Irving Finkel

Sweeping down to the Persian Gulf and, you know, the flat plains, everything would be destroyed.

All the houses would be destroyed.

Our animals would be drowned.

I believe this.

The Mesopotamians had a deep-seated horror of dependency on water when they couldn't control it.

They were fearful of it.

And they had a rainbow in Babylonia, like in the Bible, as a proof that the disastrous flood would never happen again.

But I think there must have been one episode of this kind, maybe 5,000 years before the tablet, 10,000, it doesn't matter.

Because with the passage of time, nothing happens in that part of the world.

So something will be alive, grandfather to grandson, forever.

before you go to sleep and remember my boy you know you only have to be careful because otherwise and all that stuff for sure bogeyman stuff it never quite died out in their conscious minds

So I think that when the Judeans from Jerusalem, after the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians and the rout of the priesthood and everything, the king and the others went over land to Babylon as refugees, and they had to live there for three generations of time under Nebuchadnezzar's reign.

So I believe that the text of the Bible was written then

Because if you read the Bible attentively, which I can't say I do on a regular basis, but if you do read it dispassionately, you have the mechanism that the early books of the Bible explain to the reader how it is that these people are in such a mess, because they're supposed to be the chosen people doing all that.

Look, they haven't got a temple, they haven't got a country, they're washed up and everything like that.

So I think that what happened was...

It's a complex thing, but the Judeans from Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew, but they also spoke Aramaic, right?

The two languages, their sister languages.

And the Babylonians spoke Babylonian, and they also spoke Aramaic.

And they all wore the same kind of clothes, and they all had brown skin.