Full Text for Archeology - the Nemesis, part 3 (Text)

<1tnurnrbitt ijJqrnlnguttl :alnut~l!l Continuing LEHRE UNO W EHRE MAGAZIN F UER E v.-LuTH. HOMILETIK THEOLOGICAL Q UARTERLy-THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY Vol. IV April, 1933 No.4 CONTENTS Pare FUERBRINGER, L.: Die persoenliche Weisheit Gottes .... 241 GRAEBNER, THEODORE: Separation of Church and State 249 MUELLER, J. T.: Luther oder Calvin . .. .. . . ... . . .. ... 255 MAIER, W. A.: Archeology - the Nemesis...... 264 KRE TZ MANN, P. E.: The So-called '-Christian Interpola- tions" in Josephus .... .. .................... . . . . . ..... 274 Tanz und Kirchen disziplin ..... .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 281 KRETZMANN, P. E.: Die Hauptschriften Luthers in chro- n ologischer Reihenfolge . .... . . ... .... ....... .. ..... . 284 Dispositionen ueber die a ltkirchliche Epistelreihe.. . . . . . . .. 286 Miscellanea . . . . .. . .. 297 Theological Observer. - Kir chlich-Zeitgeschichtliches .. . ... 302 Book R eview. - Literatur . . ...... . ........ . ......... .. . . . 313 Ein Predlger mlll8 Dicht alleln 1Dft Babylonier und Aegypter) or of P. Jensen in his Das GilgamesQh-Epos in der Weltliteratur> with intermediate atrocities committed by Alfred Jeremias (Das AUe Testament im Lichte des alten Orients) and Heinrich Zimmern (Keilinschrifttexte und das AUe Testament), the sober thought of scientific investigation has been outraged in an utterly unparalleled manner. But other claimants were to be heard. Oheyne had developed the prodigious absurdity which would find the origin of Israel's wor- ship in that insignificant tribe, the J erachmeelites. Stade credits the symbiotic Kenites with the invention of some of the highest and holiest aspects of Old Testament worship. The Armenians, the Egyptians, the Oanaanites, the Phenicians, the Hellenic philosophers, the Zoroastrianists, all these and yet'more have been advanced as the ultimate originators of at least some sections of the Old Testa- ment - concerning which we have the divinG assurance that it was penned by the holy men of God who wrote as they were "moved by the Holy Ghost," 2 Pet. 1,21. The fatal inevitability with which this discrediting of the Bible has overshot its mark has been graphically illustrated by the sobering influences of archeological investigation. Ohallenging claims, uttered before European royalty in the heyday of imperialism; apodictical assertions pronounced before representatives of learned societies; con- fident paeans of critical victories recorded in the now embarrassing pages of technical publications, - all these have had to be silenced, moderated, sometimes fundamentally revised, in the light which the more extended investigation of antiquities has shed upon these problems. And while no part of Old Testament theology has been spared the indignities of this pseudoscientific assault, in the follow- ing we have selected from the mass of this material a few typical and illustrative instances and tendencies, representative, however, of a vast accumulation of theories in regard to Old Testament religion which have been rendered innocuous or utterly discarded by a careful scientific approach and rebuttal. A. The Name of God. When in 1902 Franz Delitzsch gave his now widely known lecture Bibel und Babel> he reached his climax in maintaining that the name for God which is translated "the LORD" in our English Bibles and commonly rendered "Jehovah," the very intimate name of God in His revelation of love, was not of Biblical origin, but, like other foundation truths of the Old Oovenant's revelation, carne from Archeology - the Nemesis. 267 Babylonia. Almost at the very end of his lecture he must have paused for a moment to prepare for the forceful delivery of this final broad- side against the Scriptures (Babel and Bible, translation by Thomas J. McOormack, p. 61): "But more! Through the kindness of the director of the Egyptian and Assyrian department of the British Museum I am able to show you here pictures of three little clay tablets. Wlmt, will be asked, is to be seen on these tablets, fragile, broken pieces of clay with scarcely legible characters scratched on their surface? True enough, but they are valuable from the fact that their date may be exactly fixed as that of the time of Hammurabi, one of them having been made during the reign of his father, Sin- muballit; but still more so from the circumstance that they contain three names which are of the very greatest significance from the point of view of the history of religion. They are the words: Ia-ah-ve-ilu, Ia-hu-um-ilu- Yahveh is God. [Delitzsch's italics.] Yahveh (the transliteration of the tetragrammaton n\n~), "the Abiding One, the Permanent One (for such is, as we have reason to believe the signifi- cance of the name), who, unlike man, is not to-morrow a thing of the past, but one that endures forever, that lives and labors for all eternity above the broad, resplendent, law-bound canopy of the stars - it was this Yahveh that constituted the primordial patrimony of those Oanaanite tribes from which centuries afterwards the twelve tribes of Israel sprang." Enthusiastic gainsayers of the Scripture have seized upon this pronouncement of the great German Orientalist to show that even the personal name for God has been borrowed from Babylonia. How- ever, the course of the nemesis in this instance was swift and decisive. To-day only second-rate and out-of-date students of comparative religion would be willing to endorse this statement of the late German archeological leader. Dr. Albright of Johns Hopkins University sum- marizes the repudiation of Delitzsch's claim in the Journal of Biblical LitemtUJ'e, 1924, p. 370 :If., where he insists that "it is doubtful whether any serious scholar now adheres to the Mesopotamian origin of the name Jahwe, especially since the element Ja'um, found in early Akkadian proper names, has been convincingly explained as being the independent possessive pronoun of the first person," so that Ja'umilu [transliterated by Delitzsch above Ia-hu-ttm-iluJ, for in- stance, means "mine is god," i. e., "I have a (protecting) deity." Thus in hardly two decades the ipse dixit of the master mind of German Assyriologists reposes on the scrap-heap of discarded, anti- Scriptural invectives. The Biblical explanation of the divine name in Ex. 3, 14 has outlived not only this ephemeral attack on its veracity, but also von Bohlen's association of it with Indo-Germanic roots, Hitzig's claim of its Armenian origin, Roeth's Egyptian parallel in The Book .of the Dead, and other flashy, but scientifically impossible computations. 268 Archeology - the Nemesis. B. The Origin of Monotheism. A fundamentally characteristic mark of Old Testament theology, by which it separates itself from all other contemporaneous and most subsequent religions, is its exalted monotheism. Standing out in the boldest possible relief against the chaotic, feudal pantheon of all surrounding nations is its uncompromising and unique exaltation of Jehovah, the only God. It is a commonplace of modern criticism to deny that this monotheism is an integral part of the original religion of the Hebrews. In a standard critical work like Emil Kautzsch's Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments, p.17, the critical piece de resistance of past critical generations is again pl"esented in the claim that among the evident tmces of original polytheism is the use of the plural form of Elohim. This grammatical plural, it is solemnly urged, is an un- deniable indication of an original plurality of deities. The fmce of this standard objection has been eliminated by that notable discovery at Tel-el-Amarna, the court correspondence of Amenophis III and IV. Written in cuneiform, the stereotyped introduction by which the sychophant governors addressed the Pharaoh's regulaTly called the Pharaoh Ilani-ya, literally, "my gods," Ilani-ya being the plural (plus suffix) of llu, Babylonia for "god." Thus the plural (and the plurality is consciously emphasized by the deliberate use of thc plural sign of the cuneiform) is repeatedly used in records previous to, and contemporary with, Moses in the address to a single person; and the majestic plural, far from having any polytheistic basis, is definitely shown to be a common syntactical device in cognate Semitic languages. In the Old Testament it becomes particularly appropriate because of the plurality of persons in the one Godhead. A wider attack has been leveled against Scriptural monotheism. In entire disregard of the Old Testament emphasis on the uniqueness and supremacy of Jehovah (Is. 44, 6; 45, 5; 46, 9; Deut. 4, 35; 32,39, etc.), monotheism is said to have arisen either in the eighth- century ethical reform of the prophets or in the later postexilic days of that higher-critical fiction Second Isaiah. Oombined with this charge is the subsequent indictment which seeks and claims to find a previous origin of monotheism outside the Scriptures. Recourse has been taken to the cuneiform inscriptions which, it is alleged, open up a "new and undreamt-of prospect." Thus evidence of early monotheism is found, we are assured, in the ancient Babylonian hymn to the moon-god, Sin, in which this idol, patron of Ur, is called "absolute sovereign, ruler of the gods," and given similar titles of preeminence. But this is not monotheism; for the hymn, at best, states that in the writer's opinion the other gods are inferior to Sin. And the recent investigations at Ur have furnished the most obvious instances of polytheism. Further evidence of Mesopotamian mono- theism is sought in the inscription on the well-known statue dedicated Archeology - the Nemesis. 269 by Bel-tarsi-iluma to Nabu, the god of wisdom, which concludes with the solemn injunction, "Thou shalt follow after, trust in, Nabu; trust not in any other god." But this isolated statement is not even an approach to monotheism. (A. T. Olmstead, History of Assyria, p. 174 if.) It specifically recognizes other deities; and an extended investigation of Babylonian religion reveals a galaxy of gods and demigods, so numerous and so bewildering, with the hundreds of Igigi, gods of the lower worlds, and other hundreds of Anunaki, gods of the upper world, that monotheism was as distant from Babylonia as it is fTOm a Ohinese temple of five hundred gods. There may have been vestigial survivals of the original knowledge of God, which led to an isolated henotheism like that expressed in this N abu dedication or in the oft-quoted Marduk tablet, in which the head of the Baby- lonian pantheon seems to be equated with other deities and to assume their prerogatives; but the highest henotheism is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from pure monotheism. To-day the enthusiasm for original Mesopotamian monotheism that was expressed by Delitzsch, Radau, and others is entertained by but a few insignificant obscurantists. The strongest bid for extra-Biblical monotheism is found in Egypt, in the religion of Amenophis IV (1375 B. 0.), the ''heretical king," who, rising up against the tyranny of the priests of the god Amen, exalted a comparatively unimportant deity, Aten, to unparal- leled heights. In his zeal in behalf of Aten, Amenophis changed his own name to Akhenaten (spirit of Aten), built a new capital with a magnificent temple of Aten, and caused the name of Amen and of other gods to be removed from the monuments. In these acts and particularly in his great hymn to Aten, who is praised as the giver and sustainer of life, both human and divine, it is asserted that we have direct evidence of monotheism before the Biblical records. This king is glibly referred to as the original monotheist, and his zeal in behalf of pure religion is embellished to the evident disparagement of the Scriptural records. But Akhenaten was not a monotheist. He retained for himself the title "Favorite of the Two Goddesses." His inscription at Karnak shows that he worshiped other gods besides Aten. He regarded him- self as an incarnation of that god and by the implication of this belief and its ritual acts destroyed the basic requirements of mono- theism. In addition, archeological investigation has demonstrated that he did not destroy thc names of all gods, but that his antipathy, which was as much political as religious, was focused on Amen. In the face of all this Breasted (Cambridge Ancient History, II, p. 128) calls Akhenaten "not only the world's first idealist and the world's first individual, but also the earliest monotheist and the first prophet of intel'llationalism, - the most remarkable figure of the ancient world before the Hebrews." 270 Archeology - the Nemesis. C. The Old Testament Sabbath. Distinctive marks of Old Testament religion like the Sabbath have not been spared in the attempt to remove revelation and sub- stitute the findings of historical religion. Thus it was the claim of George Smith in The Assyrian Eponym Canon, p. 19: "Among the Assyrians the first twenty-eight days of every month were divided into foul' weeks of seven days each, the seventh, fourteenth, twenty- first and twenty-eighth days, respectively, being sabbaths, and there was a general prohibition of work on these days." The definite claim of this early Assyriological genius is restated as one of the accepted results of investigations in comparative religion. Delitzsch, writing as though the Euphratean origin of the Sabbath were above the possibility of question or investigation, says (0. c., p. 37): "The Babylonians also had their sabbath-day (shabattu), and a calendar of feasts and sacrifices has been unearthed according to which the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of every month were set apart as days on which no work should be done, on which the king should not change his robes, nor mount his chariot, nor offer sacrifices, nor render legal decisions, nor eat of boiled or roasted meats, on which not even a physician should lay hands on the sick. N ow, this setting apart of the seventh day for the propitiation of the gods is really understood from the Babylonian point of view, and there can therefore be scarcely the shadow of a doubt that in the last resort we are indebted to this ancient nation on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris for the plentitude of blessings that flows from our day of Sabbath or Sunday rest." As a matter of fact, however, the nemesis of archeology has again asserted its ret1'ibutive vengeance. The Sabbath is not of extTa-Biblical origin, as a scientific investigation of the facts involved demonstrates. The possibility of a Babylonian sabbath is 1'uled out by the fact that their calendar started anew with every luna1' month, while the Sabbath demands the observance of every seventh day 1'e- gardless of the intrusion of the beginnings of months. But besides this there are definite considerations which make the picture of a Babylonian sabbath unscientific. First of all, it is now definitely known that only in the intercalary month, Second Elul, is there any regular emphasis on the seventh day. The calendar for the ordinary twelve months passes without any emphasis 01' extraordinary promi- nence or any sacredness whatsoever attached to the seventh day. Then, in this month, which was added when it was necessary to complete the year, not only the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days are emphasized, but also the nineteenth day, with evident disruption of the system of sevens. Far from being a day for the entire nation, its peculiarities extended largely only to the king and the shepherds, and their observance of this "evil day" has Archeology - the Nemesis. 271 nothing in common with the observance of the Sabbath; for these days were simply marked by favorable or unfavorable omens that should be observed. There is absolutely no religious association what- soever and no cessation of labor. Examinations of Assyrian deeds and documents show that business was conducted as usual on these dates. In fact, as far as we can tell, there was no day on which business stopped altogether, as was commanded concerning the Hebrew Sabbath. Olay (Amur'I"U, p. 55 ff.) has emphasized some of these considerations and ruled out the Assyrian shap(b)attum as the etymological cognate of n:a~. Instead of meaning "Sabbath" this Assyrian term designates T '~completion," the fifteenth day of the month, at which time the moon was full. D. The Fall of Man. No religious system has an account of the origin of sin nor an attitude toward sin which bears any fundamental resemblance to the Biblical record in Gen. 3. Yet it has been the consistent assertion of modern Assyriologists that cuneiform tablets have been discovered which contain "the origin of the story of the fall of man." An elaborate presentation of this claim is made in Langdon's Sumerian Epic of Paradise, the Flood, and the Fall, in which the Genesis story is labeled as "obviously derived from Sumero-Babylonian cosmology." An unprejudiced and scientific reinvestigation of Langdon's text ex- cludes this suggestion of Biblical parallels. Clay, The Origin of Biblical Traditions, p.113, subsequently brought the consensus of more deliberate Assyriological opinion when he utterly discarded the readings of Langdon and wrote: "It is now generally thought that the tablet is a mythical account of the origin of a city and the be- ginnings of agriculture." In his ANew Oreation Story Ohiera a few years later claimed to have found "the clearest and most complete account of the Sumerian story of the fall of man." But his insistence upon a parallel to the Biblical record has been utterly repudiated by other Assyriologists. Olay (0. c.) contends: "The legend, even on the basis of his [Ohiera's] own translations, it seems to me, refers to a group of menials being sent away from the estate probably for stealing." The wide difference between the conjectured and the probable readings will be startling; not as much, however, as the more frequently suggested parallel, the legend of "Adapa and the South Wind," which is said to be the cuneiform original for the Biblical record of the temptation and the fall. Although cited in such semipopular concessions to higher criticism as Barton's Archeology and the Bible, this absurd myth, the details of which would present a disproportionate discussion here, has now been shown to be entirely innocent of any remote connection with the third chapter of the Bible. 272 Archeology - the Nemesis. E. The Sacrificial System. According to the plain statements of Scripture the Old Testa- ment sacrificial system, which in the patriarchal times was ap- parently without direction as to ritual (except in Gen. 15), is a divine institution, with particular emphasis on the piacular purpose. Ac- cording to the critical conception, however, the system of sacrifices was borrowed, in general or in detail, either from the Egyptians or from the Assyrians or from the background of the original Semitic practises and influences. The last theory is the claim popularized by Robertson Smith, who held that originally the sacrifices established a communion with God through the common eating of the flesh and blood of the sacrificial animal. The implications of this hypothesis ultimately eliminate the Biblical statements that the offerings were instituted by God and that they were generally made and accepted for expiation. For Smith insists that the sacrifices of Leviticus are simply outgrowths and adaptations of this primitive ritual communion which takes place when the sacrificeI' eats of the flesh and blood that is offered to the deity. But Smith's theory must go in the light of three or four decades or archeological illumination. We now see from the very ritual in the sacrifices of Babylonia and Assyria, older by far than the early Mohammedan and modern Arab sacrifices, to which Smith makes such constant reference, that many of the offerings have no place for the sacrificers' partaking of food and that the communal idea, so basic in his claims, does not attain to even incidental importance. On the contrary, the pleas for expiation and the symbolism that represents the transference of sin from the sinner to an animal or object is so pronounced in the Akkadian rituals that Smith's highly artificial theory must be discountenanced and at the same time the extra-Biblical origin of the Levitical sacrifices surrendered. The verdict of an unrufRed study of comparative religion shows that, while people all over the earth have brought offerings, the Biblical sacrifices stand alone, not only because of the supremacy of Jehovah, to which they give the ritual expression, but also because of the very acts of the sacrificial rite itself. The prototypes of our Savior's suffering and death are not to be explained away as sacrificial syncretisms evolved from Semitic paganism. F. Miscellaneous "Borrowings." It is hardly within the scope of our present article, nor will the available space permit, to present even a synopsis of the many other articles of Old Testament religion which, impugned by a hasty or antagonistic criticism, have emerged vindicated by the sobriety of thoroughly objective investigation. The attempt to discredit prophecy, for example, is just another of these disparaging tendencies. Strained efforts have been made to locate Egyptian prototypes of the prophets, Archeology - the Nemesis. 273 and weird stories of speJls and fits have been seriously suggested as demonstrating prophetic incipiency. Dreams of lily-livered Ashur- banipal before his battles (in which he probably never fought) bring messages of immodest Ishtar which have likewise been advanced as indicative of extra-Biblical prophecy and revelation. Conjectures of Egyptian sages, the dancing of whirling dervishes, the splutterings of Arabic nomads, have all been earnestly advocated as extraneous parallels to prophecy. Yet tho most intricate survey of Semitic literature fails to show any essential resemblance. Outside of the Bible there is not a single accurate and detailed fulfilment of any definitely predicted event. Again, in the critical revolution suggested by Vatbke, crystal- lized by Graf and canonized by Wellhausen, the point of departure centered about the date of P, the so-called Priests' Code. Up to that time the book of Leviticus and the sections which critics regarded as homogeneous (the "source" abbreciated as P) were regarded as the oldest portions of the Pentateuch. Under the new theorization this non-existent P definitely became the youngest element, written no earlier than the fifth century B. C. This is, it may be said, the keystone in the arch of contemporaneous Pentateuchal criticism. Latterly even critical investigators have attacked this focal point, and the archeology which Wellhausen serenely disregarded (cf. Henry Preserved Smith, Essay in Biblical Interpreta,tion, chap. 12, "The Significance of Wellhausen": "The only attack [i. e., vs. Well- hausenism] which needs to be considered affirms that he had not given due weight to the evidence from Babylonia and Assyria") has recoiled and shaken the very foundation of his theory. It is one of the outstanding contributions of the late George Foote :11:oore of Harvard University that, in spite of his critical position, he showed that the hitherto critically uncontested canon of Wellhausenism must be abandoned. Students of comparative religion now know that the interdictions relative to marriage, the regulations for clean and un- clean, and other characteristic cultic elements in the Priests' Code, instead of being late developments, must be very early. Merely on the basis of evidence from other religions it can be shown definitely that prohibitions in regard to food, regulations for sacrifice, the clas- sification of forbidden degrees in marriage, and similar regulations belong to the earliest systems of worship. By what show of right, then, can modern critics insist that the Priests' Code, which the Old Testament places at the very beginning of Israel's independent national history, are the latest elements in Old Testament religion ~ Similarly the present and quite universal attitude of modern interpreters toward the Psalms, which labels them as the product of the religion of the Law and the final evidence of ,Vellhausen's scheme of religious development, must run into a blind alley closed by 18 274 The So-Called "Christian Interpolations" in Josephus. archeological investigation. With a few flourishes of an agile pen Wellhausen traced the development of Old Testament religion from the nomad state down to legalism. He then asserted that the fruit and expression of legalism is the Psalter, in which the Law of Jehovah is glorified and its precepts exalted. Several cogent reasons which critics have overlooked in this discussion now protest against Wellhausen's categorical classification. The wealth of religious poetry that has been discovered in Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria shows us that psalmody exists among other people as a free expression of religious feelings, entirely independent of the artifieial stratifica- tion of religious evolutionism. Archeology has taught us to expect psalms from David and Moses and others long before the rise of Judaism and has remarkably corroborated some of the conservative opinions in Old Testament introduction. These typical examples of rejected contention are representative of evidence which is entirely superfluous for the Ohristian student, whose faith and conviction is not the result of cumulative argumen- tation endorsed by philosophical and archeological research. Yet, if it can be definitely shown that, when criticism to-day assails the Old Testament records on linguistic reasons, it has followed faulty leader- ship and adopted untenable principles; when it can be proved that the long list of indictments against the truth of Old Testament history which are crowded into critical commentaries have been disavowed by the decisive voice of archeology; when, finally, the par- ticularly heated assault against the revealed nature of the Old Tes- tament religion is checked and repulsed by an examination of the new data made available by the discoveries of archeology, the entire process and the anti-Scriptural findings of modern rationalism are branded with an unmistakable sign. Oriticism will continue to ad- vance new claims that react to the detriment of the Scriptures. But the very stones of ancient civilizations will become monuments of protests. The mighty fortress of the Word will remain unscathed as the avenging nemesis of archeology reaches out to frustrate and to scatter those who would storm the holy mount. W. A. MAIER. C • I The So-Called "Christian Interpolations" in Josephus. A number of factors have combined to make a short article on the probability of Ohristian interpolations in Josephus, especially in his Antiquities of the Jews, desirable. For one thing, the number of recent books on Josephus and his works is surprisingly large, a fact which shows that scholars are taking a new interest in this field of history and criticism. In consequence of this fact the number of