THE STORY OF EDEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 307, 28 December 1922, Page 5

THE STORY OF EDEN.

A BABYLOXIAX TABLET. Br. Edward Chiera, Assistant Professor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, has deciphered a Babylonian clay tablet of about 2100 8.C., containing an account of the fall of man similar to the account in the Book of Genesis in many particulars. The account is in the form of a dialogue • between man and God, and seems to make Adam the victim of jealous deities and the expulsion from Eden due to fear of his rivalling them in wisdom. There is no allusion to the serpent or Eve, and Dr. Chiera explains that the serpent, from the Babylonian standpoint, was the honest friend and counsellor of man. According to the best authorities, the Hebrew account of the Garden of Eden was written at some later date than 1000 B.C. The tablet deciphered is in the Sumerian language, and formerly belonged to the library of Nippur, from which excavations for the University of Pennsylvania Museum recovered several thousand tablets. Other fragments apparently belonging to the same legend or cycle legend which are now occupying the attention of Dr. Chiera referred to the invention of writing and the beginning of civilisation. According to Philadelphia's Assyriologist, the ancient Babylonian story was apparently overtaken by the Hebrews and adjusted to fit their monotheistic system.- He puts forward a long series of arguments to prove that the original of the account in Genesis was Babylonian, and that, while the Hebrews modified it, they retained many features in the Bible story which are inconsistent "with Hebrew theology. Patches of the surface are missing from the tablet from which the translation was made, so that words, and even sentences, are misging. Further than that, the Sumerian language is not perfectly translatable, because one Sumerian word often .stands for many different things. Literally translated, under these difficulties, the dialogue seems to be interesting but a trifle incoherent, and provides a basis for considerable controversy between orthqdox Christians and the exponents of Babylonian culture. '