Fact-Checking the Torah -- when was that?

Now I’m going to sum up another reason why Genesis, up to about chapter 12, is not based on Mesopotamian texts discussed to this point.

The oldest example of Enuma Elish that we have dates to 2200 BCE.  If the ancestors of the Jews were still in Mesopotamia at the time, they would have been exposed to the wars of Sargon and his descendants before they left.  That’s not in Torah, unlike the wine motif from Anatolia of the 4000s BCE.

The original Sumerian kings list dates to 2000 BCE.  If the ancestors of the Jews were still in Mesopotamia at the time, they would have been exposed to the wars of Naram-Sin, the Gutian invasion and the war that ended it.  That’s not in Torah, unlike the 2350 BCE destruction of the cities of the plain.

The twelve-tablet Gilgamesh and the identical flood story in Atra-Hasis, plus the revised Kings List that included Zidusura and Gilgamesh, date to 1700 BCE.  If the ancestors of the Jews were still in Mesopotamia at this time, they could not have experienced the agricultural problems in Egypt at the end of the reign of Amenemhet III in the 1800s BCE.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to bust a number of urban legends which are mutually incompatible chronologically.  Each urban legend has consequences which I will point out.  The logical or scientific reader will then have to decide which legend(s) to throw out.

For this week, it’s going to be very hard for most people to give up the claim that Jewish law is a version of Hammurabi’s law from the 1700s BCE.  That conflicts with the timing of the Egyptian slavery which ended about 1630 BCE, as I will discuss later.  Plus there has to be some chronicle or other written evidence of the destruction of the cities of the plain from which the ancestors of the Jews could get that story, and nobody has seen that yet.

The monument on which Hammurabi’s code was written about 1770 BCE, was found in 1901 and translated by 1903 by C.H.W. Johns.  To that point nobody knew of a regular law code older than the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which only hints at morality or laws by the 42 confessions the soul makes after death.  (We do now, but we’re busting an urban legend.)

The online versions of the translation of Hammurabi’s code reveal one thing: like the first aliyah of Genesis and Noach’s flood, it is over 80% different in verbiage from Jewish law and has significant rules that Jewish law rejects.  The latter include laws regulating female temple servants and priestesses.

People who want to hold onto Hammurabi’s code, therefore, have to reconcile the problem of the 2350 BCE date, 600 years earlier, for the destruction of the cities of the plain, as well as the differences in subjects of laws and effects of the laws.  Then they would have to realize that Hammurabi’s code, like Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh and the Kings list, was written in cuneiform.  Which I already said the Jews couldn’t read because they couldn’t get into cuneiform school. 

Here's hoping you understand that cuneiform texts could only influence people who could read them -- which does not include the Jews or their forebears -- the subject of the next post.

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