The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest archaeological texts known for the basis of Rabbinic Judaism, being dated between 335-122 B.C., but relating to events from the 7th century B.C. Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, Hellenist, Chinese and Egyptian religions all either began in the 7th century B.C., or endured major revisions at this time. This is around the same time that sprung a period of atheism and scientific naturalism among the Ionian Greeks.
But what does one make of the Tower of Babel that's mentioned in the book's 11th chapter? Well, the biblical account isn't true at all, but it is based on a kernel of truth. The unfinished tower of Babylon still exists and is still visible from the side of the original city. It was begun by Hammurabi at around 750 B.C. and was originally dedicated to Marduk, one of the elder gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon. The project was resumed in the next millennium by King Nebuchadnezzar, and was eventually abandoned a second time, but it's the reason it was abandoned the first time that provides a parallel for the peril. It seems that the shifting kingdoms of Sumer, Babylon, and Akkad once boasted and shared the earliest syllabic text ever invented. They lived in sophisticated city-states, and they sent their children to formal schools where they were taught how to read and write in cuneiform.
These people were fully literate until the fall of the Mesopotamian empire, or in this case, Hammurabi's portion of that. Then the schools were closed, and soon no one can read cuneiform anymore. This would have been roughly concordant with Hammurabi's initial construction of the Marduk Ziggurat, which was seemingly dedicated under Nebuchadnezzar and is now more popularly called by the Tower of Babel. The base of the tower is still there but otherwise, the loss of literacy may be the only element of truth the fable of the genesis story has.
For after all the literacy was lost, stories were passed down orally. This is how many legends were passed down in the bronze age. By the time the Phoenicians re-invented the syllabic text around the 10th century B.C., all the elder legends, as expected, had evidently evolved, being enhanced, exaggerated, or otherwise influenced by neighboring religions and political dynamics. Some experts now recognize four sources for the first five books of the old testament. These forgotten contributors are known as the Yahwists from 950 B.C. in the southern kingdom of Judea, the Elohists from 850 B.C. from the northern kingdom of Israel, the Deuteronomists from 600 B.C. in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform, and the priestly writers, which include Ezra (as mentioned above) and the Jewish priests in exile in Babylon.
Modern scholarship doesn't credit Moses as the author of anything, and one reason for that is that Moses couldn't have posthumously written about his own death and remembrance as detailed in Deuteronomy, and worse, he never even evidently existed as described.
As folklore changes over time, and is filtered through different tribal themes, very often, even the names of central characters are changed, just as Rome has different names for the gods and heroes of the same myths as they have in Greece (as shown below), the same thing happens in ancient Semitic mythology too.
For example, it seems that the character now known as Moses is actually a compilation of a few different predecessors of elder mythos, who most obvious of these, is Hammurabi, the Babylonian law-giver. He received the Stele of Law from the sun god Shamash some 500 years before Moses was supposed to have lived, which is typically estimated to be around 1250 B.C. Otherwise, the principle difference between these two figures is that the Stele of Law is an 8-foot obelisk, standing tall in the London Museum, while the Arc of the Covenant is one of those things that seems to only exist in movies.
Egypt provided another precursor in the form of Djadjamankh, the ritual priest for the Pharaoh Snefru, from the 4th dynasty in the old kingdom in the 25th century B.C. One of the five tales included in the Westcar Papyrus details a voyage wherein Snefru took a number of beautiful young girls, stripped them all naked, and put them on his longboat so he can watch the view as they rowed across the lake. One of these girls accidentally dropped a bubble of turquoise over the side, and became so upset about it, that Snefru called Djadjaemankh, his priestly mage, and he cast a spell that took the lake and folded it over itself (like looking under a blanket), so that Snefru can take the bubble of turquoise and become a hero to a topless slave maiden. This does cause one to wonder how the story of Moses parting the Red Sea could have been that significant in the same land where they had already written up this satirical farce well more than a thousand years earlier.
In the book, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, Lloyd and Elizabeth Graham describe parallels between the stories of Moses and Sargon.
"The myth woven about the legendary Sargon I, 2750 B.C., strikingly resembles the early history of Moses, that is, his infancy. This part is given only by the Elohist, long subsequent to the Assyrian myths. Now according to the Elohist, '. . . when she, Moses' mother, could not lonber hide him, she rook for him and ark of bullrushes and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink' (Exodus 2:3). And on the tablets of Kouyunjik, Sargon tells his story:
4. My mother, the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she brought me forth.
5. She placed me in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she sealed up.
6. She launged my in the river which did not drown me.
7. The river carried me to Akki, the water-carrier, it brought me.
8. Akki, the water-carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted me . . .
In appreciation, Sargon named his capital Agade, called by the Semites Akkad, and Akkad was near the city Sippara. Now note that Moses' wife was Zipporah."
These are too many coincidences. Portions of the story were also repeated in the new testament, except that this time it was King Herod trying to kill all the infants to get at Jesus. There are also many parallels between Jesus and many pre-christian god men, as shown in books like Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus, which outlines how savior cults at the time were popularly euhemerized, and were given other characteristics popular at the time and etc.
It is also important to note that not all parallels that are claimed to be parallels and spread around today's media and culture are not accurate. Kersey Graves' book, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, gives a poorly researched and deceptively skewed view of the parallels between different god figures. So do movies like the Zeitgeist, a film made by Peter Joseph, provide a poor and deceptive description of parallels between different god figures. However, there are predecessors like Dionysus and Prometheus and Krishna (as also shown in these books and films) that can be positively confirmed to have legitimate parallels.
Then we have a significant discovery in the mid-19th century, wherein we have 22,000 tablets of cuneiform discovered in Nineveh. At this time we had George Smith, an English Assyriologist, and others who start translating all of these tablets, coming across familiar stories. He comes across bible stories, but it's more than just the names that are changed. It's the significance of the stories, in some cases, that have changed. He found several stories including the story of Noah.
Noah for example, was originally known as Ziusudra in Sumer, Atrahasis in Akkad, Utnapishtim in Babylon, and each of these accounts vary from each other and from the bible as well. yet so many verbatim passages are shared between all that clearly they're talking about the same event that the bible does, that being a global flood centered on the city Shuruppak at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period at around 2900 B.C. At least two of these myths describe the depth of the flood as being 15 cubits, which is around 22 feet. And in the Iraqi flood plane, under 22 feet of water, you're not going to see anything but treetops. Again, many parallels are found between these myths, including the releasing of the raven to find the land, and etc.
The Enuma Elish, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, creation myths ever uncovered tells a creation not in 7 days, but is written in 7 tablets through 7 generations of gods, with the key being that the first 6 generations of gods created man so that the 7th generation of god could rest. That theme was repeated in the epic of Atrahasis where the Elohim essentially said "Let us make man in our image" and they did using the Golem spell, which is a traditional Semitic spell where you make a clay figurine out of something, and you either put a spell into its mouth, or you breath into it the breath of life and you animate it that way. This is a parallel of Genesis 1, because there was a god sacrificed, and then there were 7 men and 7 women who were made out of the clay figurines that were cleansed and soaked in the blood of the sacrificed god. This is as opposed to Genesis 1, where you have men and women being created together, and in Genesis 2 you have one man being created by himself.
Remember that the name "Adama" means "man of the red dirt" or "man of the red clay". This is the parallel to Adam in the genesis myth. Also in the collection of cuneiform documents from the mid-19th century is the story of "Adapa" also known as "Adamu", the seed of mankind called for by the gods. He was warned not to eat or drink anything offered to him because it was thought that the gods would poison him, but instead of giving him the food of death, they offer the food of eternal life, and he refused as he was instructed to do. They offered him the water of eternal life and he refused that too. They offered him clothing and he dressed himself. Consequently, he was denied immortality and returned to earth to put sickness and evil into the bodies of all the people.
Now to the case of Eve. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu, realized that he was naked for the first time in his life after he had been seduced by the harlot, who became his Eve. The god Enki in another story, trespassed into the sacred garden of Inanna and eats several forbidden fruits. He was caught by the guardian of the garden, and the goddess Ninhursag forgives his transgression and bears several daughters to cure each of his wounds. One of them is called Ninti, daughter born of the rib, for she was made to close the wound at his side.
In the legend of the Huluppu Tree, Gilgamesh, the god king, plays the part of god in Genesis as he walks through the sacred garden (this time attributed to Inanna), wherein he finds the dark maid Lilith, together with a serpent who could not be tamed, both in a divinely chosen tree. Lilith was eventually cast as Adam's first wife in Talmudic legend. Gilgamesh then took out his ax and struck down the snake who knows no charm, and in the midst, the maiden Lilith tore down her house and fled to the wastes.
The Lilith character is interesting in that she was eventually integrated in the Garden of Eden story in two places, as a matter of interpretation, much like Satan was as well. At some point, the story was that there was man and women made at the same time, and that Lilith wanted an equal position (this was a tale given by the rabbis), but Adam wanted Lilith to be subservient while he himself wanted to be dominant. She then escaped the garden because she knew the secret name of god, and that gave her the ability to fly. (A statue of her with wings is shown below)
And then later on, it was told that she was seen making love with demons at the riverside of the Red Sea, and all other kinds of wild stories about her. But then she comes back as a woman scorned by the younger woman (which is the actual Eve that is created later) and then Lilith is cast as the serpent.
Nowhere does the bible imply that the serpent in the garden was ever supposed to be anything but a talking snake. Yet today, it is a common belief. Nor does the context of that story allow that it even could have been Satan. In the middle ages there was a very different interpretation that was held by Jews and Christians, virtually every Renaissance rendering of the temptation of Eve from a relief in the cathedral of Notre Dame to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the serpent is depicted as a woman.
Many of the elements of the new testament are found in the midst of Semitic and Sumerian antiquity too. For example, we notice that the notion that Satan rules over hell came from Ereshkigal, the Mesopotamian goddess of the underworld, which is essentially the same thing as the Greek Hades, ruling over the subterranean land of the dead.
Originally, everyone who died went to the same place. Then after the 7th century B.C. the Zend Avesta of Zarathustra offers a choice of judgments depending on your deeds in life. The good and righteous will ascend to the kingdom of justice and truth, ruled over by Ahura Mazda, while wicked men are descended into the kingdom of the lie, ruled by Ahriman the opposer. The Zoroastrian religion is reputed to have profoundly influenced the development of later Judaism more than any other sect. In Hebrew, the term "The opposer" is pronounced "Ha Satan", or "The satan". The concept of Satan is a composite of multiple characters too.
So apart from the Talmudic and Reconnaissance references to Lilith, notice that each of these highlighted elements of the Genesis mythos appeared in a collection of originally unconnected fables from at least 1000 years earlier, and they were often written by the great grandfathers of the biblical authors. Notice also that the modern theme so critical to Christian belief, is not tied together to any of these. So it is not possible that Genesis contains the original un-corrupted or accurate accounts.
The current versions of those stories clearly did not exist in that form initially. Ancient Mesopotamian mythology evidently evolved over many centuries through occasional enhancement, such that the old legends were adapted for, and integrated with, the emerging culture of Judaism. So by the time the Phoenicians wrote newer versions of these stories down some 3000 years ago, the more familiar revisions finally emerged as a plagiarism of previous polytheism.
There's also an Egyptian creation myth of the bull-headed god Khnum, fashioning people and animals on the potters wheel, and his assistant offers them the breath of life to their clay Golems in the form of an ankh. (As shown below)
The archaeology of pre-Judean polytheism shows that Yahweh was originally part of a Semitic pantheon descended from the father god El. Once upon a time, some 2800 years ago, he was even depicted as having a wife, Asherah, although that may have been part of his unified association with hell. El's consort, Athrah may have become Asherah just as El and Yahweh were merged together to become Yahweh-El, whom the Muslims call "Allah", the god, and the Christians call "Abba", the father.
Composite gods were once fairly common, which includes the Trinitarian concept of Jesus. At one time, all of the gods, including Yahweh, were either magically endowed immortals, or were anthropomorphized elementals.
In illustration, we feel the breeze move against our body all the time. However, since no one yet understood that air was made of chemical particles, yet everyone knew that you would die if you couldn't breath, it was believed that the movement of air was somehow spiritual. Yahweh was granted this aspect as well, so when Genesis 1:2 said that only the spirit of god moves over the face of the waters, they're talking about the wind.
The Pharaoh Amenhotep, is commonly accredited with having created the first truly monotheistic religion. He did it with a composite of two gods, like Yahweh-El. Amenhotep combined Amun, the air god, with Ra the god of the sun disk Aten. Thus, he made Amun-Ra, something that was over looking down at us and who had a spirit that touched us everywhere in the world. Then Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten. His god could be seen and felt. What other deity could compete with his?
There are many parallels between many different gods and heroes. So many, that it's obvious that the myth makers borrowed powers and adventures from elder lore, which is why Pandora's box reads as a parallel as the story of Eve. It also seems that the Hebrew people exaggerated their god however necessary to make it bigger and badder than everyone else's.
Desert deities were often depicted like a gin, the plural of which is genie. Early Islamic literature depicts the genie as air elementals. They were often described as free-roaming nomadic spirits. This is why wandering whirlwinds are called "dust devils". There's also a strong similarity between the medieval version of the gin, and our impression of god. Remember how Elisha was taken into heaven? In a whirlwind.
Such a transition is easy for Yahweh, because his name always worked perfectly for and air god. We supposedly say his name every time we breath through our mouths. Throughout the time the bible was being composed, its authors commonly believed that the first breath of a child, was when it became infused with the spirit, and thus became a living being. And of course the flood referred to in Genesis chapter 7 was meant to drown anything that had the breath of life.
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***Adapted from AronRa's lecture, "The Evolution of Genesis" at UNT***
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