I had so closely associated the history of Israel with the stories from the Bible that it hasn’t occurred very often for me to look up the archeological or written history of Israel outside the stories in the Bible. It’s not impossible for the stories that we see in the Bible to be dramatized, abridged cultural stories of Mesopotamia. Earlier in the semester we looked at different stories, like Gilgamesh, that share strong similarities to different stories in the Bible. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in where modern-day Iraq is located, giving it a close cultural proximity to the authors of the Bible. We also looked at two rock formations that are in both Israel and Jordan that are known to both lands as Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt. The rock formations are referenced to be the same person, and it’s not hard to image that tales and stories migrated back and forth from places like Jordan and Israel. Books like Genesis could be abridged versions of cultural tales much like Aesop’s Fables: a compilation of tales that aim to teach morals to the next generation.
Categories