GENESIS AND THE BABYLONIAN INSCRIPTIONS
During the last thirty years a considerable amount of light has been thrown on the first few chapters of Genesis by the recovery and interpretation of an extensive Babylonian literature. The Assyrian king, Assurbanipal, who reigned in the middle of the seventh century b.c., caused copies of immense numbers of documents from other libraries in the country to be made for his library at Nineveh, some of these writings dating from many hundred years earlier. They comprised works on religion, history, mathematics, law, magic, and astronomy. The copies, like the originals, were on tablets of fine clay, inscribed, whilst in a soft state, with wedge-shaped (cuneiform) characters, and then burned in a furnace till they became hard and dry. These clay tablets are of all sizes, from an inch to more than a foot long, and the museums of Europe and America now possess thousands of them, derived from Assurbanipal’s library and other places. Excavations are still being carried on, with the result that every year sees a large addition to the recovered treasures. In 1872 Mr. George Smith discovered on some of the tablets, which may now be seen in the British Museum, accounts of the Creation and the Flood, written from the religious standpoint of the Babylonians. Many similarities were at once observed between them and the early chapters of Genesis. This will not cause surprise, for the Hebrew and Babylonian peoples were allied branches of the great Semitic race, and it was natural that their ideas respecting the origin of the world, and their traditions as to its primitive history, should have much in common. But these Babylonian records, which have thrown so much light on the character of the early narratives of Genesis, have at the same time done more than anything else to confirm the real divine inspiration of the latter, and their peculiar religious worth. The biblical narratives, when compared with these kindred legends, present differences which are even more striking than the resemblances. And it is these differences which reveal their spiritual value. The Babylonian stories are full of grotesque and polytheistic ideas, while those of the Bible speak only of the one living and true God. Compared with the former, the Scriptures are incomparably truer and grander from a religious point of view. They conveyed to the Hebrews, and they still convey to us, the worthiest conceptions of God and of His relation to the world and men. They are a standing witness to the fact that the nation of Israel enjoyed a peculiar revelation of the true God. If the ‘folk-lore’ of the Hebrews, like that of all other peoples, was inconsistent at many points with our modern knowledge of nature and history, yet it was so purified among them, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, from all taint of heathenism, that, as it stands in the opening chapters of Genesis, it contains nothing inconsistent either with the religion of Jehovah or with the fuller revelation of Jesus Christ.
https://biblia.com/books/commholybbl/Page.p_xxviii
Dummelow’s Commentary on the Holy Bible by J. R. Dummelow
Publisher: Macmillan Co., 1936
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