7. The Explosive Thunderclap of Delitzsch’s Dilemma
So, why was “Delitzsch’s Distinctive Dilemma” such an
explosive thunderclap that its echoes reverberate down to our own
times in obscure scholarly debates?
So how then may one
summarize “Delitzsch’s Distinctive Dilemma”?
1) On the one hand, the clear implication of Delitzsch’s cuneiform names containing the root “Ia” and even “Iave” centuries before the epiphany to Moses at the Burning Bush, as recounted in Exodus chapter 3, is that there was nothing inherently special about the name “Yahweh” itself, since it was known long before the Exodus, and that in turn demoted the Exodus passage from the status it always had had within within Jewish and Christian theology as a special monotheistic revelation, challenging conservative literalist fundamentalisms; and,2) On the other hand, the presence of the name in tablets clearly datable to a time period from Hammurabi also meant that the careful chronological reconstructions of the Documentary Hypothesis — the critics’ ‘new fundamentalism’ — were on very shaky foundations at best, or clearly dubious and spurious at worst.
But there was a
further implication:
3) The presence of such names in very old cuneiform tablets also implied that the biblical text was indeed edited, but in a very different way, and for a very different purpose, than that proposed by the higher critics advocating the Documentary Hypothesis. Indeed, as Delitzsch himself pointed out, the presence of “Cosmic War” and “Fall of Man” themes in Babylonian art, themes paralleled in the biblical stories, suggested that the editing was wholesale and present throughout the region’s texts and artwork. It suggested, in other words, that there was an agenda at work throughout all texts from the region — biblical or otherwise — and that to learn what that story and agenda was, one would have to reconstruct that history by a careful critical process.
When we put these
considerations into the implications of Koldewey’s musings on the
sirrush, we get an even further
expanded list of implications, for not only are biblical history
and the wider history of religion and culture affected, so too, and
by the same token, is the history of science
and technology itself. This implies that the “agenda”
referred to previously, the agenda at work in the careful editing
of texts, may be trying to hide something about four things: God,
man, religion, and science itself.
Koldewey’s
sirrush with its odd and bizarre
mixture of serpentine, ornithological, and feline characteristics
points the way, for with the modern science of genetics, the
creation of such chimerical creatures looms as an ever more
feasible reality, a reality that the ancient texts from Mesopotamia
also implied once existed, and even implied the use and
manipulation of a technology to achieve it. Could it all have been
an agenda of massive misdirection, a case of sleight-of-hand
designed to get the vast majority of mankind looking elsewhere,
while an informed elite, looking at ancient texts and seeing a lost
science and technology, was really digging and scratching in the
desert sands in an attempt to recover and redeploy that lost
technology?
That possibility
informs the rest of this book, and to it, we now turn.