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Saturday, January 4, 2020

Abraham and His History: Sumarian or Moses?

Nadene Goldfoot
                                                        
Moses carrying the two tablets
with the 10  Commandments
(Deuteronomy 4:13; 10-4)
the 10 words or Decalogue-
the fountainhead of all our laws of 613 others
on Mt. Sinai transmitted through Moses from G-d to Israel

A Christian, Paul Wallis, is a popular speaker, researcher and author of books on spirituality and mysticism. His work probes the world's mythologies for their collective memory of human origins, and their insights for developing our human potential.  He tells of some ancient Sumerian tablets which told the story of Abraham that is identical in our FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES or Torah (Old Testament). He falsely claims that these tablets go back thousands of years before the Torah was written. He calls this a scary truth behind the Bible story.  

The Jewish religion tells us  that Moses wrote the first 5 books which are:  Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deutronomy.  He wrote them while on the Exodus and it was G-d who told him what to write.  Jewish records show that Moses was born in 1391 BCE and died 120 years later in 1271 BCE.   Moses is the Jewish Patriarch who was a wanted man for murder in Egypt and escaped, but returned at age 80 to lead his people out of Egypt and back home which turned out to be the Exodus taking 40 years.  
                                                                         
                                                                         
Sumaria is not on our maps of today.  What and where was it?  It was a region of southern Babylonia from 3200 BCE named after a people who were not Semites like Abraham was. Abram (Abraham) lived in the 2nd millennium BCE or about 1948 BCE.   They had migrated to Babylonia in pre-historic times and founded a series of city-states.  It's culture was the basis of Babylonian civilization and influenced the Semitic inhabitants of Accad (Akkad). So Sumarians were about 1,252 years older than Abraham.  1200 is not 10 thousand years before Abram as Paul Wallis stated. This is not a scary truth but simply his theory.    This region of the Babylonian period was the northern region of the valley between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers which included Babylon, Sippar and other important cities.  Abraham and his father, Terah had come from Ur of this region according to the Torah which infers this, saying  that they came from the EAST.   Akkad was also  an ancient city of Babylonia mentioned in Genesis 10:10, which was the home of Sargon the Great.  
                                                                                
Sargon II had resettled Samaria with Cutheans who intermingled with the
remnants of the former
population and became the ancestors of the Samaritans. 
The Cuthites are mentioned in Josephus, Antiquities Book 11, Chapter 4, as "Cutheans", naming them as those who were brought from Media and Persia and "planted" in Samaria by Sargon- the King of Assyria after he had conquered the 10 tribes of Israel. The Cuthites were also a people living in Samaria around 500 BCE, and were to blame for the postponing of the 2nd temple, in the reign of Cyrus the Great.      
  SARGON THE GREAT was the king of Assyria from 721 to 712 BCE.  He had seized the throne on the death of SHALMANESER III during the siege of the capital of Israel, called Samaria,  which he brought to a successful conclusion when he exiled over 2,000 of the people of Israel.  In 720 BCE, he defeated a military alliance which included the remnants of the Israelites of Samaria.  His reign was marked by a series of victories.  He was assassinated and was succeeded by SENNACHERUB.  



BABYLON was the ancient state of Western Asia, also known in the Bible as the land of SHINAR or the KASDIM (CHALDEES).  In Genesis, it is regarded as the cradle of humanity and as the scene of man's first revolt against G-d which we read in the Tower of Babel.  Man of the early biblical stories find a parallel in Babylonian literatiure like the Flood story.  Abram (Abraham) was born in the city of UR of the Chaldeans, but migrated to Canaan where he later fought Amraphel king of Shinar found in Genesis 14.  The identification of Amraphel with the great Babylonian lawgiver, Hammurabi, now seems unlikely.  Amraphel was the king of Shinar, one of the 5 kings who united to attack the rulers of Sodom and were defeated by Abraham as told in Genesis 14.  

HAMMERABI  was a western Semitic king that ruled in Babylon from 1728-1686 BCE.  His famous legal code was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century.  It concerns many aspects of social life, and its penalties are generally severe, enforcing the Jus Talionis  of Rome, or an eye for an eye principal.  There is much resemblance between this code and biblical legislation and it has been surmised that both arose from a uniform legal tradition rooted in Mesopotamian culture.  However, there are significant differences resulting from the secular and political nature of Hammurabi's legislation, which is based on custom and obedience to the king's will.  The Mosaic Law is a contrast showing the religious and ethical nature of the Torah (Pentateuch) with its appeal to the human conscience.  It's made up of more than the first 10.  It contains 613 principal of laws.   It's as if Moses, well schooled in Egypt since he was the son of the daughter of the Pharoah, was well aware of the Hammerabi Code and changed it to suit the needs of his people now that they were not an enslaved people.  He said that G-d dictated the Torah to him, and indeed, G-d was speaking to him all along.  G-d was the voice in his head. G-d was the cause of his return to Egypt in his old age in the first place.   The Torah continues to be studied and followed today by Jews.  
                                                           

These tablets found were in CUNEIFORM.  This was a writing used in Babylon from 3200 BCE for the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.  The earliest writing we know of dates back to then and was probably invented by the Sumerians, living in major cities with centralized economies in what is now southern Iraq.  It was adopted for other tongues in neighboring lands such as the Horites and Hittites,   Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hattic, Hurrian, Luwian, Sumerian, Urartian, and Old Persian.   Cuneiform was usually written with a wedge-shaped stylos on moist clay tablets.  The signs were originally pictographic but became syllabic.  It was used by the Canaanites and others in the period before the Exodus. 

The enslaved Ivrim (12 sons of Jacob) held in Egypt for 400 years no doubt heard many stories from other newly captured slaves and added them to their repertoire.  Thus...
Moses may have heard different stories from his people on the Exodus, and he added them to the stories he grew up with in Egypt and in his school there as well.  That was the only entertainment they had;  stories, lore from other cultures and their own.  It's what many people believed. 

The story of the Gilgamesh Epic is an amazing story. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia that is often regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature and the second oldest religious text, after the Pyramid Texts. It is an ancient Babylonian creation myth, written in 2100 BCE. The several parallels with the biblical narrative, especially the story of the Flood, indicates that the ancestors of the Jews, the Ivrim in Egypt's slave holdings, may have brought a knowledge of the epic with them from their culture and even much later from Babylon when they returned to rebuild the Temple and before the Torah was completely put together.  Notice the contrast between the consistent monotheism of the Bible and the crude, pagan polytheism of the Babylonian version.  It is striking.   I'll go with Moses as the source of our knowledge about Abram (Abraham), and all in the Torah via his source, Ha Shem (the NAME, G-d) . 
                                                         

The Torah is written in Hebrew from right to left which is still a spoken and written language.  "Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, although the language was not referred to by the name "Hebrew" in the Tanakh itself.  The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family."  " Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE, from the time of Moses till the attack on Judah, taking the people to Babylonia.  
                                                         

 Before the exile biblical Hebrew (BH) was a standardized literary language with distinct idioms for prose and poetry, full-sounding, rich in vocabulary and rhetorical devices.  It borrowed many words from surrounding languages.  There seems to have been a slightly different standard language in the Northern kingdom of Israel.  After the exile, BH continued in use for over 500 years.  That's because Aramaic came into use from 539 to 331 BCE which was the language of officials and spoken by many Jews.  Mishnaic Hebrew emerged as the new colloquial language from 200 BCE which which was the literary language in the 1st century CE.  It's spoken language declined after the wars of 66-70 CE and from 132-135 CE and became more sober, simple and brief; better suited for precise expression.      
                                           

                              



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King James II of England
(1633-1701)
It makes me think of today's hip-hopper in New York trying to speak English with the Englishmen who arrived after the Mayflower of 1620.  Neither would understand the other.  They wouldn't understand their writings, either.  









Besides all this, through DNA we have found the Y haplogroup of men and the mt haplogroup of women, identifying the branches of humans on the tree of life.  The Cohen gene, named for Aaron, brother of Moses who was the father of the Cohens, have been identified as J1 and J2.  We still have Cohens today serving in the synagogues as the 1st readers from the Torah every Saturday who bear this identifiction gene.  Abraham would have also had the same  Y haplogroup, and he had fathered Isaac (by Sarah)and Ishmael (by Hagar).  This makes many Jewish and Arab men bearing the same Y haplogroup.   


Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/ancient-near-east1/the-ancient-near-east-an-introduction/a/cuneiform
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFKDRArS-HMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFKDRArS-HM  Why Are We Here?  A scary truth behind the Bible Story

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