Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [19]
How did an ancient myth cast doubt on the divinity of the Bible?
Schliemann’s anstonishing finds stimulated a new popular appreciation and interest in mythology. As a flood of information about newly discovered cultures swept through Europe in the wake of nineteenth-century exploration and colonization, a wave of late nineteenth-century scholarship was revolutionizing long-held views of the ancient world. At nearly the same moment as Schliemann found Troy, another discovery had similarly dramatic and far-reaching consequences, although it did not garner the headlines that the beguiling Sophia Schliemann had in her “Helen-ish” jewels. In Nineveh, once the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, and a city prominent in biblical history, a large number of clay tablets were discovered in the ruins of a temple. Nineveh was the “wicked city” where the Hebrew prophet Jonah of “large fish” (not a whale) fame was sent by God in the Bible. Needless to say, the discovery of writings from so important a site in biblical history attracted a significant amount of attention.
When an exhibit of these Assyrian objects—which had been taken to London’s British Museum—opened in 1850, Victorian London was astonished. Assyrians had been viewed as the “bad guys” of the Bible, cruel conquerors who had enslaved the Jews. But here, on display, were carvings and statuary that fascinated Londoners. Jewelers began to make replicas of the Assyrian ornaments, and they became the fashion rage. But even more significant was the impact of the Assyrian discoveries on biblical scholarship. George Smith, a young man when the Assyrian display opened, practically became obsessed with the exhibit—much the way America was fascinated by all things Egyptian when the King Tut exhibit toured museums around the country during the 1970s. With little formal training, Smith was able to win a job at the museum, and in 1872, delivered a paper before the Society of Biblical Archaeology with translations from these ancient tablets. Smith had translated portions of Gilgamesh, an ancient Babylonian epic poem that tells of an imperfect hero named Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality, a poem widely considered the world’s oldest known work of literature.
But its impact went far beyond exciting a few professors of literature and ancient languages. The contents of Gilgamesh that Smith revealed turned the accepted world of Christian biblical beliefs on its head. Smith’s translations of Gilgamesh included episodes of a great flood that contained clear parallels with the biblical accounts of Noah’s flood, along with many other elements shared with the Book of Genesis. His paper set off shockwaves, and a London newspaper commissioned Smith to head for Mesopotamia to do further research. On an expedition to Nineveh, Smith contracted a virulent strain of fever and died at the age of thirty-six.
But Smith’s translations had unleashed a flood of another sort. Reaction to the material was earthshaking in the world of biblical scholarship. When a leading German scholar delivered a lecture titled “Babel und Bible” in 1902, and stated that the Bible was not the world’s oldest book, as Christian and Jewish scholars had taught for centuries, there was complete outrage. Germany’s kaiser Wilhelm II heard the lecture and was neither impressed nor amused. “Religion has never been the result of science,” the kaiser wrote, “but the outpouring of the heart and being of man from his intercourse with God.”
Smith’s translations and the suggestion that the Bible was not the divine