The poetry of psalm 137 is hauntingly grieving so you can’t forget it, but it came into context – rather surprisingly – in Berlin. It wasn’t a city I knew; for most of my adult life it had been out of reach behind the Iron Curtain. Just after the Wall came down I went to the museums there in search of something else entirely and I discovered Babylon. It took your breath away.
There, re-assembled, was the smaller part of just one of the entrances into Babylon and I suddenly realised the overwhelming effect the city must have had on the Israelites who were deported there so long ago in 587 BCE. (The larger gate was kept in storage as the bricks were shipped from the Middle Eastern archaeological site early last century. It was just too large to be re-assembled inside any building.) Rose Marie Prosser, in her current Old Testament discussions Journey with Scripture at OLGC had noted that a a significant portion of the Old Testament was either written down, or redacted by priestly scholars or scribes while in Babylon, and I began to realise why.
The ‘great gate of Ishtar’ led into the inner city wall of Babylon (in modern day Iraq) and was part of a grand processional way built by King Nebuchadnezzar around the time of the Babylonian Captivity that the psalm refers to. Smaller it might be, but the gate is huge – around 15m high, with foundations of equal depth, and built of hand-made fired bricks mostly faced in a deep blue glaze the colour of lapis lazuli. Others are gold or tan to form the shapes of animals representing Babylonian gods and Ishtar herself, the goddess of war and sexuality.
This was the same Nebuchadnezzar who had conquered Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s temple, laid waste to the rest of the city and carried off a significant part of the population to his capital in Mesopotamia. With their homeland destroyed, it must have been the most enormous culture shock for the Israelites. Jerusalem had been their political and religious hub, and they were immensely proud of the Temple Solomon built, but comparatively it was just a small hill town of about 150 acres surrounded by a city wall with a population of perhaps 10,000 people. (About the size of Kilmore.) It wasn’t on a trade route and much of its wealth depended on local farms. Its population was diversified enough to have a priestly caste, but the Temple, for all its glory, could hardly match the pantheon of gods in Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar’s capital was one of the largest cities in the world – perhaps 4 sq. miles in size. It had a population of around 200,000 and was a major trading post.
Babylonian arts, sciences and mathematics were highly sophisticated and its buildings were extraordinary. While the Hanging Gardens are possibly apocryphal, there is no doubt about its palaces, temples and great Processional Way, some 700m long that wound its way round the city and that was used annually for religious processions – all must have seemed overwhelming. Even the decorations of the long Processional walls were designed so that the lions’ heads were above human height, dominating the pilgrim. (And the animals’ features were centered mid-tile, so they lost none of their vitality as the image of an eye or a snarl were split by the division between bricks.).
In the face such a sophisticated religious and artistic tradition most deportees would be tempted to fit into the new culture, losing their old identity. Certainly being absorbed into the local practices would be the easiest way to cope with the shame of defeat and the unlikelihood of ever being allowed to return to their own country.
Instead the Israelites, having no Temple, designed synagogues as places of prayer and biblical study, and they emphasised their monotheism as one God, Yahweh, for all peoples – not just for Israel. They did indeed “set Jerusalem above their highest joy”. A priestly author wrote down much of the oral tradition, redacting a number of books. While many stories had older oral or written roots, they were compiled and finalised in Babylon. In their narrative Babylon was ultimately seen as the wicked superpower, a place of sinful luxury, corruption and pride, and their exile there was explained as punishment for earlier disobedience to God.
The Jewish writers turned to their own Creation Narrative and began to write it down more completely but, consciously or unconsciously, their final versions had absorbed some strands of stories from their surrounding culture. In the bible as we have it now, early chapters of Genesis, particularly the creation of humanity and the separation of heaven and earth, share motifs with the Babylonian narrative of Enuma Elish. The structure of the Tower of Babel – Genesis 11 – was certainly based on the great Ziggurat towers in the city and apparently the Hammurabi legal code is reflected in some legal principles laid down in the Old Testament.
But much of this was only realised in retrospect – through the rear window, as it were, of history. Two religions of the Book, Judaism and Christianity were both vitally alive in western Europe for the last 2,000 years, while Babylon and its culture was conquered successively by the Persians under Cyrus, then the Greeks under Alexander the Great, then fell to Muslim rule. While the Bible was read and studied intimately, the earlier clay tablets were lost and forgotten. The key to their cuneiform writing, the oldest known writing system, disappeared for 1,700 odd years. It was basically wedge shape indentations in wet clay tablet which was then fired, but these clay tablets broke easily, and cuneiform was used for a number of different languages, so it was almost impossible to be sure which ancient language was being used on each fragment of clay tablets held in a myriad of museums across Europe when scholars started to gradually recover early Middle Eastern history.
Perhaps the most engaging account is the recovery of the Flood narrative and a young man born in 1840 in London. Working class and with a minimum of education George Smith was apprenticed at the age of 14 to the engraver of banknotes in the City of London, but he spent every possible lunch hour poring over the clay tablet collection in the British Museum. He read voraciously and began volunteering in the evenings to sort the mass of clay fragments previous expeditions had brought back from Mesopotamia. By the age of 26 this self-educated man was making important discoveries, dating events and supplying descriptions, and a few years later he was invited to take a senior role in the Antiquities section of the world famous museum. Adept at reading cuneiform inscriptions, in 1872 he made the extraordinary discovery of a version of the Flood story dating perhaps 1,500 years earlier than the written biblical account. Fellow workers in the British Museum told the story that, on the morning Smith started the new clay fragment and gradually realised what he was reading he “began to remove articles of his clothing” and run around the room shouting in delight that he was the first person in two millennia to be reading this story. In fact the fragment is better known today as part of the Epic of Gilgamesh – one of the oldest known works of literature written down in Mesopotamia around 4,000 years ago.
That year Smith read the account of his discovery to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in front of both the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury; his news made world headlines, and he was funded for three trips to Middle Eastern archaeology. Sadly, he died there of dysentery at the age of 36. He left a wife and six children, to whom Queen Victoria awarded a lifetime annuity of £150. What a loss.
References:
Image 1: Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum (source: Joy of Museums)
Image 2: Panel from King Nebuchadnezzar II’s throne room, in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin (source: Neoclassicism Enthusiast, Wikimedia)
Image 3: Standard of Ur – Peace side (source: Alonso de Mendoza, Wikimedia)
Image 4: Babylon processional way (source: Jononmac46, Wikimedia)
Image 5: Neo-Assyrian clay tablet. Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11: Story of the Flood. Known as the “Flood Tablet” (source: BabelStone, Wikimedia)
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