Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves
5. Although eunuchs were forbidden membership in God’s congregation (Deuteronomy XXIII. 1), it was an early Israelite battle custom to castrate uncircumcised enemies, as it was in the Egyptian wars of the fourteenth to the thirteenth centuries B.C. against the Sea Peoples. According to 1 Samuel XVIII. 25–27, David pays King Saul two hundred Philistine foreskins as a bride-price for the Princess Michal. The same custom, originally perhaps a magical means of warding off a dead man’s ghostly vengeance, survives today among the Arabs.
6. Japheth’s sons are listed in Genesis X. 2 as Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Meshech and Tiras. Gomer is now generally identified with the Cimmerians of Anatolia; Magog, with the Armenian kingdom of Gog (Ezekiel XXXVIII. 1 ff) mentioned in the fourteenth-century B.C. Tell Amarna letters; Madai, with Media; Javan, with Ionia—his sons, recorded in Genesis X. 5, are Elisha, the Alashya of Cyprus; Kittim, another Cypriot people; Tarshish, the Tartessians of Southern Spain; and Dodanim, an error for Rodanim, the Rhodians. Tubal represents the Tibareni of Anatolia (see 19. 2); Meshech, their neighbours, the Moschians; Tiras, a people mentioned in an Egyptian document of the thirteenth century B.C., as Tursha, members of a sea-confederacy—perhaps the piratical Tyrsenians, some of whom held the Aegean islands Lemnos and Imbros as late as the sixth century B.C., while others emigrated to Italy and became the Etruscans.
22
THE TOWER OF BABEL
(a) Noah’s descendants journeyed together from country to country, slowly moving eastward. They came upon a plain in Shinear, and said: ‘Come, let us bake bricks; we will build ourselves a city, and a tower reaching to Heaven, and become one nation, lest we be scattered over the earth.’ At once they began work, using bitumen for mortar to seal the courses of brick. God watched them, and thought: ‘While they continue as one people, speaking one tongue, whatever they have in mind will be accomplished… Let us now confuse their language, and provoke misunderstandings between them.’ This He did, and presently work on the tower ceased, and the builders dispersed in all directions. Its ruins were called Babel, because God confused the tongues of mankind, and divided a single nation into seventy.224
(b) Others say that Nimrod, a famous hunter in God’s service, raised the Tower of Babel; but that it was not his first foundation. Having won dominion over all Noah’s descendants, he had already built a fortress upon a round rock, setting a great throne of cedar-wood upon it to support a second great throne, made of iron; this, in turn, supported a great copper throne, with a silver throne above the copper, and a golden throne above the silver. At the summit of this pyramid, Nimrod placed a gigantic gem from which, sitting in divine state, he exacted universal homage.225
(c) Nimrod’s father was Cush, Ham’s son by the wife of his old age. Ham doted on Cush, and secretly gave him the garments of skin which God had made for Adam and Eve, and which Shem should have inherited from Noah, but that Ham stole them. Cush kept the garments well hidden, and bequeathed them to Nimrod. When, at the age of twenty, Nimrod first wore these holy relics, he became exceedingly strong; and God granted him courage and skill in the chase. After killing his quarry, he never failed to raise an altar and offer God sacrifices.
(d) Twenty years passed, and a war broke out between the Sons of Ham and the Sons of Japheth, their chief enemies. Despite an early defeat, Nimrod gathered together four hundred and sixty Sons of Ham and eighty chosen mercenaries from the Sons of Shem. With this army he routed the Sons of Japheth, and returned victorious. The Sons of Ham thereupon crowned him King, and he appointed governors and judges over his entire kingdom, choosing Terah the son of Nahor to command the army. Nimrod’s Councillors advised him to build a capital in the Eastern plain. He did so, calling the city Shinear because, he said, ‘God has shattered my enemies.’ Presently he also overcame the Sons of Shem. They brought him tribute, paid homage, and came to live at Shinear, side by side with the Sons of Ham and Japheth, all continuing to speak the Hebrew tongue.
(e) In his pride, Nimrod did more evil than any man since the Deluge, raising idols of stone and wood, which the whole world must worship; his son Mardon proved to be yet worse—hence the proverb ‘Evil parents, evil child.’ Nimrod and his people raised the Tower of Babel in rebellion against God; for he said: ‘I will be revenged on Him for the drowning of my ancestors. Should He send another flood, my tower will rise even above Ararat, and keep me safe.’ They planned to assault Heaven by means of the Tower, destroy God, and set up idols in His stead.226
(f) Soon the Tower had risen seventy miles high, with seven stairways on its eastern side, by which hod-carriers climbed to the summit; and seven on the western, by which they descended. Abram, Terah’s son, viewed this work and cursed the builders in God’s name: for should a brick drop from a man’s hand and break, all bewailed its loss; but should a man himself fall and die, his neighbours never so much as turned their heads. When Nimrod’s men shot arrows into Heaven, God’s angels caught every one and, to deceive them, threw it back dripping blood. The archers cried: ‘Now we have killed all Heaven’s inhabitants!’227
(g) God then spoke to the seventy angels nearest His throne, saying: ‘Let us go down again and confuse their language, making seventy tongues of one!’ And so He did, for immediately the builders became embroiled in misunderstandings. If a mason told a hod-carrier ‘Give me mortar!’, the carrier would hand him a brick instead, with which the mason would angrily kill the hod-carrier. Many were the murders done in the Tower; and on the ground also, because of this confusion; until at last work slowed to a standstill.
As for the Tower: Earth swallowed a third part; fire from Heaven destroyed another third; the remainder stands to this very day—still so tall that from its summit the distant groves of Jericho appear like a swarm of locusts; and the thin air robs men of their wits. Yet the Tower seems less tall than it is, because of an exceedingly wide base.228
(h) Every family now spoke its own language, chose its own country, founded its own cities, became a nation, and acknowledged no universal ruler. God appointed seventy angels to guard these separate nations; but He said also: ‘Over Abram’s Children I will Myself watch, and they shall stay true to the Hebrew tongue.’229
(i) Nevertheless, Nimrod continued to rule from Shinear, and built more cities; namely Erech, Akkad and Calne, which he filled with inhabitants, reigning over them in majesty, and taking the title of ‘Amraphel’.230
(j) At last Jacob’s son Esau met Nimrod by chance while both were out hunting, killed him, and despoiled him of the holy garments. Esau was then likewise greatly strengthened, until Jacob stole them from his tent; saying: ‘My brother does not deserve such a blessing!’, he dug a hole and buried them.231
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1. This twelfth-century Jewish version of the ancient Tower of Babel myth closely resembles that given by the fifth-century Christian writer Orosius of Tarragona in his Seven Books Against the Pagans. Orosius, who seems to have drawn—though at second or third hand—from Jewish Tannaitic sources, describes the Tower as five and a half miles high, ten miles in circumference, with a hundred brazen gates and four hundred and eighty storeys. He reports that Nimrod’s grandson Ninus built the city of Nineveh—an honour which Genesis X. 11 gives to Asshur.
2. Haupt identifies Nimrod son of Cush, also called Nebrod, or Nebron, with Nazimarattas, one of the non-Semitic (but also non-Indo-European) Cassite Kings of Babylon. Coming down from Cush (Kashshu) now Kurdistan, the mountainous region which separated Assyria from Media, they had overwhelmed the Amorite dynasty of Babylon, and ruled from the sixteenth century B.C. to the twelfth. Their national god was called Kashshu, and their kings could therefore be described as ‘Sons of Cush’. Another Cassite god was Murudash, identified with Ninurta, a name from which Nimrod may have been evolved. Like all his predecessors and successors, Nimrod will have been ‘a mighty hunter’ in so far as he was depicted on monuments killing lions, bulls and serpents—a symbolic act suggesting a coronation ritual. This myth may preserve the tradition of Nazimarattas
3. Nimrod’s Hebraicized name (from the verb marod, ‘to rebel’) confirms his evil reputation. According to the seventh-century A.D. Chronicon Paschale, Persians called the constellation Orion ‘Nimrod’; thus linking him with the rebel angel Shemhazai (see 18. f), and with the Greek hero Orion, also ‘a mighty hunter’ who offended his god.
4. The Nimrod tradition has, however, become attached to the myth of Samael’s rebellion against El (see 13. b. c.), and the Hittite myth of Kumarbi’s towering stone giant Ullikummi from whose head he intended to launch an attack on the seventy gods of Heaven (see 8. 3). A Greek myth, evidently drawn from the same source, tells how the gigantic Aloeids piled Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa as a means of attacking Zeus’s Olympian Heaven.
5. In Genesis XIV. 19 Amraphel is called the King of Shinear; in the Targum, King of Babylon; and in Josephus’s Antiquities, ‘Amara Psides, King of Shinar’. He has been confidently identified with Hammurabi, King of Babylon (1728–1686 B.C.), the code-maker and city-builder, though Shinar is now thought to be the Akkadian Shankhar, a country lying to the north-west of Babylon.
6. These early Hebrew traditions were reinforced and enlarged when King Nebuchadrezzar II (604–562 B.C.), another great administrator who forcibly populated the cities he built, carried off large numbers of Judaeans to exile in Babylon. King Sargon II of Assyria (721–705 B.C.) had already deported all but a few of the Northern Israelites; and Nebuchadrezzar needed the Judaeans to help him repair the shameful damage done at Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 B.C., when he plundered and burned the enormous terrace-temples known as ziggurats.
7. For a long time the lofty tower of Birs Nimrud was believed to be the Tower of Babel. With the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions, it has, however, been established that Birs Nimrud was the tower of the city of Borsippa; and agreed that the Tower of Babel must have been located within the city of Babel (or Babylon) herself. This huge tower, called in Sumerian Etemenenanki (‘House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth’) stood in the central temple-complex called Esagila or ‘House that Lifts Up the Head’.
The location of Babylon had been known before the German Oriental Society excavated it in 1899–1918, because the mound which marked its site near modern Hillah was called Bābil by the Arabs. This name preserved the old Akkadian form of the city’s name, Bab-Ili or ‘Gate of God’. The Biblical interpretation of Babel, as deriving from the Hebrew balal, ‘to confuse’, is an early and classic example of popular etymology.
8. Literal belief in the ‘confusion of tongues’ myth has been encouraged by the discovery at Borsippa of another Nebuchadrezzar II inscription. It records that the local ziggurat, long fallen into disrepair, had never been completed by its original architect; the God Marduk, therefore, persuaded his servant the King to perfect it. ‘Mardon’, the name of Nimrod’s son, also means ‘rebel’, but may well be a cacophemism for ‘Marduk’.
Though the Judaeans transported to Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar will have been astonished at the number of different dialects spoken by their fellow-deportees, God’s confusion of tongues seems to be a far more ancient tradition—Moses of Chorene records it in his Armenian History, when discussing Xisuthros and the ark (see 20. 5).
9. St Jerome, like Orosius, identifies the Tower of Babel with Babylon itself—the outer walls of which, according to Herodotus, measured over fifty-five miles. The circumference of the Royal City enclosed by it was, however, about seven miles (not much less than the Tower’s), and its inner walls stood over a hundred yards high.
10. Nebuchadrezzar’s corvées, cruelly enforced, may account for the graphic description of how workmen went up and down the Tower stairs, and of what happened when a brick was dropped. His royal palaces, also, were ‘adorned with gold, silver and precious stones, after being reared as high as the hills’—which may explain Nimrod’s extravagant throne-pyramid. Forty years later, King Darius the Persian (522–485 B.C.) began the work of destruction so often prophesied by Isaiah and Jeremiah; his son Xerxes continued it. According to Arrian, Alexander the Great (366–323 B.C.) thought seriously of restoring Babylon’s glory, but reckoned that it would take ten thousand men more than two months even to cart away the rubble. Meanwhile, the population had emigrated to Seleucia on the Tigris and, by Josephus’s time (end of first century A.D.), all the ziggurats had fallen into complete neglect.
11. The Biblical tradition (Genesis X. 10) ranking Babylon with the primeval cities of Erech, Akkad and Calne, has not yet been disproved.
23
ABRAHAM’S ANCESTRY
(a) This is the genealogy of Abram, whom God afterwards renamed Abraham, and who was descended in the elder line from Noah’s son Shem:
Shem begot Arpachshad two years after the Deluge.
Arpachshad begot Shelah at the age of thirty-five.
Shelah begot Eber at the age of thirty.
Eber begot Peleg at the age of thirty-four.
Peleg begot Reu at the age of thirty.
Reu begot Serug at the age of thirty-two.
Serug begot Nahor the First at the age of thirty.
Nahor begot Terah at the age of twenty-nine.
Terah begot Abram, Nahor the Second, and Haran at the age of seventy.232
(b) Abram’s wife was Sarai, his half-sister by a different mother; for Terah had married both Amitlai daughter of Barnabo, and Edna, daughter of an elder kinsman also called Abram. Nahor the Second married his niece Milcah, daughter of Haran. The name of Haran’s wife is forgotten, but he had Lot by her, and another daughter, Iscah. Some say that Haran was also Sarai’s father.233
(c) When Haran died young, Terah left Ur, the city of his birth, accompanied by Abram, Sarai and Lot, to settle in the Land of Harran; but Nahor the Second stayed behind at Ur with his ancestors, who were all still alive. Shem finally attained the age of six hundred years; Arpachshad, of four hundred and thirty-eight; Shelah, of four hundred and thirty-three; Eber, of four hundred and sixty-four; Peleg, of two hundred and thirty-nine; Reu, of two hundred and thirty-nine; Serug, of two hundred and thirty; Nahor the First, of one hundred and forty-eight; and Terah, of two hundred and five.234
(d) Chaldean Ur was so named by its founder, Ur son of Kesed, Noah’s descendant—an evil, violent ruler who made his subjects worship idols. Abram’s ancestor Reu married Ur’s daughter Orah, and called his son Serug, grieved that he would turn aside towards wickedness. Serug taught his son, Nahor the First, all the astrological wisdom of the Kasdim (Chaldeans); and Nahor called his son Terah because of the suffering he underwent when immense flocks of ravens ravaged the crops at Ur. Terah called the son borne him by Jessica the Chaldean, Abram, in honour of Edna’s father.235
(e) Some make Abram the youngest of Terah’s sons; others, the eldest.236
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1. The Patriarchs’ names have been identified with those of places or ethnic groups known from historical documents, which makes it plausible that they are the mythical residue of ancient traditions about ancestral wanderings. Arpachshad, whom Josephus calls ‘ancestor of the Chaldeans’, may refer to the land of Arrapkha, with the addition of Akkadian ‘shad’, meaning mountain. These ‘mountains of Arrapkha’ were ringed around modern Kirkuk with which Arrapkha is identified. Shelah seems to be the name of a deity, to judge from the composite name Methuselah (Genesis V. 21 ff) which means ‘Man of Shelah’, as Ishbaal means ‘Man of Baal’. Eber, the eponymous ancestor of the Ibrim or Hebrews, may be connected with any of the several areas which Hebrew and Assyrian sources describe as the land ‘beyond the river’ (eber
2. The ages of the Patriarchs—Adam is said to have lived 930 years, Seth 912, Enosh 905, Kenan 910, Mahalalel 895, Jared 962, Enoch 365, Methuselah 969, Lamech 777, Noah 950, Shem 600, Arpachshad 438, Shelah 133, Eber 464, Peleg 239, Reu 239, Serug 230, Nahor 148 and Terah 205—are the modest Hebrew equivalents of the much longer life-spans attributed by the Babylonians to their antediluvian kings. The first five names will suffice as examples: Alulim reigned 28,800 years, Alamar 36,000, Enmenluanna 43,200, Enmenluanna 28,800, Dumuzi the Shepherd 36,000, etc. These Babylonian lists, a version of which is recorded also by Berossus, have one feature in common with the Biblical list of patriarchs: that both attribute extremely long life-spans to the earliest figures, then shorter, but still unrealistically long, lives to the later ones, until the historical period is reached when both kings and patriarchs are cut down to human size. In the ancient Near East, where longevity was considered man’s greatest blessing, the quasi-divine character of early mythical kings and patriarchs is indicated by a ten-fold, hundred-fold or thousand-fold multiplication of their reigns or ages.