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.
