Nadene Goldfoot
Babylonia was known as the land of Shinar or of the Kasdim (Chaldees). Genesis, 1st book in the Bible, refers to Babylonia as the cradle of humanity and as the scene of man's first revolt against G-d with the tower of Babel, a very high ziggurat. The people did build structures with steps that went up as high as they could build them, but then so did the Egyptians with their pyramids. Babylonian literature includes Noah's story of the Flood.
Babylon was a walled city and they used canals for their croplands. It was highly sophisticated, even back 4,000 years ago. They had planted beautiful gardens and palm trees around their ziggurat. However, the people fought over other people's land all the time. " Here the warrior peoples of Assyria reigned with a fearsome hand over Sumerian and Babylonian culture. In their wake were produced systems of writing and communication, literature, a codified set of laws, a calendar and system for ascertaining time. Wheeled vehicles became common---and water management evolved into irrigation dams, drains and basins and personal bathrooms of their era's rich and famous."
When Abraham reached Canaan, he had to fight the king of Shinar, Amraphel, who was one of 5 kings who united to attack the rulers of Sodom and were defeated by Abraham (Gen. 14). Shinar was at first thought to be Sumer, but thought now to be Shanhar, mentione in cuneiform documents. This was either in northern Mesopotamia or in the plain of Babylon. Rulers of Shinar included Nimrod (Gen 10:10) and Amraphel (Gen. 14:1-9). Exiles from Judah were banished there after the destruction of the 1st Temple by the Babylonians. (Is.11:11). Babylon became the symbol of insolent pagan tyranny to our prophets who knew them.
Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king (604-561 BCE) inherited the Assyrian Empire by being victorious over the Assyrian-Egyptian alliance at Carchemish in 605 BCE. Then he conquered all the lands from the Euphrates River to the Egyptian frontier, including Judah. After his conquest of Judah (597 BCE and 586 BCE), he exiled many Jews to Babylon. This took place 1,351 years later after Abraham's birth.
In existence since 2900 B.C., the city of Babylon, under the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar (Circa 605-562 B.C.), had spread on both sides of the Euphrates River. It covered 500 acres. Many of the houses were 3 stories high whose flat roofs were buttressed with timbers packed with mud. For the poor who couldn't afford the luxury of wood, there were circular mud-brick huts supported by a center post, the walls packed with reeds and mud.
Budding plumbers worked their ingenuity with the only available resource in unlimited supply---clay mixed with finely-chopped straw. Copper was known to some extent from the beginning, while bronze was introduced about 2500 B.C. from outlying trade routes; sometimes it was alloyed with tin, sometimes with antimony. Some working in lead (anakum) was developing too at this time, as natives began to rivet, solder, hammer and anneal.
Most streets of Babylon ran parallel or at right angles to the river. They were very narrow in width, from 4-1/2 to 20 ft., and unpaved. They not only provided access to the houses, but served as depositories of rubbish, excrement and filth. Periodically the debris was covered with a layer of clay. In this fashion, as the level of the streets continually rose with the debris, it became necessary to build stairs to go down into the house until the houses were rebuilt at the new level.
Although clay tubs were supposedly reported 200 years earlier in the reign of Sargon the Great, an Assyrian king (721-705 B. C.), most sources agree that there were no bathtubs during this period of history, during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar's "bath" in all actuality was a shower, as slaves poured water over him as he washed with a soap made of ashes of certain plants and fats. Due to the texture of the concoction, his "shower" was probably like a detergent rinse.
There is some confusion over reports of privies at this period in history. Most likely a privy did develop which consisted of a hole in the floor with a cesspool underneath (a practice carried forward to modern times). But others report a more elaborate arrangement of six "toilets" in the palace of Sargon the Great. Those toilets had high seats which brought the latrine off the floor in the western style. Here, archaeologists say they have found connections to drains which discharged into a main sewer. According to their findings, the sewer was 3.28 feet high, and 164 feet long, vaulted over with baked bricks. It ran alongside the outer wall of the palace, beneath a pavement. The sewer sloped downward to allow the sewage to be washed down. Other bathrooms which could not be connected with the sewer system had individual cesspools.
Nebuchadnezzar's palace was built around five courtyards and included his private quarters and his harems. Two rooms behind the throne room contained circular wells. The space between the walls and the wells down to the water level were firmly packed with mud, asphalt and broken brick.
The king's well had three shafts close together---two were oblong, the center one square. Above the well was a wheel and an endless chain with pottery buckets attached, going up one oblong shaft and down the other. The center shaft was used as an inspection pit so a man could clear out the well or repair the machinery. The same type of well is still used today in the area, propelled by animals. In those ancient times, slaves were the primary source of power.
It is thought that men who sought an audience with their ruler performed a kind of ritual washing before entering his sacred presence. Drains have been found beneath the hard-tamped floor of an anteroom. They were made from pots whose bottoms had been knocked out, set against a row of bricks that had been set on edge to form the rim of a basin.
Sumeria was a region, similar to a country but was part of Southern Babylonia named after a non-Semitic people, and Abraham, father of both the Jews and Arabs, was a Semite. . These non-Semites had migrated to the Sumeria region in prehistoric times and founded a series of city-states. It's culture was the basis of the Babylonian civilization and influenced the Semitic inhabitants of Akkad/ACCAD to their north.
Sumaria is not specifically mentioned in the Bible but some early names, such as Nimrod, and Cush, are connected with Sumerian tradition. Its importance in the Bible is that the city of Ur, home of Abraham and his father, Terah, lies in Sumer and is under their laws. Ur of Kasdim, always with that tag on the name, in English as Ur of Chaldees. That denoted the political ruling party of his day.
The Chaldeans of Chaldea (in Hebrew-Kasdim) were a Semitic tribe which migrated to Southern Babylonia and adopted the ancient Babylonian culture. They gradually gained supremacy over the native inhabitants and gave their name to the entire area.
Attempts were made, initially under Merodach-Baladan, to overthrow Assyria, and they finally succeeded in the 7th century BCE under Nabopolassar and his son, Nebuchadnezzar, who established an empire extending from Assyria to the Egyptian border.
This was conquered by the Persians (Iran) in 539 BCE. The fame of the Chaldeans as astrologers made the terms synonymous long after their empire had vanished.
Elam lie east of Babylonia which is the modern Khuzistan. The capital was Susa, the same Shushan of the Book of Esther. The Elamites were not Semites. Semites were the branch of people with Shem, son of Noah, as their origin. According to the Bible, the nation of Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad and Aram were branches from Shem. It was Arpachshad who was father of Eber and ancestor of Abraham.
What would today's DNA testing say about all of this? . "By utilizing high-resolution mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) markers and reanalyzing our previously published Y-chromosomal data, we have found a previously unexplored, genetic connection between Iranian populations and the Arabian Peninsula, likely the result of both ancient and recent gene flow. Furthermore, the regional distribution of mtDNA haplogroups J, I, U2 and U7 also provides evidence of barriers to gene flow posed by the two major Iranian deserts and the Zagros mountain range." So we see we have geography acting as walls between peoples.
"Haplogroup J-M267 defined by the M267 SNP is in modern times most frequent in the Arabian Peninsula: Yemen (up to 76%), Saudi (up to 64%) (Alshamali 2009), Qatar (58%), and Dagestan (up to 56%). J-M267 is generally frequent among Arab Bedouins (62%), Ashkenazi Jews (20%) (Semino 2004), Algeria (up to 35%) (Semino 2004), Iraq (28%) (Semino 2004), Tunisia (up to 31%), Syria (up to 30%), Egypt (up to 20%) (Luis 2004), and the Sinai Peninsula.
To some extent, the frequency of Haplogroup J-M267 collapses at the borders of Arabic/Semitic-speaking territories with mainly non-Arabic/Semitic speaking territories, such as Turkey (9%), Iran (5%), Sunni Indian Muslims (2.3%) and Northern Indian Shia (11%) (Eaaswarkhanth 2009). Some figures above tend to be the larger ones obtained in some studies, while the smaller figures obtained in other studies are omitted. It is also highly frequent among Jews, especially the Kohanim line (46%) (Hammer 2009)." These are the descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses.
Chedorlaomer was the king of Elam who attacked the kings of southern Canaan with 3 of his cohorts and was defeated by Abraham, who is turning out to be quite a leader in battles.
Jews may have lived in Elam from the period of the Babylonian Exile (Is.11:11). Under Persian rule, their numbers were considerable being of importance several centuries later.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.plumbingsupply.com/pmbabylon.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg2010174 DNA
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