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Religious Pron - Syncretism 2 - Floods

Mar 11, 2022, 1:08 PM

Religious Pron – Syncretism II – Floods

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So how do we know all this stuff? In addition to text written directly on temples, tombs, and monuments, ancient libraries are a great source of information. And they are free of charge, if you know where to dig.

Sample of the Mari Texts found in Syria. 25,000 clay tablets dating back to 2900 BCE, 500 years before the pyramids. Discovered in 1928. Cuneiform writing was a big step up from pictographs like Egyptian heiroglyphics. They were faster to write, smaller, more portable, and far more versatile than clunky pictures. The twitter of its day. Technology baby. Yeah!

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The Amarna letters. 358 Tablets dating from 1300 BCE. Discovered in Amarna, Egypt in 1878. Most ancient texts are incredibly mundane. Like, “You paid me 10 donkeys and I owe you 20 goats and a cow.”

But the one thing all these texts have in common is that they are always very human. Like this king griping to his vassal that his tribute statuette was gold-plated, not solid gold, as per their agreement. Ancient cheapskates. People will be people. Circa 1300 BCE.

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Occasionally there is some real interesting stuff like a poem or a story. Or even just poetic prose like “King Hezekiah is like a caged bird within Jerusalem [during my siege.]” Very vivid. You can read all about it in Kings or Isaiah in the Bible. Or on this clay prism in the British Museum.

It’s the exact same story told two different ways. The Assyrian perspective on this clay prism, the Israelite perspective in the Bible.

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Here’s more. The Ugarit Texts. 1500 tablets dating from 1200 BCE. From Syria in 1929. Notable for having more than 50 ancient poems, as opposed to boring old accounting and inventory stuff. There are more than half a million cuneiform tablets scattered around world museums, with the British Museum having almost 150,000 alone.

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The Ebla Tablets. 6,000 tablets dating from 2500 BCE. From Syria, in 1974. These tablets are incredibly valuable because they proved that the early northern Canaan civilizations were as developed as Egypt and Mesopotamia. For centuries the Canaanites were considered to be rubes compared to their cultured neighbors. But not since 1974. A huge, huge, discovery. Sorry we dissed ya.

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The Ashurbanipal Library. More than 30,000 tablets from the Royal Library of ancient Assyria, 700 BCE. The mother load. From Mosul, Iraq, in 1849. Their predecessors, the Sumerians, even told us how we got writing:

“Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat his message, the Lord of Uruk patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.”

—?Sumerian epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. Circa 1800 BC. That settles the question about writing Thanks, Lord of Uruk!

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This is possibly the earliest example of “writing” in existence, the Kish Tablet from 3500 BCE, found near Ur and Uruk. It represents a mental transition from scratches and marks used for counting, to picture representations, to abstract symbols that can be combined for different words. A big leap for human intellect. But no bewbs pigs.

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Development of 3 language systems from pictograph to abstract.

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But on with the show. Last time we got into syncretism, the inevitable mixing of ideas as cultures and times change.
Without it, we wouldn’t have culinary delicacies like Tex-Mex Quesadilla Hamburgers.

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or Chinese-Korean Mouse Wine.

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or African-Indonesian Fruit-Bat Soup.

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Musical genres like Cute Metal wouldn’t exist.

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And forget about Folk-tronic and Techno-Folk.

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And as for domestic fusions, car-truck classics like the El Camino….well, let’s just be thankful we lived to see it. Tough enough to haul lumber, and still suave enough for that special night on the town with the little lady and her dog...and its jockey.

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The Bible is full of this syncretism fusion. That’s a part of what makes it so awesome. Just on the surface, anyone can see that the New Testament God behaves very differently than the Old Testament God. Not nearly as much wrath, or as many insect plagues...

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or as much smiting.

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And the focus for believers changes from unyielding obedience with 600+ commandments (for Jews), to simple belief and faith (for Christians).

But it’s when you get in deeper, to the detailed document analysis, that the Bible really sings as a text.

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It’s the detailed analysis that shows the amazing amount of cultural and political complexity in the Bible. Four Gospels, 2 creation stories, 2 sets of instructions to Noah - just for starters. And it gets way better from there. Spirituality aside, the Bible reads like a great mystery novel about the people who wrote it, and who it was written about. Like this Noah fellow...

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There are tons of doublets, or different versions of the same story with slightly different details, all through the Bible. And the reason they are told twice, and why they are both are included, is the really interesting stuff. We’ll save most of those juicy mysteries for later.

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But here’s a sample. Once we get to Mesopotamia, which literally means, “land between the rivers” in Greek, there’s gonna be a lot of flood stories. Lots of flood stories. Everybody who lived along the Tigris or Euphrates had a flood story. And like minestrone soup, they all got mixed together.

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In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, a guy named Utnapishtim is told by his god Ea to build a giant boat and get ready because a flood is coming that will wipe out all life.

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Utnapishtim on his boat, saving mankind, and a few lucky animals.

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And 300 years before him, a Sumerian king named Zuisudra got the same warning from his god – Build a boat and save your axx.

***Severe Weather Alert – Flash Flood Warning ***

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The Zuisudra Flood Tablet. From the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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And a guy named Atra-hasis got the same instructions even before Utnapishtim and Zuisudra. And these are only some of the different flood stories in ancient Mesopotamia alone.

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Everybody on board! This ship is shoving off! Don’t worry. This’ll probably just be a three-hour tour.

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The bottom line is, if you live near turbulent water, it will affect your life.

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The flood story of King Atra-hasis. From the British Museum.

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Even Led Zeppelin got in on the act and tried to warn us about the levee breaking, in more contemporary times. And Memphis Minnie before them. Syncretization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3fodiK9rY
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Now, if you’ve ever traveled to the Judean desert, you might have to wait a few thousand years for a flood. There’s not a lot of water, or green, to be found there. There’s a reason it was called “the land of milk and honey.”

It could have meant a land of prosperity. But then again, there is nothing green about either milk, or honey.

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Kinda white and milky, I guess…

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Honey is sort of brown, if you squint.

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Years ago I visited the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, and I was expecting to see a lush, green jungle just like in the medieval paintings I had seen of it.

Looking around at all the rocks and scrubs, I whimsically commented, “this isn’t much of a garden.” Our guide replied, “Here, if something grows, we call it a garden.”

Point taken.

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900 year old olive trees, rocks, and a lot of dirt, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

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900 years old would put them being planted just about the time the Crusaders were in Jerusalem. Cool.

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So a flood story didn’t, and still doesn’t, make a lot of sense in bone dry Israel. But if you lived say, at the mouth of the Euphrates 4000 years ago, you might have wanted to have a life jacket handy all the time. Because you never knew when the river was gonna rise up and wash your world away.

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So terrain mattered, just as it did in Egypt by the peaceful and easy Nile, and the impact it had on ancient writers influenced what they wrote about, in a big way.

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Now, to tie all this stuff together...floods, and syncretism, and writing, next time, we’ll take a look at one of the most famous stories in the Bible, Noah and that famous flood.

Then we'll take a look at tradition, a very big part of all of this, before moving on to Mesopotamian civilizations and their religions and floods.

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There are tons and tons of other sources of ancient information. Literally hundreds of ancient cities, only a fraction of which have been excavated to any degree.

Tell Lysta, in Turkey. Paul healed a man and was stoned here, per the Bible. Acts 14:8-20. Looks like it has remained untouched since then.

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The Alalakh Texts. Over 500 tablets from 2000 BCE. Discovered in 1937 in southeast Turkey. Some even come with clay envelopes. Clay postage not included.

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And it doesn’t even take uncovering buried cities to make historic discoveries. These caves, near Qumran just outside of Jerusalem, are where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947.

Kind of a big deal. And a great story about human politics and machinations, too.

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Not always, Ron. Not always. It’s rarely that simple. Not when people are involved.

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The Nag Hammadi Library. Thirteen papyrus codices from 100 AD. Found in 1945, in Egypt. Nice hands for a dirt-digging archaeologist. Palmolive, I presume?

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And here’s the current Holy Grail of Mesopotamia. The missing city of Akkad. Oh it’s there, just like Troy was, and is.

Akkad was a major, major civilization on the timeline between the Sumerian Empire and the Babylonian Empire. Most of its client and vassal cities are known and have been discovered, but the capital city itself remains hidden.

It would be like digging up America in the future, but not being able to locate Washington, D.C. Everybody talks about it, you find statues and letters and pottery that came from there, but you just can’t pinpoint the place. It’s a real life Indiana Jones mystery.

We know when and where the empire was, but where was the capital city itself? Nobody knows.

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The great King Sargon II of the missing city of Akkad. With a beard groomed for a king. He sat with his court there, but didn’t leave directions on how to get back to the place. So we have to find it the hard way. Lots and lots of digging.

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Good post 88. Always good discussion...

>A Christ was coming from before the world was created.

This is one of the major differences between Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and other religions. They all expected a messiah, eventually. But there are important differences, and the timing is different. And how the Biblical text is interpreted of course, relies on personal faith. Here comes another book <img border=

">">">">">

Actually, I'll have a post or two, or several, to specifically to address Messianism. Here's a sampler though.

For Jews, while there was long the idea of "post-world" perfection, no individual was expected to do that alone. Yahweh would deliver it, without a messiah needed. Keep in mind that in Judaism, "Biblical" means the first 5 books of the Bible, the Torah. Post-Biblical means the period after their partial destruction by Assyria in 722 BCE through their captivity in Babylon in 586 BCE to the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD. So "Post-Biblical" to them means that 500-700 year period between Assyrian and Babylon and Rome. All the prophets, etc. And of course, they don't really follow the New Testament.

In their belief, the idea of a messiah, as a person, developed during this time. They have their evidence all through the post-Torah books, but this is the gist of it:

Psalm 18:50 "He gives his king great victories; he shows unfailing love to his anointed, to David and to his descendants forever."

So they are looking for a man to win "victories", just like the Bible says, and to be a descendant of David, just like the Bible says. That's in the context of them recently getting smashed by foreign powers. They actually considered Cyrus of Persia to be a messiah because he delivered them from Babylonian captivity with "victories." After Rome smashed them, they were, and are, looking for another Cyrus.

In Christianity, "victories" means something other than military victories.

And then there's the rub over the Davidic hereditary line. Jesus, being the son of God (and God himself via the Trinity concept) isn't of the human, Davidic, line. They point the to words of God himself, in the Bible.

So the Jews say "God said David's descendant would be the messiah", and the Christians say "God said Jesus would be the messiah", and they are both right. God said both.

After Jesus's death the Christians did trace Jesus back to David through Mary, since Joseph doesn't really apply here. But the Jews say matrilineal doesn't work, even if the Christians can show that lineage.

In Islam, Jesus is sort of an administrator. They have another expected messiah, called the Mahdi (who is unknown at this point), who will do all the heavy lifting and combat while Jesus watches over him and guides him. Then, like MacArthur returning to the Philippines, Jesus will return to earth and reign over the peace:

"The Hour will [of redemption] will not be established until the son of Mary (Mariam) (i.e. Jesus) descends amongst you as a just ruler."

In Buddhism, messianism is slightly different still. There, the "Maitreya" or successor to the Buddha himself, will descend to earth and aid people in their quest for spiritual enlightenment, not save them militarily or bring them salvation in any way.

So you can see that although the idea of a man "saving" others is common, how he saves them, and what he saves them from, is all very different. And once again, which history you grew up in, or which one you follow, affects why you think what you think. <img border=

">">">">">

Religious Pron - Syncretism 2 - Floods

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But:

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Superb work

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I watched the dog/puppy clip a dozen times.

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You would have earned a TU for Baby Metal alone but it’s all

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