the possibility that Rameses II did not really live in the 13th century BC at all. Kurkh Stela depicting Shalmaneser III king of Assyria. Found in Ku

ablished contacts between rulers of different nations that prove they were contemporaries. Using the modern world as an example, we know that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was a contemporary of Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United Sates. We know that because they fought each other in World War I. Similarly, Robert E. Lee was a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, for the same reason. They fought each other in a war. Another form of proof that two rulers were contemporary comes from correspondence. If two men wrote letters to each other, or concluded treaties, they must live at the same time. Or, if they both correspond with a third party, all three must live at the same time. Let us take these principles back to the time of Rameses II. Rameses II was a great Egyptian king who ruled 67 years, built lavishly, fought wars with the Hittites and other nations, and concluded international treaties. His reign is well known. One of his major accomplishments was a major treaty with the great Hittite king Hattusilis III. We have both the Egyptian and the Hittite versions of this famous document. Closeup of Shalmaneser III, on the famous Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser found at Nimrud, ancient Calah, Iraq, in 1846. This 2m (6 ½ ft) tall, four-sided polished black stone monument is now on display in the British Museum. Although not mentioning Ahab, the obelisk’s cuneiform text does mention another king of Israel. On one side, the second register from the top depicts a man kneeling before Shalmaneser with the inscription, “Tribute of Jehu son of Omri.” Jehu ruled ca. 841–814 BC and he probably paid tribute to Shalmaneser in the first year of his reign. Note that in order to formulate such a treaty, both of these kings would have to have ruled at the same time. But the interesting part of all this is the following: Hattusilis III also corresponded with the Assyrian king Shalmaneser I (ca. 1275–1245 BC). Consequently, Shalmaneser I must have been a contemporary of Rameses II as well. And we know roughly how many years there are between Shalmaneser I and his namesake Shalmaneser III: slightly over 400. Since we know that Shalmaneser III lived in the 800’s, Shalmaneser I and hence Rameses II must have lived in the 1200’s. One of the Egyptian copies of the treaty between Rameses II and the Hittites carved into a wall of the Temple of Amun at Karnak. After 20 years of fighting, the treaty was concluded in Rameses II’s 21st year, ca. 1258 BC, corresponding to the later part of the period of Judges in Biblical history. Thirteen years later the treaty was further cemented by the marriage of a Hittite princess to Rameses II. A Hittite copy of the treaty was discovered on two clay tablets written in Babylonian cuneiform found at the Hittite capital of Boghazköy in Turkey. In conclusion, it seems nearly impossible to date the Exodus in the times of Rameses II. There is simply not enough time for all the periods of Biblical history between that seminal event and the last years of Ahab, King of Israel. (Reprinted, with permission, from Artifax 17.2 [2002]:19) Recommended Resources for Further StudyBible and SpadeCD-ROM Archaeology andthe Old Testament Moses andthe Gods of EgyptEndnotes1. For evidence and details for all this, see any standard history of Israel, or a good history of Assyria, such as Saggs, 1990. 2. There are some possible revisions in middle Assyrian chronology, but none of the propose changes extend about a decade. Bibliography Saggs, Henry W.F.1990 The Might That Was Assyria. New York: St. Martins. Younger, K. Lawson, Jr.2000 Neo-Assyrian Inscriptions: Shalmaneser III (2.113), Kurkh Monolith (2.113A). Pp. 261–264 in The Context of Scripture 2, ed. William W. Hallo. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.Please help ABR continue to post these freearticles by making a donation of any size today. Donate



Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood: Part III
Tags: genesis 1, flood, genesis 6-9, atra hasis, ugarit, ebla, sumerian king list, toledot, elohim, genesis 3, enuma elish--> This article was first published in a 4 part series, starting in the Winter 1996 issue of Bible and Spade. FloodCreation and FloodUntil recently, the Creation and the Flood have often been treated as separate units. One of the reasons for this may be that initially discovered ancient Mesopotamian documents provided either a Creation myth without the Flood story (“Enuma elish” and others) or the Flood story without a Creation motif (“Gilgamesh Epic,” tablet XI), all in seventh-century neo-Assyrian copies from the Nineveh of Ashurbanipal’s time.1 Therefore, scholars were busy comparing Genesis 1 with “Enuma elish,” and Genesis 6–8 with “Gilgamesh” XI, without integrating these two sections of Genesis.However, we now have some evidence that the “continuous narrative of the first era of human existence” in the ancient Near East covered both the Creation and the Flood, as Millard (1994: 116) and others have noted. For example, the “Atra-Hasis Epic” from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 1630 BC), which Lambert and Millard presented in 1969 in a thorough study, with the text and its translation,2 covers the history of man from his creation to the Flood. This history was widely known in ancient Mesopotamia, and a similar tradition with the same overall structure was known in the early second millennium BC.Recently Jacobsen suggested the existence of a Sumerian version of such a tradition. According to him, the Sumerian Deluge Tablet from Nippur, which gives not only an account of the Flood but also a list of five cities before the Flood like those in the Sumerian King List,3 may be combined with another Sumerian fragment from Ur and a later bilingual fragment from Nineveh. This combined text, which he names the “Eridu Genesis” (1994: 129–30),4 comprises: (1) the creation of man, (2) the institution of kingship, (3) the founding of the first cities and (4) the great Flood. While Jacobsen’s reconstruction of two Sumerian fragmentary texts (ca. 1600 BC) and one Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual fragment (ca. 600 BC) from three different places remains hypothetical, it seems that an overall tradition linking Creation, early kings, and the Flood existed in Babylonia from early times (Millard 1994:125).Comparative Approach. Biblical scholars have accepted the view that a similar tradition, which links Creation and the Flood, is also reflected in the overall literary structure of Genesis 1–11. Coats, following Clark, notes that in the Sumerian King List and the 'Atra-Hasis Epic', "various narrative elements are set together in something of the same series as the OT primeval saga" (1983: 38).According to Clark, "in his total outline P is influenced by the King List tradition which had now (in some editions) incorporated the flood narrative."As for “J,” he proposes that "J is basically dependent on the tradition of the Atrahasis epic for his outline of the primeval history including the sequence of creation, repeated sin, punishment, and divine grace culminating in the flood" (1971:187–88).It is not so simple, however, to divide the Mesopotamian traditions exactly between the King List, “priestly” tradition, and the “Atra-Hasis” “epic” tradition. In fact the latter played important roles in the priestly tradition. For example, it is reported that a Babylonian incantation priest cited a part of the “Atra-Hasis Epic” to advise a late-Assyrian king on a drought (Lambert and Millard 1969: 27–28).5A number of scholars have made a thorough study of “Atra-Hasis” and its relevance to Genesis research.6 For example, Kikawada, who abandons the source analysis of Genesis, studied the structural similarities between “Atra-Hasis” and Genesis 1–11 as a whole. According to him, both learn spanish