Is Genesis Plagiarized?

[jackswstd]

So whoever wrote the bible was sampling verses like sampled beats?

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

The 11 monsters in Tiamat’s retinue are also parallel to 11 monsters that fought alongside the Anzû. The war between Marduk, with his army of winds, and Tiamat, who embodies the sea, has parallels in earlier Western myths about a conflict between a storm god and a sea god. A Middle Bronze Age silver goblet from ‘AinSamiyah, Israel, is decorated with a similar mythological scene that the late Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin interpreted as the slaying of Tiamat by Marduk. This scene is similar to one on a clay plaque from Khafaje, in eastern Iraq, of the Isin-Larsa period (late third to early second millennium B.C.E.) showing Marduk slaying Tiamat. Creating the cosmos by splitting the body of defeated Tiamat reflects Sumerian beliefs according to which the world was created by splitting various primeval cosmic elements. Creating man by mixing blood from a slain rebel god into the body of the man is rooted in accounts found in Atra-hasis and Enki and Ninmah.

In Enu ma Eliš, Babylon is built by the gods who mold bricks. A similar description about the building of Nippur is found in a Sumerian hymn in honor of that city. And finally, Marduk’s 50 names are somehow related to 50, the symbolic number of Ellil, the chief god in the Mesopotamian pantheon.

The author of Enu ma Eliš is deliberately attributing to Marduk and Babylon acts ascribed to other gods and cities in other myths. The author is stealing the thunder of these gods, undermining them in favor of Marduk. When Marduk receives Ellil’s fifty names, he in effect becomes Ellil. When the gods build Babylon instead of Nippur, Babylon becomes the new religious capital. Most important, when Marduk defeats the 11 monsters that Ninurta fought in the ancient Anzû myth, Marduk son of Ea, god of Eridu, in effect usurps Ninurta son of Enlil, god of Nippur. Enu ma Eliš is a story about Marduk that challenges a story about Ninurta. It reflects a politicaltheological competition over primacy in the pantheon and supremacy of the capital city. These tales of Marduk spawned further debate. An ancient Babylonian commentary praises Marduk; an Assyrian commentary satirizes him.

What appears to have been an alternate Assyrian version of at least parts of Enu ma Eliš—known only from some fragmentary manuscripts found at Aššur—offers a competing version of events by replacing Marduk’s name with Anšar, a name given to Aššur, chief god in the Assyrian pantheon. Wall reliefs in the Akitu (New Year’s) House built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib depict Aššur, not Marduk, riding his chariot and vanquishing Tiamat.

The ancient Near East was full of conflicting claims to supremacy of this or that god or city over all others. The Bible is part of this polemic. The biblical authors borrowed from foreign Creation stories in order to make the best case possible for YHWH, God of Israel. They were participating in a contemporary international debate on the basis of data considered basic and agreed upon by all.

For example, the preexistence of water may have been considered a “scientific” fact, common knowledge. In Enu ma Eliš this water is personified as Tiamat; in “monotheistic,” “nonmythological” Genesis 1, the watery Deep is “just water.” Here, the biblical author is trying to correct the record.

The view of the world as a bubble with water above and below was a commonly held “scientific” truth at the time of the Bible, so it need not have been borrowed from a particular literary source. This water had to be parted somehow in order to form the bubble, and authors throughout the Near East had to decide how within the framework of their own beliefs. Marduk does this by physically splitting Tiamat, the personified waters. Genesis 1 has God ordain a firmament in the demythologized waters by simply speaking.

In Enu ma Eliš, divine sleep deprivation is a constant problem. Tiamat and Apsû can’t sleep so they try to kill their noisy kids. Man is created to give the gods rest, and Babylon is built to provide a resting place for gods in transit on a cosmic journey. This idea is rooted in the Mesopotamian myths of Enki and Ninmah or Atra-hasis.

In Genesis 1:1–2:4a God “ceases” and sanctifies the Sabbath, but in Exodus 31:17, a Priestly passage connected with the author’s Creation story in Genesis, God “puts his heart at rest/is satisfied” (wayyinn paš).

It was common belief in the ancient Near East that a high god in a pantheon had to defeat the sea and create the world. A god, whoever he might be, had to act in a godly manner and do godly things! But the Priestly author of Genesis 1 gave the story a new spin. Rather than having God vanquish rebellious monsters, he had God create them (compare Psalm 104:25 where God creates Leviathan to play with), thus showing God’s superiority from the start.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

So whoever wrote the bible was sampling verses like sampled beats?

No. My next post is the summary of all the material posted thus far.​

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

SUMMARY:​

In light of all this and more, it is impossible to accept today in a simplistic manner the claims of Smith or Delitzsch that the biblical authors took the Babylonian Story of Creation, that is, Enu ma Eliš, and simply applied it to YHWH, God of Israel. The specific parallels are fewer than originally thought, and even the best ones are not entirely certain. However, both the Bible and Enu ma Eliš are products of the ancient Near East, each accepting common beliefs and knowledge, and each developing them in their own unique manner. They should be studied by modern scholars as mutually illuminating not only for what they hold in common but for the unique ways in which each presents their common heritage.

~The Genesis of Genesis by Victor Hurowitz. Hurowitz is a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He is a recognized expert in the interface of the Hebrew Bible and Assyriology, and serves on the steering committee of the Melammu Project, which focuses on the study of the intellectual heritage of Assyria and Babylonia in the modern East and West.

One of the great myths perpetuated by Zecharia Sitchin and those who promote his material is that the material of Genesis 1-11 (and other parts of the Bible) are "borrowed" from the Sumerians and Akkadians. This was the predominant view in biblical scholarship nearly 150 years ago, but the idea now has been abandoned. The reasons are several:

More is known today about Sumerian and Akkadian. These languages were just beginning to be deciphered and studied in the mid-to-late 19th century. Scholars today have a deeper knowledge of the linguistic disconnections between those languages and material in Genesis than ever before.

The late 1920s saw the discovery of the Ugaritic cuneiform material. Ugaritic turned out to be far closer to biblical Hebrew than Akkadian or Sumerian, and the literature of Ugarit had closer parallels to biblical material.

The scholarship of the late 19th century was predisposed by anti-Semitism, and so many parallels put forth by scholars with anti-Semitic beliefs were contrived or exaggerated.

The logical question, then, was "what's the alternative?" The answer is *not* that the Hebrew Bible was dictated from on high and is utterly unique. That is also a view that has proven to be untenable with the advance of modern scholarship.

The alternative is actually quite simple. No legitimate scholar in biblical studies disputes that there are similarities between the literature of Israel, Sumer, Akkad, Ugarit -- and Egypt, and the Hittite civilization. The question is why the similarities exist. The answer held in great consensus today is that it is because all these civilizations share a common cultural, linguistic, literary, and religious worldview. Because parts of the Hebrew Bible were composed or edited in Babylon during the exile, the possibility of some borrowing here and there exists, but it is done for fairly obvious reasons of theological polemic. In other words, The Hebrew Bible, as the latest literary creation among these civilizations, at times draws on each of them, not for worldview material (they already had a common pool of ideas), but to make deliberate, often antagonistic, theological statements about the beliefs of the other nations and their belief in the superiority of their God, Yahweh, compared to others.

 

[ugksam]

damn and all this time i thought the bible was a true account of human history

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

damn and all this time i thought the bible was a true account of human history

It is as 'true' as they thought it could be at the time considering their level of technology and understanding of nature. What it ultimately is, however, is one group of Near East people's explanation as to how everything came to be that was more believable than anything else. This ONLY applies to the 'Creation' of the Universe and man 'aka' Genesis. With that said, Genesis is NOT plagiarized and does borrow from other cultures only in what was thought to be general knowledge in ALL cultures they (Ancient Hebrews) were in contact with.

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[ugksam]

It is as 'true' as they thought it could be at the time considering their level of technology and understanding of nature. What it ultimately is, however, is one group of Near East people's explanation as to how everything came to be that was more believable than anything else. This ONLY applies to the 'Creation' of the Universe and man 'aka' Genesis.

​

shut up

 

[Xtraz2]

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Keep in mind, this is only a theory, but well-supported with evidence.

They call this place 'Higher Learning' for a reason. Let's use it for it's intended purpose.

Here, have some hip-hop......



Thank you for reading.​

 

[winb83]

So i been listening to these YouTube videos and they talk about the Lost Book of Enki and this shyt is piff. Basically it says some aliens came to our solar system and set up a way station on Mars to mine Gold on Earth to help save their planet and at first they were doing their own mining and eventually their own people revolted and they made Humans by crossing their genetics with a life form they found here and they kept adding more and more of their genetics because they kept producing results that weren't sufficient.

the Aliens thought the workers were supposed to be preemptive life forms like animals they made a male then a female and stuck them in a garden as the first of the new species (Adam and Eve) and the original two lived in the garden of paradise and didn't have to work the mines.they were using Alien women as surrogate mothers and producing other humans that were doing the mining but the humans were fukking but not reproducing so they went back to the garden and took Adam and Eve and using the aliens ribs they injected their own genetic material removed from their ribs right into them. Adam and Eve became self aware and gained enough intelligence to know they were naked so the Aliens gave them leaf made clothes to cover themselves up and one of the leaders went into the garden and flipped out like "what the fukk is this shyt? how much of our genetics did you put in these fukking workers? they're too much like us now!" then on top of that they had Aliens watching the humans that started fukking them and crossbreeding with them.

i haven't finished it but its getting really good but these stories eerily parallel stuff from the Bible and supposedly predate biblical text.

this is the Youtube playlist of a guy reading this stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF50766F8DC53FFEC

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

^^That's all bullshyt and based on garbage 'scholarship' by a gentleman by the name of Zecharia Sitchin. He's the guy responsible for the whole 'Ancient Aliens' theory.​

 

[winb83]

^^That's all bullshyt and based on garbage 'scholarship' by a gentleman by the name of Zecharia Sitchin. He's the guy responsible for the whole 'Ancient Aliens' theory.​

i'm not saying its true or false i'm saying its fascinating to hear. i'm of the mind that we don't know the truth of our origins and the bible isn't infallible. i'm also skeptical of most organized religion.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

i'm not saying its true or false i'm saying its fascinating to hear. i'm of the mind that we don't know the truth of our origins and the bible isn't infallible. i'm also skeptical of most organized religion.

It would be fascinating if it were based on actual scholarship, but it isn't. Zecharia Sitchin's research isn't based on evidence. He basically made it all up. He honestly believed what he was saying, but there is no corroborative evidence in ANY of the texts he used to support anything he wrote about.

http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/

Welcome to the website devoted to addressing the claims of the ancient astronaut hypothesis popularized in the writings of Zecharia Sitchin. Who's behind this site? My name is Mike Heiser. Who am I? The short answer is that I'm a scholar of biblical and ancient Near Eastern languages, cultures, and religions. Why do I bother with this stuff? Because I don't like ancient texts manipulated to promote false claims. If I were a lawyer I'd feel professionally obligated to tell you if someone was giving you bad legal advice. If I was a medical doctor, I'd owe you the truth if I knew the medicine you were taking was bogus or could kill you. If I was an accountant, I'd let you know if a neighbor's tax advice could put you in jail. I'm none of those things, but take the analogy to heart. I'm trying to provide the same service in my areas of expertise. I can tell you--and show you--that what Zecharia Sitchin has written about Nibiru, the Anunnaki, the book of Genesis, the Nephilim, and a host of other things has absolutely no basis in the real data of the ancient world. I don't doubt that Zecharia Sitchin is a nice guy; he's just wrong. Nothing personal.

 

[winb83]

It would be fascinating if it were based on actual scholarship, but it isn't. Zecharia Sitchin's research isn't based on evidence. He basically made it all up. He honestly believed what he was saying, but there is no corroborative evidence in ANY of the texts he used to support anything he wrote about.

http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/

​

fiction can be fascinating. regardless of it being true or false i just find the story interesting. i think it would make a compelling movie.

 

[The Real]

SUMMARY:​

I didn't think the "plagiarism" theory had much following nowadays. I thought the majority consensus was the common Semitic cultural substrate thing. One element of the plagiarism thesis that does seem plausible to me is the repression/sublimation of ancestral pagan elements in the later interpretations and recapitulations of the texts, though properly recontextualized to refer not to Babylonians, but to the direct cultural ancestors of the Hebrews. I'm not aware of whether that part is written about in the substrate theory, but I think it has some support in the sources, especially in the thesis that Hebrews branched off in large part from Canaanites, which is still the anthropological standard from what I understand.