Word: babylonians
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Josiah was probably a monolatrist, not a monotheist. But within a few decades of his death, true monotheism would finally emerge. In 586 B.C.E., Israelite élites were exiled to Babylon after conquest by the neo-Babylonian Empire. In passages from Isaiah that are thought to have been written during the exile, Yahweh says unequivocally, "Besides me there is no god." Does this extreme intolerance of other gods - the denial of their very existence - flow from a zero-sum view of Israel's environs...
...world, offering a modest contribution in return for two samples of the local currency. He would sell one and keep the other, a self-financing collection that eventually grew to more than 200,000 pieces--from ancient Etruscan rings and Incan gold to Kenyan elephant tails and Babylonian clay tablets, all of which he kept in a vault in the basement of his house...
...Babylon," a stunning exhibition at the Louvre in Paris from March 14 to June 2, seeks to re-establish that reality. It deftly illustrates how 2,000 years of Babylonian history gave rise to manifold myths, and how European artists and thinkers responded to and transformed them. Put on jointly by the Louvre, Berlin's Staatliche Museum (where the exhibition moves on June 26) and London's British Museum (where it will open on Nov. 13), it's an unprecedented collaboration that brings together nearly 400 artifacts and pieces of art. Béatrice André-Salvini, a curator...
...city-states and to establish Babylon as Mesopotamia's political heart. But Hammurabi was concerned about more than expansion, as demonstrated by the magnificent Code of Hammurabi stela, a 7-ft.-high (2 m) column of basalt upon which he inscribed 282 codified laws and punishments in cuneiform, the Babylonian script that predates even hieroglyphics. Although its prescriptions sound cruel today ("If a man commits a robbery and is caught, that man will be killed"), it helped him craft his image as a just ruler: the stela was displayed publicly, so nobody, regardless of status, could plead ignorance...
...logical assumption," he contends, "is that Jeremiah wasn't written by a later writer, but a person writing at the time. I don't know why a later writer trying to create a legendary basis for [a later Jewish regime] would want to make reference to a third-ranked Babylonian clerk. This argues that the document is accurate in its references to the world around...