Sumerian Literature

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The world’s oldest literature—poetry as well as prose—belongs to the Sumerians, that fascinating, enigmatic people who settled over 5,000 years ago on the shores of the Persian Gulf¹ and in the lower (southern) part of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in present-day Iraq. There the Sumerians founded the world’s oldest civilization. They invented, for the first time, a means of communicating language in a preserved, instead of transitory, form—in writing. The writing system they invented is called cuneiform, a wedge-shaped script formed by pressing a stylus into clay tablets that were then baked in the sun or in a kiln. Later, other peoples adapted cuneiform writing to their own languages. The best known and most widely used of these written languages is Akkadian.

The Sumerians are also responsible for such mundane innovations as the system of counting by sixties, still preserved in our own time-counting system in which 60 seconds equal a minute and 60 minutes equal an hour. It was they who formulated the first law-codes. It was also they who created that architectural wonder known as the ziggurat, a stepped tower that gave rise to the biblical tale of the tower of Babel, set in Mesopotamia (Genesis 11:1–9). Mesopotamian building techniques—baked mud bricks with 029bitumen as mortar—were used, according to the Bible, to build the tower (Genesis 11:3).

Indeed, it may be said with some justice that “history begins at Sumer”—and that is precisely the tide of a book on the subject by Samuel Noah Kramer, the doyen of Sumerologists, whose 90th birthday was marked by a day-long symposium at the University of Pennsylvania (September 27, 1987).² One of the best-known and most prolific interpreters of the Sumerian achievement, Professor Kramer has excelled particularly in recovering Sumerian literature, and it is this aspect of the Sumerian legacy that will occupy us here.³

The rediscovery of Sumerian literature began in 1873, with the first systematic publication of Sumero-Akkadian bilingual texts by Francois Lenormant. Two years later, many additional bilingual texts were included by George Smith in the fourth volume of his Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. These bilingual texts all came from the ancient libraries of Assyria, not Sumer. The original homeland of Sumer (and with it, its libraries) was rediscovered only toward the end of the 19th century. And not until our own century have we been able to make sense of the unilingual literary texts thus brought to light—i.e., texts written only in Sumerian without benefit of an accompanying translation into Akkadian.

Excavation, publication and interpretation of the entire range of Sumerian literature has continued unabated to the present. We now have a very respectable corpus of literary masterpieces, completely reconstructed (or very nearly so) from, as often as not, numerous duplicates, and rendered into English, or other modern languages in reliable editions that reflect the current state of knowledge. For the first time, it is becoming possible to assess and appreciate Sumerian literature and to integrate it into the history of world literature, where it not only occupies the opening chapter but also represents one of the longest-lived bodies of literature in anyone language. Sumerian compositions were created from the beginning of the third millennium B.C. right down to the first century B.C.

Sumerian died out as a spoken language in about 2000 B.C. But, even as a dead language, Sumerian, like medieval Latin, continued as a sacred language in the liturgy of Mesopotamia, and as a subject of instruction in schools throughout the Near East where cuneiform writing was taught. It is thus no accident that Sumerian literature ultimately influenced even biblical literature, even though the Hebrew Bible was composed considerably after the great bulk of Sumerian literature.

Before assessing this influence, let us look more closely at the Sumerian literary achievement. Most Sumerian literature was composed in the form of poetry, organized carefully into numbered lines, each of which runs the width of a clay tablet, or of a column of writing on such a tablet. Compositions now recovered and reconstructed with any degree of completeness total approximately 40,000 lines.⁴ This includes literary texts of all types and from all periods, but it excludes the equally sizeable body of monumental (or “historical”) inscriptions, and it also excludes the much vaster corpus of archival (or “economic”) texts— those endless accounts, ledgers, letters, court cases, price indices, contracts, sales slips, receipts, birth records, and memoranda that Assyriologists sometimes lump together disparagingly as “laundry lists”—although in the aggregate they provide precious clues for reconstructing the society and economy in the only part of the world where that can be done at so early a period.

While a corpus of 40,000 lines does not begin, 030as yet (who knows what remains to be recovered from the sands of Iraq or from museum drawers!), to rival Greek or Latin literature as a whole, it is surely a respectable achievement. The Iliad and the Odyssey together number only about 28,000 lines; the Aeneid, less than 10,000. The scope of Sumerian literature also compares favorably with the Hebrew Bible, whose traditional Masoretic division into verses (whether poetry or prose) provides a total of exactly 23,097 verses.⁵ In short, the Hebrew Bible and Sumerian literature both constitute a corpus of approximately commensurate size, given that a biblical verse may be twice as long as a Sumerian line of poetry.

The corpus of Sumerian literature can be subdivided in many ways—by date, subject matter, presumed author, or dialect, for example. But since our aim is to explore the relationship between Sumerian literature and biblical literature, the most fruitful division is by genre, that is, by type of literary composition. Indeed, genre is especially significant in understanding and appreciating ancient literature, because ancient literature was composed not at the whim of an author but according to fairly strict traditions and rules that differed for each genre and that were generally adhered to even at the expense of individuality. Thus, the author of most Sumerian compositions was anonymous, and the composition was praised not so much for originality as for adherence to norms of the genre. Only very gradually did these norms change over time, allowing us to reconstruct what may be called genre-histories.

The major genres of Sumerian literature, broadly speaking, fall into three categories, according to their subjects: gods, kings and common mortals. Today, we would expect the largest share of our literature to fall into the last category. For the Sumerians, however, it was the other way around. The realm of the divine, including deified royalty, received the largest 031share of attention, being addressed in such varied genres as hymns and prayers, lamentations and incantations, myth and epic, history and legend.

The common man was the central focus of only one kind of literature, so-called wisdom literature, which includes such genres as proverbs, instructions, and essays on morality. Nevertheless, we shall begin by looking at the Sumerian literature of the common man and the genres that fall within that literature.

The first genre is a rather tiny literary category—the riddle. It is typically a very short, proverbial saying, usually in the first person, in which the speaker gives clues about the character or thing he represents, and ends with the answer. In Sumerian a riddle is called ibilu; in Hebrew, a riddle is called a hidah, a cognate of the Akkadian term hittu. Unlike Sumerian riddle collections, Hebrew riddles are not found grouped together—individual examples are scattered in other contexts.

In Sumerian we find collections of riddles. Here are a couple of Sumerian riddles:

“A house with a foundation like heaven,

A house which, like a tablet-box,

has been covered with linen,

A house which, like a goose, stands on a (firm) base.

One with open eyes has come out of it.

Its solution: the school.”

Another, slightly more transparent, example:

“When I was small, I was the child of a plant.

When I grew big, I was the body of a god.

When I became old, I was the country’s physician.

Its solution: linen.”⁶

(Linen grows from a flax plant and clothes the divine statue, and the extract from the plant is used medicinally.)

The most famous riddle in the Hebrew Bible is in the Samson story. Near the Philistine town of Timnah, Samson tore a roaring lion apart with his bare hands. The following year, he returned and found a swarm of bees and their honey in 032the lion’s skeleton. At his wedding feast— Samson’s first wife was an unnamed Philistine woman from Timnah^a—Samson propounded a riddle:

“Out of the eater came something to eat,

Out of the strong came something sweet.”

Judges 14:14^b

With tears and nagging, Samson’s wife wheedled the answer out of him, and then told the answer to the Philistines, who solved the riddle and claimed the prize:

“What is sweeter than honey,

And what is stronger than a lion?”

Judges 14:18

Thus bereft, Samson complained in what was almost another riddle: “Had you not plowed with my heifer, you would not have guessed my riddle” (Judges 14:18).⁷

In Greek literature, perhaps the most famous riddle was that of the Sphinx, solved by Oedipus: “What animal walks on four legs in the morning, on two at midday, and on three in the evening?” (Answer: Man, who as a baby crawls on four legs and as an old man walks with a cane.)

I am not suggesting that either the Greek or the Hebrew riddle owes anything to the Sumerian precedent, but only that the genre goes back to Mesopotamia, at least in its written form.

Riddles were a special sub-class of the broader genre of proverbial wisdom, a genre found in all the world’s literatures and, more often than not, transmitted orally. But Sumerian provides the first examples of written proverbs. They were especially popular in Sumer as the first exercises in writing connected texts by pupils of the scribal schools. So we have many so-called school-texts in which these pupils tried their best to emulate the instructor’s more practiced hand.

Proverbs were composed according to a certain pattern, or rather a number of different patterns, of which one is the pithy saying; for example: “In the city of the lame, the halt is courier” (that is, where everyone is lame on both legs, the one who is lame on only one leg is given distinction). This is quite similar, in spirit if not in precise imagery, to the Talmudic^c saying: “In the street of the blind, they call the one-eyed man great of sight,” which in turn has an obvious similarity to the English proverb (with demonstrated classical antecedents): “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”⁸

It may be no more than happenstance that this proverb does not turn up in the biblical book of Proverbs, which represents a systematic collection, or rather several such collections, of the wisdom of the east, some of it attributed to Solomon, some to other worthies such as Lemuel, and much of it clearly a reflection of known wisdom collections from Egypt as well as from Mesopotamia.

A number of Sumerian proverbs list a series of abominations, usually three, of this or that deity (most often Ninurta). For example:

“A judge who perverts justice,

A curse which falls on the righteous party,

A (first-born) heir who drives the younger (son) out of the patrimony—

These are abominations of Ninurta.”

This is reminiscent of the catalogue of biblical divine abominations, for example, in Proverbs 6:16–19:

“Six things the Lord hates; seven are an abomination to him: a haughty bearing, a lying 033tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, mind that hatches evil plots, feet quick to run to evil, a false witness testifying lies, and one who incites others to quarrel.”

This catalogue exhibits the typical biblical roster of seven items but, otherwise, it is remarkably similar in form to the Sumerian example. Interestingly, the Sumerian rosters of divine abominations more often are concerned with manners and morals, while the Hebrew rosters are more concerned with cultic errors.⁹

Not all Sumerian wisdom literature is short and epigrammatic. There are also long series of wise sayings on a single topic, strung together to form what the Sumerians called nariga, instructions. One such set of instructions, attributed to the same warlike god Ninurta who abhorred so many moral delicts, is a complete set of practical rules for agriculture and has sometimes been compared to the Georgics of Vergil. No wisdom quite so practical is found in the Bible. But another set of Sumerian instructions is attributed to human authority—to one Shuruppak, the hero, in one account, of the Sumerian flood story. We are thus reminded that the biblical Noah, at least in post-biblical texts, became a wisdom figure, associated with the Sibylline oracles and other sagacious pronouncements.

Another popular wisdom genre was the disputation, which pitted against each other two contestants representing different professions, or products, or natural essences. In the end, the palm of victory was awarded to the one who had the best of the argument—usually the “underdog.” Thus, copper apparently bested silver, the lowly pickaxe defeated the lordly plow, and the tree, rare in Sumer, outdid the ubiquitous reed.¹⁰

Traces of this genre may also be found in the Bible, for example in the fable of the thistle that arrogantly challenged the cedar of Lebanon and was trampled by a wild beast for its pains (2 Kings 14:9; 2 Chronicles 25:18).¹¹

A model of sorts for the story of Cain and Abel may be found in the Sumerian disputation between Enkimdu and Dumuzi. Cain and Abel are the Bible’s antediluvian prototypes of farmer and shepherd respectively—indeed its vehicle for recalling the domestication of plants and animals. Similarly, Enkimdu and Dumuzi are the prototypical and probably likewise antediluvian farmer and shepherd, respectively, of Sumer.

In the perennial struggle to please his god and reap the rewards of piety and good behavior, Sumerian man, like his successors including modern man, was often frustrated by the fickleness or capriciousness of fate. His good behavior went unrewarded, while the misdeeds of his neighbor were not visibly punished. In quasi-philosophical treatises, the “just sufferer” vented his frustrations, while at the same time trying to assert his belief in the ultimate justice of fate. One of these Sumerian treatises has survived in nearly complete form; its resemblance to the biblical Book of Job is close enough to suggest an ultimate dependence of Job on the Sumerian version, or at least on later Akkadian variations on this same theme. The structural parallels between the biblical and Mesopotamian accounts are especially close in the poetic portions of Job. And while these portions of the Book of Job are generally regarded as having been composed quite late, they are nevertheless framed by a prose prologue and epilogue that has many archaic features, including vaguely patriarchal and specifically Mesopotamian allusions. For example, when Job was restored to his former state at the end of the prose frame, he was given one qesitah and one gold ring by each of his siblings and former friends (Job 42:11). This enigmatic detail can now be seen as a reflection of the token prize awarded to the winner at the conclusion of some Sumerian disputations.¹²

Thus far we have dealt with wisdom literature, and hence with its focus on the common man and his concerns: solving life’s little riddles, 034observing ethical norms, making a living off the land and, through it all, avoiding—or at least coping with—the wrath of the gods. But the common man was not the common reader, for literacy was not widespread in Sumer. Though the scribal schools enrolled commoners as pupils, the main markets for literary products of the schools were the court and the temple.

Then as now, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Royal patrons demanded royal themes, and priestly patrons required religious themes. So let us turn to some of the genres specifically devoted to kings and gods—often commingled, for kings were regarded as gods in their own right during the half millennium between 2300 B.C. and 1800 B.C. when Sumerian literary creativity was at its peak— in what I consider the “classical period” of ancient Mesopotamian culture.

We may begin again with antediluvian traditions. One of the earliest, and certainly the most important, of these is the so-called Sumerian King List. This could better be called the Sumerian city list, for it is a record of all the cities—five before the Flood and eleven thereafter—that ruled Sumer from the dawn of history to the accession of Hammurapi, in about 1800 B.C. The five antediluvian cities were ruled by eight kings with incredibly long reigns, of whom the last became the hero of the Sumerian Flood Story. There were also seven fabulous creatures who, according to other Babylonian traditions, brought learning and the arts of civilization to Sumer, and served as counselors to the antediluvian kings.

In the biblical version of antediluvian traditions, we hear of no kings, and of only one city, named for the son of its builder Enoch, Irad, reminiscent of the first Sumerian city Eridu.^d And the biblical version turns both lists of antediluvians— the “Cainite” line of Genesis 4 as well as the “Sethite” line of Genesis 5—into genealogies. But the similarities in the names of both lines, the presence of culture-heroes in one of them, and of the flood-hero, together with legendary life-spans, in the other, all conspire to show the biblical record here ultimately indebted to the Sumerian. The Bible differs, however, in deriving all mankind from a common ancestor.¹³

Turning to the Flood itself, we have already met its royal Sumerian protagonist, Shuruppak, in connection with the wisdom literature. But we meet him again, this time as Ziusudra, king of the city Shuruppak, in the context of a story of the Flood known from a single fragmentary text which, in spite of its gaps, suffices to indicate that, via various Akkadian versions, it inspired the biblical tale of Noah.

In the Sumerian tradition, kingship came down from heaven a second time after the Flood and was domiciled in successive cities beginning with Kish and Uruk, the latter familiar to us as Erech in Genesis 10. Uruk was governed by a succession of rulers who became the protagonists of Sumerian epic—though we cannot claim “epic” as a separate genre in Sumerian. Instead we have a group of poems that end in a formula of praise (the so-called doxology) in honor of these semi-legendary, semi-divine rulers of Uruk. The tales of their conflicts with Kish and with distant Aratta became the stuff of a heroic age celebrated in the royal courts of later Sumerian dynasties. The most popular of these tales, notably those about Gilgamesh, were translated or adapted into Akkadian and in this form passed from the Mesopotamian scribal schools to those of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine; a fragment of a 035cuneiform tablet (dating from about 1400 B.C.) with an extract from the Akkadian Gilgamesh was excavated at Megiddo, near Haifa in modern Israel. Thus it is not wholly unexpected to find individual lines, usually proverbial sayings, from these epics quoted, in entirely different contexts, in the Bible. For example, Ecclesiastes 4:12 contains the aphorism, “A three-fold cord is not readily broken,” to illustrate the point that two are better than one, and three better than two. This saying has been traced to the Akkadian line in the fifth tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic referring to a three-ply cord;¹⁴ its ultimate source is Sumerian, however: “The three-ply rope will not (easily) be cut.’¹⁵

Beyond these isolated echoes, however, Sumerian epic as a genre found little place in the Bible: unlike the antediluvian Sumerian kings, the later Sumerian hero-kings could not be construed as ancestral to mankind as a whole, let alone to Israel. Nor could the Sumerian hymns in honor of living kings, the so-called royal hymns, provide much that would be useful to the Israelite psalmist. The Sumerian royal hymns, a large and characteristic genre or group of genres in Sumerian, were intimately tied to the notion of divine kingship—a concept that, though not at home in Mesopotamia in the sense or to the extent familiar from Egypt, was the prevalent ideology of its “classical” period. In Israel, even the notion of an earthly kingship was considered a late aberration, a denial of the theocratic ideal in imitation of the surrounding world—and a divine kingship was totally unacceptable. On the contrary, it was rather God who was acclaimed and glorified in royal terms. Nevertheless, a parallel of sorts to the royal hymns in honor of the Sumerian kings may be seen in those psalms in the Hebrew Psalter that celebrate God’s accession to kingship (or: his kingship)—most particularly Psalms 93, 97 and 99, which begin, “The lord has become [NJV: is] king.” Such psalms typically employ the imagery of kingship and its regalia. In lines such as “Your throne stands firm from of old” (Psalm 93:2) or “righteousness and justice are the base of His throne” (Psalm 97:2), we may hear echoes of such standard sentiments as “He [the divine Enlil] has made the foundation of my throne firm for me,” which comes from the coronation-hymn of king Ur-Nammu of Ur.¹⁶

Having thus arrived at the biblical Book of Psalms, it may be well to recall that, in addition to the psalms or, literally, hymns for which it is named (Hebrew t^ehilliµm), this book consists mostly of prayers (Hebrew t^efilloµt; cf. especially Psalm 72:19). Some are prayers of the individual and others collective or congregational prayers sometimes referred to as laments. Both genres have their counterparts in Sumerian poetry. In Sumerian the individual prayer can be traced to the form of a letter deposited at the feet of the divine statue and employed as a medium for 036communication with the deity. This same form of communication with the deity was also resorted to by the king. For example, a king of Larsa in the 19th century B.C. prayed to the healing goddess for relief from illness; another of his prayers was addressed to the sun-god as patron of justice. The latter prayer survived in bilingual form for more than a millennium. It is therefore not beyond the realm of possibility that an echo of this genre is found in the Bible, in the prayer that Hezekiah, king of Judah, wrote in connection with his recovery from an illness. The Hebrew term used for this prayer is michtaµv (Isaiah 38:9), which in later Hebrew means “letter.” (In English translations, michtaµv is variously translated as “writing” or “poem”; the New Jerusalem Bible translated it “canticle” and by footnote offers the alternative, “letter.”) Perhaps Hezekiah was writing a letter to God in the tradition of the old Sumerian letter-prayer. Another possible analogue to such letter-prayers may be the psalms identified in their superscript as a michtaµm (Psalms 16 and 56–60), a term not usually translated because its meaning is so obscure.¹⁷

Finally, one may cite as a royal contribution to Sumerian literature the oldest collections of casuistic law, that is, laws formulated in conditional sentences (if X, then Y). These collections are attributed respectively to the kings Ur-Nammu of Ur (or his son Shulgi) and Lipit- Ishtar of Isin. In the Bible, casuistic legislation, most notably the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 21–24, is attributed to God. Nevertheless, the individual clauses in the Bible are thoroughly reminiscent of the Sumerian formulations in a number of cases. For example, in the Sumerian laws, we read: “If a man proceeded by force, and deflowered the virgin slave-woman of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver.” In the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 22:15–16), where a free woman not a slave-girl is at issue, the same subject is handled in this way: “If a man seduces a virgin for whom the bride price has not been paid, and lies with her, he must make her his wife by payment of a bride price. If her father refuses to give her to him, he must still weigh out silver in proportion to the bride price for virgins.”¹⁸

So much for royal literature. Space does not permit a complete survey of the genres devoted more particularly to the Sumerian gods. Some of them are, in any case, so, peculiar to the spirit of Mesopotamian theology that it would be fruitless to look for them in the literature of Israel. Take, for example, one of the oldest of Sumerian genres, that of incantations. Incantations are designed to ward off the evils predicted by divination. Both divination and incantation depend on a prescientific world view according to which the future can be predicted and to some extent controlled by appeal to the gods. The Israelite view was diametrically opposed. As Martin Buber has observed, “the task of the genuine [Hebrew] prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision.”¹⁹ In the words of Balaam, the Mesopotamian seer (Numbers 23:23): “Lo, there is no augury in Jacob, no divining in Israel: Jacob is told at once, yea Israel, what God has wrought [NJV: planned].” So in this respect Sumerian literature and Hebrew literature diverge quite sharply.

But in other areas of belief the two cultures more nearly converged. The notion that each people or nation had its own deity, for example, was widely shared, and so was the logical consequence drawn from this premise—namely, that the triumph of a nation reflected glory on its patron-deity. In Israel’s case, the escape from the Egyptians at the Reed Sea,^e and the drowning of Pharaoh’s chariotry, was regarded not only as a miraculous deliverance by divine intervention, but as the theological basis for the exaltation of Israel’s God to parity and even to supremacy among all the gods. Israel proclaimed God as its king, a relationship that was sealed by the subsequent covenant at Sinai. As Moses’ sister Miriam sang at the Sea: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider He has hurled into the sea.” Moses expanded on this theme: “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods [NJV: celestials]? None [NJV: who] is like You, majestic in holiness,” concluding: “the Lord will reign for ever and ever!” (Exodus 15). If its historicity is accepted, this triumph may be dated to the 13th century B.C. But a millennium earlier, a similar divine exaltation was already celebrated in song by the very first Sumerian author whom we can identify by name—the princess Enheduanna. It is interesting that this, the earliest author in history of whom we have any direct knowledge, is a woman. The princess Enheduanna wrote to celebrate the military triumphs of her father Sargon, reinterpreting them in cosmic theological terms as the exaltation of the goddess Inanna.²⁰

If national triumphs redounded to the glory of the national deity, national disasters must lead to 037his abasement. This further logical consequence of the original premise was to some extent circumvented in Mesopotamian theology by reinterpreting national disaster as a sign of the prior abandonment of the nation (or the city) by its patron-deity. This point was made more graphic when the cult-statue of the deity was led into captivity. In Israel, where all sculptured representations of the deity were theoretically forbidden, God was reinterpreted as holding universal sway and therefore able to order the destruction even of His own people by foreign nations as a means of chastisement for their collective guilt. But in both cultures the experience of disaster led to somewhat comparable responses in literary terms: the genre of lamentations.

Each in its own way, the lamentations over the destruction of Sumerian cities (and particularly their temples) on the one hand, and the biblical book of Lamentations (on the destruction of 038Jerusalem and the Solomonic temple) on the other, move us to this day by the immediacy of the grief they so tellingly describe.²¹

The last example we shall look at is erotic poetry. Most Sumerian erotic poetry celebrates the sacred marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi. Dumuzi has survived in the Bible as Tammuz. In Ezekiel 8:14, the prophet speaks of the women “bewailing Tammuz [literally: the Tammuz].”

But most of the Sumerian erotic poetry is happy and celebratory. Compare these two descriptions of a woman as a garden; the first comes from a Sumerian composition, the other from the Song of Songs.

“My mother is rain from heaven, water for the finest seed,

A harvest of plenty …,

A garden of delight, full of joy,

A watered pine, adorned with pine cones,

A spring flower, a first fruit,

An irrigation ditch carrying luxuriant waters to garden plots,

A sweet date from Dilmun, a date chosen from the best.”²²

“A garden locked is my sister [NJV: my own], my bride,

A fountain locked, a sealed-up spring.

Your limbs are an orchard of pomegranates and

of all luscious fruits, of henna and of nard—

Nard and saffron, fragrant reed and cinnamon,

With all aromatic woods, myrrh and aloes—

All the choice perfumes.

The spring in my garden is a well of fresh water,

A rill of Lebanon.”

Songs of Songs 4:12–15

Can we generalize? How did Sumerian literature influence biblical literature? Was it directly, or via Akkadian intermediaries, or are the similarities coincidental? If they are not coincidental how or when or where did the knowledge of Sumerian literary precedents reach the biblical authors?

The parallels I have drawn may in many cases owe more to a common Ancient Near Eastern heritage—shared by Israel—than to any direct dependence of one body of literature on the other.

What can be said at this stage of our knowledge is that this common heritage included not only particular turns of speech, themes, and diverse literary devices, but also whole genres. The evolution of these genres can be traced over millennia, and their spread can be followed across the map of the biblical world. Sometimes, as in the case of casuistic law, the biblical authors adopted these genres with little change; at other times, as in the case of individual prayer and congregational laments, they adapted them to Israelite needs; occasionally, as with divination and incantation, they rejected them altogether in favor of new genres of their own devising (in this case, prophecy). But whether by comparison or by contrast, the rediscovery of Sumerian literature permits a profounder appreciation of the common, as well as of the distinctive, achievements of biblical literature.²³

028 The world’s oldest literature—poetry as well as prose—belongs to the Sumerians, that fascinating, enigmatic people who settled over 5,000 years ago on the shores of the Persian Gulf1 and in the lower (southern) part of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in present-day Iraq. There the Sumerians founded the world’s oldest civilization. They invented, for the first time, a means of communicating language in a preserved, instead of transitory, form—in writing. The writing system they invented is called cuneiform, a wedge-shaped script formed by pressing a stylus into clay tablets that were then baked in […]