The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia — John Shaqi
The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and BabyloniaPinches, Theophilus G. (Theophilus Goldridge)
Religion
The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia
Pinches, Theophilus G. (Theophilus Goldridge)
Bible. Old Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Fragments of tablets have been spoken of that seem to belong to the fifth
and sixth of the series, and one of them speaks of the building of certain
ancient cities, including that now represented by the mounds known by the
name of Niffer, which must, therefore, apart from any considerations of
paleographic progression in the case of inscriptions found there, or
evidence based on the depth of rubbish-accumulations, be one of the oldest
known. It is probably on account of this that the Talmudic writers
identified the site with the Calneh of Gen. x. 10, which, notwithstanding
the absence of native confirmation, may very easily be correct, for the
Jews of those days were undoubtedly in a better position to know than we
are, after a lapse of two thousand years. The same text, strangely enough,
also refers to the city of Aššur, though this city (which did not,
apparently, belong to Nimrod’s kingdom) can hardly have been a primæval
city in the same sense as “Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh.”
The text of the Semitic Creation-story is here so mutilated as to be
useless for comparative purposes, and in these circumstances the bilingual
story of the Creation, published by me in 1891, practically covering, as
it does, the same ground, may be held, in a measure, to supply its place.
Instead, therefore, of devoting to this version a separate section, I
insert a translation of it here, together with a description of the tablet
upon which it is written.
This second version of the Creation-story is inscribed on a large fragment
(about four and a half inches high) of a tablet found by Mr. Rassam at
Sippar (Abu Habbah) in 1882. The text is very neatly written in the
Babylonian character, and is given twice over, that is, in the original
(dialectic) Akkadian, with a Semitic (Babylonian) translation. As it was
the custom of the Babylonian and Assyrian scribes, for the sake of giving
a nice appearance to what they wrote, to spread out the characters in such
a way that the page (as it were) was “justified,” and the ends of the
lines ranged, like a page of print, it often happens that, when a line is
not a full one, there is a wide space, in the middle, without writing. In
the Akkadian text of the bilingual Creation-story, however, a gap is left
in _every_ line, sufficiently large to accommodate, in slightly smaller
characters, the whole Semitic Babylonian translation. The tablet therefore
seems to be written in three columns, the first being the first half of
the Akkadian version, the second (a broad one) the Semitic translation,
and the third the last half of the Akkadian original text, separated from
the first part to allow of the Semitic version being inserted between.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account