An overlooked message: the critique of kings and affirmation of equality in the primeval history

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter, 2006 by Robert K. Gnuse

First, Mesopotamians engaged in complex religious rites at the New Year Akiti or Akitu festival, led by their priests and the king, to avoid another flood. By these rituals they gave strength to Marduk, the god of Babylon, to defeat the power of chaos, the evil goddess of water, Tiamat, every year and thus avert the destruction of Babylon by floods. The possible re-enactment of this drama, which may have featured the king annually in the role of Marduk, gave tremendous psychological legitimation to the king as the representative of the divine realm. When the biblical narrative declares that a flood will never happen again, it makes the Babylonians and their king look foolish with this superfluous ritual.

In the second place, the hero of the flood in one account, Ziusudra, is a king. His reception of the gift of immortality for surviving the flood further adds credibility to the divine status of the king. (Atrahasis and Utnapishtim also receive immortality in their versions of the account.) In the biblical account, however, Noah is not a king, and he receives no immortality after the flood; rather, the blessing of God is for all people--the curse on the ground is removed (Gen 8:21) and people are enabled to eat meat (Gen 9:2-4), as well as promised no more flood. This further debunks the status of primordial heroes who could be seen as ancient kings.

The symbolic story of the building of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is another anti-royal account. The sin of the tower builders is their desire to storm the heavens and make a name for themselves, which symbolically means that they seek to invade the divine realm and become immortal like the gods. Thus, they would avert the destruction of another flood sent by the gods, or they can avoid being scattered by Yahweh, as the text declares in v 4. Put in other terms, the sin of the builders is tremendous pride, the desire to be like the gods, which in the opinion of biblical authors is the sin of the Mesopotamian kings.

Mesopotamian kings considered it one of their chief duties to build temple ziggurats in their cities. Especially great ziggurats were built by Ur-Nammu in Ur (2000 BCE), Hammurabi in Babylon (1750 BCE), and Nebuchadrezzar I in Babylon (1100 BCE). Nabonidns engaged in numerous temple and shrine rebuilding projects in Ur, Babylon, and Harran (550 BCE). Of special interest is the temple ziggurat, the Entemenanki, in Babylon, which was built by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon in the mid-7th century BCE, rebuilt by the Chaldean Babylonian king Nabopollasar in the late 7th century BCE, and refurbished by two Chaldean Babylonian kings, Nebuchadnezzar II and Nabonidus, in the early and mid-6th century BCE. Mesopotamian ziggurats were cosmic mountains that reached to the heavens, and the worshipping individuals--the king and priests--who could build and ascend such mountains--had their authority on this world legitimated by such activity. Of special interest is the activity of Nebuchadnezzar in building a great temple in Babylon, the Etemenanki, for in his royal inscriptions he bragged of how he brought people from all over his empire to work on that building construction (Van Seters 1994: 182-84; Smith-Christopher: 67). Those peoples obviously would have included Judeans exiled after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.