The Babel und Bibel controversy

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At first, Assyriological discoveries seemed to root the Bible firmly in history: cities such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Ur had indeed existed, and their excavation yielded important textual information. The existence of ziggurats gave us a better understanding of the history of the Tower of Babel. Kings mentioned in the Bible, such as Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar, could be known from their own inscriptions; conversely, the writings of Assyrian kings mentioned kings known from the Bible. But the situation soon changed.

On December 3, 1872, before the Society for Biblical Archaeology in London, a thirty-two-year-old British Museum assistant named George Smith reported the discovery, among the tablets of the library of Assurbanipal in Nineveh, of a "Chaldean" (today we would say Babylonian) version of the biblical story of the flood. It's hard to imagine today just how much of a sensation this announcement caused, far beyond England. Controversy over the status of the Bible, and the Pentateuch in particular, developed. The positions of biblical scholars ranged from "liberals", who admired the Bible's dependence on Mesopotamian texts while emphasizing the uniqueness and originality of its message, to "conservatives", who would have none of it.

The controversy reached its climax with Friedrich Delitzsch: between January 1902 and October 1904, this Assyriologist from Berlin gave a series of lectures entitled " Babel und Bibel ", "Babylon and the Bible". Coming to the defense of the ancient Babylonians against Bible scholars who were unwilling to consider the Bible's roots in the Near Eastern culture of his time, Delitzsch presented the religion of Israel as having its origins in Babylonian culture, certain passages of the Old Testament being for him mere adaptations of Babylonian myths. The impact of these lectures, thirty years after George Smith's discovery, was considerable.

Delitzsch's lectures were not translated into French, but this didn't prevent lively debate on the relationship between the Bible and the Mesopotamian world in France, well before 1902. The situation there was very different from that in Germany and Anglo-Saxon countries in general, for two reasons. Firstly, the academic world there was not organized in thesame way: there were no Orientalist departments in the universities. Secondly, the context of the French debates was different: it was the so-called crisis of modernism that shook the CatholicChurchat the beginning of the twentieth^century. The crux of the debate was whether texts from the Bible - and in our case, the Old Testament - could be subjected to literary or historical criticism. Gradually, textual criticism showed that the text of the Bible had a long history, but this approach clashed with tradition, which saw the Pentateuch as the work of Moses. Even within the Catholic Church, currents of thought emerged: the most progressive were sometimes accused by traditionalists of aligning themselves with Protestants, who were soon at the forefront of critical reading of the Bible. Fr. Lagrange, founder of the École Biblique de Jérusalem in 1890, was brought to heel. The breaking point was reached in 1907 with the encyclical Pascendi, followed by the excommunication of Abbé Loisy. The many priests who had specialized in Assyriology usually confined themselves to purely philological work, to avoid having to engage in risky theological debates.