The Bible and the Book of the Dead

AGENERATION ago, Professor Friedrich Delitzsch in his lectures on “Babel und Bibel” let loose a slue of characteristic Teutonic anti-Semitism under the guise of Assyriologic scholarship. A few cuneiform inscriptions had been deciphered and striking parallels were discovered in them to some of the legends of the Bible and to some of its legislation. A Babylonian version of the Creation stories, of the Fall of Man and of the Flood as well as the famous code of Hammurabi served as a base for his attack upon the Old Testament and upon the acknowledged leadership of ancient Israel in the fields of religion and ethics. Lesser pundits followed suit. The Mesopotamian vogue engulfed even Jewish scholars who proceded to ascribe everything of worth in the Old Testament to Babylonian antecedents wherever a Canaanitish, Midianite, Hittite, Persian or Phoenician antecedent was not available. Nothing original or creative was discovered in it. It was only a congeries of borrowed ideas, a heap of appropriated beliefs and institutions. Israel was represented as helpless putty in the hands of alien cultural influences, always molded but never molding, always borrowing but never contributing.

After thirty years of “streit um Bibel and Babel” the eminent archaeologist, Dr. James H. Breasted, in a recent book, “The Dawn of Conscience,” thus sums up the entire significance of Assyria and Babylonia to the moral heritage of the Western World: “Babylonian civilization, however, was dominated throughout by a spirit of calculating commercialism, of hard and mechanical requirements, which deprived the social evolution of the Babylonians of the very foundation of altruistic development. . . . Babylonian morals have contributed little if anything to the moral heritage of the Western world.” . . .

And this is the generally accepted view of scholars today.

Dr. Breasted, however, is in danger of tipping the scales too strongly in favor of Egypt as the original home of those great religious and moral ideas which men have come to associate with Israel and the Bible. No one, of course, would dream of charging Dr. Breasted with an anti-Jewish bias. His own disavowal in his book of any such bias was entirely unnecessary, and our criticism is not prompted by any such suspicion.

At times Dr. Breasted states his thesis in a way to which no fairminded man can take exception: “In receiving a great and inspiring moral and religious heritage from the Hebrews, therefore, we may regard it as a demonstrated fact that we have inherited a twofold legacy, which is made up in the first place of some thousands of years of human experience in the Ancient Near East, chiefly Egypt, before the Hebrew nation arose, and was then in the second place marvelously deepened and enriched out of their own social experience by the prophets and sages of Israel themselves.” (p.383).

At other times, however, his enthusiasm for the few literary breccia of Egyptian religious and moral teachings which he presents, leads him to make assertions which go far beyond this position: “In morals, in religion and in social thinking in general . . . the Hebrews built up their life on Egyptian foundation.” Elsewhere he speaks of “the prophets of the Hebrews appropriating (sic!) the social visions of Egypt.” (p. 367).

The documentary evidence which he presents is fragmentary and meager and he traces what he regards as the direct and powerful influence of Egypt upon the moral and religious ideas of Judaism through an amazing labyrinth of tenuous, subtle and at times fantastically elaborate Midrash and commentary which leaves one breathless but unconvinced. Thus Amenemope, an Egyptian moralist (1000 B. C.). compares the upright man to a tree growing in a garden whose fruit multiplies, and the wicked man to a tree growing in the forest which is cut down and burned. Jeremiah, four hundred years later, also compares the godly man to a tree planted by the waters, whose “leaf shall be green” and the godless man to the “heath in the desert.” On the basis of this correspondence in simile, Dr. Breasted contends that Jeremiah was acquainted with Amenemope’s picture of the two trees and actually “adopted” it. (p. 364).

An Egyptian king (2500 B. B.) addressed his son: “More acceptable is the virtue of the upright man than the ox of him that doeth iniquity.” In the Bible it is stated: “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice and to hearken than the fat of rams.” On the strength of this identity, Dr. Breasted concludes that the “roll that contained his (the Egyptian king’s) instruction to his son must have found its way to Palestine. . . . (p. 356).

The Psalmist prays to God: “Hide me in the shadow of thy wings.” The Egyptian Sun-god was represented as a falcon. Hence “the Hebrew psalmist drew a picture of divine protection from the sheltering wings of the Egyptian Sun-god” (p. 376), and “the Egyptian Sun-god . . . was therefore among the influences which contributed to transform Yahveh into the righteous ruler of men.” . . . (p. 361). On evidence such as these, Dr. Breasted would base his theory of the decisive influence of Egyptian thought upon Judaism.

The eminent Egyptologist makes much of Ikhnaton’s religious reformation in the Fourteenth Century and of the world-religion based on sun worship which he sought to establish. He implies that Ikhnaton, and not the prophets of Israel, was the father of universalism and monotheism. He overlooks the simple fact that Ikhnaton’s god, Aton, like the Babylonian Sun-god Shamash or the Greek Phoebus Apollo, was still a physical, corporeal being, a solar deity, (“Thou dawnest beautifully in the horizon of the sky”) and that he was represented and worshipped in the image of a sun disk, whereas the God of the prophets of Israel was a spiritual being, cosmic force and moral force whom no eye could behold and whom no hand dared represent in graven images. Even the tentative physical monotheism of Ikhnaton the Egyptian people could not long endure. Within a generation, Ikhnaton’s reformation was completely wiped out and his very name became anathema Egypt sank back into her “native,” millenial religion of idolatry, magic and preoccupation with the dead and the nether-world. Ikhnaton affected no transformation in the religious life of his people and inaugurated no new religious movements in the world as did Moses and the prophets of Israel. The people of Israel possessed a unique spiritual sensibility and was sufficiently attuned to the appeal of a religious and social idealism to accept the mandate placed upon it by its prophets to become a covenanted people in order to preach those ideals to the world.

What Dr. Breasted and other scholars who are not unfriendly to Judaism fail to recognize is that the great significance of Judaism to the progress of religion lies not in its consonance with other religions of antiquity, but in its dissonance. Its uniqueness lies in its disagreements, in what it rejected of the common religious “urstoff.” of the ancient Asiatic and Mediterranean world. Prophetic Judaism was a religion of protest, a vast reformation in the religious thought of the ancient world, a direct, conscious and deliberate challenge to all which it regarded as unspiritual and unethical in the religions of the surrounding nations. The dominant and ringing motif of the Bible is not imitation of other peoples’ religions and practices but strong and unyielding resistance to them. “Thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of other peoples.” Babylon and Egypt are especially singled out as nations whose beliefs and practices should at all times be avoided and opposed. “And with the idolatry of the Egyptians, ye shall not defile yourselves.” Judaism after a long period of spiritual development finally came to reject certain ideas which other peoples of antiquity, many of whose civilizations were far in advance of that of the Jews, never succeeded in eliminating from their theologies–polytheism, idolatry, anthropomorphism. Judaism also perfected a code of moral judgments and practices based on universal justice, brotherhood and peace which in its comprehensiveness, profoundity and exalted expression, is removed, toto caelo, from the inchoate and defective ethical concepts of all other religions of antiquity.

Above all, Israel created a great religious literature for mankind, a literature of strength, majesty and supreme artistry. Dr. Duncan Black MacDonald in his recent “Hebrew Literary Genius” observes: “We hear much nowadays about Egyptian literature and Babylonian literature. Can anyone who reads those scanty, broken fragments, which are called “literature” because they are undoubtedly in writing, ever dream of putting them beside the contribution of the Hebrew race to real literature. . . . When all is said and the dust of learned controversy has cleared away there survive for us only two real literatures in the ancient Mediterranean world, those in Hebrew and in Greek. . . .There is even an element of pathos in watching Assyriologists and Egyptologists gathering up the scraps of literature left by those most unliterary peoples and trying to make it rival the literature of the Hebrew.” (p. 218).