Lecture

Lecture number nine. We should not leave the life of Abraham without giving a little attention to the historical situation of his day and what had been happening in the surrounding countries. I think it’s important for us to realize that Abraham, after all, was the heir of a considerable period of culture before he left the land of Southern Mesopotamia, or the North as we had said.

If we assume the flood took place about ten thousand or eleven thousand years ago as we have previous argued, after the flood mankind would have spread out through the fertile crescent, which was a very habitable place, and on down into Egypt. We follow, the best we can, the table of nations, the spread of peoples, and, of course, the tables of nations in Genesis 10 does not presume to give all of the peoples and their movements, but only certain outstanding ones. People lived then on in these different places from around ten thousand years ago. It would be around 8,000 – 9,000 BC down through the days of Abraham, and for Abraham we can take the rough date of about 2,000 BC.

After the people spread around and began to build cities, then the science of archaeology can really be said to begin, as distinguished from the science of the anthropology, which discusses particularly the rather scant remains of bones and flint objects and so on of earlier peoples, people whom we would think would have lived before the flood.

Archaeology deals with the early cities such as we have mentioned, the city of Jericho, beginning around 7,000 – 8,000 BC and the cities of Asia Minor such as Çatalhöyük that we had referred to and also in Northern Mesopotamia, northeast on the edge of Mesopotamia, the city of Jarmo, and a little bit later than Jericho. These cities were lived in year after year and can be excavated by the archaeologists, and a good bit of the history of the people living there can be made out from their remains. We think of archaeology as a science of uncovering the buried cities. It is, of course, broader than that, but in the Near East it amounts largely to this work of digging up these cities. The cities are found and the technical name is tells, a word that occurs in the Bible once, and these tells are artificial mounds. They’re rather characteristic in shape as you see them in the Palestinian landscape; they are hills with a flat top, and they are, indeed, manmade. You find them also in Mesopotamia. You do not find them like this so much in Egypt where the situation is different.

I find people asking me the question, “Why do these cities get buried?” Our cities today, if for instance, because of some plague or change of culture or war or whatnot—if St. Louis, for instance, were disused for a while, it surely would not fall down and become a layer in a city and if we came back later on, build on top of it and get a tell. Not so. How is it that the ancient cities of the Mesopotamia become tells like this so that they can be stripped layer by layer and the history of the site discovered from the remains?

Well, the reason it happens is because over there the situation is different than it is here. Here, of course, we spread the cities out. With modern transportation we can do that. But in those days, the cities were crowded together so that in time of war they could have a more adequate defense. A city would have to have a water supply. It would be on a [spite] rise, a hill, so it could defend itself better, and it would be near a strong spring or well. The well, of course, would be usually at the bottom of the city and the hill. That made a problem because in time of siege it was, of course, disastrous to have the water supply outside the city gates. So strenuous measures were taken to get that water brought into the city through tunnels and whatnot in later days.

Well, the houses in Babylon and in the Dead Sea Valley, the Jordan Valley north of the Dead Sea, would be made out of mud bricks, something like the adobe that we use in the Southwest. Indeed, the climate and general outlook in Palestine is rather similar to parts of our Southwest. The house walls, then, might have been in some parts made out of stone as in the mountains or made out of mud brick; then they would be small rooms and small houses. The people lived outside a good bit and used the houses and the courtyards of the houses more for their home industries—spinning, weaving, dying, and cloth-making. These houses then would have a roof that would be made by spreading poles. Wood is not too plentiful, of course, in Palestine, so rather small poles would be stretched across the room. It wouldn’t be a very long span for these poles, and on top of these poles there would be a good depth of mud, adobe, a place perhaps twelve inches thick. This would be the roof and this roof would have to have constant attention. Of course, in Palestine it does not rain through about two-thirds/three-fourths of the year. In the summertime it never rains, and then in the wintertime, the rains are rather short, but not too much water falls. In Jerusalem, they have considerable water. The average rainfall is about twenty-four inches, which is not too bad, and more in Haifa; back in the Dead Sea Valley, of course; there is very, very little rain. It is desert conditions there. So the climate of Palestine varies a great deal, and a good book from which to study the climate and geography of Palestine is the one by Dennis Baly, The Geography of Palestine. It gives figures and a very good analysis.

The roofs would be rolled with stone rollers. Those stone rollers are still used today and they are found in archaeological diggings. After a rain that roof would have patted down and rolled flat so that it could be ready for the next rain. If this were not done, the roof would soon deteriorate. This is what happened if for any reason the city was not occupied. If there was a war and the people were taken captive or if there was a pestilence and everybody fled, or if for any reason, famine or whatnot, the city would lay idle for ten or twenty years, all these roofs would fall down. The dust would turn into mud and drip down and fall down. The sticks would be eaten away in time, and whatever was on the floor of the house would be sealed by about twelve inches of dirt that came down from the roof. Then if the walls were mud brick, they would fall over and there would be, of course, some dust blown in from desert storms so that there would be an accumulation of dust and dirt on top of the floor. Well, anything that had been left on the floor like pieces of pottery or maybe an occasional jewel or bead or button of some kind or little instruments—maybe a spear point, arrow point, or something—if these things were left on the floor when the people disappeared, then the archaeologist comes back and digs through that layer of debris. He will find on the bottom, on the floor level, sealed in by the fallen mud and dust, the objects the people used in their life.

Well, if the city is neglected for a while, the houses fall down and the walls tumble over, then when people come back and occupy this same city, because, of course, it has a hill and good situation or it has a well or spring at the bottom of the hill, the people begin again. But when the people began a second time, they did not dig all the debris out; they simply leveled it off. They leveled it off and began again. They didn’t have very high houses. Sometimes part of the house would be two-story, but at least heavy foundations were not needed. There would be no frost line in Palestine, and so they just built on top. And when they built on top, the same process would be repeated in another fifty or maybe one hundred years and there would be another layer. So you have these cities, layer by layer, depending on the destruction of the city. Of course, if the city is destroyed by war, you would probably have a layer of ashes there that would mark the distinction between the upper later city and the lower earlier city.

When we have these layers and we study them in archaeology, how do we study these layers? Of course, what we have is the objects to study. In Palestine, we have very little writing. This is unfortunate, but there is a reason. In Mesopotamia when cities are excavated like Nippur, they are large great cities and in parts of these cities large numbers of tablets have been found. Indeed, in the different cities of Mesopotamia, so many clay tablets have come up that they say that perhaps a million tablets are now available for study and use. Many of these have been read and published, but there are quite a few that have not been published as yet, some of them perhaps not worthy of publication, but there may be some tablets not published that should be.

Well, in Mesopotamia, the reason why the writing is preserved is because they wrote on clay tablets. They used the cuneiform form-type of writing, impressing syllables, signs standing for syllables, on the clay by means of a triangular stylus. You do not draw on the clay with feathers; it doesn’t work very well. You push in with a stick and make impressions, and these impressions are the cuneiform form tablets which we have probably all seen pictures of.

So the clay tablets of Mesopotamia are rather indestructible, especially if they were baked by fire, and they can be read after all these years. There are many, many thousands of them available to read. They are written in the Acadian language, which is a sematic language, somewhat like Hebrew, but the style of writing is by the syllable method with one set of signs standing for a syllable. Sometimes a set of signs stand for a word.

In Egypt, they used a different style of writing. There they inscribed their great buildings laboriously with in-size characters, but mainly they used papyrus for their writing. And in Egypt, of course, we have the great monumental temples and a great deal of writing on these temples for us to read. The Egyptian language was discovered after Napoleon invaded Egypt. He found the famous Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was written in three languages; and since we knew the one, we could decipher the other two. So the Egyptian language has been known for quite some time, and in Egypt the writing that was done day-by-day on papyrus has been preserved for us. There are great numbers of papyrus documents in Egypt from the early times around 3,000 BC on down, to the late times of the Ptolemies. The writing had been preserved because the papyrus had been preserved because of the very dry climate of Egypt.

Now the point is that in Palestine, the writing was done on the papyrus. Palestine was in constant trade with Egypt. We get our word book—Bible, the Greek word for book is byblos—from which we get our word Bible and the Greek word byblos meaning book, comes from the town of Byblos, the center of the papyrus trade. The ships from Egypt came up to the coast of Phoenicia and traded there—bought the Palestinian wheat and cedars and other products—and, in turn, gave to the Palestinians and the Phoenicians gave the papyrus; this then became an item of trade for the seashore there. So the Palestinians and the Hebrews eventually wrote on papyrus, but the papyrus in Palestine does not last.

They also probably wrote on animal skins. The Dead Sea Scrolls are practically all written on animal skins, but the leather, of course, does not last usually because in the rainy season they mildew badly. So we have very little writing from Palestine. We are, therefore, in Palestinian archaeology, restricted more to the pottery and to the walls and to other objects that may be found in the houses.

We look at one city and find that there is a change in the style of pottery as you go from level to level. At one place you find, perhaps, some imported pottery, similar to what is found in Greece. In a later section, we find some pottery that is very similar to what is found in Nineveh. Then you check and you find that this is the layer that was burned and it turns out to be about 720 BC, which is the time of the Assyrian invasions. So we first see the style of pottery, layer-by-layer, in a given mound. Then we compare that pottery in those layers with pottery in other layers in cities in Palestine and in cities outside Palestine. If we can get some connection between the Palestinian level and Egyptian writing or some Mesopotamia events, we then can have a peg on which to hang the rest the history of that particular Palestinian city.

Well now, as I say, Abraham lived at around 2,000 BC and these cities had been going on for a long time. In Mesopotamia there is constant occupation from the days of Jerimoth. We hardly know the date of Jerimoth. The carbon-14 datings of Jerimoth are somewhat uncertain, but from around 6,000 BC on to 2,000 BC, there’s 4,000 years of history in Mesopotamia.

In the early days, we have no writing in Mesopotamia. Writing was apparently invented in Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC, so the periods before that are named from more of their pottery styles; there are such levels as we know by the names of Jarmon al Halaf and Obeid and Uruk. These are cities; actually the levels and the historical periods are named from the cities where this distinctive pottery first appeared. The Obeid level would have been around 4,000 BC and it would be a level in which copper first appears in any consequence. It is also the level that shows the first occupation of Southern Mesopotamia. The cities of Southern Mesopotamia have in their lowest level objects that show the characteristics of the Obeid age.

Above that would be the Uruk age, the biblical word Erech and Erech is named, as you know, in Genesis 10. And the Uruk age goes up to around 3,000. In this period, writing was invented. I may say that there was a high degree of culture at this time. Art objects are well-made and some people were living in relative luxury. But at about 3,000 there is a growth of culture. There was more international commerce and, I suppose, we may believe that there would be more leisure time for some classes at least to advance. There was also the invention of writing which facilitated learning and commerce.

So around 3,000 in Mesopotamia and very nearly the same time and probably dependent upon Mesopotamia, this is known only because certain dependencies in artwork and some objects found in Egypt—palettes on which they ground eye paint—the famous Narmer Palette seems to have some representations of ideas that might be called preliminary writing, and the Narmer Palette shows some acquaintance with Mesopotamian motifs. So it would seem, though the argument is given at more length, of course, that Egypt was dependent on Mesopotamia at least for the idea of writing.

Well, about 3000 BC, Egypt became unified under one king. Before that, the Delta Region, lower Egypt, up in the north, had had somewhat of an independent existence. Southern Egypt, up the Nile, had its own area too, and different monarchs or nobles were in control. But after about 3000 BC, the dynasties began. Egyptian history is carried on and designated by the different dynasties. There are three major groups of dynasties. The Old Kingdom, which runs from around 3,000 to about 2,200 BC, includes the first five or six dynasties. Then there is a period when several dynasties follow each other, and it is hard to follow because our sources are lacking; this is called the First Intermediate Age. The First Intermediate Age would be seven to eleven dynasties, and we know very little about them. This was from sort of a dark ages from 2200 BC to about 2000 BC. This would be just about the beginning of the period of Abraham, you see. After that comes the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, going from 2000 to around 1776 as I figure, for the end of the Middle Kingdom. I remark sometimes that when I remember that figure, 1776, that helps me to remember the date of the American Revolution.

Well, in Mesopotamia there was also as sequence of events like this. Around 3000 BC, we speak of the Early Dynastic Period. The people in control of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians. The Sumerians are very wonderful people. In the Bible their land is called the “Land of Shinar,” especially Southern Mesopotamia, and we know a good bit about the Sumerians. Their language has been deciphered and is rather well-known, and there’s considerable material from the Sumerians. Dr. Samuel Kramer from the University of Pennsylvania Museum has studied the Sumerians extensively. He has a number of books that are very interesting and illuminating on their culture. They were a very literate and cultured people. They ruled in Mesopotamia, but in peace in city states. Something of their artwork is shown by the royal tombs that have been excavated in Ur coming from about 2600 BC with rather remarkable gold objects. Wealth of all kinds is buried in these tombs. Their mathematics was rather extensive, and it developed through that millennium. In about 2350, there was a Semitic ruler of Middle Mesopotamia, Sargon I of Akkad. For about 100 years, Sargon had a Semitic dynasty that covered Mesopotamia and his conquest. Because he was the first real conqueror, his conquest reached all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. So the Semitic Period came in there, and that was followed by a renewed Sumerian emphasis and a Neo-Sumerian period that lasted down to about 2000 BC, around the days of Abraham.

At about the days of Abraham, there were movements in the world of that day that were rather shaking. We can hardly follow them, but it seems as if a new type of settler came in from Arabia or from the borders of Mesopotamia. They were rather despised by the Sumerians. They were thought of as wild beasts and uncivilized. They said they ate raw flesh and they did not have the manners of the Sumerian city dwellers. But these people were a vigorous people, and they apparently spread to the west into Canaan and also to the east into Mesopotamia and took over. They were also Semitic and they are called the Amorites. The word Amorite in Acadian means westerner. These people apparently came somewhere from the west and spread into the fertile crescent both east and farther west. The Intermediate Dark Age that I referred to in Egypt from 2200 to 2000 was probably caused by these people or backwashed from the conquest of these people.

They settled in Mesopotamia partly peaceably and partly by conquest, and I suppose by robbery. The Amorites finally became the rulers of Mesopotamia and one of the most famous of the Amorite rulers was Hammurabi. Hammurabi, they used to think, was around 2100 BC, and some have thought that Hammurabi was the Amraphel of Genesis 14. It seems rather clear that this is not the case.

The two names look somewhat alike in English, but in the Acadian they are quite different. Hammurabi in Acadian would be “my people is broad,” probably using people in the sense of the divinity of the clan, a name which we call theophoric. Most of the biblical names and the Semitic names of Mesopotamia include the name of a god, like, for instance, Nathanael would be “God has given” or Shem-ai'ah would be “Jehovah has heard.” On the other hand, in Mesopotamia we have Nebuchadnezzar “O Nabu protect the boundary.” So these are the theophoric names of Mesopotamia and Hammurabi would be one such.

On the other hand, Amraphel would be a totally different name, it would mean Amurru [appelo], the god Amurru; [appelo] would have reference to a son, son of Amurru. So they are totally different names, and that is fortunate because actually now the date Hammurabi is put down from 2100, by many people at least, to about 1700. So where Hammurabi used to be thought to be too early to have contact with Abraham, now probably he should be considered too late to have contact with Abraham.

The picture of the land of Mesopotamia and also Canaan and of Egypt that we should draw in the days of Abraham is a picture of high culture indeed. If Abraham were a cultured man, and we presume he was, he would be able to do considerable mathematics. They used in that time the sexagesimal system, one that we still use in our time pieces. We say one hundred cents to a dollar, but we say sixty minutes to an hour and sixty seconds to a minute. A dollar and a half is one hundred and fifty pennies, but a minute and a half is not one hundred and fifty seconds; it is ninety seconds. It has a base of sixty.

The Sumerians apparently used the base sixty. The first written records that we have from around 3000 are probably temple tax income receipts and they include numbers. These numbers are probably the sexagesimal system. The weights of Mesopotamia down into the biblical times would be sixty shekels, one mina, sixty minas, one talent. This later changed to a short talent—fifty minas to a talent, making three thousand, and shekels to a talent instead of the earlier 3600 shekels to the talent. A shekel—we can tell from the weights that have been discovered with the names on them—would average about 11.4 grams and about a third of an ounce.

I mentioned the mathematics of the Sumerians and the later Arcadians. They were able to extract the square root to the second decimal place, which is no mean achievement. They used the equivalent of a decimal place, because if they said for instance, fifty-nine, thirty, you could have fifty-nine minas and thirty shekels or fifty-nine talents and thirty minas, depending on what you were dealing with. So in surveying mathematics, they could even deal with quadratic equations and solve quadratic equations. So I say that the period in which Abraham was born was a period of advanced culture. There were people going back and forth all the time and people were learning or going to school. Abraham was by no means primitive and his religion was not primitive; he was a man of consequence of international knowledge, and the civilization should be held high in our esteem in Abraham’s day.