ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #4 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> That was a good question, Nick. I have a similar one about the lands through which the tribes traveled. Because of the war in Iraq, lots of Americans have seen pictures of that part of the world as it is now. Did it look the same in the time of Abraham as it does today? >> It's interesting that you mention Iraq. Let me answer your question with a question. Who is the most famous Iraqi of all time? I'll give you a second to think about that. No, actually the answer is not Saddam Hussein. Although, he's the Iraqi that most Americans think of these days if they think of someone from Iraq. Actually people who maybe know a little bit more about the ancient world would maybe think of someone like Hammurabi, the giver of the famous law code. But actually without a doubt the most famous Iraqi of all time is Abraham mentioned in the Bible. He's from the city of Ur. Ur of the Chaldees the King James called it. Chaldea was a later name. Babylon, which is today part of Iraq. So Abraham was an Iraqi at least from the area that's now Iraq. And the question is a good one because today we are used to seeing images of Iraq. And what we see is a desert, sand, desert. But Iraq wasn't like that in the time of Abraham. It was very different in those days than today. And just to illustrate the difference, I mention that Abraham was from the town of Ur, Ur of the Chaldees. If you look at Ur on the map or see it on the news today or actually go there -- I have a student who recently -- his brother was in the military. And he recently sent me an entire CD full of pictures of Ur of the Chaldees that his brother had taken when his military unit was there. And what strikes you about it is it's in the middle of a sand desert. And you wonder why in the world people would have built a city in an inhospitable place like that in the middle of nowhere. And the answer is that they didn't. Ur in Abraham's time was the New York City of the ancient world. It was the center of world trade and commerce. And the reason it was such an important city was it sat at the point where the Euphrates River entered the Gulf, entered -- came to the sea. And because it was where the river met the sea like New Orleans, you know, in America where the Mississippi River comes to the sea, it's a major port for trade and commerce. And Ur in Abraham's time was a fabulously wealthy and powerful city because of its location. The irony is that over the 4,000 years since Abraham's time, the Euphrates River has silted up the land. And so if you go there today, the city of Ur is 165 miles from the coastline. And because the course of the Euphrates has moved, it's now six miles from the Euphrates River. So today is sits in the middle of a sand desert. But in Abraham's time, it wasn't only a coastal city, but it was a coastal city in a region that was pretty lush and productive in terms of farming. They grew a wide variety of produce there. Grains. That fed not only the inhabitants of the city of Ur, which was a large city and powerful, but also produced grain that they sold as part of the market that passed through there. So things are very different in biblical times than they are today. Another illustration of the difference is the fact that not all the changes have taken place that long ago. Just as recently as 10 or 15 years ago the government of Iraq drained the marshland in the southern part of Iraq. That marshland had been there since the beginning of recorded history. The name of the marshland was the Andean. And many scholars today -- most scholars today believe the word for Andean, for the marshland in that area, was actually where the name Eden, the Garden of Eden comes from. That is the place, afterall, that's closest to a place we can identify where the Garden of Eden might have been located based on the evidence given to us in the book of Genesis. Although, we don't know exactly how the contours of the land might have changed as a result of the flood and other things. But the name has been preserved anyway. So things were quite a bit different in Mesopotamia today than they were many years ago in the time of the Bible in the Old Testament time. In particular today there's much more desert, much less grassland, much less pasturage. And this illustrates the fact that Mesopotamia has always been a land where the balance between the forces of nature was very precarious and the lives of the people were very tenuous because of their dependence upon the annual flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And the changes in climate had a tremendous effect upon the life of the people there. As far as Mesopotamia goes, farmers and fishermen began to settle the region as much as we can tell around 5500 BC, maybe a bit earlier than that. There are some villages that may go back before that. We can't date things exactly when we get that far back. Over time those small villages grew into settlements. And as those settlements began to develop trade like Ur did, they eventually grew into cities. And these became the first major big cities anywhere in the world. And so it behooves us to take just a minute to review some of these cities. Some of them show up in the Bible. Some do not. But all of them are very important for understanding the history of humankind and our life as humans in this first part of the world that grew to be what we might call today civilization. So let's take a look at a couple of these cities. And you should probably be able to identify these on a map if asked. Ur of course we already talked about. This was one of the major centers of Sumerian culture. And we'll talk about the Sumerian people later in this course. It was a city that was founded perhaps as early as 3500 BC or earlier than that. It basically existed as long as human recorded history has existed. And it still exists today. In the center of the town was this major temple, a ziggurat, which is a kind of platform temple, sort of half temple, half pyramid that was built in Mesopotamia. The ziggurat in Ur was quite large. It was roughly 200 feet by 140 feet three stories high. And on top of the third floor was the actual temple itself. The temple was small. But it sat up on top of this ziggurat that was about 90 feet high. And that doesn't seem to us like something very high today. Roughly the equivalent of a nine-story building. And you know, a nine-story building is impressive but it's not all that impressive until you remember that everyone else was living in basically a mud-brick hut perhaps one or two or three rooms that were single-story buildings for the most part. None of them were more than two stories. And so this was a wide area but a low area. And towering over it was this mighty temple platform. And the wealth and power that it took to build such a thing reflects the economic strength of the city of Ur. As a trading center it was very wealthy and very powerful. The wealth of the city was reflected when it was first excavated at the beginning of the last century. The excavators found a series of graves that they thought must be royalty because they contained so many valuable jewels and trinkets and very richly appointed clothing and other grave goods. And so they were called royal tombs. Later on we discover these were not tombs of royalty at all. These were just probably tombs of wealthy merchantmen. But they were fabulously wealthy by comparison to the average person of the day because of the influence and power of the city that Abraham came from. As powerful as Ur was, it wasn't the only powerful city or even the most important city in that part of the world that was known as Sumeria at the time. Another city that's less well known to us because it doesn't play as significant a role in the Bible is the city of Uruk spelled U r u k. Uruk is as old as Ur, if not older. And it was the -- probably at least as old as Ur if not older. And it was the largest city in the world. At Abraham's time this city would have been roughly about the same size as the city of Rome was at the time of Christ. A very large and impressive city with high walls, high and thick walls, that stand to this day. It was the center of worship of the goddess Inanna, who was one of the chief goddesses in the pantheon, the goddess of love and war. And it produced very valuable and beautiful stonework, jewelery, metalwork and such like that. And it was again a major capital, political capital, in ancient Sumeria. Uruk is also important to us because it was where we discovered the earliest recorded writing in human history. A kind of writing that we know today as cuneiform written with a little web shaped stylus on clay. And we'll talk about that a little later in the course. But cuneiform was discovered in Uruk. We don't know if writing was invented there or not. If it wasn't invented, it was invented somewhere in the neighborhood. And it's the place we have the oldest examples of writing from. Another important city is the city of Akkad usually spelled A k k a d. Sometimes you'll see it on the maps as A c c a d. But the exact location is not known to us today. It's out there somewhere waiting to be found in a mound. And perhaps when the political situation is better in Mesopotamia, archeology can begin working and we may discover the location of the city of Akkad. But it was an important city. It gave its name to one of the most powerful empires in the ancient world known to us today as the Acadian empire. This was the empire that eventually kind of split into two, half of which became Babylon and the other half became Assyria. So it was in some ways the progenitor of those two great empires on their own. Well, having mentioned that I suppose we should mention Babylon now. We know where Babylon is. In fact, some people believe the city of Akkad is the same site as the city of Babylon, just at an earlier stage. But no one knows that for sure. Babylon still exists. It was largely rebuilt over the last generation by the political leadership in Iraq. It's of course, not rebuilt as an inhabitant town. But you can go there and see it today. It was the central capital of the empire that developed in the southern part of Mesopotamia. That part that we today know as Babylon, the empire, as well as Babylon, the city. A little further to the north on the Euphrates River was another city that we don't hear a lot about because it's not mentioned in the Bible. But it was very important to the ancient world. And that's the city of Mari spelled M a r i. Mari was the home of the capital of a people who are mentioned in the Bible, the Amorites. And they are actually mentioned fairly often in the Old Testament. They were closely related to the Hebrews in terms of their culture and language. And about the time that the Hebrews were just going down to Egypt or just after they went down into Egypt in the 18th century before Christ, the city of Mari was ruled by a very important king by the name of Zimri-Lim. And the reason that Zimri-Lim was important was he built a very impressive temple and palace complex there, part of which was a library. Later on the city was destroyed about 1700 BC and it was never rebuilt. And the library was preserved. There were about 20,000 clay tablets that were preserved in this library. And as a result of this find, the discovery of the library of Zimri-Lim at Mari, we know a tremendous amount about what the world and the culture and the society were like at the time of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the patriarchs, you know, because we have a tremendous picture of life in that area as preserved in these clay tablets. And of course, they don't mention the patriarchs. They don't mention any of the people in the Bible. Although, they do mention names that are similar to names that are found in the Bible. And they tell us a lot about the culture and the law and the economic system of the lands of the Bible in that day. So even though Mari itself is not mentioned, it's a very important city for our understanding of the world of the Old Testament. Another city that's important is just a little further to the north. And that's the city of Ashur. Ashur was the first great capital of the northern Mesopotamian empire, the empire that later adopted the name of the city. And we know the empire as Assyria, the empire of the city of Ashur. Ashur was founded in the early 2000s. That is shortly after 3000 BC apparently by immigrants from Mesopotamia, immigrants from the south who moved to the north. There are some similarities in the early artwork found at Ashur and the artwork found in the same period in the south. The city had a fortified wall that was two and a half miles around. And it was an important site. It is said that there were 34 temples and 3 palaces in the city. Although, we haven't found them all yet. So again, a city of tremendous wealth and power. It wasn't located in a particularly militarily strategic location. And as a result, many centuries later the rulers of Assyria moved the capital from Ashur to another city, a city that we know better because it is mentioned in the Bible. The city of Nineveh. And that's the last one I would like to mention. Nineveh, which by the way is -- still exists, is in the northern part of Iraq. It's just across the river from the city that we know today as Mosul, M o s u l. And Mosul has been in the news or is in the news in Iraq because there's a lot of activity up in that region. And just across the river is the ancient city of Nineveh. We know Nineveh from the Bible, of course, because it's the city that Jonah went to. And Nineveh is also mentioned in some of the prophets, as well. About 705 BC King Sennacherib established Nineveh as the new capital. And the city was already there before that. But he moved the capital from its previous location to Nineveh and then began to build up the city. And he built it up very quickly. And Nineveh grew very rapidly. And it didn't last very long, though. By the end of that century, Nineveh had been destroyed by the Babylonians. And it was never rebuilt as the prophets prophesied that it would not be. Never inhabited again after that. The inhabited place today is Mosul, which is across the river. So Nineveh has been excavated. There was, again, a very large library of Ashur ***banaple and other rulers that was found in Nineveh that tell us a great deal about life in the Assyrian empire at that time. But it remains today one of the most important cities in the ancient world, a city that's been somewhat thoroughly excavated. Although, part of it is under something else. It can't be dug up. At least not right now. So there's certainly more to be found there. But I thought I would mention these cities since you asked about Mesopotamia and Iraq. Because you really should have heard of them. And you probably should be able to identify them on a map. So make sure before you finish this lesson as you look at a map of Mesopotamia and study the area, that you can identify the locations of these cities. Of course you won't be able to identify Akkad since we don't know where it is. But you should at least be aware of its general location in the -- in or around the area where Babylon is located. And so that's what Mesopotamia was like at roughly the time of Abraham. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***