Let's say you're all in the same church and I said; «I want you all to write a paper
on why our worship service is better than the church down the street there.
But you're not allowed to tell me anything that the other place does.»
They're gonna make their own assumptions about that. I want to show you something.
Her comment was that a culture is going to make certain assumptions
about what common knowledge is,
like, if you're writing a flood story, there's going to be elements in there
that everybody should just know.
I mean, there's going to be some unique elements in there too.
And that would take us back to Okay, if you're using the raven thing,
that's probably not like in everybody's story. Water's probably in everybody' story,
but the raven thing is a little too narrow. And so you had to be looking at that.
You had to have some reason that that was useful to you.
Okay, we'll come back to the usefulness and reasonable.
I want to show you something I did not have you read this,
and I'm gonna show you two things, I think tonight, and
I've given both of these to John, we'll put these online.
But this is from a book here
«From Babylon to Baghdad: Ancient Iraq and the Modern West.»
And the first or the second, first article, but the second item here;
«The Genesis of Genesis by Victor Hurowitz.»
Hurowitz is a cuneiform guy, and a biblical studies guy. This is from...
is either Biblical Archaeology Review put this out,
or the Biblical Archaeology Society. So «Is The Creation Story Babylonian?»
So he's going through all this stuff, and, you know, there's our buddy George Smith,
we can lay all the blame at his feet, for a lot of this stuff. And then
Delitzsch is going to come into the picture.
But he goes through the different story elements, and then he gets to Lambert,
there's Lambert's article. «All told. Lambert sees the connections
between Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish as relatively few in number.»
Again, you've read the article so that that shouldn't be news to you.
But he also notes something else; «many of the parallels between
the Babylonian poem and the Bible are as common
throughout Near Eastern literature as to be insignificant.»
There you go. That's the point: common knowledge.
That's a legitimate thing, even back here. «As recent scholarship
is making clear, simplistic comparison between Enuma Elish
and the biblical tradition—as if the Bible were directly dependent
on Enuma Elish and it alone—is patently untenable.»
In other words, it's nonsense. «And yet there is clearly some kind of relationship.»
Then he talks a little bit about Delitzsch and Smith. And he has this observation,
he starts looking at, well, let's compare Mesopotamian stuff to other Mesopotamian stuff.
«The author of Enuma Elish is deliberately attributing to Marduk and Babylon
acts ascribed to other gods and cities in other myths.» About the same subject.
«The author is stealing the thunder of these gods,
undermining them in favor of Marduk.»
So what he described is Hurwitz makes the point that you know, if you compare just
the Mesopotamian stuff here, you have an old text and the hero god is you know, Enlil.
But if you go into Babylon, the Babylonian period, which is later; VI century BC,
all of a sudden, it's Marduk. And the Marduk story looks a lot like this older one.
So it isn't just those two, it's more than two. As you acquire and translate
more floods store... or not flood stories, but well, flood or creation,
whatever it is here. His article is wider than just the creation stuff this week,
you begin to notice that the real agenda here is not;
«we're so dumb, we can't come up with a story.
I'm so glad we have a library so I have something to write now I'm going to steal this guy blind
and put my name on it.» That is not the agenda.
The agenda is to use the material theologically.
So what the biblical guys doing is pretty much the same as what everybody else is doing.
But no one is thinking that one is dependent on the other
because they don't have something to write.
It's all about religious and theological messaging. Now, having said that,
again, «it reflects a political-theological competition
over primacy.» So if we say that.
I want to go to the key question here, well, do I even have it? I'm just gonna
give it to you cuz I don't know if I have it at the end exactly. Here's the question.
And I hope you get the point right away. If I'm a Hebrew, an Israelite, a biblical writer,
and I want to write a creation story. And I want to give credit to Yahweh
as the creator, both from my audience and also as sort of a smackdown
to our theological and religious competitors.
How can I possibly do that without "borrowing"? Think about that.
How would you do? There's no way you can do it without dipping into the material.
It would be like me assigning you, let's say, you know, you're all in the same church.
And I said; «I want you all to write a paper on why our worship service
is better than the church down the street there.
But you're not allowed to tell me anything that the other place does.»
Like, how am I supposed to do that? I've got to be able to dip into what they do and say,
to make the comparison. That's the point.
It's not that the biblical writers heads were so empty.
And the Israelites alone are so stupid, that they can't write anything down.
The point is, because they have the agenda they do,
they must do something with the other material.
Sometimes it'll be a thought, put that in my own words.
Sometimes it'll be a specific word or phrase or an item.
Because they want their readers to hook mentally back into the thing
that they are comparing to.
If they can't use the material, there's no way to do it.
It's just not possible. Now, if you're thinking that that reframes entirely
the whole relationship between biblical material and the comparative material,
and this happens, not only with Bible and Babylon,
it happens within Babylon; competing city states, people are used to doing this.
This is how you do theology. This is how you do polemic.
You must dip into the other material or else you got nothing.
You got nothing to say. You got nothing to work with.
So it's not one's intellectually up here. And the other ones are like The Three Stooges.
Okay, no, no, there are no Stooges in this picture.
There are people who know exactly what they're doing and why.