Temple of Illusia

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Israel, like many other nations, had gone from polytheism to monolatry - the worship of one god in preference to others - primarily because kings could enhance their perceived power if they were closely identified with the primary god and then all other gods were subordinated. But what then brought about the next decisive and epoch-making step: Israel's transition from monolatry to true monotheism - the disappearance of other gods? Monotheism was the innovation that then became the basis for the three great and interrelated Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - that are embraced by half the world's population today. Some scholars suggest that monotheism was born out of the terrifying, hideous trauma of the Babylonian exile of the Israelites in 586 BCE:

"When King Zedekiah of Judah rebelled against the Babylonians, they captured him, killed his sons before his eyes, plucked out those eyes, then burned Yahweh's (Jehovah's) temple to the ground. And they completed a process they'd started years earlier, the transfer of Israel's upper classes to Babylon. Now, as of 586 BCE, the Babylonian exile - the most famous trauma in the story of ancient Israel - was in full swing. No doubt the Babylonians, following theological conventions of the day, took all this to signify Yahweh's humiliation at the hands of their national god, Marduk. ...

"The retributive impulse is universally human, almost certainly grounded in the genes of our species. And it is deeply, often hotly, felt. But, however laden with emotion, it has an intrinsic logic, and in terms of this logic Israel's monotheism makes sense. The core of the logic is, as the Bible puts it, an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth; punishment is proportional to the original transgression. And what was the magnitude of the transgression that Israel's exiles had suffered? The Babylonians hadn't just conquered their land and belittled their god. They had removed them from their land and, ostensibly, killed their god. Whereas [previously] Assyria had stripped Jerusalem's temple of its treasures, the Babylonians had destroyed the temple itself. And a god's temple was, in the ancient Middle East, literally the god's home.

"The ultimate transgression calls for the ultimate punishment. An apt response when a people kills your god is to kill theirs - to define it out of existence. And if other nations' gods no longer exist, and if you've already decided that Yahweh is the only god in your nation, then you've just segued from monolatry to monotheism.

"This isn't to say that monotheism followed from retributive logic as rigorously as four follows from two plus two. ... [Yet] there is a sense of humiliation so massive that counterbalancing it would require Yahweh's elevation to unprecedented heights - which meant the demotion of the world's other gods to unprecedented depths, perilously near the subsistence level. Monotheism was, among other things, the ultimate revenge."

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Egyptian, Ugaritic, Homeric, Babylonian (Gilgamesh), etc

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According to the extant clay tablets, scholars reckon the time of the first compilation of the Epic [of Gilgamesh] in Akkadian around the second millennium B.C. Since there is a Sumerian version behind the Akkadian, the Epic is, “…upon any view of the date of the Book of Genesis, considerably older than the biblical narrative.”

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The earliest Sumerian versions of the epic date from as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur (2150-2000 BCE) (Dalley 1989: 41-42). The earliest Akkadian versions are dated to the early second millennium (Dalley 1989: 45). The "standard" Akkadian version, consisting of twelve tablets, was edited by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 and 1000 BC and was found in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.

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This writer’s research question is this: what is the relationship between the flood accounts of the Gilgamesh Epic and Genesis? Through this study, this research question is investigated by comparing five perspectives of these two accounts. The purpose of this thesis is to support the trustworthiness of the Bible in order to strengthen Christians’ faith in the Bible.

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