Moses, Sargon, and the Context of the Bible
This post was previously published on May 9, 2017, on a different platform. I was preaching through Exodus at the time. Here’s a link to the sermon where I didn’t talk about any of the stuff below.
Last week was one of those sermons where a lot of important (and much to my chagrin, some highly nerdy) stuff hit the cutting room floor. If you’re thinking, “Well good grief, man, you still talked about Moses for about 40 minutes, and I, for one, thought it was alreadypretty nerdy.” Then maybe you should just keep your crazy and hurtful thoughts to yourself! I’m a person with feelings.
Ok? Ok.
For many of us, the story of the birth of Moses (Exod 2:1-10) is familiar enough. At the end of Exodus 1, Pharaoh is frustrated by the increased population of the Hebrews, so he issues an edict that his people kill all their baby boys by drowning them in the Nile. In response, Moses’ mom plans to float her sweet little, 3 month old, baby boy down the river (seemingly) in hopes that he would be rescued by Pharaoh’s own daughter. It’s a gutsy move, to say the least, but because she could no longer hide her “fine child,” she had to do something to save him. And it worked.
As I have tried to emphasize over the last two weeks, we should note that the retelling of this story is dominated by bold, purposeful women. Moses’ dad doesn’t do much in the story other than marry a Levite woman and impregnate her. Then he disappears. It’s Moses’ mom, his sister, and Pharaoh’s daughter who do all of the “empire defying” in this passage.
That much is pretty straightforward.
But here’s something that is less well-known.
The story of Moses’ birth utilizes a common ancient Near Eastern literary motif known as the “exposed infant.” That’s scholar speak for “there are other (roughly contemporaneous) stories that look very similar to this one.” In fact, Donald Redford has identified more than 30 ancient Near Eastern stories that incorporate some variant of this motif.
Apparently, the “exposed infant” trope was a thing.
The most famous example is an Akkadian text (google it) that tells the story of a guy named, Sargon.
One of my former professors, Peter Enns, explains in his commentary on Exodus: “Sargon was a king of ancient Akkad (2300 BC) whose mother, as the story goes, put him at birth in a reed basket treated with bitumen and placed him on a river. He was found by a drawer of water, who raised him as his son. Sargon grew up to be a mighty king” (Enns, Exodus, 59).
Of course, there are some notable differences between Sargon and Moses—Moses wasn’t raised in obscurity, for example, and his mother was aiming to protect him rather than get rid of him—but there are also some undeniable similarities, like (oh I don’t know) the whole BABY FLOATING DOWN A RIVER IN A BASKET bit.
If this is your first exposure (pun) to Sargon’s story, I imagine you are beginning to ask some questions, which is totally normal.
When I first heard about Sargon, I was indignant … not so much because there was a figure like Moses who appeared in other pieces of ancient literature, but because no one ever told me about it. It was almost like my community was embarrassed by it, or worse, scared because of it, so it was kept under wraps.
Sargon isn’t the only example of similarities between our Bible and other cultural texts either.
You could say that this “sharing of ideas” actually happens a good bit in the Old Testament.
The creation narratives and the story of Noah and the Flood in the early chapters of Genesis serve as prime examples. They definitely seem to “breath the same air” (as Enns would say) as other extra-biblical stories, such as Enuma Elish (which is known as the Babylonian Genesis) or the Gilgamesh Epic and Atrahasis (both of which retell their own version of a flood narrative).
So what do we do with all of this?
Now, I might be the weird one here, but once I got over the initial shock of “why don’t we talk about this,” the process of reading and thinking about these stories has actually enhanced my view of the Bible. I will be the first to admit that the Legend of Sargon raises important questions about how we understand, in this case, Moses and his birth narrative and the ever present question of “what really happened,” but we can’t escape them, nor should we want to.
I hope this provides some perspective.
The Old Testament is a collection of ancient texts.
It includes different genres written by different authors at different times for different purposes.
And because it is a collection of stories and laws and prophecies and poetry written over a long period of time—it’s diverse.
As a result, it’s important to remember that each text should be read in its proper historical and literary context.
And the Old Testament’s context, regardless of what we are reading, is different than ours.
Take our example, Exodus.
Exodus is an important source for the history of ancient Israel. But it is not merely an objective historical record. That’s a very modern, Western expectation that we sometimes impose on our very ancient sacred text. Instead, it is better to see Israel’s history as a “shaped” history or a “theologically motivated” history because that’s how history was written back then. (As you read, please don’t diminish any of these terms—the shaping, the theology, OR the history. They are each extremely important in understanding what is going on in the Bible.) To add these descriptors certainly doesn’t indicate that these stories aren’t “historical.” But we shouldn’t expect it to look like history writing from our time—which I would also argue is not objective (but that’s beside the point).
All of this provides an important window into how God communicates to his people—he speaks in ways that they understand. Put another way, he uses the “parlance of their time,” even the common literary motifs of their day.
Rather than trying to explain away all of the exposed infant stories or the shared similarities between Moses and the non-biblical, Akkadian king, Sargon, it is probably more constructive to read Exodus in light of them. At the very least, Exodus 2 should be viewed as a “presentation of history that is firmly at home in the literary conventions of the ancient world” (Enns, Exodus, 60).
Again, this doesn’t mean that Moses is not a historical figure. It means that the story of his birth was told in a way that the audience would have understood. And, apparently, they understood “exposed infants.”
When you think about it, this makes total sense, and Jesus provides us with the keystone example.
When Jesus showed up, he was the exact representation of God in human flesh. He was God incarnate. (There’s a fancy term to impress your friends.) And as such, he was embedded within a specific historical context. He was a first-century Jew, who practiced first-century Jewish customs, knew first-century Jewish texts and traditions, and engaged with people in a first-century Jewish way … well … at least in terms of how he communicated with them. To be fair, Jesus was a bit of a wildcard theologically, but it wasn’t because he transcended his culture. It was because he was redefining the kingdom of God for his audience in a completely surprising way, which culminated with his death and resurrection. No one saw that coming.
Now if this is how God revealed himself climactically in and through his son, Jesus, why would we expect God’s previous revelation in the Old Testament to be any different. It, too, speaks in a way that God’s people would have understood. It uses the “common literary motifs” of their time. It is embedded in a specific culture with a message for a specific people living at a specific time.
When we read the Bible, we should, therefore, approach it in its proper context. We should value the weird stuff, like the “exposed infant” motif, because it helps us to read these stories effectively.
Further, we should not be afraid that God spoke in ways that the people of that time would have understood. In fact, we should be grateful, and we should expect him to do the same today.
So back to Moses. In this episode, the authors utilized a common literary motif to tell his story. And that makes sense, because “when God speaks to someone, he speaks their language” (Enns, Exodus, 60).
