Tag: Bible Verses

An inscribed clay tablet in the author’s possession (ca. 2000 B.C. – the time of Abraham)

Note the last line (under the blank space) which forms the colophon. The colophon generally  incorporates the title, the date of writing, and the name of the scribe or owner.

“Wiseman’s theory postulated documentary sources for Genesis although of a completely different nature from those suggested by the adherents of the Graf-Welhausen school. He stressed the strictly Mesopotamian nature of much of the source-material which he had uncovered, and suggested that it had been combined with the Joseph narratives to form the book of Genesis, presumably under the direct influence of Moses. His approach had the distinct advantage of relating the ancient Mesopotamian life-situation, unlike the attempts of the Graf-Welhausen school, and showed that the methods of writing and compilation employed in Genesis were in essential harmony with the processes current among the scribes of ancient Babylonia.”


“Accordingly, the present writer feels justified in following Wiseman in the assertion that Genesis contains in the first thirty-six chapters a series of tablets whose contents were linked together to form a roughly chronological account of primeval and patriarchal life written from the standpoint of a Mesopotamian cultural milieu” (R.K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament, 1969, pp. 63, 64, 548).


If Wiseman is right about the colophons coming at the end of each of the eyewitness’s accounts, it would indicate that the book of Genesis is made up of tablets which were written or owned by an eyewitness to the events described therein. These “family records” would have been eventually compiled by Moses, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, probably during the Exodus (ca. 1450 B.C.) and should be considered historically reliable.

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Part Two – THE GENESIS TABLETS

Archaeology is a relatively new science, the benefits of which have not been available to us until about the last hundred and fifty years or so. But we now have the distinct advantage of incorporating tangible evidence along with the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our efforts to clearly understand Scripture. A man by the name of P. J. Wiseman became familiar with ancient Babylonian tablets and noticed similarities in literary form to that of the book of Genesis. His “Tablet Theory” caught the attention of more than a few Bible scholars. Professor R. K. Harrison wrote:

“An important step towards an understanding of the manner in which Genesis was compiled in the light of the ancient Babylonian ‘life-situation’ was made in 1936 by P. J. Wiseman. A British air-commodore of decidedly antiquarian bent, Wiseman examined the literary forms of ancient Babylonian tablets with a view to solving the literary problem of the origin of Genesis. From the existence of colophons, catch-lines, scribal dating, and other devices of antiquity familiar to the Assyriologist, Wiseman argued towards the presence of similar phenomena in the bulk of Genesis. He interpreted the enigmatic phrase ‘these are the generations of’ as in fact constituting a colophon in the text, and pointing to the preceding verses as a complete unit which in cuneiform would have constituted a tablet. He further adduced the presence in the early Genesis narratives of such Babylonian literary mechanisms as scribal attempts at dating, the linking of passages in series, specific titles of sections, and the use of catch-lines.”

 

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