The Bible of Clay Read Online Free

attempt at a joke. Clara realized that things were going from bad to worse, but she was determined to push on, no matter how strongly she felt the audience's intense irritation— even though the surface of her skin seemed to burn.
    "More than half a century ago, during an archaeological mission near Haran, my grandfather Alfred Tannenberg found a well-shaft lined with pieces of broken tablets. As you all know, certain artifacts— like writing tablets—were often reused to provide structural material for buildings. Even today we find tablets that farmers and shepherds used to build their houses.
    "Most of the tablets that lined this well-shaft were covered in cuneiform text detailing the surface area of fields and the volume of grain from the last harvest. There were hundreds of them. But upon farther inspection, two of the tablets seemed not to belong. Judging by the lettering, the incisions in the clay itself, it was clear that one scribe had not entirely mastered his stylus."
    Clara's voice became tinged with emotion. She was about to reveal her life's mission, the dream that had led her to archaeology, which she cherished more than anything in the world, including Ahmed.
    "For more than sixty years," she went on, "my grandfather has kept those two tablets on which someone, no doubt an apprentice scribe, wrote that a relative of his by blood—a man named Abraham—was going to reveal the creation of our world by an omniscient and omnipotent God, who at one point, angry with men, flooded the earth. You must see what this means. . . .
    "We all know what importance the discovery of the Akkadian creation poems, the Enuma Elish, the story of Enki and Ninhursag, and the story of the deluge in Gilgamesh held for archaeology and history, and also of course for religion. Well, according to these tablets, the patriarch Abraham added his own vision of the creation of the world, influenced no doubt by the Babylonian and Akkadian poems on paradise and the creation.
    "Archaeology has also proven that the incarnation of early books of the Bible we've come to know were written in the seventh century before Christ, at a time in which the Israelite rulers and priests needed to unite the people of Israel, and for that they needed a common history, a national epic, a 'document' that would serve their political and religious purposes.
    "Though sometimes it is hard to separate legend from history because they are so intermingled, it seems clear that the stories represent traditions handed down from generation to generation, tales of the past, ancient stories that those shepherds who emigrated from Ur to Haran carried still later to Canaan. ..."
    Clara paused, waiting for some reaction. Her audience had been listening to her in silence, some people doubtfully, others with some interest.
    "... Haran . . . Abram ... In the Bible we find a detailed genealogy of the 'first men,' beginning with Adam. That list takes us down to the postdiluvian patriarchs, the sons of Shem, one of whose descendants, Terah, begat Nahor, Haran, and Abram, whose name was later transformed into Abraham, father of nations.
    "Despite the detailed story in the Bible in which God orders Abram to leave his house and his lands and go into the land of Canaan, no one has been able to show that there actually was a first migration of Semites from Ur to Haran before they arrived at their destination in Canaan. And the encounter between God and Abraham had to have occurred in Haran, where some biblical scholars maintain that the first patriarch must have lived until his father, Terah, died.
    "The Bible tells us that when Terah moved to Haran—and I am now going to quote from Genesis 11 — Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. We know that at that time families were much like small