by
Damien F. Mackey
“I am Sargon, the powerful
king, the king of Akkad. My mother was an Enitu priestees, I did not know any
father . . . . My mother conceived me and bore me in secret. She put me in a
little box made of reeds, sealing its lid with pitch. She put me in the river”.
What ensues from the revised model of
history that I am pursuing is a fairly complete turnaround of the almost
universal tendency by historians and biblical commentators to argue for a
dependence of the biblical material upon pagan myths and influences, be these Mesopotamian,
Canaanite, Egyptian, or others.
And so we have found that, for
instance:
- with Hammurabi King of Babylon now re-dated to the time of King Solomon:
Hammurabi and
Zimri-Lim as Contemporaries of Solomon
then no longer can Hammurabi’s Laws be
viewed as a Babylonian forerunner of Mosaïc Law.
- with the age of El Amarna now re-dated from the C14th to the C9th BC:
King Ahab in El Amarna
then no longer can pharaoh Akhnaton’s
Sun Hymn, so obviously like King David’s Psalm 104, be regarded as the literary
inspiration for the great King of Israel.
And the same comment applies to the
Psalm-like pieces inscribed upon the monuments of Queen Hatshepsut, the
biblical Queen of Sheba:
Solomon and
Sheba
whose influence was Davidic and
Solomonic Israel.
But, just as convention has wrongly
assumed an all-out pagan influencing of biblical Israel, so had I once wrongly
assumed that Sargon of Akkad (conventionally dated to c. 2300 BC), must
actually have post-dated Moses, due to the famous Moses-like legend of Sargon
as a baby.
Compare the two texts:
Sargon legend (http://www.skeptically.org/oldtestament/id3.html):
“I am Sargon, the powerful king, the
king of Akkad. My mother was an Enitu priestees, I did not know any father . .
. . My mother conceived me and bore me in secret. She put me in a little box
made of reeds, sealing its lid with pitch. She put me in the river. . . . The
river carried me away and brought me to Akki the drawer of water. Akki the
drawer of water adopted me and brought me up as his son . . .”.
and
Exodus 2:1-10:
“Now a man of the tribe of Levi
married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When
she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she
could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with
tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along
the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen
to him. Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her
attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds
and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was
crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she
said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the
Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” “Yes, go,” she answered. So the girl
went and got the baby’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby
and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and
nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and
he became her son”.
And I had, accordingly, looked for a
much later, revised location for the Akkadian dynasty.
However, that apparently futile search
was finally stopped short after I read this article by Douglas Petrovich:
Identifying
Nimrod of Genesis 10 with Sargon of Akkad ….
This new - and I think, plausible - historical
reconstruction would mean that the Akkadian dynasty has been dated by
historians to at least within a few centuries of its proper place – a rarity as
regards conventional early BC history.
Consequently, my conclusion now would
be that this famous ‘Sargon as a baby’ legend, thought to have been recorded as
late as about the C7th BC, hence long
after Moses, was based upon the biblical Exodus story, and not vice versa.
This famous biblical incident concerning
baby Moses would have been recounted in Mesopotamian captivity by faithful
Israelites, such as Tobit and his family, taken into exile by the kings of
Assyria. See my:
Book of Tobit
and the Neo-Assyrian Kings
So, even though Sargon of Akkad
himself, and his dynasty, had well pre-dated Moses, the famous Moses-like
legend about the mighty king of Akkad had well post-dated Moses and likely belongs
to the era of Ashurbanipal and his famous library.
