The Cuneiform inscriptions and the Old Testament; - The Search For ...

0UNESI8 II. 23
creation-story (line 6) "... a sprout had not yet sprung 23
forth" see above page 2. The Chaldaean account, which
elsewhere exhibits more points of contact with the Elohistic
narrative of creation, is here on the contrary more closely
akin to that of the Jahvistic-prophetic narrator. The latter
is for the most part true in the case of the story of the
Flood.
^>)y}\ In Sargon's great inscription at Khorsabad line
33*, as well as in the Nimrtid-inscription of the same monarch,
we meet with a king** of Hamath named Ja-u-bi-'-di i. e.
Jahubi'd. Beside the determination of person, the word
is preceded by the determination of deity. Accordingly it
is certain that Jahu was regarded by the writer as the
name of a god. The correctness of this conjecture is
established by the remarkable fact that this same king is
called in another inscription of Sargon (viz. the cylinder-
inscription of Khorsabad) I-lu-u-bi-'-di i. e. IMbi'd I Rawl.
* Botta, monument de Ninive IV pi. 145 line 21.
** Lay. 33 line 8. Here he is designated Ma-lik i. e. n^'Q. I
ought not however to pass on without observing that the rendering 'king'
is from the Assyrian standpoint inadequate. The Assyrian always
employed the word malik plur. maliki, malki to designate the
minor potentates. Malik to the Assyrian is equivalent to 'prince',
while 'king' he expressed by sarru "^jj*. We see that tSo ^"^^ IH^
in Assyrian, as compared with Hebrew, have exactly changed places.
The Conjecture of Lotz ('The Inscriptions of Tiglath Pileser I' p. 99
rem.) is worth noticing, that sarru is properly a foreign word in
Assyrian, borrowed from the Akkado-Sumirian in which sirra signifies
"leader." The word would thus be in its migration from language to
language somewhat analogous to the German "Kaiser", Slav "Czar"
= Caesar. The hypothesis is rendered more probable from the circumstance
that the corresponding term for 'King' is only to be found
among the Eastern and Northern Semites (i. e. Assyrians and Hebrews),
not among the Semites of the South.—The attempts that have been
made to find Semitic derivations are all of them unsatisfactory.