The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News May 12, 2006

Haskell Series Explores the Historical and the Religious
 
Religious Perspective: Feminist professor Tikva Frymer-Kensky of the University of Chicago visits Oberlin.
 

After a near cancellation, this year’s 99th annual Haskell Lecture series opened to a large crowd this past Wednesday.

Speaker Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a distinguished feminist professor of the Bible and the ancient Near East at the University of Chicago, had a prolonged illness and so the series was first delayed and then cut from the usual three lectures to two.

The Haskell Lectures were endowed in 1899 by a bequest from the will of Mrs. Caroline E. Haskell to examine Middle Eastern literature in its relation to the Bible. The series began in 1908 and has run continuously ever since, featuring a prestigious line of Biblical scholars.

Last Wednesday’s lecture, titled “From Sumer to Sumer: The Early Adventures of Biblical Humanity,” was the first in this year’s series. It addressed a wide variety of popularly misread or overlooked themes in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Frymer-Kensky, a four-time visitor to Oberlin, employed a unique combination of social historical criticism combined with feminist hermeneutics to dig deep into the cultural meanings behind the Biblical story.

At the center of her argument was the 1576 BCE story known to most as “Atrahasis.” This ancient Near Eastern text was discovered in 1965 at the beginning of Frymer-Kensky’s career.

“Atrahasis” tells the story of creation and a great flood from the perspective of a Near Eastern culture— one contemporary with that of the ancient Israelites. It is now commonly believed to be a story upon which the first 11 chapters of Genesis are based. This text predates another ancient Mesopotamian flood story, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” which is also thought by many to have influenced the Noah narrative. Frymer-Kensky said that “Atrahasis” joins “Gilgamesh” and the story of “Enuma Elish” as the three most important known texts for understanding Genesis.

In order to better understand the Bible, Frymer-Kensky compared the story of “Atrahasis” with its Mesopotamian context to Genesis and its Israelite context. In doing so, she defined important cultural and geographical differences between the two cultures.

In the Mesopotamian culture in the Fertile Crescent, limited resources necessitated a small population. In “Atrahasis,” the gods produced the flood in order to wipe out a large portion of the overcrowded population, both restoring the fertility of the earth and reducing the number of humans.

Ancient Israel, existing within the modern day area of Israel-Palestine, was a very different culture, Frymer-Kensky noted. In contrast to the populations in the Fertile Crescent, a large populace capable of doing work was necessary for survival in this rugged terrain.

“[I]f the problem is not overpopulation,” Frymer-Kensky asked, “then why did God have to bring a flood?” She said that the answer lies in what happened after the flood.

“What the ‘Atrahasis’ story taught us,” she explained, “was to focus on what God did immediately after the flood.”

In Genesis, as opposed to “Atrahasis,” God’s motivations seem primarily concerned with the quality rather than the quantity of human life.

“[God]’s got to wipe out all the pollution, purge the earth and start all over...so He brings a flood,” Frymer-Kensky explained.

Frymer-Kensky framed these narratives within the larger context of the advent of wide-spread farming: the Neolithic Revolution.

“[That revolution was] as major as the electronic revolution or the nuclear revolution,” she said. She explained that the development of farming presented new social conditions in which cultural mores changed. In Genesis, there is an emphasis on male-female relationships, while Mesopotamian texts of the same period emphasized same-sex relationships.

Frymer-Kensky’s lecture was followed by “Learning to be Human: Noah and the Tower of Babel” this past Wednesday. The annual Haskell Lecture faculty banquet at the Oberlin Inn will conclude the series.
 
 

   

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