101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

82 101 Myths of the Bible
ity. So, why did the biblical editors change the time frame? The answer lies with a corrupted
form of the ancient Sumerian king list, which recorded the sequence of kings
that ruled in ancient Mesopotamia, both before and after the flood of Babylonian myth.
In Mesopotamian versions of the flood story, the deluge occurred long after Creation.
In a Sumerian document dating to about 2000 B.C., we have a list of the first
eight kings of Sumer. These kings had a combined reign of 241,000 years and the
flood occurred during the eighth reign. But in a later version of this king list, dating to
the fourth century B.C., the flood took place during the reign of a tenth king named
Xisouthros and 432,000 years elapsed before the flood arrived. Xisouthros does not
appear in the earlier list of Sumerian kings, but his name corresponds to a Hellenized
pronunciation of Ziusdra, one of the names for the Babylonian flood hero. (We can’t
say when in time the list of Sumerian kings names was altered, only that it happened
between about 2000 B.C. and 400 B.C. If we knew precisely, it would have an enormous
impact on dating the formulation of the biblical text.)
While the Babylonian texts also date the flood tens of thousands of years before
the time of Noah, the placing of the flood in the tenth generation of kingship parallels
Noah’s place in the tenth generation of humanity. The figure of 432,000 years from
the later list of kings, as we shall see in a moment, adds a second corresponding parallel
to the biblical story that connects the biblical account to this later form of the list.
The Babylonians used enormous and implausible time periods in their king lists,
tens of thousands of years for each of many early kings. They also divided these time
frames into smaller units, one of which was known as the saroi and lasted 3,600 years.
A period of 432,000 years, therefore, equals 120 saroi. This reminds us that in the biblical
story, God says to Noah,“My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he
also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years” (Gen. 6:3).
What does it mean to say that “his days shall be an hundred and twenty years”?
One interpretation is that 120 years defined the longest life span allowed to humans.
But, after the flood, several generations lived longer than 120 years, so this cannot be
correct. Another interpretation is that this was a warning that the flood would come
within 120 years. This would be the correct meaning, but the 120 years would originally
have been 120 saroi, and the warning would have been that the flood would