The Roots of the Pentateuch

The Narrative Portions of the Pentateuch and Ancient Near Eastern Literature

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 17, Roots of the Pentateuch. In this program, we’re going to cover the narrative, or story portion of the first five books of the Old Testament – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Read by Israel Radvinsky on Librivox.

When we read this book, sometimes, it seems deceptively familiar to us. For thousands of years, we have spun around it like a vortex, fashioning our civilizations in different ways but hurrying back always to its pages and finding slightly different things there. The Bible tells of how God created the world, as you just heard in Biblical Hebrew a moment ago, but we can just as well say that the Bible itself created us. It taught us the rather curious ideas that there was a beginning and that there will be an end, that an extrasensory tier of reality persists somewhere beyond our capacity to understand it, that our deeds and thoughts have moral ramifications, and that life on earth is a matter of some sort of providence, and some has greater consequence than the random flux of everyday experience might otherwise lead us to believe. Such ideas abounded in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean ideology prior to the Bible, but it was through the Bible that they came to us, and through the Bible that individuals and states and organizations acted on them, creating the cultural and national geography of much of the modern world.

But when we open this book, and read it lengthily – beyond the piecemeal survey of choice morsels of text on a Sunday morning, beyond the pages of exalted quotations that seem so much more exalted because we have been conditioned for thousands of years to think that they are so – when we read the Bible book by book and not verse by verse, its strangeness, and its exoticism begin to unspool, and the illusion that it is somehow an anthology predominately consonant with our broader cultural values is dispelled. Even just the five books that we will read today are challengingly diverse. Legalistic instructions follow third person narratives, which are followed by more instructions. The stories themselves often have relentlessly repetitious structures, and the instructions frequently double upon one another. The Pentateuch assumes that you have a geographical knowledge of Iron Age Canaan, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the cultures and religions of these places. It assumes that you are a member of the kingdom of Ancient Judah, and that on all related subjects, you’re a partisan of Hebrew culture – that you share your countrymen’s anger at infractions committed against your ancestors, even when it comes to making war on a foreign population. The Pentateuch assumes that you are male, and that and that you are concerned with piety, a good civic reputation, and the transference of your property through your male heirs. It assumes that you are sufficiently enthusiastic about animal sacrifice, ritual cleanliness, and the correct layout of holy sites, down to the cubits of tent walls, that you’ll read and recollect hundreds of pages written on these subjects. For all these reasons, the Pentateuch has the strange position of being at once the most read text in history, and simultaneously one of the most difficult and faraway – the single vestige of the Iron Age that still has a formative effect on so much of modern life.

The remainder of this episode will have a very simple organization. First, I’m going to summarize the stories of the Pentateuch. I hope to give you a clear, chronologically ordered panorama of the major events in the Pentateuch, from the moment of creation up until the time Moses and his people are about to cross over the Jordan River and into the Promised Land of Canaan. Then, I’m going to talk about some of the literary and religious texts that were circulating around in the Ancient Near East in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages that demonstrate the Pentateuch as part of a greater textual environment, and in some cases may have influenced the Pentateuch. We’ll begin the journey with a book that I’d wager you’ve encountered and read before. At 50 Chapters, in chapter count Genesis is the fifth longest book of the Bible, behind Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Sirach. But while no one remembers all the Psalms, or the visions of the prophets, and many bibles don’t even include Sirach, almost all of us know Genesis. [music]

The Pentateuch, Book 1: Genesis

The Old Testament's creation story begins like many other Ancient Near Eastern creation stories – with darkness, and water.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Gen 1:1-4)

In due time, night and day came to be, then the sky and the earth, plants, the sun and moon, and moving creatures. The chief among them was man. Pondering the creation of man, God said, “Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26), and so, all in a moment, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). God promised them dominion over all living things, and was pleased with everything he’d made.

Later, because rains were flooding the fallow fields, God realized someone was needed to till them, and he created man from the dust of the ground – uh – again, this time by breathing into his nostrils. This second man was given a garden called Eden, a land of four rivers, the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. God plopped this second man down into the garden and told him to eat whatever he wanted there, except for the fruit of one tree. God said, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:16-17).

With this first – or second man safely situated in Eden alongside a deadly tree, God decided that man ought to have a companion, and so he created a woman – again – only this time by making the man fall asleep and using one of the man’s ribs to create her. So there they were, the man, and the woman, in the Garden of Eden, naked, unashamed, and within arm’s reach of plenty of food. You know, for the first two of the Bible’s total one thousand three hundred and ninety nine chapters, things were going fairly well. But then – well, you know what happens next.

A serpent – just a serpent, mind you – Satan makes no appearances in the Old Testament – a serpent came to the woman, and, in spite of her apprehension, promised her that “when you eat of [the forbidden fruit] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5). So the curious woman took a bite, then her husband did so, too, and all of a sudden they felt the need to cover their private parts with fig leaves. This tipped God off, and then, the punishments began.

The talking snake was cursed to crawl on his belly. The woman was cursed to suffer pain in childbirth, to desire her husband, and to be ruled over by him. The man was cursed to work, and toil in the fields – which by the way seemed to be the reason for which he was initially created in Chapter 2 verse 5 – but anyway, he was cursed to sweat, and cursed to return to the dust from whence he came. God made them clothing, and announced that they were henceforth exiled from Eden. The couple were chased out by God, and a flaming sword was put up east of the garden to prevent them from reentering.

Cain and Abel to the Flood and Noah's Descendants

Now exiled from Eden, the inaugural couple had a baby. The man named his wife Eve, which sounds like the word “living” in Biblical Hebrew, and their boy was called Cain. Soon another boy – this one called Abel – was born to the first couple. Cain liked to grow vegetables and fruits. Abel was a shepherd, and kept flocks. One day, the two young men offered sacrifices to God. Cain offered fruits and vegetables. Abel offered meat. God wanted the meat. In general, the gods and holy men of the Ancient Near East really, really liked meat.

Having his fresh produce spurned by God did not sit well with Cain. He’d worked quite hard to till those fruits and vegetables. So he killed his brother Abel. As a punishment for fratricide, God told Cain he’d be cursed to wander the earth. Cain went to the Land of Nod, where he found a wife. Which is a bit strange, since his parents were the first people, and they had just the two sons so far – and yet there was a woman out there in Nod, waiting for Cain. That isn’t particularly coherent, and biblical scholars assume the creation story, the Cain and Abel story, and Cain’s finding a wife in Nod were all separate tales that were combined together at one point.

Let me pause here for a minute. I’m going to stop pointing out these narrative oddities for the remainder of the Book of Genesis. We’ll talk about them at the end of the next episode. I can think of nothing more annoying than listening to a summary of the Bible that constantly takes snarky little excursions to point out narrative quirks or contradictions in the narrative. I bet you know about them, that they’re there, and you can imagine how much Biblical scholars have pinpointed them and picked them to pieces, and we’ll consider one or two them in detail a bit later, rather than grinding through all of them as we encounter them. So for now, let’s continue with the central narrative of the Book of Genesis.

Cain had a boy named Enoch, and founded a settlement called Enoch, which was soon home to Cain’s many descendants. Meanwhile, the original couple, Eve, and her husband Adam, now both aged a hundred and thirty years, had another boy. His name was Seth. Seth’s son was called Enosh, whose son was Kenan, and then Mahalalel, and then Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and then Noah. Of all these men, Enoch had the shortest lifespan, living a paltry 365 years. The others lived into their eight hundreds and nine hundreds. It was an extraordinary time – people not only had fantastically long life spans, but also interbred with a race of giants called the Nephilim. The Nephilim copulated with human females, creating “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (Gen 6:4).

The world, already, was not so young anymore. God resolved that men wouldn’t live as long as they had. A hundred and twenty years, he resolved, was quite long enough. And he was dissatisfied with what he saw on the planet – “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5).

So God told Noah, the great great great great great great great great grandson of Adam, to build a giant boat, fill it with the world’s species, and be ready for some heavy rain. Nine generations of humankind, and God already wanted to kill us all. After the Biblical flood, which we covered in great detail all the way back in Episode 2, Noah offered God some sacrifices. God caught the scent of the meaty odors, and summarily resolved that he wouldn’t again flood the planet. He issued some preliminary rules for Noah, and then said he wouldn’t forget his covenant.

As for Noah, patriarch of the ninth generation of mankind – he had three sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The three of them repopulated the earth. Due to an awkward incident in which Ham saw his father drunk and naked, Ham and his son Canaan were cursed to be the slaves of his brothers. Then proceeds the infamous tenth chapter of Genesis, a list of the descendants of Noah. Generally, these descendants are associated with geographical locations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor, and the story of Noah’s descendants is shorthand for the dissemination of ancient civilizations.

In the middle of the genealogy of Noah’s descendants, the narrative pauses to tell the story of the Tower of Babel – how it threatened God, and how God destroyed it and created a plurality of languages instead of a single one. In Episode 1 of this podcast, I spent ninety minutes considering this strange story, and what it means.

More genealogical narrative proceeds, culminating in a descendant of Noah’s son Shem, a descendant called Terah. Terah was terribly important, because Terah was the father of Abraham. And Abraham was the man. Side note. I don’t know if this has happened to you. But from time to time you meet someone who says he didn’t finish the Bible because he couldn’t get past all the begats. “That there’s this long section of begats – it just goes on and on.” No it doesn’t. Really. It’s only a few pages. I mean have some patience. And it’s actually pretty interesting, because if you know a little about the geography of ancient Canaan and its neighbors, you can see that it’s a decent little origin story for the power relations of the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. If you want boring, check out Leviticus’ immense rules list on how to cook meat for God, or read Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel back to back and feast your eyes on the massive repetitiousness in metaphor and sentiment over hundreds of pages. Compared to these, the list of Noah’s descendants is like a Hollywood blockbuster. [

Anyway. Noah’s descendants culminate in Abraham. Abraham, Abraham, Abraham. His name, initially, is Abram. But I’m just going to call him Abraham. Abraham, according to the narrative, was born in the Sumerian city of Ur. He, his wife Sarah (or Sarai, as she’s called at first) and his nephew Lot left Ur. After a journey to Canaan, and then Egypt, Abraham returned to Canaan. His brother had settled on the plain east of the Jordan, and Abraham himself, now well off, settled permanently in Canaan, the beautiful, ecologically diverse land we talked so much about a couple of episodes ago.[music]

Abraham to Jacob

One day, as Abraham gazed around Canaan, God told him, “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever” (Gen 13:14-15). This promise, which is frequently repeated by God to Abraham and his more significant descendants, is one of the main themes of the Old Testament. The notion that Canaan is the destined homeland of Abraham’s descendants, according to divine mandate, is one of the core tenets of the Old Testament, and a very powerful idea in the history of Judaism.

Abraham, for whom the land of Canaan was promised, soon had a son. His infertile wife told him to have sex with a slave called Hagar, and with this woman Abraham had a wild boy named Ishmael. God then had a chat with Abraham about penises. It was absolutely critical, God said, that fathers were circumcised, that slaves were circumcised, and sons were circumcised – all at eight days. Having a foreskin, God emphasized, would mean that a man had broken the covenant with the lord.

More dramatic events unfolded in Abraham’s life. His supposedly infertile wife conceived a son. Then, Abraham learned that God planned a wholesale destruction of cities out to the east, on the other side of the Jordan. What happened next happens again and again and again in the Old Testament. It happens as often as God guaranteeing the Promised Land to the Israelites. God got angry. Abraham pleaded with God to spare people and not vent too much wrath on them, and God relented. That’s the pattern of the story. Somebody screws up. God gets ready for some wholesale slaughter. Then someone begs God’s mercy. And God relents. This incident takes place dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible.

So, in this specific case, the first intercession story, if you will, Abraham tried to keep God from killing absolutely everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. After throwing many numbers out there, Abraham asked whether God would spare the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if just ten righteous people could be found there. God said he would.

Two angels went to the city of Sodom, and sought shelter in the house of Lot. Chapter 19 of Genesis – the story of Sodom, Lot, and Lot’s daughters, is a dark tale, filled with violence, wickedness, drunkenness, incestuous sex, and the overt threat of homosexual rape, or – uh – sodomy, hence the word. It’s one of those sections of the Bible that you wonder – I should put this delicately – you wonder how you would introduce it in Sunday school without being chased out of the building. Anyway, at the end of Lot’s story, Sodom and Gomorrah are leveled, his wife is dead, and his two daughters are pregnant with his children, children who went on to become the heads of the states of Ammon and Moab – the future eastern and southeastern neighbors of Israel, respectively. They would prove to be Israel's enemies, and so it made sense to create an ignominious origin story in which their founders were the products of incest.

So the crisis in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Cities on the Plain, was taken care of. Back on the other side of the Jordan River, God decided to test Abraham. His wife Sarah had given birth to a boy - Isaac. God asked Abraham to kill the boy. Abraham was willing to kill his son, but in the nick of time, God stopped the murder, satisfied with Abraham’s loyalty. Soon enough, Isaac was grown enough to be married, and wed a woman named Rebekah. And Isaac had two sons. One of them was red and hairy. His name was Esau, and he was the eldest. The other was more normal looking. His name was Jacob, and he was the youngest. And like many figures in Genesis, Jacob is preposterously important.

First and foremost, Jacob was clever. Through trickery and the help of his mother, Jacob was able to secure the rights of the firstborn son from his hairy brother. Esau was not happy about this, and, at his mother’s behest, Jacob fled to the land of his uncle Laban. There, he served Laban for seven years, and had sex with every female in the house. Jacob slept with Leah, Laban’s older daughter. He slept with the maids, and got everybody pregnant. Then he married the youngest daughter, Rachel, who was barren. With his new bride and crop of semi-legitimate children, Jacob left the land of Laban, pursued by his angry uncle slash father-in-law slash master, later managing to smooth things over.

No sooner had he settled things with Laban than Jacob met his angry, disenfranchised, exceptionally shaggy older brother Esau. Jacob was terrified, and prayed and prayed, and at night, he waited for an answer. Instead, he met a divine being who attacked him. He grappled with this being and, with great effort, he was able to best it, although he dislocated his hip in the process. The divine being was God, and it told him that his name would no longer be Jacob. Instead, it would be Israel, because, it said, “you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” (Gen 32:29). Hence, as I mentioned a couple of episodes ago, the word Isra-El means, “The one who strives [or] struggles with God.”

Jacob’s story would continue to be one of struggling. He met his brother Esau again, and again treated the man very, very cautiously. Once Jacob had grown older, and sired more and more children, a man named Shechem raped one of Jacob’s daughters. Jacob forced the man to pay a very high dowry and marry his own daughter – that was the law, but even after Shechem and his people were circumcised, and made part of Jacob’s religion, they seemed to just want to take the Israelites’ property. Out of retaliation, two of Jacob’s sons snuck into the city of Shechem, murdered all the males and stole all the valuables, enslaving their virginal women and children. The two sons assured Jacob that the killing and enslavement were all for the sake of honor.

Jacob, or Israel, as he was now called by this point, had many sons, and was quite clever and successful in his work as a herdsman and trader. He migrated to a place called Bethel and set up a sacrificial altar there. His father Isaac died, and then his wife died in childbirth. At this point, the narrative begins to concern itself with the twelve sons of Jacob, or Israel, who would go on to become the twelve tribes of Israel. [music]

Israel and His Twelve Sons

Israel had multiple wives, and multiple concubines. The lot of them together produced twelve sons. These were Rueben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, Gad, Asher, Dan, Naphtali, Joseph, and Benjamin. A few of these kids are going to be really important for different reasons. We’ll start with Joseph.

Joseph was one of Israel’s younger sons. Joseph and his father Israel signify a general change in the first twenty-two generations of humankind. At first, mere piety is sought by God. Israel’s grandfather Abraham’s most important moment is the test of his willingness to kill his son in order to please God. But with the coming of Abraham’s grandson Israel, and Israel’s son, Joseph, ingenuity, trickery, and innovation are the favored characteristics of the central figures of the story of the patriarchs. Israel tricks his brother out of his birthright. He contrives to not just marry his uncle’s youngest daughter, but both of the man’s daughters, and to use their maids as concubines. Israel an expert breeder of livestock and his innovations make him wealthy. And if Israel is smart, a sort of trickster folk hero who’s wily enough to wrestle with God himself, then Israel’s son, Joseph, is the apple that fell closest to the tree.

Joseph and the Closing Chapters of Genesis

Joseph was his father Israel’s favorite – Joseph was clever, ambitious, and in his own way, merciless. All of the other boys knew it. Joseph had a dream that he would one day dominate all of his brothers. And when Joseph told them so, they were understandably miffed. They considered killing him. Instead, they sold him into slavery. Soon, Joseph wound up a slave in Egypt.

Ever associated with his ability to understand dreams, Joseph was soon enough promoted into the position of psychoanalyst of the Pharaoh. Years passed, and Joseph proved useful to his king, and commercially and socially successful in the lands of Egypt. A dream told Joseph that the earth would face seven years of famine. Subsequently, Joseph’s careful stockpiling of grain saved Egypt from a terrible food shortage. As the entire ancient world reeled from famine, some of Joseph’s brothers were sent to Egypt to seek the stockpile of grain in the Nile. Joseph did not immediately reveal his identity. In fact, he demanded to see his youngest brother Benjamin, whom he’d worried about for a long time. The brothers brought him, and after an extensive delay, Joseph revealed his identity to his long estranged siblings, telling them that he did not fault them for selling him into slavery. It had all been God’s plan to send him to Egypt, so that he could stockpile food.

While such scenes seemed to promise Joseph’s continued beneficence and work for the public good, he soon proved to be more interested in cash flow than philanthropy. First, his brothers and other relations emigrated down from the northeastern lands of Canaan, and settled in the Nile Delta. Then, having the market cornered on food, Joseph began taking everything he could get from everyone in exchange for grain – first money, then livestock, and then land. The Pharaoh – for whom Joseph was still working, became vastly wealthier. Joseph then made people become slaves to the Pharaoh, and pay a tax of one fifth of all their goods to the Pharaoh.

Israel, the father of the twelve tribes, was by this point getting old. He requested to be buried in his ancestral land of Canaan. And on his deathbed, he gave his sons a lengthy speech, derogating some of them, and giving others his blessing. When Israel died, Israel’s youngest son Joseph wept deeply. Israel was embalmed in the Egyptian style. Joseph asked permission to go bury Israel in his ancestral home. A great retinue escorted the fallen patriarch across the desert to the northeast.

When Joseph returned, his brothers watched with anxiety. Their father being dead changed everything. He would remember, they thought, their misdeeds in the past. So Joseph's brothers made up a story that Israel, on his deathbed, had asked that Joseph would forgive them for their misdeeds. But as before, Joseph showed circumspection and forgiveness. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “‘Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.’S” (Gen 50:19-21).

So, after living 110 years, and seeing the birth of his great-grandchildren, Joseph bid his brothers goodbye, requesting that he be buried in Canaan like his father. The Book of Genesis breaks off at the twenty-second generation of mankind, the most central figures of whom are Joseph and his brothers, the twelve tribes of Israel. One of these tribes was the tribe of Levi, the patriarch of the priests, or Levites, of Israel, for whom the Book of Leviticus is named. While Joseph emerged as the key figure in getting the Israelites down to Egypt to help them weather a great famine, it would be the descendant of the tribe of Levi who’d get them back up to Canaan. [music]

The Pentateuch, Book 2: Exodus

The name exodus comes from the Greek exodus aigyptou, or “exit from Egypt,” and this is the central subject of the book. In Egypt, the Israelites, descendants of Israel, and before him Isaac and Abraham, had prospered. Their population had grown steadily. But a power transition affected them much for the worse. A new Pharaoh came to power who mistrusted the success of the Israelites. These were not Egyptians, after all, but foreigners who had settled in the Delta. Soon thereafter, “The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them” (Ex 1:13-14). Even these oppressive acts were not enough.

The Pharaoh began demanding that midwives kill the male babies of the Israelites – that they drown these unfortunate boys in the Nile. One Israelite mother – a woman of the tribe of Levi – would not see her defenseless baby massacred. At a loss for anything else to do, this woman made a papyrus basket, plastering it over with bitumen and pitch. The Nile bore the baby northward, and the baby was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter as she bathed in the Nile. He was given an Egyptian name, Moses. But his interests, as a young man and long after, were with the nation of Israel.

Moses quickly showed concern with the way his fellow Israelites were treated. “One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Ex 2: 11-13 86). Unfortunately, the Pharaoh found out about this murder, and Moses had to flee. He fled far to the northeast, to a land called Midian, where he found a wife, and had a son.

The Rise of Moses

Meanwhile, for the average Israelite in Egypt, things were bad indeed. So great were the tribulations of the Israelites that God heard. As brave Moses tended to his flock in the land of Midian, he saw an amazing spectacle in a field. “There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed” (Ex 3:2). Then Moses spoke with God. God said he’d heard of the Israelites’ miseries, and that “I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites” (Ex 3.8). Next, God told Moses his name – YHWH, or Yahweh, which means “I AM WHO I AM,” or “I AM WHAT I AM” or “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” God has a number of different names in the Pentateuch – we’ll get to that at the end of this episode.

Suffice it to say that God revealing his name to Moses, and appearing as fire in a bush, and promising to get the Israelites out of Egypt all meant that Moses was a pretty special person. Moses humbly wondered whether his people would believe that he was acting on God’s behalf. To convince him, God performed some miracles. He changed Moses’ staff into a snake, and then back to a staff. He made Moses’ hand bear the marks of leprosy, and then returned it to normal. He said that if Moses needed such miraculous evidence of his divine guidance, these miracles would be available to Moses when the time came.

Moses’ anxieties persisted, though. God had to assure him that Moses would be able to turn the Nile to blood. Moses then worried that he wouldn’t be a good public speaker, and so God said Moses’ brother Aaron would accompany him from Midian back to Egypt.

Yahweh vs. the Pharaoh

Now, folks, Exodus Chapter 4 begins to get a bit odd. First, God disclosed his overall plan to Moses. God’s plan was – uh – a bit strange. He would let Moses go to the court of the Pharaoh, and show the Pharaoh the divine miracles – the snake staff, the leper hand, and the bloody Nile. But God would also force the Pharaoh not to be convinced by any of these divine miracles. “I will harden his heart” (Ex 4.21), God resolved. After forcing the Pharaoh not to be convinced by his miracles, God said, he would murder the firstborn sons of Egypt. Not exactly fair, but, anyway, this was the plan.

On the way to Egypt, a frightening incident occurred. God almost killed Moses for not having circumcised his son, but fortunately, Moses’ wife performed the emergency surgery in the nick of time and saved her husband from certain death. Thereafter, with his son’s penis safely surgically altered, and his God justly placated, Moses finished his journey down to Egypt. He and his brother Aaron rallied the Israelites, and asked the Pharaoh for an allotment of time – time to go and celebrate a religious festival in the wilderness. The Pharaoh was not convinced, and accused the Israelites of merely being lazy.

Then, a sort of magic trick competition ensued. Moses and his brother Aaron wanted to convince the Pharaoh that their God was the chief God. The Israelite brothers turned Moses’ staff into a snake. But Egypt’s magicians were able to replicate the feat, and the Pharaoh wasn’t convinced. Next, Moses and Aaron turned the Nile into blood. Egypt’s magicians were able to do this, too. Then, Moses and Aaron caused a plague of frogs. Although the Pharaoh asked Moses to stop this plague, and Moses prayed, and it stopped, soon thereafter the Pharaoh “hardened his heart” (Ex 8:15) in an often repeated phrase. Then came many other plagues, and the cycle of the Pharaoh praying for the plague to stop, and thereafter God forcing the Pharaoh’s heart to be hardened happened again, and again, and again. There was a plague of gnats, a plague of flies, then a plague on all of Egypt’s livestock, then a plague of boils, then hail and thunder, then locusts, and then darkness. With each new plague, God attempted to convince the Pharaoh of his supremacy, and then, by hardening the Pharaoh’s heart, forced the Pharaoh not to be convinced of his supremacy. Which is again, really, really bizarre. Well, onward.

Then came the tenth plague. God told Moses and Aaron to carve up lambs and splash their blood on the doorposts and above the door of all the Israelites’ houses. God said he was going to butcher all of Egypt’s firstborn children, and didn’t want to accidently kill any of the firstborn of the Israelites. These preparations made, God killed the firstborn of all the Egyptians, from the Pharaoh himself to the prisoners, and even the firstborn of the livestock. Following this climax in the bloodletting, God allowed the Pharaoh to be convinced of his primacy.

By this point, the Egyptians were weakened and demoralized. The Israelites stole openly from them. Six hundred thousand Israelites convened and prepared to make the journey from Egypt back to Canaan, and their great trip home, or exit from Egypt, or exodus, began. God showed them where to go. “The LORD went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night” (13.21).

Sadly for the Egyptians, God was not done playing mind games with the Pharaoh. He forced the Pharaoh to pursue the Israelites. God told Moses, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue [the Israelites], so that I will gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army, [against]. . .all the gods of Egypt” (14:4; 12:12). So the Israelites fled to the east, the waters of the Red Sea parted to allow their crossing, and the pursuing Egyptian army was drowned in its entirety. After a victory celebration on the eastern shore, the Israelites continued their journey.

At Mount Sinai

Two and a half months passed. When the Israelites became hungry, God made it rain, telling them to gather up a specific portion, plus double the day before the Sabbath, so they’d have plenty to eat on the holy day. As time passed, Moses had become the leader of the Israelites, and settled all their disputes and court cases. Some of Moses’ extended family recommended that he delegate at least some of his minor responsibilities.

Three months after their departure from Egypt, the Israelites gathered around Mount Sinai in the arid country of the Sinai Peninsula, east of Egypt and south of Canaan. After some warnings to be on their most holy behavior, and sustain a level of ritual cleanliness, God had Moses come to the top of the mountain. Moses returned, bearing the Ten Commandments. I’m going to bracket those for now, because this episode is about the story, and the personnel, of the Pentateuch. The next episode will be all about the legalistic parts of the Old Testament’s first five books.

After promulgating the Ten Commandments, along with dozens of other rules, Moses had hammered out some of the details of the contract with Yahweh. God, in turn, told Moses that an angel would be sent to guide the Israelites to the Promised Land. It was important, God explained, that they kill absolutely everyone in the Promised Land. Otherwise, the Israelites might be led astray by false religions. All these instructions were set down in stone and given to Moses. He built twelve pillars for all the twelve tribes, sacrificed many oxen, and sprayed blood all over the pillars. He then listened to six chapters of explanations of how to build God’s holy tabernacle, where the sacred tablets would be stored, along with explanations on how to slaughter animals in front of the tent, how to splash their blood on altars and burn their organs correctly, and so on. More legalistic instructions, and we’ll cover them in the next episode. Let me just say that the tabernacle, if you haven’t heard of it, was Israel’s holy tent, where the Ten Commandments were kept, and the precision of its assembly is of high importance in the Bible.

Anyway, after Moses listened to the nitty gritty of God’s instructions, he came down the mountain and saw something that upset him greatly. The Israelites, anxious that their leader was absent on such a long conference with God, had convinced Aaron to build a golden calf. Moses was not happy. He broke the golden calf. He broke the tablets. He told some of the priests to kill each other, and three thousand died in this way. God, seeing the idolatry and pandemonium, hurled a plague at the Israelites. But fortunately, this was not the end of the fledgling nation.

Moses met with God in an isolated spot and pleaded for the Israelites. This would be his main role, for the rest of his life. If you looked at his resume, you’d see a long list of bullet points. “1476 BCE,” you’d see, “Mount Sinai – stopped God from killing everyone.” “1475, wilderness of Sinai – interceded on behalf of my people and convinced God not to kill us all.” “1475, again, wilderness of Sinai – convinced God not to kill us all.” “1474, persuaded God not to kill us all.” “1472, quote marks.” “1471, quote marks.” Israel’s transgressions, and Moses’ intercessions, are the story that is repeated throughout most of the rest of the Pentateuch. The golden calf is simply the inaugural instance in a long line of similar episodes.

So following his private conference with God, Moses went up to Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, got everything reinscribed in new tablets, and apologized, asking God not to abandon them. “O Lord,” he said, “I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance” (Ex 34:9). God accepted the apology, and, after the Israelites heard God’s instructions, they gave Moses the building materials necessary for the Tabernacle’s construction. The Tabernacle was built, the Covenant tablets were stored safely inside, and God, whose cloud hung over the holy tent, after some early hiccups, had a dwelling place with the Israelites. [music]

The Pentateuch, Book 3: Leviticus

Leviticus. Leviticus, Leviticus, Leviticus. When you read the Bible for the first time, you can push you way through the genealogical sections of Genesis. You can force yourself by sheer will to read the huge, granular account of the way the Tabernacle is to be built in the book of Exodus. But Leviticus. Leviticus will break you.

Other than Moses’ nephews being slaughtered by God for lighting incense at the wrong time in the holy tent, nothing really happens in Leviticus. Because Leviticus is all about lighting the incense at the right time. It is a massive, ancient codex of laws on ritual sacrifice, cleanliness, and atonement for sin. It says that male homosexuals should be executed. It also says that we must splatter the blood of pigeons and turtledoves on altars, that we should burn prostitutes alive, kill wizards, avoid church for a week after ejaculating or menstruating, eat grasshoppers, not get tattoos, and make sure our sacrificial bulls, lambs, rams, and female goats are all spotless before squirting their blood all over the Tabernacle altar. Now, who does all of this today? I mean, I try to kill wizards, but as to the other stuff, I’ve done a terrible job.

Let me just say this. In the New Testament, John 3:16 is the beautiful, succinct maxim, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Okay, sure. You don’t have to believe in it, but it sounds pretty darned solid. And now let’s hear Leviticus 3:16. “All fat is the LORD’s.” Again. “All fat is the LORD’s.” Hmm. Save your – uh fat for God. Leviticus 3:16.

Well, let's bracket Leviticus for now. We’ll spend a bit of time in the world of blood, fat, boils, and bodily fluids in the next episode. Let’s continue on with the story of the Israelites, whom we left just having finished that Tabernacle in the hinterlands of the Sinai Peninsula.

The Pentateuch, Book 4: Numbers

The sprawling 36 chapters of Numbers tell the story of Israel’s journey from the southern Sinai Peninsula into the outreaches of Canaan, specifically, the land of Midian or Moab. It is a dangerous, violent journey, filled with internal dissension, ceaseless outbreaks of sacrilege, divine punishment, and the threat of foreigners. And it begins where Exodus left off.

With a Tabernacle, a devoted priestly class called the Levites, and a nascent leadership system headed by Moses, the Israelites had the beginning of a nation. And like many nations, they decided to take a census, discovering that there were exactly 603,530 of them out there wandering around and subsisting on heavenly manna. Ten chapters of Numbers are more of the same legalistic substance of Leviticus, until we get once again to the story of Moses and his followers.

The Intercession Stories of Numbers

There is a central pattern in the Book of Numbers, an event that happens nine different times, with variations, and takes up most of the book. It’s an even I’ve already described before, typified by the Golden Calf episode. The Israelites do something impious. Then, God prepares to kill everyone. Moses intercedes, and God’s wrath is blunted. Yet in spite of Moses’ timely intercessions, many Israelites suffer terribly. They suffered from plagues, banishments, military defeats, poisonous snakes, and various other forms of grisly death. But in the main, Moses’ intercessions kept the bulk of them alive, and kept them chugging along, crisis after crisis, to Midian, to the southeast of Canaan, the Promised Land.

The sins of the Israelites in Numbers follow a general pattern – in some way or another, they doubt God’s power or question his elected officials. At one point, they complained about the variety of meat and food, and later griped about a lack of water. They worried openly about the dangerousness of the lands into which God was leading them. They questioned the eligibility of Moses and Aaron as leaders multiple times. They defected to foreign lands, and had sex with foreign women. Thousands of them die for these transgressions, victims of God’s various punishments. For the brio of their narration and the historical value of their descriptions, the sin and penalty episodes at the core of the Book of Numbers deserve to be read in great detail. But because they are a repetition of essentially the same event, chapter after chapter, they are a good place for me to pick just one to serve of an example of all of them. [music]

Sample Intercession Story: Moses and the Moabite Survivors

The intercession story we’ll look at in the Book of Numbers is the very last one - it's an event that occurs after the Israelites have journeyed lengthily over the Sinai Peninsula up to the lands southeast of Canaan, lands called Midian, or Moab. On the way to Moab, the Israelites had already killed every living person as they passed through a land called Bashan. As they prepared for the wholesale slaughter of Moab, the Moabite king tried to get a powerful seer to leverage curses against the Israelites. God came to this seer, however, and intervened, and soon Moab was ripe for the taking. Some form of military victory was won against Moab, although it wasn’t the genocide that was carried out against Bashan. On the contrary, many Moabites were left alive, and the Israelites began fornicating with their women. God was utterly enraged. He told Moses “Take all the chiefs of the [sinning Israelites], and impale them in the sun before the LORD, in order that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel” (Num. 25.4). One Israelite incurred this horrible punishment. Later, Aaron’s grandson saw an Israelite who’d returned to camp with a Moabite woman, and he speared them both through the belly.

God’s wrath was still not sated. After a break for some more legalistic instructions, and more details on how and when sacrificial animals must be offered to him, God told Moses it was time to go to war on the Moabites. The purpose of this war was to “Avenge the Israelites” (31.2), evidently to get revenge on the Moabites since some of them had been willing to integrate culturally and sexually with the Israelites in order to survive. The punitive campaign that ensued was gruesome. All of the males of Moab were killed. And thereafter Moses was dissatisfied with his officers for their mercy. God, and Moses sought more killing. I’m going to read Numbers Chapter 31, verses 15-18.

Moses became very angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. Moses said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? These women here. . .made the Israelites act treacherously against the LORD. . .so that the plague came among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Num. 31.15-18).

Those again are Moses’ instructions to the Israelites. The narrator makes it clear that in addition to the huge numbers of sheep, oxen, and donkeys taken from the slaughtered Moabites, the Israelites took 32,000 virgins, presumably to be forced into marriages or sex slavery.

The violence against the Moabites finally sated God’s anger in the Book of Numbers. The 600,000 people of the twelve tribes of Israel migrated northward. On the outskirts of Jericho, on the east bank of the Jordan river, God told Moses they were about to cross into the Promised Land, and set out some additional rules for the Israelites. He specified how pastures ought to be laid out around towns. He delineated rules for cities of refuge, where accused persons might seek solace from vigilante justice. And he disentangled some inheritance rules for wealth passing through daughters. With these latest regulations in place, and the chaotic journey of the Israelites through the wilderness of Sinai and the territories of Bashan and Moab complete, the Book of Numbers finally concludes. [music]

The Pentateuch, Book 5: Deuteronomy

Let’s talk about Deuteronomy. Plot-wise, Book 1, Genesis tells of the earliest patriarchs. The most important are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob/Israel, and then Joseph. Then there’s Book 2, Exodus. Exodus is about Israel’s great great grandson Moses, and Moses getting everybody out of Egypt. Book 3, Leviticus, has no plot. That’s easy. Then Book 4, Numbers, which is the story of the wilderness journey across Sinai and into the outer reaches of Canaan. Now, Book 5, Deuteronomy, the final book of the Pentateuch. I wish I could tell you that Deuteronomy is a gripping tale, which continues with a riveting account of the ongoing adventures of the Israelites. But – uh – it’s not. Deuteronomy is something else.

Get an image of Moses in your head. Picture him standing on the east banks of the Jordan River, with the sun setting behind him. Got that? The sun is setting on a generation of Israelites. They’re on the verge of crossing into the Promised Land. Moses is retiring. And Deuteronomy is his retirement speech. It is a really, really long speech. And basically, it recounts what the Israelites have been through, and then outlines, in elaborate detail, all of the behavioral rules that they must follow, a great many of which have already been covered in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Deuteronomy means “second law,” and much of Moses’ speech is a reworking of the legal codes found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. The writer of Deuteronomy, biblical scholars concur, lived in a different timeframe than the other writers who worked on the Pentateuch. He’s commonly called the “Deuteronomist,” and his worldview and moral compass are distinct to the books of the Bible that he wrote. Let’s take a quick look at the contents of Deuteronomy.

In his retirement speech, Moses recollected the military campaigns that transpired in the Book of Numbers. He proudly recounted the ethnic cleansing the Israelites had performed in Heshbon, and Bashan. Moses made clear that as the Israelites entered the lands of Canaan, that they must treat the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hiyites, and Jebusites a similar degree of wholesale ruthlessness, leaving not a single one of them alive. Not too long after, Moses assured his listeners that “the LORD your God. . .is not partial and takes no bribe. . .and. . .loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the strangers, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (10.17-19).

This paradox runs through the center of Deuteronomy. On one hand, Moses emphasizes the kindness, and forbearance of God. On the other hand, he stresses necessity of killing anyone guilty of apostasy, and all of their neighbors, and even their livestock, and lays out a draconian legalistic code, imposing the death penalty unstintingly. But to stick with just the narrative portion of the Pentateuch, there’s really only one thing that happens in Deuteronomy, excepting Moses’ sizable speech.

Moses told the Israelites that he was a hundred and twenty years old. He’d been informed by God he wouldn’t cross the Jordan. Then, Moses was summoned by God, along with a man named Joshua, who would take up Moses’ mantle as leader of the Israelites. God warned Moses that the Israelites would forget him in the Promised Land, and so Moses wrote down the Book of Deuteronomy itself. God also told Moses to write down a song to remember him by. Moses sung his song to the Israelites, offered a long blessing to his people, praising each of the twelve tribes. He then died, and was buried by God himself. The Book of Deuteronomy, and the entire Pentateuch, closes with the words “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (34.10). Because almost all of Deuteronomy is made up of legalistic codes rather than narrations of events, we can consider Deuteronomy covered for today’s purposes. [music]

There's Just Nothing Else Like It (?)

Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it? If all I were doing were summarizing, we’d be all set for this episode. But we still have a ways to go. Because in the remainder of this show, I want to tell you a bit about the literary traditions that probably influenced the Pentateuch. I’m going to start with a story of my own.

Once, I met a freshman who had just finished reading Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. Boy, this kid loved Oliver Twist. It had been a while since I’d read the book, so I asked him to summarize the plot for me. He told me all about it. It was, he said, the most extraordinary novel ever written. It was unique, he said. It was the story of a downtrodden orphan who was just too smart, and too resourceful to accept his station in life. This orphan, the freshman told me, joined a gang of thieves, and had many shady adventures. Eventually, however, the orphan, after much suffering, discovered that he had some very wealthy relatives. Everyone who did him wrong paid for it, and he lived in luxury with good honest people for the rest of his life. Wasn’t it a great story? Wasn’t it true that there was nothing else like it out there?

I smiled and said it sure was a great book. You don’t want to squelch some freshman’s adorable boyish zeal about literature. But privately, I had other thoughts. Oliver Twist, I thought, was like a switchboard of every single Victorian novel I could think of. Downtrodden morally upright protagonist, check, caricatured antagonists, check, picaresque adventures, check, gothic mystery, castaway heir to a fortune, and super duper happy ending in which all get their just desserts – check, check, check. It’s a great book. Dickens was an innovator and high practitioner of some of these traditions. But in terms of uniqueness, Oliver Twist is what would happen if someone sniffed fifty Victorian English novels, and then sneezed.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? First of all, the Old Testament, in its size and scope, actually is unique in ancient literature and world literature. Let’s get that out there right away. There’s a reason I’m doing so many episodes on it – we could have done thirty episodes on the Pentateuch itself. If you want a program that’s exclusively on the Bible, I recommend Garry Stevens’ History in the Bible Podcast.

Anyway, our main concern in this podcast is obviously literature, and many of the Old Testament’s component elements do have literary analogs and precedents, which is what we’re going to talk about for the next half hour or so. Before the decipherment of hieroglyphics and demotic script, before we were able to translate Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, before we figured out the languages of Ugarit and Hattusa, we didn’t know this. But times have changed. We’ve found the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, and Atrahasis, and dozens of other works and fragments of works that share elements in common with the books of the Pentateuch. And we’ve learned enough about ancient Canaan to understand that it was a cosmopolitan place, and that the diverse young kingdoms of the Biblical Israelites were in constant cultural and economic intercourse with the Egyptians to the south, the Aegean peoples on the west coast, the Aramaic speaking Syrians to the north, and, more than any, the Assyrians and Babylonians to the east, in Mesopotamia, where the exiled nobility of Judah were forcibly resettled in 586 BCE. The late 600s, and the 500s, both before, during, and after the Babylonian Captivity, are the timeframe in which Biblical scholars concur most of the Old Testament was produced. During these decades, the peoples of Judah had extensive dealings with all manner of cultures. It’s little surprise that the writings that they generated exhibit commonalities with the writings of some of these cultures.[music]

Genesis alongside Egyptian and Mesopotamian Creation Stories

It’s time to turn to the main idea of this episode, which is again in its title: Episode 17: Roots of the Pentateuch. I’m going to talk a lot about stories that existed in the Ancient Near East before and during the composition of the Old Testament. Unless you’re superhuman, you’ll probably get a bit befuddled by the sheer number of sources and names – I know I would be. But the basic idea is really simple. A whole lot of stuff has been discovered on clay tablets, papyri, and stone inscriptions in and around Canaan that sounds an awfully lot like the stories told in the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch has many, many contemporary literary parallels. It may be a controversial idea, but it shouldn’t – I mean you can’t really be angry at a clay tablet or a poor little scrap of papyrus for having had stuff written on it.

In our discussion of the Pentateuch’s literary roots, let’s begin at the beginning, with Genesis, and think about the stories in the ancient world that might have influenced the creation story of the Old Testament’s first book. The vocabulary, historical references, and general interests of the creation story and similar material in the Pentateuch are usually dated to a period during and just after the Babylonian captivity; or, after 586 BCE. By the way, in the next episode we’ll talk about the different sources that scholars have differentiated within the Pentateuch. If you’re new to the subject of Biblical authorship, which really got on its legs in the 1880s with the pioneering work of the German Biblical and Ancient Hebrew scholar Julius Wellhausen, then let me lay this out clearly and – hopefully – diplomatically. Modern Biblical scholars believe that the books of the Old Testament – especially the oldest ones, like those in the Pentateuch – are like layers of a cake. Each book has multiple sources, the sources worked in multiple timeframes and had slightly different ideologies, and each layer has its own syntactical style, its own distinct religious vocabulary, and its own regional interests.¹ We’re going to get chest deep in that in the next episode.

For now, we can simply say that there were many people at work on the stories in the Pentateuch, and that these people lived in cosmopolitan centers like Babylon, the Nile Delta, and in Canaanite cities along Assyrian trade routes, and that these people, like we do, loved to hear, share, and craft stories, and they used these wonderful stories to express their experiences and the religious faith that they felt. One of the stories that they developed is the earliest story in the Old Testament – the story of creation. Genesis’ creation story has so many similarities with older ones from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Ancient Greece that it’s hard not to believe that some cross pollination took place between the creation narratives of these regions.

The easiest way for me to explain the similarities between these creation stories is to quote briefly from Episode 2 of this podcast.

In the beginning, everything was roiling, primordial of darkness. Then the waters and lands were separated. Then the dome of heaven was built. Great leviathans and monsters swarmed in the ocean, and God vanquished them. And after a time, God rested. Soon, mankind was made, fashioned both from clay and divine material, and after almost no time at all, mankind was compelled into an existence defined by physical labor.

Soon, man began to vex God. God planned a cataclysmic flood. A single pious man was given instructions to build a vast boat, on which he installed his family, and a huge variety of animals. The flood raged, obliterating humanity, and when it was over, the boat became lodged on a great mountain, surrounded by floodwaters on all sides. The pious man then sent forth birds, to see if they could find land, one of them did - he knew his tribulations were complete.

Thereafter God and the pious man and his ancestors had a new covenant. The pious man made animal sacrifices to God, and seeing them, God resolved to treat the pious man and his ancestors with justice and clemency.

So, what was that? As you certainly know from today’s episode, it’s the story of Genesis up until we get to Noah and the aftermath of the Biblical flood. But it’s also the story of the Enuma Elish combined with the Atrahasis, the ancient Akkadian creation stories that had been circulating around the Tigris and Euphrates since around 1,800 BCE. In these Akkadian creation stories, Gods create men out of raw materials. “I will knead blood and bone into a savage,” says a deity in the Enuma Elish, as mankind is created.² In Genesis, god “formed man from the dust of the ground” (Gen 2:7) and makes Eve out of one of his bones. Let’s look at another parallel. The physical formation of a man by a god is of primary importance in the Ancient Egyptian hymns to the gods Ptah and Atum. These hymns were discovered carved in granite and written on papyrus, both dating back to before 1200 BCE, and Egypt’s creation stories bear close resemblances to the one in Genesis.

At the beginning of things, reads the ancient papyrus about the Egyptian god Atum, “There were no heavens and no earth, / There was no dry land. . .There was not a single living creature.”³ Genesis describes how “In the beginning. . .the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen 1:2). Another Egyptian parallel. “The. . .living,” reads a Late Bronze Age Egyptian stele about the god Ptah, “were created in the image of Ptah. / All formed in his heart and by his tongue.”⁴ In Genesis, “God created humankind in his image” (1:27) and “breathed into [man’s] nostrils the breath of life” (2:7). With his acts of creation completed, the Egyptian creator “Ptah rested and was content with his work,” just as God in Genesis “rested on the seventh day” (2:2) after he “saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (1:31).⁵ Considering these parallels, and many others, it doesn’t seem too farfetched to conclude that some widespread Ancient Near Eastern creation stories probably influenced the one that opens the Bible. Canaanites had been in and out of Egypt since at least the Hyksos dynasty that began in 1670 BCE, and the generation scholars believe produced the flood and creation stories were, as we saw in Episode 2, in the city of Babylon, where the old Akkadian flood and creation stories still circulated.

Original Sins, Babies Adrift, and Other Parallels

The flood story of Atrahasis – the one that, even at a granular level, so closely resembles Noah’s, is also told in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And Gilgamesh has another element in common with the early chapters of Genesis – a mortal who comes close to the possibility of immortality, only to find immortality impossible to obtain. That story – of coming close to immortality, making a mistake, and being punished for it, is pervasive throughout the Ancient Near East. It happens to Adam and Eve. And Gilgamesh also loses immortal life due to a serpent. The plant Uta-naphisti had told him about, as Gilgamesh is bathing, is stolen from him by a snake, depriving him of eternal life. The Mesopotamian folk hero Adapa, whose stories were discovered in the Library of Ashburbanipal along with Gilgamesh’s, also comes within a hair’s breadth of immortality. A god offers Adapa, “Eat our life-giving bread. / Drink our life-giving water. / You, mortal, will become immortal.”⁶ But this Mesopotamian folk hero Adapa refuses, and his refusal seals the fate of the humans who come after him. Stories like these – mortals coming to the verge of immortality, and then stepping back, extended beyond just Mesopotamia and Canaan. Even way out in the world of the Aegean and Asia Minor, the story of the Lydian king Tantalus bears the same pattern. A man, Tantalus, steals ambrosia, the food of the gods, and has their mysteries revealed to him, only to thereafter commit terrible transgressions and be punished in Hades forever after.⁷ Or, theme with variation in Hesiod – Prometheus tricks Zeus into acquiring fire, a divine mystery, and is cursed with the coming of Pandora and her fateful jar, which dooms mankind to toil and trouble⁸ Forbidden apples, plants at the bottom of the sea, divine food, water and ambrosia, forbidden fire – these things all have the same results in ancient literature. There’s just something that resonates with us about these stories. We seem to love writing and sharing these narratives that, like the Tower of Babel story, involve mortals reaching for the power of immortality, and reaching too far, and having their overweening hopes dashed by one consequential mistake. The idea of paradise lost is older and more complicated than the story written by Judahite priests and scribes during the late Babylonian and early Persian period has traditionally led us to believe. Our oldest tales are full of forbidden apples, and the tale of Original Sin is far from original. [music]

Another famous instance of the Pentateuch probably borrowing from other narrative traditions comes later in the Pentateuch. From the Book of Exodus onward, Moses is at the center of the Pentateuch, and his origin story is famous. “My mother, a priestess, conceived me and bore me in secret, / she put me in a basket of reeds, sealed its lid with pitch; / she cast me adrift on the river from which I could not arise, the river bore me up.” ⁹ These words are written about Moses, right? Actually, they’re not. They’re about the childhood of Sargon, who lived long before Moses was said to have lived, around 2300 BCE, and had legends of his birth inscribed on stele and cuneiform tablets. Just as Sargon’s mother “put me in a basket of reeds, sealed its lid with pitch, [and] cast me adrift on the river,” Moses’ mother “got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch, [and] put. . .it among the reeds on the bank of the river” (Ex. 2:3). And like our friend Odysseus meeting princess Nausicaa in the land of the Phaecians in the Odyssey, Moses, once cast adrift was discovered, clothed, and taken to safety by a bathing princess, and soon thereafter ingratiated a royal household.

These parallels – like the ones we’ve already seen concerning the creation of the world, of the creation of man, of Moses, are all over the Pentateuch. The sibling rivalries of Cain and Abel, and Jacob and Esau, are par for the course in Ancient Near Eastern narrative traditions that focus on brothers fighting brothers, like Egypt’s story of Anubis and Bata, recorded before the Bronze Age Collapse.¹⁰ Barren wives and parents praying for children fill the Pentateuch, and other ancient texts, like the Ugaritic story of Aqhat, which is referenced in the Book of Ezekiel.¹¹ The Bible’s demigods, or nephilim, seem to come from a northern tradition about beings called “Rephaim,” or deified ancestors, beings which are mentioned in Genesis, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Job, and Isaiah.¹²

Seeing these different strands of influence behind the Pentateuch doesn’t need to diminish our appreciation of it as a text. The transmission of stories from generation to generation, is, with important exceptions, a process of survival of the fittest, and the Old Testament, for its massiveness, power, and capacity to synthesize many traditions, has survived for a reason. Nonetheless, according it a unique respect doesn’t mean that we exempt it from close study – even the parts of it that are the most sacred, and most central. I am talking, specifically, about the God of the Old Testament. [music]

Yahweh Elohim and Canaanite El

You cannot read the Old Testament without noticing that its central figure – God, of course – exhibits many very diverse patterns of behavior. He has many names in Biblical Hebrew – El, Elyon, Elohim, Yahweh, El Shadday, Yahweh Elohim. He is sometimes kind. He tells Aaron in a beautiful verse in Numbers, “The LORD bless you and keep you; / the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; / the LORD lift up his countenance / upon you, and give you peace” (Num. 6.25-6). Later, in Deuteronomy, God emphasizes that he is a being who “not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing” (10.17-18). Yet this same god who loves strangers orders mass child murder, impalements, capital punishment for dozens of offenses, and demands a multi-generational campaign of ethnic cleansing that continues hundreds of pages into the Historical Books. The Old Testament God has many names, and many characteristics, being sometimes a distant, numinous deity out of physical reach of the Israelites, and at others blowing into Adam’s nostrils, sniffing the scent of Noah’s sacrifices, and wrestling with Jacob. The Old Testament god is sometimes brutal, and other times kind; sometimes otherworldly, and other times anthropomorphic. For all of these reasons, for over a hundred years Biblical scholars, looking closely at the Hebrew names of God, and the vocabulary and interests of different portions of the Old Testament, have argued that it is the product of many people, over a number of centuries, and the Old Testament God is a composite of multiple Canaanite deities.

The name Isra – El, if you remember from the episode in which Jacob wrestles with God, means “One who strives with God.” “El,” in this word means “God.” Now, listen up- I know we’ve been at it for a while, but this is really fascinating stuff. A couple of shows back we talked about how cosmopolitan the land of Canaan was – how permeable its boundaries were, how many cultures washed together there. One of the cultures there was a beautiful coastal trading hub called Ugarit. Ugarit was a powerful city, but one of the first to go during the Bronze Age Collapse, and by the time the Judahites started gaining power in the early 600s BCE, Ugarit was long gone. We learned a great deal about Ugarit when a Syrian farmer accidentally opened a tomb there in 1929, and gave us access to thousands of new texts – texts that recorded Canaan’s gods and beliefs a few centuries before the kingdom of Judah began to rise. One of the things we learned that Canaan had a deity called “El.”

The tablets at Ugarit contained a number of stories about the patriarchal Canaanite God El. El’s epithets are “the Kind,” or “the Compassionate.” In Ugaritic art, he was shown as a beneficent, bearded father figure, and associated with a bull. And El ruled over other Ugaritic gods, among them Baal, the Cananite storm God, Asherah, El’s wife, and Anat, El’s powerful daughter. El was, in short, a distant, otherworldly being – a kind father who superintended his fellow deities at a distance. In some of the El stories, he is a bumbling old man with erectile dysfunction, and in others, embarrassingly drunk.¹³

Altogether, though, the Canaanite deity El was kindhearted and not particularly threatening – a world away from thunder gods like Zeus or Marduk.

El’s name is all over the Old Testament, both in its singular form, El, and its plural form, Elohim. When God reveals the name Yahweh to Moses, if we use the Ancient Hebrew words for his names, Exodus reads, “Elohim spoke to Moses, and he said to him, ‘I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them." El Shadday means “El of the Mountain,” a reference to the “cosmic mountain” on which he lived and ruled over the other deities of Canaan.¹⁴ The Old Testament is quite frank about God’s multiple names. Chapter 6 of Exodus distinguishes between “earlier and later names of the God of Israel” (Ex 6:2-3). And numerous moments of the Old Testament mention multiple Gods. God is depicted as presiding over assemblies of Gods in 1 Kings 22 and the first chapter of Job. Psalm 82 begins with “Elohim has taken his place in the / Assembly of El, / in the midst of the gods he / holds judgment” (Psalms 82). Similarly, God is the superintendent of many gods in the famous Song of Moses in Deuteronomy: “When Elyon apportioned the nations, / when he divided humankind, / he fixed the boundaries of the peoples / according to the number of gods” (Deut 32:8).

El, Elohim, El Shadday, Yahweh – if this is confusing, the conclusion biblical scholars have often drawn from all of it is straightforward. Many parts of the Old Testament bear the marks of a polytheistic past. They show the people of Israel and Judah co-opting and adapting older northern stories about Elohim and his pantheon, and changing this Elohim into a different being – a more anthropomorphic warrior deity, or storm god, called Yahweh. Yahweh is a name that may have come from a nomadic people called the Shasu that lived along the Jordan River. Egyptian texts from the 1300s and 1200s BCE survive that associate these Shasu nomads with a deity called Yhw or Yahu.¹⁵ Whatever variant of the way his name was spelled, the Canaanite deity Yahweh seems to have had a wife. He was linked to the Canaanite goddess Asherah at a religious site used during the 700s BCE in northeastern Sinai called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud – iconography and text at the site identify Asherah as Yahweh’s wife or consort.¹⁶ What I’m telling you here is the tip of the iceberg, by the way – book length studies of all the parallels I’m mentioning exist, and this episode’s footnotes will tell you the details.¹⁷ Anyway, if Yahweh is an adapted version of the Canaanite deity El, it is no wonder that early practitioners of the Israelite religion still associated Asherah, El’s wife, with Yahweh. While Yahweh has much in common with the Canaanite deity El, he perhaps has even more in common with the Canaanite deity Baal.[music]

Marduk, Baal, Yahweh

There was a pervasive story in the Ancient Near East, a story that all the major cultures told. This was the story of a brave young storm god who fought and bested the ocean. The Enuma Elish tells this story, too – Marduk defeats Tiamat and establishes himself as the chief of the gods.¹⁸ The Canaanite deity Baal conquered the ocean, or Litan, similarly, establishing his primacy. And the Old Testament bears the remnants of a similar story, not about a Litan, but a Leviathan. God brags to Job that he bested this Leviathan in the Book of Job. The Leviathan was a terrifying sea monster of the likes of Babylonian Tiamat or Canaanite Litan. “With his power,” the Book of Job reads, “he stilled the sea, / with his skill he smote [the sea], / with his wind he bagged Sea, / his hand pierced the fleeing serpent” (Job 26:12-13). Following their victories over the ocean, Marduk, Baal, and Yahweh all have structures carefully built in their honor – for Marduk and Baal, grand temples, and for Yahweh, both the Tabernacle and, as we’ll see soon, a temple in Jerusalem.

The language about these young storm Gods has very specific commonalities. Yahweh leads the Israelites as a pillar of cloud. Both Baal in the Ugaritic texts and Yahweh in Psalms are called “Rider on the Clouds.”¹⁹ Marduk is described as the “son of the storm” who rides on a “storm chariot.”²⁰ In the Book of Psalms, similarly, Yahweh “makes the clouds his chariot, / [and] goes about on the wings of the wind” (Ps. 104:3-4). Then there’s that other storm God, Zeus, who, if you’ll remember, fought off his cannibalistic father Chronos, in order to ascend to his place as the sovereign of the other Greek deities, high in the clouds of Mount Olympus.

To some extent, then, the different temperaments of the God of the Old Testament can be explained by contextualizing the book amidst other Ancient Near Eastern religions. God in the Pentateuch, which we covered today, has many characteristics. These characteristics are probably a result of the deity – particularly of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Psalms, and Job – being a compendium of a few different religious figures. Sometimes he is the wise distant patriarch El that we see in the ancient Canaanite tablets discovered in Syria in 1929. At other times, he is a war god like the divinities in Homer’s Iliad, a swashbuckling, temperamental figure who forces the Pharaoh’s army to chase him in Exodus just so that he can crush them and show them his might. His alternations between gentle, sagely wisdom and militant braggadocio, between blessings and unspeakable curses, have puzzled readers for thousands of years. And again, one common answer to his temperamental inconsistencies, made possible by the archaeological discoveries of the past two centuries, has been that the being called El, Elohim, El Shadday, and Yahweh is an amalgamation of multiple diverse theological traditions. [music]

The Pentateuch and the Rise of Monotheism

We’re almost through for today. Let’s leave El, or Elohim, or Yahweh for a minute. Actually, let’s put down the Bible, too. Let’s climb into a hot air balloon, and float way, way up above the lands of Canaan, so that we can see the Aegean coast, and the mountains of Turkey – the distant green of the Nile Delta and the vast reaches of the Mesopotamian desert. There’s been an elephant in the room for this entire show. This elephant is bigger than any single idea I’ve covered in this program so far. And the name of this element is the historical rise of monotheism. Up here, in our air balloon, with the Jordan River far below us, and the whole Fertile Crescent in sight, we can see the broad, warm landscape that nurtured this idea and brought it to life.

In our very first episode, we looked at a clay tablet found in the city of Uruk, impressed in 3100 BCE – essentially a receipt for a sacrifice to the Sumerian goddess Inanna. It said, “2, Sheep, God, Inanna." ²¹ The early Mesopotamians believed that their gods actually dwelt in their temples – often embodied by a sacred object, which received worship and sacrifices. Their gods were not distant vaporous entities that dwelt in a separate spiritual world. They were embodiments of palpable things – fresh water, wind, sex, and fire. The Israelites’ worship of the golden calf in Exodus, to the authors of the Old Testament, is not only an instance of sacrilege – a direct violation of one of the commandments. The Golden Calf is also a moment of cultural backsliding. You can imagine Moses saying, “Are you really praying to a golden calf? Come on, folks, it’s the Late Bronze Age, not 3,000 BCE. Get it together!”

The move from naturist polytheism to the worship of numinous otherworldly gods is evident throughout the Ancient Near East during the first and second millennia BCE. Assyriologists have noted from surveying thousands of clay tablets a rhetorical shift wherein believers began addressing the gods en masse as a body that determined human fates, rather than diverse individual spirits reigning over the various cogs and wheels of physical reality. By the time of Tiglath-Pileser’s Assyrian empire in 1120, Mesopotamian religious artwork had begun depicting deities with symbols – stars, crescents, and so on. This is a big change from the way gods had been delineated a thousand years earlier, during the reign of Sumerian Sargon, when gods were illustrated merely as people. At the center of this change in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates was the Assyrian god Ashur, a being who received increasingly exclusive worship in the Assyrian empire before and during the time the Assyrians conquered Israel and Judah. ²² Whether they were the sole source of this new monotheism, a product of the greater cultural forces around them, or something in between, the Judahites in the 600s BCE lived during a time in which god was becoming singular, distant, and therefore omnipresent. Looking very closely at the names and deeds of God in the Pentateuch, especially if we read them alongside other Ancient Near Eastern religious traditions, reveals the hidden story of the spread of monotheism.

The notion that one god rules over the entire earth or cosmos – is one of the most important ideas in history. It has motivated both genocide and acts of profound selflessness and generosity. It has motivated both smug complacency as well as acts of artistic and scientific ingenuity. And we are now so saturated with the notion that a god is something spiritual and ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine the old Mesopotamian and Canaanite religions. Kish, Uruk, Harran, Nineveh, Akkad, and Ur had their resident deities. When inhabitants of these cities fought, it was thought that their gods were battling, as well, and one army’s victory was the result of their deity’s primacy. At first it sounds silly, as though gods are coaches and armies the sports teams that play for them, and it’s as random as a soccer ball bouncing off of goalposts. Yet the notion that gods have residence in specific geographical locations suggests that Mesopotamians were more aware of religion as a cultural and geographical phenomenon than, say, medieval Christians were. A resident of Nineveh wouldn’t expect some guy from Babylon to worship Ashur. Why would he? You worshipped Marduk in Babylon. Not until the mid-nineteenth century CE, with the work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, would intellectual history broadly begin to return to Mesopotamia’s exceedingly commonsensical notion that people believe what they believe because of where they’re from and how they were brought up.²³

Excepting the Greek and pre-Christian Roman authors we’ll get to shortly, almost every literary figure to be discussed in this podcast is the product of the monotheism born in the fertile crescent during the second millennium BCE. Some were more doctrinal than others. Dante Alighieri’s ferocious and egomaniacal Catholicism, for instance, is quite different than Jane Austen’s restrained Anglicanism. Neither one of these writers, however, believed that the cities they inhabited, Florence and Bath, were home to sword-swinging, sacrifice-devouring, beer slurping resident war gods. But for two thousand years, the ancient land between the rivers believed something like this. The Pentateuch itself is not the end of polytheism, which has of course never ended. The Pentateuch, and Old Testament more generally, is a text that straddles the divide between polytheism and monotheism, between pantheons of diverse personified gods and a singular ascendant god. While its stories tell the narrative of Yahweh and his people, the idiosyncrasies of its text and the milieu out of which it came tell the story of the birth of monotheism. [music]

Moving on to the Prescriptive Parts of the Pentateuch

Well, all this, and we’re still not done with even the Pentateuch! In the next episode, we’re going to talk about all the passages of the Pentateuch we ignored today. Bring your barbecue sauce, because there will be piles of meat. Bring your scrub brush, because there will be rituals for cleanliness. Bring some stones, because we may have to partake in an excruciatingly slow and inefficient means of public execution. And bring a notepad, because there will be tons, and tons, and tons of other rules – some good common sense, others a bit outdated, and still others that are really, amusingly strange. Next time, Episode 18: The 613 Commandments. Thanks for listening to Literature and History say. Got a long quiz on this program if you want to review the who’s who of the Pentateuch at literatureandhistory.com. If you like the musical numbers in this podcast, definitely keep listening – otherwise, class dismissed.

Still here? Okay. I wanted to make something special for the Pentateuch. And I got to thinking about what kind of musical accompaniment the creation story of the Old Testament ought to have. If you were going to see a montage of God creating the world and then overseeing the events of the Pentateuch, what kind of a soundtrack, I thought, what music would best accompany it? Classical? Opera? Baroque? And then, I thought, this is going to be a montage. And it’s about a very difficult task – one that required a lot of earnest effort, and perseverance, since it made even the Old Testament God have to rest on the seventh day. A montage involving a challenging task. That sounds like something that needs some eighties music – like “Eye of the Tiger,” or “Don’t Stop Believin’.” So I imagined the Old Testament God putting on a neon sweatband, lacing up his tennis shoes, and putting on beginning the marvelous work of the world’s creation. And I wrote the following song. If you like it, please note that this song is also a 3d animated cartoon I’ve released on YouTube – no joke – starring all of the Patriarchs of Israel. Hope you like it, and I’ll see you next time!





References

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