Sargon of Akkad and Moses

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Superman
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Sargon of Akkad and Moses

Post by Superman »

The story of Moses is probably a great example of how the ancient Hebrews seemed to plagiarize the story of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon was an Akkadian king who lived from about 2333 to 2279 BCE. He was well known as the conquerer of Sumeria and Mesopotamia, and presided over an empire that spanned from the Mediterranean to the far side of the Persian Gulf. Some historians believe that the Akkadian empire may have even extended as far as Asia Minor.

The Hebrews also inhabited Mespotamia during this time. Their civilization was a relatively puny one in comparison to the empires of Akkadia, Sumeria, Babylonians, etc. They were probably enslaved by the Akkadians for a time and adopted some of the Akkadian culture into their own.

This is Sargon's birth story, as reported from a Neo Assyrian text from the 7th century BCE.
Sargon, the great king of Akkad, am I. Of my father I know only his name.... Otherwise I know nothing of him. My father's brother lived in the mountains. My mother was a priestess whom no man should have known. She brought me into the world secretly.... She took a basket of reeds, placed me inside it, covered it with pitch and placed me in the River Euphrates. And the river, without which the land cannot live, carried me through part of my future kingdom. The river did not rise over me, but carried me high and bore me along to Akki who fetched water to irrigate the fields. Akki made a gardener of me. In the garden that I cultivated, Inanna (the great goddess) saw me. She took me to Kish to the court of King Urzabala. There I called myself Sargon, that is, the rightful king.
Here's Moses' birth story, as reported in Exodus 2. Keep in mind that Moses was a 13th century BCE Hebrew, and about a thousand years had passed since Sargon. At this time, Sargon was firmly entrenched into mythological history of the region.
Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews' children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
The story of an abandoned child who grows up to be a great leader isn't limited to Moses and Sargon by a long shot, but these two have some interesting similarities. Another good one is 'The Epic of Gilgamesh" and the story of Noah and the Ark.
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Post by Darth Wong »

Really, it's amazing how Christians try to convince themselves that the stories of the Bible are original. Ancient mythology is filled with stories of supernatural conception, abandoned babies, and hidden royalty.
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Post by TithonusSyndrome »

Darth Wong wrote:Really, it's amazing how Christians try to convince themselves that the stories of the Bible are original. Ancient mythology is filled with stories of supernatural conception, abandoned babies, and hidden royalty.
I don't find that half as annoying as the ones who make the token concession that the Bible is much more likely than not entirely fictional, but that the book's final bottom-line message is "love thy neighbor" because Jesus was quoted as having said that on one single occasion.
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Post by Superman »

Darth Wong wrote:Really, it's amazing how Christians try to convince themselves that the stories of the Bible are original. Ancient mythology is filled with stories of supernatural conception, abandoned babies, and hidden royalty.
I once showed these stories to a fundie I knew, and he explained to me that they were both probably true.

I sometimes wonder if these idiots suffer from a case of massive reality denial, or if there's a part of their brains that genuinely can't comprehend anything if it's not presented in a strict literal fashion.
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Post by Darth Servo »

Superman wrote:I sometimes wonder if these idiots suffer from a case of massive reality denial, or if there's a part of their brains that genuinely can't comprehend anything if it's not presented in a strict literal fashion.
A lot of them insist the Bible being alegory constitutes God lying and of course that possibility is immediately dismissed out of hand.
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Post by Darth Wong »

A lot of it is definitely reality denial. Anyone who's ever attended fundie church services know how exaggerated their faith play-acting is. Wild gesticulation and shrieking high volume are par for the course in those places. It's a very self-conscious form of worship, in which you want to make sure that everyone around you knows how strong your faith is.
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Post by Covenant »

In the thread about exodus I touched on the Sargon myth, as well as an Egyptian folktale about a guy who is forced to flee Egypt, goes off to the boonies, meets an important fellow, settles down and takes lands and herds from him to start a life, and so on. The guy was more of a badass warrior hero, and he's also a bit of King David, since it includes a remarkable account of a David and Goliath fight with an arrow to the neck instead of a stone to the noggin. I'd say that the story, as the Jews wrote it, was far better. We don't really know at which point they even became monotheistic though. They probably had a lot of time to write a really good story.
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Post by PainRack »

Darth Wong wrote:Really, it's amazing how Christians try to convince themselves that the stories of the Bible are original. Ancient mythology is filled with stories of supernatural conception, abandoned babies, and hidden royalty.
Don't you know that's due to them corrupting Christian Messages?!?!?!?!

The similarities are obviously due to them being culturally and geographically close to the Hebrew race, so, they didn't get too many mistakes! This as opposed to the Chinese where the Flood stories are totally different, yet retain 4 similar arches to the Global Flood of the Bible! :roll:

And of course, when you show them that the ACTUAL myths have no correlation to the Christian myths whatsoever, they insist that you're wrong. I won't be so pissed if it wasn't for the fact that some of these buggers are actually people who should know better. I don't understand how any chinese here can even remotely believe that chinese characters show the Global Flood myth, yet I seen a guy who quoted that .
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Post by Vicious »

PainRack wrote:This as opposed to the Chinese where the Flood stories are totally different, yet retain 4 similar arches to the Global Flood of the Bible! :roll:

And of course, when you show them that the ACTUAL myths have no correlation to the Christian myths whatsoever, they insist that you're wrong. I won't be so pissed if it wasn't for the fact that some of these buggers are actually people who should know better. I don't understand how any chinese here can even remotely believe that chinese characters show the Global Flood myth, yet I seen a guy who quoted that .


The whole "even [insert random distant culture] has a flood myth" fallacy pisses me off. Of course they have flood myths. Ancient civilizations were highly dependent on localized water sources, and were thus prone to flooding. Of course, fundies just say that that's because God caused the Flood, and go right on in their ignorance. :roll:
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Post by Ariphaos »

Darth Wong wrote:Really, it's amazing how Christians try to convince themselves that the stories of the Bible are original. Ancient mythology is filled with stories of supernatural conception, abandoned babies, and hidden royalty.
When I convinced them that they weren't original, they decreed that it was 'Satan preparing for the coming of Jesus'.

Or in this case, Moses.
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Post by PainRack »

Vicious wrote: The whole "even [insert random distant culture] has a flood myth" fallacy pisses me off. Of course they have flood myths. Ancient civilizations were highly dependent on localized water sources, and were thus prone to flooding. Of course, fundies just say that that's because God caused the Flood, and go right on in their ignorance. :roll:
It gets even more damn annoying when they claim the myths are similar... I'm still wondering how the Hindu myths of a universal flood(there are multiple actually, but the first was during the era of Creation), or the Chinese where a demigod/demon struck the pillar supporting heaven, causing a hole in the sky to open and the earth to crack are anything remotely similar.
Or how the Tower of Babel corresponds to Chinese mythology....... Amazing since the first myth of the Chinese people was how the 12 tribes UNITED together, forming the symbol of the dragon from their totems. And how they promptly waged war on the other tribes, which shared different languages and customs. So, there's not a single fragment of the babel myth intact, since there's no universal language, and the people were united together as opposed to split apart.

Then there's the outright lies and misrepresentations............... And of course, outright denial and disbelief when they're showed that they're wrong.
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Re: Sargon of Akkad and Moses

Post by wautd »

Superman wrote:The story of Moses is probably a great example of how the ancient Hebrews seemed to plagiarize the story of Sargon of Akkad.
Could this be seen as proof that Moses never existed in the first place?
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Re: Sargon of Akkad and Moses

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wautd wrote:Could this be seen as proof that Moses never existed in the first place?
Hardly. If there is even the possibility of another explanation, then it doesn't constitute proof. For example, Moses could have existed, and appropriated the story himself, as justification for his position of leadership. You can argue about whether this sounds likely or not, but if it is even possible, there is no disproof for Moses. I think. Can someone tell me if I screwed my logic up somewhere please?
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Re: Sargon of Akkad and Moses

Post by The Vortex Empire »

wjs7744 wrote:
wautd wrote:Could this be seen as proof that Moses never existed in the first place?
Hardly. If there is even the possibility of another explanation, then it doesn't constitute proof. For example, Moses could have existed, and appropriated the story himself, as justification for his position of leadership. You can argue about whether this sounds likely or not, but if it is even possible, there is no disproof for Moses. I think. Can someone tell me if I screwed my logic up somewhere please?
We don't really need disproof of Moses. If there is no evidence to support his existence, then we can assume he didn't.
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Re: Sargon of Akkad and Moses

Post by Superman »

wautd wrote:
Superman wrote:The story of Moses is probably a great example of how the ancient Hebrews seemed to plagiarize the story of Sargon of Akkad.
Could this be seen as proof that Moses never existed in the first place?
Probably not. It's more likely that the Hebrews committed sort of a retroactive plagiarism of the Sargon story.

Interestingly, the Moses story seems to be full of historical inaccuracies. The name "Moses" itself is most likely an Egyptian name. In Exodus we are told that the reason behind it was that it means 'he who was drawn out of water', however, it seems absurd that an Egyptian princess would derive a name from Hebrew. In the Egyptian vocabulary, 'mose' meaning 'child' was often suffixed to the father's name to form full names such as 'Amen-mose' meaning child of Amen, etc. It's not much of a stretch to consider that later Hebrew scribes might have simply dropped the prefix in order to fully assimilate him into a full fledged Hebrew.
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Post by Darth Wong »

The Moses story was always fucking stupid anyway. The story starts by saying that the paranoid king has a policy of killing all Jewish male children. But when Moses grows up and returns to lead his people to glory, presto! The Jews suddenly have 600,000 men of fighting age for some reason. Where did they get them from, if they were all being killed at birth? The Kamino cloners?
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Post by Enforcer Talen »

Back when I was a christo, I found the liar, lunatic, or Lord argument quite compelling, because the hidden assumption in there is that the bible is factual. It always startles peeps when you question that.
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Post by Patrick Degan »

It seems Abraham's "great nation" was habitually getting ass-raped militarily by the surrounding cultures, barring a few brief periods when they managed to gain the upper hand over their enemies (until the Romans came). But you can't hold a people together on a legacy of defeat. Likely the whole Exodus story was concocted around the time of the Maccabean revolt or the Babylonian captivity as propaganda. The Jews reinvented themselves into the people with the Divine Deal with the being who smacked Egypt. There's tribal ego for you.
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