other nations’ gods deemed idols. The Israelites were a people of a very distinct history, faith, and culture. The Bible tells of their formation as a people called by God, and their painfully real failings toward, and salvation by, this one, true God. To claim that Hebrew monotheism developed during Babylonian captivity requires book after biblical book to be cast aside and branded false. It requires a view of the Israelites as a people of inferior culture, easily influenced, without tradition, and against the evidence. It is surely more plausible that the already established monotheism of Israel and Judea arrived and shook the pantheism of Babylon into some hasty but unsatisfactory amendments. This would not be a one-off occurrence: the sudden pivot to sun-god ‘monotheism’ of ancient Egypt occurs around the same era that the Israelites would have been there as slaves; the adoption of a kind of deism by neo-Platonism occurs when Christianity spreads in the Roman Empire. The same thing keeps happening – when unsatisfactory and inferior belief systems meet the Jewish and Christian God, there is a scramble to adapt, rather than humble acknowledgment of the truth encountered. The Hebrew texts emphasise God’s holiness and his call to purity and right living for people. To believe that these very same texts were designed by a bunch of historical forgers is frankly absurd.
As Jesus later says in Luke 6:43-45 “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
The flood story and the Hebrew Bible, and its cuneiform roots need no Babylonian genesis, not even the partial direction that Finkle suggests plausible. Abraham, the man to whom the promise of being made into a nation was first given, started off a Sumerian. He hailed from the city of Ur, where the moon god Sin was worshipped – and still was in Babylonia in the exilic era – and where the cuneiform script of Akkadian was used. When Abram left on his journey through Caanan with his father, and perhaps with a wealth of herds and servants, tents and possessions, it would be sensible to think that cuneiform went with him – tablets recording the already ancient past, the flood, his antecedents, and unfired tablets ready for legal documents and fresh record keeping. Hebrew was a script that later developed beyond cuneiform roots, but it would be natural to assume that by it the Kingdom of Israel maintained knowledge from the clay-tablet past. What flood story did Abraham carry with him from Ur? What did God reveal further to him of these events, and what to Moses, traditionally the writer of the first biblical books?
To favour the later experience of exile as the source for similarities between the flood stories found on Babylonian clay tablets and in the Hebrew text is to negate the many centuries of Israelite life in the Levant, and their Sumerian ancestry. It is to belittle Israel and their literary culture, which existed in a near-East of well-known tales and retellings of ancient events, about which they surely had their own ancient records. It would seem logical that the Jews arrived in exile, carrying fully formed flood and other narratives, with no need to adopt or adapt from the obviously related, but distinctly different Babylonian tales they encountered, which did not honour Yahweh as the one true God.
Perhaps, for those secularists for whom the Bible has felt culturally familiar, there is indulgence in the hint of the extraordinary that a tablet pulled from the dust can evoke. Perhaps, as evident in poetic writings since the Renaissance, the vague spirituality of a long gone past seems preferential and amenable to the moral and spiritual call of the biblical text, which is alive, which speaks of sin, the need of a saviour, and asks of us our response. Biblical scripture in fact breathes of cuneiform, and further, of the Word beyond time and dust; and for those who can see them, the now translated marks still evoke as miraculously as their first scratches pressed in clay.