After The Flood - 4 - The plain of Shinar

Those first two centuries or so after the flood were stressful times for the little family. The wide plain of Iraq, later to be called the Plain of Shinar, was at that time occupied in part by the northern extension of the sea and for the rest by salt-laden mud and marshland. From their position on the mountain terraces, a thousand feet above the plain, they could see that for many years they must remain in the mountains. They must build their dwellings of forest timber and subsist on such wild berries, fruits and the flesh of small wild animals as the mountains would provide. Later as their children were born and their numbers increased, they would need to find land suitable for growing crops and keeping flocks and herds, to feed the increasing number of mouths. To the south of them the mountains closed in, dark and forbidding. To the north-west they opened out into wide terraces. These offered a mixture of grassland and forest, well watered by copious streams rushing down to the marshy plain below, as they still do today although that plain is now well drained and fertile. Here was the logical place for them to go and it may well be, the recently discovered remains of prehistoric settlements are the remaining evidences of their sojourn for some two centuries before they could,.."journey from the east, and find a plain in the land of Shinar, and dwell there" (Gen. 11.2). Braidwood and Howe, in 1948/51, made some discoveries at Qalal Jarmo and Karim Shahir about eighty miles distant from the settlements mentioned above, in the headwaters of the Diyala river system. This must have been the type of life of the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of Noah to perhaps the fourth generation. The lowest levels show evidence that the villagers lived on wild wheat and barley, berries and fruits and the flesh of wild sheep, goats, and pigs. Then come the indications of agriculture and stock-breeding. Braidwood records ('Prehistoric investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan', 1966) "The Kurdistan foothills are the original source of the earliest village farming in the world.... This is a major landmark in human history….Nowhere else in the world were the wild wheat and barley, the wild sheep, goats, pigs, cattle and horses to be found together in a natural environment. This meant an entirely new way of life for all mankind". This was said, of course, upon the popular assumption that mankind evolved from a long continued state of primitive savagery to the point where they began to cultivate plants and breed animals for themselves. The Genesis story contradicts this; the eight who survived the Flood were already civilised and knowledgeable and all the evidence is that they were brought out of the Ark and into the new earth by the providence of God in a locality where they could readily commence to apply the skills they already possessed, and after perhaps a relatively limited number of years begin to reap their own harvests and make use of their own flocks and herds. Pottery at first was unknown; domestic vessels were made of wood but even the earliest ones were perfectly round as if turned on a lathe. The finest specimen of a wooden egg cup ever known comes from a house which must date to the time of Noah's grandsons. Stone was worked to produce bowls and tools.

No village has been found to exceed twenty to twenty-five houses, but there are always six or seven rooms which would seem to indicate large families; this would be essential to the rapid increase of the race from three principal forebears. This brings to the forefront a factor that has no parallel in subsequent times. Although children were born and grew to maturity and in their turn brought forth more children, there was no death! For some three centuries at least no one died! The ages of the patriarchs recorded in Genesis show that the normal span of life for those born after the Flood was at the first some five hundred years, lessening then in steps to about two centuries a thousand years later. If this unusual length of life betokened a corresponding increase of the childbearing period there would logically be a considerably accelerated growth in population. Even so, it must have been a comparatively long time before the community springing from three brothers and their wives attained any appreciable number. If the span of life of those three and their wives was, as Genesis indicates, between five and six hundred years, the childbearing period would be as much as two centuries. If the children born reached marriageable maturity in something over fifty years of age, it would follow that at the end of two centuries there could be a population of some ten thousand or more living and no sign yet of any one dying. By this time men would have long since settled into a regime of agriculture and stock-raising and in consequence become organised into separate village communities, each at the centre of an area of farmland which sufficed for their needs.

With the third century after the Flood, there came a change. The population increase would be accelerating; there was still no death and the very genial climatic conditions would be conducive to a high birth rate. At least a quarter million could be expected by the end of the third century. The mountain slopes were proving inadequate. The many sites of prehistoric settlements in this area which have been discovered give testimony to the density of population which must have existed in those early times. It was time to find more living space. Small detachments probably made their way up the river valleys leading into the Iranian Mountains, finding isolated spots where they could settle. This might well have been the time that some of the known mountain sites such as Qalal Jarmo and the half-dozen villages surrounding it, were established. Many of these show the primitive state of life that would be expected of the time concerned. Later on their descendants began to mine copper, gold and precious stones that exist in the mountains, and so became artisans and traders. But that lay several more centuries in the future. By far the greater proportion of the fast-growing community would look longingly at the spacious plain that lay to the west of their mountain home where once the waters of the Flood had extended but which now was in process of becoming fit for human habitation. As they gazed across that plain from the mountains, a little above the latitude of the modern city of Baghdad, they would have seen, in the foreground, a wide stretch of water and salt marshland some forty miles wide. It was an apparently unassailable barrier, a remnant of the waters of the Flood three centuries earlier. Their scouts would have been out, and they would have reported that on the other side of that sheet of water the land had dried, the salt marshes had leached out into fertile ground and there the grass and wild grain was growing and the countryside was fit for habitation. They had but to trek around the northern end of the water and they could reach a plain that stretched for scores of miles to north and south and there they could find room for their villages and farms for generations to come. So the great migration began. It was not likely to have been a mass journey similar to the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt. Many of the older folk probably stayed where they were, preferring to keep to the mountain life to which they had been born and in which they had been brought up. The settlements that have been excavated in the Diyala river area bear witness to that; some of them were inhabited for many centuries. Bands of pioneers would strike out, each finding a suitable place in which to settle, spreading ever farther outwards, and onwards, so that as generation succeeded generation the plain became increasingly populated. This is the event that is described in such brief and concise terms in Gen.11.2. "As they journeyed from the east, they found a place in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there". They came from the east, and they spread over a fertile country some seventy miles wide by two hundred long, traversed through its middle by the famous river Euphrates. Their children went out from there, to people every region of the earth. It has long been held by archeo1ogists and anthropologists that the first inhabitants in the Iraq plains came from the east, from somewhere in the Iranian mountains. The story of the Flood and Gen. 11.2 confirm their findings.

Of course it was not called Shinar at the time. The need for place names hardly existed. The word is the Sumerian term for the combined lands of Sumer and Akkad, the land of the Hamites and Semites, and did not come into use until the sons of Shem and sons of Ham had evolved into distinct nations many centuries later. A much later scribe, either author or copyist of Gen. 11, inserted the word to explain to his own generation ‑ and to us ‑ just where the plain was situated on which the people settled. Thanks to him, we now know that they had come into the country, the capital and most famous city which was to figure repeatedly in the Bible ‑ Babylon.

About this time the old patriarch Noah breathed his last. He had survived the Flood by three hundred and fifty years, living long enough to see his three sons grow into a company of a quarter million people. The impression given in Gen.11 is that the community was living in a state of peace and harmony and one might be justified in thinking that he died happy in the thought that the world was being re-peopled by men and women who had regard for God and righteousness. He could have had no conception of the miseries that sin was to inflict upon the world in later days. Tradition says that he was buried on the mountain on which the Ark had landed but there is not likely to be much truth in that. The more significant thing is that in all probability his was the first death to occur in this new post-Flood period.

For more than three hundred years there had been no deaths; now it was to begin to intrude its power upon mankind again. In another hundred and fifty years his eldest son Shem was to follow him to the grave.

Just how literate were these people back there three thousand years before Christ? No specimens of their writing, if they knew of writing, have survived. The earliest so far discovered dates from about four centuries later, when the cities began to be built and industry and trade began to flourish. But there must have been writing long before. E.J.Geib in "A study of writing" (1965) says that the structure of the Sumerian cuneiform writing (on clay tablets) indicates a long period, perhaps five centuries, of development. The earliest script which is known, earlier than cuneiform, is called 'pictographic', because the signs are obviously derived from pictures of objects, but no examples of the original picture-writing have ever been found. It is clear that other writing mediums were known before the use of clay tablets because the Sumerian word for tablets has a prefix indicating wood or vegetable substance. There were ‑ and still are ‑ no trees on the Euphrates plain and clay made into tablets and baked was the only possible writing material. The survival of words like Gis-sar, "to write", and "Gis-gar", a building plan, ('gis' being the prefix for wood or trees) indicates that before the people came down into the plain there was such a thing as writing on wood. Mallowan in 1953, excavating on the site of ancient Nineveh, found wax-covered wood panels, bound with gold hinges in the form of a book, bearing traces of cuneiform texts. It has often been remarked that the story of the Flood as narrated in Genesis bears all the hall-marks of being written by an eye-witness. It is most unlikely that the antediluvian world should have endured more than two thousand years without men having invented writing. The persistent Jewish tradition is that Enoch was the man who did so. There is every likelihood that these pioneers who came into the plain of Shinar carried with them, written in the picture-writing script which no modern man has ever seen, the stories of their ancestors which we now have as the first nine chapters of Genesis.

The plain was fertile and well watered, more so than the mountain regions from which they had come, but it lacked a good many of the things incidental to daily life to which they had become accustomed in the mountains. Up there they could quarry stone - granite, sandstone, limestone, sometimes even marble - and they had learned to make stone bowls and vessels and door-sockets of fine quality. Some of these have been found where they were thrown away and buried, five thousand years ago. Down here in the plain there was none of that, only clay, and so they learned to make their utensils and ornaments of clay baked into pottery, tablets for writing, and bricks for building. That is why the narrative of the building of the great Tower in Gen. 11 says "bricks had they for stone, and bitumen for mortar". They were compelled to learn new building and new writing techniques.

Neither had they any metal. It was only after the dispersion, when the peoples began to separate, that the mineral wealth of the mountains was discovered and men began to fabricate those works of art which, brought to light in this modern age, have excited the wonder and envy of the present-day world. Nothing like them has been made since. The skill of the ancient Sumerians has never been surpassed. The finest works of art in gold, silver and copper which have ever been known were produced by craftsmen only seven generations removed from Noah and a couple of centuries after the dispersion from Babel. That scattering of the nations described in Gen. 11 was a blessing in disguise for the developing human race;. It sent them into widely separated regions, in which they discovered all kinds of natural products which were going to prove necessary for the well-being of mankind as the human race increased. Without that dispersion they would have remained in the Stone Age much longer than they did. These sons and daughters of Shem, Ham and Japheth to the fifth and sixth generations occupied the length and breadth of the Plain of Shinar. They all were there; none had yet died, and the three old patriarchs, nowhere yet near the end of their days, must have looked with pride, and thankfulness to God, upon the thousands of great-great-great-great grandsons and daughters to whom they had given the spark of life. It is difficult to visualise the nature of society at that time. Three men, survivors with their father of the great Flood which had ended the lives of all others, could look upon a quarter of a million people and reflect that by the providence of God they had given life to all these. They must have remembered the admonition given them by the Lord when they came out of the Ark into this cleansed new world, "be ye fruitful, and multiply. Bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein" (Gen. 9.7). They looked now upon these teeming multitudes and they also looked out across the smiling cornfields and the luxuriant groves of date-palms. They remembered the harder times spent in the mountains where they brought up their first children in an environment hardly yet ready to provide them with the food they needed, and they must have bent their heads and given thanks to God.

There is an old Sumerian story, of which the earliest copies now in existence were written about eighteen hundred years before Christ. It may reflect this change in the fortunes of the human community when they came into the Plain of Shinar, and, too, the beginning of the rivalry between the sons of Shem and the sons of Ham which probably lies behind the Tower of Babel story. The "Epic of Emesh and Enten" tells of the enmity of two brothers and its consequences, for which reason it is sometimes claimed by adherents of the "mythical" school that it was the original from which the Genesis account of Cain and Abel was derived. In fact this cannot be, for every element in the legend is as unlike the story of Cain and Abel as could be. It tells of a time when Enlil, the god of earth and heaven, found it necessary to produce fruit trees and grain to establish abundance in the land to meet the needs of his human creatures.

This at once looks like the time at present being considered, when the rapidly increasing human race moved into the Plain of Shinar to find living space and food. To this end Enlil appointed two men, Emesh and Enten, and assigned to them their duties. Emesh was to set up farmsteads, stables and sheepfolds, multiply the produce of the farms, cover the earth with cornfields and orchards and bring the harvests into the granaries and storehouses. Enten was to go out into the plain and gather in the wild goats, sheep, asses and so on. He was to make use of their fat and milk and their young as they were born, collect the fruit from the wild date-palms and vines and wild grain, and generally "live off the land". In all of this it is not difficult to see the distinction between the settled farming and industrial way of life which was characteristic of the descendants of Ham, the Sumerians, and the nomadic, wandering from place to place; a way of life that was the hallmark of the sons of Shem, the Semites. In the story the two brothers quarrelled and brought their pleas to Enlil in his holy city of Nippur. Enlil pronounced in favour of Enten and commanded that his decree be observed. Emesh accepted the verdict, was reconciled to his brother and thereafter they lived and worked happily together.

Emesh may have been a dimly remembered recollection of Ham and his descendants, who colonised the plain and remained there. Similarly Enten of Shem, who according to history very largely left the plain and migrated to the north, and after the lapse of centuries returned in force to mingle with the native Hamites and form one nation. If this is so we have here what might well be a dim recollection of the separation which occurred at Babel. Centuries later many of the Semites came back and fused with the Hamites who were still there, so that there were two peoples living side by side. In later times the Semites were known as the Akkadians and the joint country as the land of Sumer and Akkad. The Semitic element was the most spiritually minded and had the higher conception of God. In the story Enlil favoured Enten, the nomad. In the Bible (Gen.9) God pronounced His blessing upon Shem, the nomad. And that is how it came about that, a thousand years after Babel, Abraham the Semite and his forebears were found living in the Sumerian city of Ur of the Chaldees.

Before this and perhaps three centuries after the Flood and three thousand years before Christ, there had occurred the first great crisis in the affairs of the new world. This was the separation that sent the sons of men wandering in all directions to re-people the earth, the crisis that is recorded in Gen. 11 as the building of the Tower of Babel.