21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 5:25-27: Metushelach

I apologize for not posting yesterday, I put my brain in backward when I got up and worked on a future blog thread instead.

You know M’tushelach; he lived the longest time of anybody in the Bible.

כה וַיְחִ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח שֶׁ֧בַע וּשְׁמֹנִ֛ים שָׁנָ֖ה וּמְאַ֣ת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֖וֹלֶד אֶת־לָֽמֶךְ:

כו וַיְחִ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֗לַח אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הֽוֹלִיד֣וֹ אֶת־לֶ֔מֶךְ שְׁתַּ֤יִם וּשְׁמוֹנִים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּשְׁבַ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֥וֹלֶד בָּנִ֖ים וּבָנֽוֹת:

כז וַיִּֽהְיוּ֙ כָּל־יְמֵ֣י מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח תֵּ֤שַׁע וְשִׁשִּׁים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּתְשַׁ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיָּמֹֽת:

M’tushelach must have lived 187 years -- he sired Lemekh --

M’tushelach must have lived, after his siring Lemekh – 782 years – for he sired sons and daughters.

All the years of M’tushelach were 969 years; he died.

Now for another urban legend. Some people will tell you that these genealogies are copied from the Sumerian kings list.

Not even close.

The kings list is available on line. There is no match in any of the names or ages.

The history of the Sumerian kings list is this: about 2000 BCE, when Utu-Hengel shoved the Gutians out of Mesopotamia after they had ruled for a century or two, he commissioned that the kings lists of all the cities be collected and consolidated. The result was found early in the 20^th century and it had two puzzles in it.

One is that all the kings seem to have reigned consecutively, but an additional tablet turned up later which showed that some of them had reigned concurrently, each in his own city. The scribes fudged the dates to fit the concept of consecutive reigns.

The second was that the great city of Lagash had no representatives in the final list. We don’t know why. It certainly was an important city; one of its rulers, Eannatum II, took over all of Mesopotamia about 2500 BCE and appropriated the name “King of Kish”  to show how important he was. He was defeated by the grandson of a woman king of Mesoptamia, Kug Bau. Her grandson was followed by the famous Sargon of Akkad.

About 1700 BCE, the kings list was expanded with a prequel. In the prequel were names from Mesopotamian literature, like Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh and Dumuzi.

The kings list was first composed when the ancestors of the Jews were already living in the Holy Land, more than three centuries after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain.  When the prequel  was added, they lived in Egypt, about a century before the Exodus.  I discuss this timing on the Fact-Checking page.

What’s more, the kings list originated and was maintained in cuneiform. The Jews didn’t read cuneiform. Their ancestors didn’t read cuneiform. Heck, the scribes didn’t read cuneiform very well. Cuneiform scholars point out problems in the second kings list that identify changes in the understanding of the language since the first kings list, such that the scribes didn’t understand what they copied and made mistakes.

These are the same sort of mistakes that would have occurred if Jews living at the end of the Babylonian Captivity had tried to compose new material using the Biblical Hebrew that they knew only from scripture, not from speaking it on the street: spelling errors, fractured idioms, and so on.

The Jews who wrote Neo-Babylonian at the end of the Babylonian Captivity used the “square” lettering now known as the Hebrew alphabet. The Mesopotamian scribes wrote Neo-Babylonian in royal decrees and religious texts, using cuneiform. The standard “Dick and Jane” for cuneiform was a pagan work, Gilgamesh. The only way Jews would have known Gilgamesh was to get accepted to cuneiform school. There’s plenty of room to doubt that, in an up-and-running monotheistic culture, Jews applied to cuneiform school, where they would be exposed to paganism. It was much easier to learn the square script which had the same number of symbols as the “paleo” Jewish script and recorded the same sounds.

The same argument applies to all Mesopotamian literature that has been found only in cuneiform so far, and that includes Enuma Elish and Hammurabi’s code, as well as Gilgamesh and the kings list.  For a more detailed discussion, see the Fact-Checking blog.