Thank you!
Posted on 07/10/2007 5:48:08 PM PDT by blam
Tiny tablet provides proof for Old Testament
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 7:33pm BST 10/07/2007
The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum's great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years.
But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact.
Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered - Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as "the chief eunuch" of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.
Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name - Nebo-Sarsekim.
Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II's "chief officer" and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the Babylonians overran the city.
The small tablet, the size of "a packet of 10 cigarettes" according to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, is a bill of receipt acknowledging Nabu-sharrussu-ukin's payment of 0.75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylon.
The tablet is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595BC, 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.
Evidence from non-Biblical sources of people named in the Bible is not unknown, but Nabu-sharrussu-ukin would have been a relatively insignificant figure.
"This is a fantastic discovery, a world-class find," Dr Finkel said yesterday. "If Nebo-Sarsekim existed, which other lesser figures in the Old Testament existed? A throwaway detail in the Old Testament turns out to be accurate and true. I think that it means that the whole of the narrative [of Jeremiah] takes on a new kind of power."
Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing and was commonly used in the Middle East between 3,200 BC and the second century AD. It was created by pressing a wedge-shaped instrument, usually a cut reed, into moist clay.
The full translation of the tablet reads: (Regarding) 1.5 minas (0.75 kg) of gold, the property of Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief eunuch, which he sent via Arad-Banitu the eunuch to [the temple] Esangila: Arad-Banitu has delivered [it] to Esangila. In the presence of Bel-usat, son of Alpaya, the royal bodyguard, [and of] Nadin, son of Marduk-zer-ibni. Month XI, day 18, year 10 [of] Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.
“you pays your money, and you takes your chances.”
- Nabu-sharrussu-ukin
There are thousands of other petroglyphs still out on site throughout Nickel Oblast and nearby towns and counties in Finland and Russia.
Yup, with an added, though not unexpected, detail.
I did read that in National Geographic a couple of years ago, but as I seem to recall, it was described more as an accident that he was in a position to rise to great power. Still, not the kind of perk that most prospective executives look forward to...ouch!
Are you saying the definitive source for an event in the Holy Lands are Finnish pictoglyphs?
Thank you but I’ll stick to the Bible.
Shrinkage?
The Biblical account has the daughters getting their father drunk and then bedding him. The tale got it backwards.
The evidence is, as Moses told us, the records were there in Egypt for him to look at and assemble.
Supplement that with a few direct revelations to Moses and you have one humdinger of a book.
Most serious authorities believe Moses's work was further edited some time in his future. Frankly, I think Moses did the job himself (with God's assistance of course).
I thought perhaps you meant the ... uh... procedure... was a “small thing” instead of the archaeological find...
Uh...
Oh, look! A butterfly!
Lot’s daughters did that because they thought the whole world was destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah.
They thought they were the only ones left.
He was a eunuch?
How unfortunate...
God told him to? That is a great idea : ) I'll add that little detail and my book will be the best seller of all time.
You needn't treat it as "religion," per se -- you could, rather, see it as support for the reliability of ancient historical narratives.
And, actually, in terms of the Bible as History, it's not at all uncommon to find pieces of supporting evidence like this.
You know you're a language nerd when the most surprising thing to you in this thread is that Dravidian is agglutinative. I was also stunned that cuneiform came from an agglutinative language, so I poked around some.
I already knew that Jeremiah was reliable. :-)
Interesting details, new to me.
This tale is still current throughout North Asia ~ it's an old favorite of the Shamen.
Interestingly enough, the oldest version is clearly feminist in structure; the newer version found in the Bible is patriarchal.
The moral of the story is that the parent(s) must see to their children's marriages or trouble will ensue.
This tale is still current throughout North Asia ~ it's an old favorite of the Shamen.
Interestingly enough, the oldest version is clearly feminist in structure; the newer version found in the Bible is patriarchal.
The moral of the story is that the parent(s) must see to their children's marriages or trouble will ensue.
The persecution of Catholics (and some threats against Lutherans as well) were selective.
One of the best known instances was the expulsion of religious congregations from Germany. Gerard Manley Hopkins bases what I think is his greatest poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” on this.
You may have run across the school of thought that the Hebrew Bible was pieced together by scribes from various traditions, giving us the J Writer, the Priestly Writer, the Deuteronimic Code, and so forth. That was the work of a German professor given a chair by Bismark.
So, too, the theory that the order of the Gospels was not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as traditionally thought, but that Mark was written first. But there are contradictions in that theory unless you posit a lost manuscript, which was named Q, for Quelle, on which the other gospels could have drawn.
But, it has been speculated, the real reason for trying to reorder the gospels was that Matthew contains the verse, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.” The idea was to say that this verse was added late by some Pope, to justify a power grab.
There was certainly persecution of Catholics in parts of Germany, as well.
This tiny tablet records rations of beer, bread, garlic, oil and soap supplied to eight imperial messengers at a way station in the province of Umma in the empire of the Third Dynasty of Ur. (The month name suggests that the tablet is from ancient Umma.) These small texts recording daily outlays are known to scholars as “messenger texts.” Every month, the daily records were totalled and the records were deposited in the provincial archives. This particular text dates to the seventh day of the third month, but the exact year is not given (certainly in the latter half of the empire’s existence, i.e. ca. 2000 BC).
The Third Dynasty of Ur controlled most of present-day Iraq and parts of western Iran from about 2100-2000 BC. Ur, known from the Old Testament as “Ur of the Chaldees,” is a major archeological site in southern Iraq. The site of Umma, northeast of Ur, has been the scene of intensive looting over the last ten years.
http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/iclay.html
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