Job Studies

Ideal Shepherd Motif    Postmodern link of a different kind for Job and Gudea in thought and history

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

12 December  2011

           Post-Modern link of Job and Gudea in thoughts and history

Eclectic and pluralistic is post-modernism, yet critical and faithless in biblical sense. Annoying is this trend not only to neo-orthodoxy and rationalism but a logical step further in their tenets any way. We call our approach here post-modern, because what it is going to do is to bring Job and Gudea in relation with one another, not artistically but with biblical foundational aspects from the book of Job, its writer, biblical chronology and what we know in Sumerology about the chronology and works of Gudea in his cylinders. It is post-modern since the claims in this article is going to annoy rationalism and its scholars who reject the existence of the historical Job. It is going to annoy neo-orthodoxy who is doing the same but trying to cling to the Bible nevertheless. It is going to annoy Sumerologists who wish their science to be totally separated from the Bible in most part, independent and distantly, albeit not related at all. For them it is as if the Bible originated after Sumer was history, a piece of propagandistic composition by late Jewry.

           What is going to appear here from the article will make Hugo Radau turn in his grave if he knew what is been said here. He set out to undo the Creation in Genesis 1-2 with his Babel-Bibel descriptions (see Hugo Radau, The Creation-Story of Genesis I

Sumerian Theogony and Cosmogony in Analecta Gorgiana 174

[Gorgias Press, 2010, originally 1902]). Paul Carus, who wrote the Preface for Radau in 1902 was very keen in his own works to promote the concept of Fantasies in the Bible.

           Radau, like Carus, wished to undo every other aspects that one can think of in the Bible. Look how he reasoned:

"According to this skeleton the creation of the world is described as having taken place within a space of seven days. This system of seven days is not original, it is not found in the Babylonian account. It was inserted by P[riestly source = late]." (Radau 1902: 3)

           The Sabbath was a Babylonian copy. For him the author of Genesis modeled the Creation story according to the Babylonian creation myths and legends. Radau was supported financially by people who wished him to say what he said. They took it upon themselves to publish and distribute his book and even recently a trend is there to redistribute his book in a modern publication. But Radau and others linked to himself, had serious problems with their methodology. It was the glow and afterglow of thousands of cuneiform texts from Sumer and Akkad. From Egypt and elsewhere. A data explosion. As the data became known, scholars did not know what to do with it. So the best option was to make the Bible late and ascribe through plagiarism all correspondences that they could find, Creation, Rebellion in Heaven Motif, Fall of Man, Flood, Laws, Sabbath, and many other features of systematic theology in the Bible. Many doctrines were shown to have originated in Babylon, but later formulated in the Bible by a process of what they saw as plagiarism.

Their books and articles were so convincing that thousands of scholars in almost every generation since then thought that this is the latest scientific stance on the issues. Neo-orthodoxy and relecturing trends after the 1980's all followed with the same biases in their modus operandi. Even today in post-modernism, those biases are not removed but has caused the train to derail and try to run on mud and water instead of on the biblical tracks. Other holy authorities are called in to help build their own human fabricated track for the train to continue, incorporatively, pluralistically, fusing all traditions and pick and choose their own way out.

           Let us start with De Wette, not because we like him, but because we do not like him. In 1843 his English translation appeared on Job. In an online article called "Complex Poets: Moses and the book of Job" by this author at http://www.egw.org at VAN WYK NOTES much was said about De Wette's treatment of Job. The book was originally written in 1814 in German. In that article we mentioned the online link of De Wette in point 12. De Wette showed that the date of Job can be seen from a number of sources: Ezechiel listed Abraham, Job and Moses in that order. Job is thus before Moses who was born in 1530 BCE.

           Another line of thought that is very essential for a proper understanding here is biblical chronology. The ancients were very careful in their dating systems. We do not always understand their calculations but they did. It was mathematically precise and from various angles as well. Biblical chronology is tested the same way by a number of probes. 1 Kings 6:1-4 remains the locus classicus for proper biblical chronology of the Exodus, Moses, Abraham and also Job. A number of articles at www.egw.org dealt with these aspects. If one do not have a proper biblical chronology, one cannot properly do a History of the Ancient Near East. This is what is important here.

           Modern scholars lives with some biases:

1. That Hebrew literature is late since the Hebrew nation were small than other Umwelt nations like Sumer, Akkad, Ashur, Babylon, Persia and others. Thus, these literatures were first and Jewish literatures must be later. Thoughts and ideas must then always be derived from Sumer or Akkad into Hebrew literature and not vice versa. This bias is undo in this article.

2. The Bible is placed under or dependent or of lesser value than Sumerian-Akkadic literature and not equally or higher. Just the mere suggestion that Sumer and Akkad derived ideas from the Bible would make Sumerologists and Assyriologists very angry. I was recently pointing out to a Assyriologist and Sumerian scholar in the USA that Gudea started reigning when Ishmael, the son of Abraham was born, the same year. He was very offended and said that Gudea's chronology is just tentative and postulation and that Abraham never mentioned one king from Sumerian history. Thus, absence of data means data of absence.

           It is exactly this point that strengthens the argument for connection between Job and Gudea. Scholars are biased and to expect to hear from them about links between Job and Gudea is to wait for inhabitants from the Moon to visit us. They are not interested in the Bible as equal partner sharing the reality of the past that early and secondly, they do not believe in its reliability to bring a contribution to history that early. Even modern Jewish scholars of the Torah, Neviim and Ketubim have all drank at the same wells of skepticism. They all will not like this article.

           Marvin Pope says that Job lived in the time of Abraham. In the Anchor Bible page xxxii Poper said that wealth and slaves as well as cattle compares very well between Genesis 12:16 and Job 1:3. The money unit geshitta in Job 42:11 appears only in Genesis 33:19 where Jacob bought a land near Sukkoth, which is Deir Alla and also in Joshua 24:32. The date is thus between 1950-1405 BCE for these last two events. The longitivity of Job in Job 42:16 and 17 (more than 140 years old) suggests that Job lived in the days shortly after the flood. Our suggestion is that it is near the time of Abraham.

           De Wette wanted to allocate Job late on the basis of linguistic Aramaic features (Aramaisms) in the book of Job. That is because he could see correspondences in Proverbs, Daniel, Ezra, Chronicles and Psalms. But the argument can be turned around. The last mentioned list of books and their authors were keen readers of Job. They borrowed the expressions or linguistic elements from Job, an earlier book.

           Abraham lived during and before Gudea the patesi of Lagash. The literature of Gudea was transliterated and translated into German by F. Thureau-Dangin. Gudea was a very religious man. Very pious. He erected statues of himself folding his hands in respect to his gods. Gudea started to reign in 2143-2124 BCE. It is the year Ishmael was born. Job was a contemporary of Abraham, it seems and thus a contemporary of Gudea. Why is this important?

           In many of Gudea's cylinders we learn that he had a special preoccupation with the number seven. For seven days he entered the temple and during that feast slaves and masters were walking side by side, the widow was taken care of, the orphan as well and the focus was on righteousness. But also in Job we have this particular comparison with Cylinder (for a treatment of the cylinders of Gudea, one can see the early work of F. Thureau-Dangin, Die Sumerischen und Akkadischen Königs Inschriften [Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs' Buchhandlung, 1907]: 136-9 Lagash, Gudea: Cylinder B 17: 17-18:10). This is exactly what Job claimed he did. Now seven was also important in the book of Job that Moses wrote: In Job 42:8 God ordered Eliphaz, one of Job's friends, in the days of Gudea, to offer seven bulls and seven rams. Exactly seven. Moses wrote Job and also Genesis 1-2 where God created for seven days this earth and everything else on it. He rested on the seventh-day (Genesis 2:2-3) and expected His creatures to do the same, as formulated again by Moses in the Ten Commandments. Notice how religions, even Christians have changed this command of God by their own rationalization and humanistic design. It is all but Saturday Sabbath worship. Even after the Flood Noah waited seven days to send out the dove (Genesis 8:10; 12). Biblical chronology indicates that Abraham was a young man when Noah died. They could have known each other. The book of Adam and the book of Noah was preserved by Abraham so that when Moses found himself running from Egypt that night in 1490 BCE after the manslaughter, one can assume that his mother gave him copies of these books which he utilized in Midian to write Genesis and Job. The might have been also a copy of the history of Job. He used that to write his great epic, the book of Job. Is Job 29 with the ideal Shepherd King an inreading of cuneiform knowledge from Gudea by Moses in the live of Job who may not have even said that at all? The answer is negative. Because Gudea also said it in the same time as when Job was presumably living, and because seven is a Jewish number, Adam, Noah, Exodus 20, therefore the presence of seven in Sumerian literature means the vivid presence of Habiru or Hebrews in Sumerian and Akkadian societies. Gudea knew of an elaborate system of sacrifices but so did Job as one can see in Job 1:5 and also in Job 42:8.

           The same scholar who was negative about Abraham mentioning any of the Sumerian or Akkadian kings, also said that seven is one of the most problematic features of Mesopotamia. He is so right, since they were mostly orientated with a decimal (10) or sexagesimal (6) system of counting. Seven is out of the way, off-road for them. And yet, Gudea was preoccupied with seven:

           Gudea uses seven for his secret weapon, act on various occasions for seven days, blesses for seven days, erected seven stelae, had seven heroes situated in the temple, seven twin daughters situated in the temple, had seven musicians and there were seven heavenly zones. These examples were all taken from the work of Thureau-Dangin and presented in an article at www.egw.org "Number seven in the days of Gudea, Abraham, Ishmael and Izaac". This article adds also Job. In fact, the presence of early Habiru with seven in their Sabbath history and custom, their Creation week history and custom, must have rubbed off on some Sumerians of which Gudea is a shiny example. A fusionistic approach to Sumerology and the Biblical history is done with absolute mathematical precision of chronology, not tolerating sweeping statements or allusions farfetched or remote. With these investigations the same high standard of science is expected and anyone breaking the rules of the scientific standards is bound to be critiqued. It is not just a license for innovation here. It must be based on solid data and somewhat probable or hopefully very clear. It may shock many a scholar who have never heard of this assumption, but the scientific claim still have to be present to carry the day. The radical shift from earlier approaches and the fusionistic trend may bring it near to a post-modern approach, yet fundamentalistic and conservative.

Job was written by Moses in Midian while he was suffering himself hiding due to his criminal activity. Job’s problem was also for him a help in his own struggle