There is no critical analysis of these sources. I am asking a simple question, how do these souces determine the direction of influence? Answer, it's assumed that the ones who wrote it first were the original source, and the ones who wrote it later borrowed from the first.
I can say the same thing about you, Joel. You don't like the question, because it sinks the whole theory, so you hand wave it away saying "but they're scholars, they must have considered this and ruled it out". No, it doesn't appear that they have.
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This is all a strawman and other fallacies at once. You demand scholarship yet your main point is that why didn't the Israelites influence the Mesopotamians.
Which no scholar said ever. There is no evidence the Israelites existed before 1200 BCE. The Mesopotamian myths are from around 3500 BCE.
And STILL you have no evidence.
So first we need more scholarship. I'm not writing long sections of books so worldhistory will have to summarize.
age of mesopotamian cuneiform
around 3500 BC
c. 35th century BC
LanguagesSumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hu
Cuneiform
Cuneiform is a system of
writing first developed by the ancient
Sumerians of
Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE. It is considered the most significant among the many cultural contributions of the Sumerians and the greatest among those of the
Sumerian city of
Uruk, which advanced the writing of cuneiform c. 3200 BCE and allowed for the creation of
literature.
All of the great Mesopotamian civilizations used cuneiform until it was abandoned in favour of the alphabetic
script at some point after 100 BCE, including:
When the ancient cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia were discovered and deciphered in the late 19th century, they would literally transform human understanding of history. Prior to their discovery, the
Bible was considered the oldest and most authoritative book in the world and nothing was known of the ancient Sumerian
civilization.
Many biblical texts were thought to be original until cuneiform was deciphered. The Fall of Man and the Great Flood were understood as literal events in human history dictated by God to the author (or authors) of Genesis but were now recognized as Mesopotamian myths which Hebrew scribes had embellished on from
The Myth of Etana and the
Atrahasis. The biblical story of the
Garden of Eden could now be understood as a myth derived from the
Enuma Elish and other Mesopotamian works. The
Book of Job, far from being an actual historical account of an individual's unjust suffering, could now be recognized as a literary motif belonging to a Mesopotamian tradition following the discovery of the earlier
Ludlul-Bel-Nemeqi text which relates a similar story.
The concept of a dying and reviving god who goes down into the underworld and then returns to life, presented as a novel concept in
the gospels of the New Testament, was now understood as an ancient paradigm first expressed in
Mesopotamian literature in the poem
The Descent of Inanna. The very model of many of the narratives of the Bible, including the
gospels, could now be read in light of the discovery of
Mesopotamian naru literature which took a figure from history and embellished upon his achievements in order to relay an important moral and cultural message.
Prior to this time, as noted, the Bible was considered the oldest book in the world, and the Song of
Solomon was thought to be the oldest love poem, but all of that changed with the discovery and decipherment of cuneiform. The oldest love poem in the world is now recognized as
The Love Song of Shu-Sin dated to 2000 BCE, long before The Song of Solomon was written. These advances in understanding were all made by the 19th-century archaeologists and scholars sent to Mesopotamia to substantiate biblical stories through physical evidence, but, in fact, what they discovered was precisely the opposite of what they had been sent to find.
Along with other Assyriologists (among them, T. G. Pinches and Edwin Norris), Rawlinson spearheaded the development of Mesopotamian language studies, and his
Cuneiform Inscriptions of Ancient Babylon and Assyria, along with his other works, became the standard reference on the subject following their publication in the 1860s and remain respected scholarly works into the present day.
The literature of Mesopotamia significantly informed written works which came after. Mesopotamian literary motifs can be detected in the works of
Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and
Roman works and still resonate in the present day through the biblical narratives which they inform. When George Smith deciphered cuneiform he dramatically changed the way human beings would understand their history.
The accepted version of the creation of the world, original sin, and many of the other precepts by which people had been living their lives were all challenged by the revelation of Mesopotamian – largely Sumerian – literature. Since the discovery and decipherment of cuneiform, the history of civilization and human progress has been radically revised from the understanding of only 200 years ago, and further revisions are expected as more cuneiform tablets are discovered and translated for the modern age.
