The writing on these tablets, a mix of phonetic signs and visual symbols, was done with a sharpened reed that, when pressed into the moist clay, left wedge-like marks. Since the word “wedge” is cuneus in Latin, the script became known as cuneiform, that is, “wedge-shaped.” Once widely used by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and other peoples of Mesopotamia, cuneiform was gradually displaced by the simpler, easier writing in alphabetic characters, and by the time the Romans took control of the region, it had fallen into disuse. The last-known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was made in 75 CE. Before long the wedge-shaped marks became completely indecipherable.
When the tablets could no longer be read—when they had become like the old floppy disks to which I no longer have access—the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis, and Gilgamesh sank into a dreamless sleep. It did not happen suddenly: their existence must have lingered in the memories of those who recalled distant times when the account of creation was read aloud from the ziggurat. But as vanquished Babylon and the other Mesopotamian cities fell into ruin, the ancient stories gradually ceased to be told. With their vanishing any grasp of the influence the stories had once had upon the imagination of everyone in their orbit, from mighty kings to Hebrew slaves, vanished as well.
In the scriptures that they compiled after their return from exile, the adherents of Yahweh had no interest in acknowledging a debt to Babylonian myths. On the contrary, they were determined to eradicate anything that looked like a trace of an “abomination.” This eradication—a massive, collective act of forgetting—was largely successful. With the passing of the centuries, less and less was known about Babylon and its neighboring cities, apart from what was written in the Bible. Marduk shrunk into a generic idol, one of those stocks and stones that only a fool could believe in. Nebuchadnezzar became a grotesque tyrant who was reduced to madness—“he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws” (Daniel 4:33)—and then, recovering his wits, he humbly acknowledged the sovereignty of Yahweh.
More reliable, if quite modest, information about Babylonian religion remained just barely accessible, thanks to a priest of Marduk named Berossus who was active in the early third century BCE. A gifted astronomer, he is credited with the invention of the semicircular sundial hollowed into a cubical block, Berossus also wrote in Greek a History of Babylonia. That history was lost, but before its disappearance it was excerpted in the work of two later historians. That work in turn was lost, but before vanishing it was used by two still-later historians. Their work too was lost, but not before it was used in the third century CE by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea. Eusebius’s original Greek text was also lost, but an Armenian translation of it somehow survived. The early Christians who encountered Eusebius might have noticed that the ancient Babylonians had a creation myth with certain odd echoes of Genesis. Of course, given the extreme unreliability of the transmission—a translation of a lost copy of a lost copy of a lost copy of a lost original—it was perfectly reasonable to think that any echoes were simply garbled versions of the Hebrew account, which was assumed to be far more ancient and, in any case, was taken on faith to be true.
In the fullness of time then, the psalmist’s fondest dream had come true. No one any longer worshiped Marduk (or Baal or El, the comparable West-Semitic storm gods). He became extinct, like Ishtar, Shamash, Ashur, and innumerable other vanquished deities. (Marduk today is principally known as the name of a Swedish heavy metal band.) In the wake of violent conquest, ruthless pillaging, and long, slow neglect, all that remained of Babylon and the neighboring cities were enormous mounds of dirt, with scarcely a broken pillar or a headless statue above the ground to indicate what had once been there.
But by a strange twist of fate, the historical disasters that destroyed so many records of past civilizations helped to preserve these, for when in wars and invasions the great Mesopotamian cities were burned down, the sun-dried tablets in the libraries and royal archives were in effect baked into durable form. In their death-agonies, the palaces and the temples had become kilns. Even the violent floods that on rare occasion swept through the ruins could not wash away what these kilns had hardened. Moreover, there was no incentive to recycle or destroy the indecipherable texts on which permanence had been so unwittingly conferred. Parchments could be scraped clean of whatever had been written on them and then reused; papyri were convenient for lighting fires and keeping the stove warm. But fire-hardened clay tablets were worthless: if you smashed them, all you got was a handful of dust.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, foreign travelers to the Near East occasionally came across the cuneiform tablets and brought some home as souvenirs or as objects to puzzle over. But it was not until the nineteenth century that the extent of what had survived was grasped. From the 1830s on, Western archaeologists began systematic explorations of the buried cities along the Tigris and Euphrates, discovering what were evidently the archives of rulers whose scribes kept careful records. It turned out that the ancient Mesopotamians had systematically gathered and saved tablets; they had in effect invented the idea of the library. In his capital Nineveh, on the eastern bank of the Tigris, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE assembled the largest, most comprehensive, and best-organized library ever created. Ashurbanipal—whom the Greeks called Sardanapalus—had a personal interest in these collections: unlike most of the region’s kings, he had received scribal training and was proud of his ability to read not only the simplified cuneiform of his contemporaries but also the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian scripts. Centuries before the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt established their famous library at Alexandria, this learned ruler in what is now northern Iraq brought together under his lordly gaze the wisdom of the whole world.
And then it was all gone. In 612 BCE, shortly after Ashurbanipal’s death, Nineveh was besieged by a coalition of enemies. The walls were breached, and after fierce house-to-house fighting, the city was sacked, its houses and temples set on fire, its citizens massacred. In the murderous conflagration that destroyed the city, the library’s shelves, on which cuneiform tablets in their thousands had been carefully arrayed, collapsed; the floors buckled with them; and the whole mass was buried under tons of rubble.
Nineveh was abandoned and forgotten until the 1840s, when archaeologists burrowing through the rubble began to make their finds. Along with the more obviously valuable and impressive statues, reliefs, and ornamental gateways, huge numbers of tablets or fragments of tablets—at the time completely unreadable—were shipped back to European imperial capitals and particularly to London. The archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam, a Chaldean Christian who converted to Anglicanism and eventually became a British subject, is alone credited with adding some 134,000 tablets to the holdings of the British Museum.
As with the deciphering of hieroglyphics by means of the Rosetta Stone, the key to cracking the cuneiform code was the discovery of a trilingual inscription. “I am Darius the king,” it began, in parallel Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian scripts, “the son of Hystaspes, the Achaemenid, the King of Kings, the Persian, the king of Persia… .” Two of the scripts were in legible script; the third was in cuneiform. Slowly, painstakingly, the mystery of the tablets began to be unraveled. The central figure in grasping their significance was a young working-class banknote engraver, George Smith, who had become captivated by the objects on display in the sculpture galleries of the British Museum. With little formal education and no social credentials but driven by a deep fascination, Smith read everything that he could get his hands on in the nascent field of Assyriology. He soon began to show an extraordinary aptitude for deciphering the wedge-shaped signs.
Laboring feverishly over newly found tablets as well as tablets that had been languishing on the shelves for years, Smith identified and succeeded in translating the Enuma Elish. After two thousand years of forgetting,
both deliberate and accidental, it became clear that the Hebrew origin story had not stood alone, in solitary splendor. The opening of Genesis was evidently a response to what the captives heard over and over again when they sat and wept by the waters of Babylon. Those captives determined not to swell the number of the lullu, the black-headed people who sang hymns to Marduk. They would make clear that it was Yahweh, not Marduk, who fashioned the universe and who created the first humans.
The sublime simplicity of the opening of Genesis was polemical. Creation for the Hebrews was not a tangle of incest, conspiracy, and intergenerational bloodletting; it was the act of Yahweh and Yahweh alone. He did not grapple with a rival or impregnate a goddess. Indeed there was no one else in all the vastness at the beginning of things, no consort, no assistance, and no resistance. The humans were created in God’s image and likeness, animated not with the blood of a murdered rival but with his own breath. He did not produce these creatures in order to serve him and make his divine existence easier. God did not need servants. The building of cities, the digging of canals, the tending of the flocks, and the exhausting work in the fields were of no interest to him. Rest—the repose of the seventh day—was important to Yahweh, as it was to Apsu, but it could not be impertinently threatened or disturbed. When Yahweh decided to take his rest, he simply took it.
The Hebrews were determined to distinguish themselves—from the very beginning of time—from their former captors. The Genesis storyteller was in effect burying a hated past. At the same time, in the wake of Smith’s deciphering, it was possible to catch distant echoes, like sounds coming to us from under mounds of rubble, of what had been buried. A god, hovering over the restless deep, engenders everything that will come to exist; he divides the waters in two, shaping one into the sky and the other into the sea; he forms a primordial human from clay and assigns him agricultural work. Are we in Jerusalem or Babylon?
The echoes were striking enough in themselves, but they were amplified to a spectacular degree in a further shattered tablet, partly caked with deposits of lime still covering some of the cuneiform signs, that Smith came across in November 1872. The young Assyriologist found himself reading what seemed to be an account of a devastating flood and a boat that enabled a tiny remnant of humanity to survive. Once the tablet was thoroughly cleaned, he grasped that his initial surmise was correct. When he began to read over the lines and saw that “they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there,” a colleague later recalled,
he said, “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.” Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself.
The undressing that so shocked Smith’s colleague may, as the literary historian David Damrosch has observed, have been only a loosened collar: this was, after all, Victorian England. But almost any level of excitement could have been justified by the discovery.
Here at last, resurrected from a distant past, was overwhelmingly powerful evidence of the deep currents that linked ancient Mesopotamian mythology and the Hebrew scriptures. Smith had found a flood story considerably older than the date on which Moses was traditionally said to have received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. It is not simply that the clay tablets, which reach back astoundingly to 1800 BCE, gave an account of an immense, destructive deluge; they included many of the key elements that feature in the Noah story: the enraged god’s determination to eradicate all human life; lifesaving advice to one particular human who finds divine favor; the careful building and provisioning of the ark; the terrifying storm and rising waters; the ark coming to rest on a mountaintop; the release of birds to see if the waters had receded; the offering of a sweet-smelling sacrifice in gratitude for the recovery of dry land.
The flood story that Smith initially happened upon—out of the vast number of tablets in the storeroom of the British Museum—was from the great epic Gilgamesh, but it was told there in abbreviated form. Continuing his search, the indefatigable scholar managed to find an even older and more complete version. This version, the Atrahasis, linked the flood, in a manner reminiscent of the Enuma Elish, to the problem of noise, but now it was not the noise of the junior gods but human noise. Humans had been created in order to help out with the most disagreeable chores, but they had an irrepressible penchant to reproduce:
The land had grown wide, the peoples had increased,
The land was bellowing like a bull.
The god was disturbed with their uproar.
This restless god repeatedly tried to reduce the human population through a succession of catastrophes—plague, drought, and crop failure—but his efforts were thwarted each time by a fellow god, Enki. Enki had established a pleasant relationship with a particularly intelligent human—Atrahasis in Akkadian means “Extra Wise”—to whom he gave advice on ways to avert through sacrifice the worst consequences of the divine attacks. After every disaster, the human population, and with it the unbearable human noise, rebounded.
At last, losing patience, the angry, sleep-deprived god decided to do away with humans once and for all by unleashing a terrible flood. Enki advised Atrahasis to abandon his house and build a boat—“Forsake possessions, and save life”—in order to survive. The flood was suitably catastrophic: at the spectacle of destruction, the corpses clogging the river like dragonflies, Atrahasis’s “heart was broken, and he was retching gall.” But thanks to the boat, a remnant of humanity was saved.
In the wake of this survival, a brilliant solution—a kind of sinister bargain—was finally devised. From henceforth the great god would not try to eliminate humanity altogether. He would simply reduce the human population on a regular basis by making some women infertile and by causing large-scale infant mortality. Misery for humans, but happiness for a god who wanted his rest.
The Genesis storyteller embraced this ancient text, taking over for his tale of Noah both the general outline and many specific details. But something happened in the retelling, something that marked off a decisive difference between the Hebrews and the Babylonians. The Babylonian god was angry because his rest was disturbed, but not so the Hebrew god. Yahweh did not need to sleep, and he was indifferent to human noise. He did not want to reduce human numbers; indeed he commanded the first humans to be fruitful and multiply.
Fine. But why then did he unleash the flood? What was his motive? In the Babylonian source, it all makes sense, from the creation of the first humans to their noisy multiplication to the attempt to exterminate them and finally to the compromise that would keep the burgeoning population down through infertility and infant mortality. Noise is a characteristic of humans, as everyone who has lived in a crowded city knows particularly well. The myth of Atrahasis seems perfectly suited to an urban culture such as that of Babylon.
But the Hebrews did not think of themselves primarily as urban dwellers; they clung, if only in fantasy, to their rural or nomadic roots. Imagining an all-powerful God who is indifferent to noise, they gave him an entirely different motivation for murderous anger: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). To the Hebrews’ way of thinking, there had to be a moral reason that accounted for the disasters that humans encounter, something in their actions and their inner lives (“every imagination of the thoughts of his heart”). The flood was a response to human evil.
This radical rewriting of the ancient Mesopotamian story was in its way a tremendous achievement. Humans—the black-headed people who reproduce and swarm noisily across the land—must not be conceived of as thoughtless nuisances. They bear moral responsibility for their actions. Even those things that seem to link them to the fate of all living creatures, such as their shared vulnerability to a disaster like the flood, are in the case of humans the consequence of their own choices, their willed decisions. Besides, the Genesis storytel
ler seemed to ask with a hard look back at Babylon, what kind of God is it that needs slaves in order to eat, or that cannot sleep because of the racket, or that would visit destruction on his own creatures because his nap has been disturbed?
Yet any rewriting of myth comes at a cost, and this particular rewriting, for all its sublimity, cost dearly. There is, after all, much to be said for explaining infertility and infant mortality and a terrible vulnerability to drought or plague or flood not as punishments for moral failings but as divinely mandated devices to keep down the human population. The devices are cruel, but at least they do not attribute guilt, either to the individual victims or to humanity as a whole. Human reproduction is not limitless; there will be constraints, painful, structural, and largely indifferent to good and evil. Recognition of this indifference did not need to be a call for mere fatalism: wisdom and piety, of the kind embodied in Atrahasis, were rewarded. But it is not as if humans had done something wrong, as if they should have tried to reproduce less or be quieter. Atrahasis was not encouraged to regard those who were swept away in the flood as somehow deserving of their fate. On the contrary, he was literally sickened when he saw the destruction.
There is a lot to be said as well for a religion that regards certain gods as beneficent protectors of mankind and others as malevolent threats. One god might argue openly against the destructive design of another god or work secretly to circumvent a planned outcome. A worshiper could imagine playing one god off against another and could express ambivalent feelings toward the acknowledged rulers of the universe. It is difficult to find a place for such feelings in Genesis. The Hebrew Bible has many moments of subtle negotiation with Yahweh and of veiled protest against his divine decrees, but these all occur within an overarching understanding that Yahweh, at once just, compassionate, and wise, is the ultimate locus and arbiter of all moral value. This understanding promises a greater coherence: the Babylonian pantheon (like that of the Greeks and the Romans) seems by contrast a confused jumble of competing powers. But it opens up queasy questions of responsibility that haunt the biblical story of Noah and reach back still further to haunt the biblical story of Adam and Eve.