The Hellenistic Origin of the Torah: A Review of Russell Gmirkin’s Books Part 1 of 4: Genesis 1–11 and Berossus

I’ve heard about Russell Gmirkin’s work for a few years, but it is only very recently that I decided to give it a try. What I had heard of his theories sounded so extravagant that I had assumed it couldn’t possibly be serious scholarship. Well, I can report that it is serious scholarship. Cutting edge, and groundbreaking. I became so absorbed that I read his three books in a row, took notes, and will now try my very best to give you an overview. The material is so rich and the implications so vast that I will need two parts for his first book, and two parts for his other two books. Gmirkin’s work turns the spotlight on what has been, for two thousand years and some, the most successful of all Jewish adaptative strategies, and the mother of all others.

The Copenhagen School of Biblical Criticism

Gmirkin’s theory didn’t come out of nowhere. Its seminal intuition and its arguments developed in an academic milieu known as “biblical minimalism”, a regrouping scholars who go one step further than their peers in revising downward the age of the Hebrew Bible. Those biblical minimalists are also known as the Copenhagen school, because in 1993 two of them, the Danish Niels Peter Lemche and the American-born (now Danish) Thomas L. Thompson, founded the Copenhagen International Seminar, hosted by the University of Copenhagen. This Seminar, in partnership with the British academic publisher Routledge, is now a major forum of discussion for Old Testament scholars.

A word on Thomas Thompson: Before being recruited by Copenhagen University, he had faced a lot of opposition and ostracizing, because of the controversies surrounding his first book published in 1974, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham — a quest that ends nowhere, since, according to Thompson, the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are complete fabrications of the Hellenistic period. This book and another one published the following year, Abraham in History and Tradition by the Canadian John Van Seters, marked a paradigm shift that was fiercely resisted by the old guard of biblical scholarship, but progressively gained wide acceptance.

Controversy, however, did not stop. When Thompson published The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past in 1999, Ha’aretz printed an attack by Hershel Shanks, the editor of The Biblical Archaeology Review, accusing him and other “minimalist” scholars of being “anti-Zionist,” “anti-Bible” and “anti-Israel,” adding: “At the extreme, they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic.” As Thompson himself relates with more amusement than indignation, The Jerusalem Post quoted the former director of the Israel Department of Antiquities saying: “A mutual acquaintance told me that Thompson confided in him that he is a staunch believer in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”[1]

Why the libel? Because the biblical narrative is the foundation of Jewish identity, as well as the justification for the existence of Israel. Minimalists are not only saying that the Bible contains very little real history; they also expose the deliberate deception of its special claim to antiquity. For if they are right, the people of the Book didn’t have their book yet when they could already read more than 200,000 books (scrolls, that is) in one single library, the Museum of Alexandria. If the minimalists are right, then the Jews “invented” God at a time when every “pagan” philosopher was talking about Him. And if the minimalists are right, those Jewish scholars who wrote under the name of Moses were in fact using Greek literature as models.

That’s where Russell Gmirkin excels. Using the academic disciplines of comparative studies and source criticism, he argues that the Hebrew Pentateuch was composed in its entirety around 273–272 bc, and that its authors borrowed extensively from works that they most probably read in the great Library of Alexandria: these works included histories of Egypt and Babylon in Greek, as well as Greek cosmogonies and legal treaties, notably the most famous ones by Plato. The spread of Hellenistic culture, and the foundation of the Library of Alexandria in particular, created a great incentive for the writing, copying, compiling and translating of books from all corners of the world, including nationalistic accounts of the past glories of the civilizations of Egypt (by Hecataeus of Abdera and Manetho) and Babylon (by Berossus). This intense competition, described by one author as a “war of books,”[2] was the context for the creation of the Jewish scriptures. It was already known as the context for the Greek version, the so-called Septuagint, but Gmirkin argues that the Hebrew version was written around the same time, probably by the same group. Here is Gmirkin’s best scenario:

The financing of a translation of Hebrew legislation into Greek by Ptolemy II Philadelphus was seen by Jewish scholars as a golden opportunity to present a comprehensive account of Jewish origins to the Greek world. This ambitious account was intended to demonstrate that the Jews, like the Egyptians and the Babylonians, had traditions that ran back to the beginning of time.[3]

The creation of the Hebrew Pentateuch was disguised as a mere translation (by seventy scholars) of long-existing Mosaic laws and traditions. While the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles certainly incorporate pre-existing sources, the bulk of the Pentateuch (Torah) was mostly invented from scratch, borrowing from Greek sources (in fields of law, cosmogony, and narrative history) but rephrasing them sufficiently to make them appear more ancient than the Greek.

As far as I know, this kind of deceptive scholarly practice is quite unique to the Jews in the ancient world. In the same period, a Jew wrote the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, pretending to be a Greek philosopher singing the praises of the ancient wisdom of the Jews. This text, quoted by Flavius Josephus in Jewish Antiquities, is the earliest source of the legend of the Seventy Jewish translators working at the invitation of the Greek king Ptolemy Philadelphus. It tells how, upon reading the result of their work, Ptolemy swooned in ecstasy and exclaimed that it “comes from God.” We can mention at least two more books written by Jews under false Greek authorship to praise the Jews: On the Jews by the pseudo-Hecataeus (2nd or 1st century bc), quoted by Josephus,[4] and the third book of the Sibylline Oracles (middle of the 2nd century bc), that makes the oracle of Delphi glorify the Jewish people and promise them the world.

Gmirkin refrains from calling the Pentateuch authors plagiarists, but I think it is a fair description of the evidence he provides. For these authors didn’t simply recycle Greek sources; they pretended that their copy was older than the original. As if by tacit agreement, this claim was repeated in all Jewish literature. The Jew Aristobulus of Paneas, in his Explanations of the Scripture of Moses (around 170 bc), insisted that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato had been inspired by Moses. Around the same time, the Jew Artapanus of Alexandria, in On the Jews, presents Joseph (son of Jacob) and Moses as the “first inventors” who taught the Egyptians everything they knew, from astronomy and agriculture to philosophy and religion.[5] In the early 1st century AD, Philo of Alexandria asserted that Greek legislators actually plagiarized Mosaic Law, and that Heraclitus stole his theory of opposites from Moses. Flavius Josephus repeated similar lies in the 1st century AD, in response to the Hellenized Egyptian Apion who contested the antiquity of the Jewish people and their scriptures. Josephus actually used parallels between Plato’s legislative works (Laws and Republic) and Mosaic Laws to argue that Plato “imitated” Moses (Against Apion 2.257).

In his second book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, Gmirkin reverses the argument and proves Apion right: “it now appears evident that the Mosaic writings were informed by those of Plato and not the reverse. This book will be reviewed in the third instalment.

Here, I examin Gmirkin’s first book, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (T&T Clark, 2006).

The Elephantine papyri

As Gmirkin explains in two introductory chapters, the scholarly method for dating the Hebrew Bible is to establish a terminus ante quem (latest possible date of redaction) and a terminus a quo (earliest possible date). The indisputable terminus ante quem is the date of the Bible’s Greek version, the so-called Septuagint, whose existence is clearly attested in the 270s.

A first terminus a quo is provided by the Elephantine papyri, written around 400 bc in Upper Egypt, because they indicate that the Jewish colonists who wrote them knew nothing of the Pentateuch, although they were in close communication with the priests of Jerusalem. In 408 bc, they appealed to “Johannan the high priest and his colleagues the priests who are in Jerusalem” for help in securing permission to rebuild their own temple of Yahweh at Elephantine. As Gmirkin notes, this request is “highly inconsistent with the existence of an authoritative Pentateuchal tradition banning all altars or local sacrifices outside of Jerusalem.”[6] Moreover, “when the Elephantine Papyri are scoured for evidence of the existence of the Pentateuch or any portion thereof, the results are emphatically negative.”[7] There is no reference in the papyri to the Exodus or any other biblical event, nor to a written Torah. None of the central characters of the Pentateuch is ever mentioned. None of the Pentateuch laws is mentioned. The Elephantine colonists didn’t even seem to know about the sabbath as a day of rest. Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the great number of Elephantine papyri and ostraca make it virtually certain that the Torah did not exist in 400 bc. These arguments are gaining wide acceptance. Some object, like James L. Kugel, Richard E. Friedman, or Konrad Schmid: they insist that the Torah existed, but that the Elephantine Jews’ simply ignored it because it had not yet achieved universal authority among Jews.[8] The argument falls flat, since it is clear that the Elephantine Jews’ recognize Jerusalem’s central authority.

Having settled that question, Russell Gmirkin pushes that terminus a quo more than two centuries forward, by establishing the literary dependence of the Pentateuch on two works written in Greek between 285 and 278 bc, namely a history of Babylon by Berossus, and a history of Egypt by Manetho.

Berossus and Genesis 1–11

Genesis 1–11 forms a separate unit within the Pentateuch, known as the Primordial History. “It is widely acknowledged today that the Primordial History was an independent composition, added after the completion of the Patriarchal Narratives of Genesis 12–50, and integrated with the latter by a few transitional verses that bridged the two otherwise independent compositions.”[9] This Primordial History has also long been recognized as belonging to the Mesopotamian literary genre of creation-flood accounts, with parallels in Mesopotamian sources such as the Enûma Elish, The Sumerian Flood Myth, The Gilgamesh Epic, The Atrahasis Epic, or The Poem of Erra.

What Gmirkin endeavors to demonstrate is that the authors of Genesis 1–11 drew not directly from these disparate Mesopotamian sources preserved in cuneiform clay tablets, but from Berossus, a Babylonian author who had compiled these materials in Greek in the third century bc. Berossus’s Babyloniaca tells the history of Babylon from the dawn of time to Alexander’s conquest. It was published and disseminated in 278 bc, with the intention of making ancient Babylonian history and traditions available to the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world. Berossus’s Babyloniaca is lost, but fragments survive in quotations made by Flavius Josephus in the 1st century AD, by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, and by George Syncellus in the eighth century. All fragments are collected in the authoritative edition of Felix Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (“Fragments of the Greek Historians”), a monument of German scholarship published between 1841 and 1870, and commonly abbreviated FGrHist.

After writing his Babyloniaca and dedicating it to the Seleucid king Antiochus I, Berossus emigrated from Babylon to the Aegean island of Cos within the Ptolemaic realm and founded a school there. There was extensive interaction between Cos and Alexandria in Egypt under Ptolemy I and II; the latter was born at Cos, and his father hired the grammarian Philetas of Cos to educate him. “Given this constant intellectual interaction,” Gmirkin explains, “it was inevitable that the Babyloniaca of Berossus should have been early acquired for the burgeoning library of Alexandria.”[10] Under Ptolemy II, the Alexandrian library became the world’s greatest scholarly institution, with hundreds of thousands of scrolls (estimations vary between 200,000 and 400,000). Since many Greek-speaking Jews lived and studied in Alexandria, it is a reasonable assumption that they had access to the Babyloniaca there.

Extra-biblical evidence indicates that both Samaritans and Jews knew Berossus by about 250 bce. There is thus no question of Jewish knowledge of Berossus’s book shortly after its publication — and through the Babyloniaca, knowledge of the entire corpus of Mesopotamian sources that influenced Genesis.[11]

To prove that the biblical authors borrowed from Berossus, Gmirkin engages in a detailed intertextual comparison. In my view, he has found no smoking gun of the Bible’s borrowings from Berossus, only a good amount of circumstantial evidence, which rests on philological arguments that would take too long to reproduce here. I can only quote from Gmirkin’s final conclusions:

The structural parallels between Berossus and Gen 1–11 are so remarkable as to preclude independence of the two accounts.[12]

It has been demonstrated that Berossus drew on all the same older cuneiform sources that have been identified as having parallels to Genesis. In several cases, Berossus provides better parallels than the older cuneiform sources (notably the primordial chaos consisting of water and darkness, and the ten antediluvian kings). In other examples, only Berossus provides a convincing parallel. … In every case it has been shown that Berossus could have been the immediate source for the Mesopotamian influences reflected in Genesis. Additionally, Berossus not only collected together all the same ancient Babylonian sources that influenced Genesis, but also contained the same overall organization of material in an orderly sequential historical narrative as in Genesis. The entire phenomenon of Mesopotamian traditions in Gen 1–11 is completely explained by dependence on Berossus. … The weight of evidence strongly favors Berossus as the specific intermediate source by which ancient Mesopotamian traditions came to the attention of the authors of Gen 1–11.[13]

The economy of this model is striking. Instead of a multiplicity of ancient Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform sources of different ages influencing Genesis by a hypothetical mechanism of oral tradition, one need only discover the mechanism by which a single copy of Berossus’s Babyloniaca reached Jewish hands.[14]

The conventional model [by contrast] requires a whole series of essentially unprovable propositions: that the ancient South Syrians were independently exposed to Enûma Elish, The Gilgamesh Epic and perhaps Sumerian lists of rulers before the flood; that these Sumerian and Akkadian myths were incorporated in minute detail into Jewish oral tradition and passed down for from anywhere between 500 years (J) to nearly a thousand years (P); and that the essential cosmological details of these Babylonian myths, such as the order of events of creation and many specific details of the flood narrative, were preserved intact through this lengthy process despite a complete change in the cast of gods and human heroes.[15]

The Serpent in the Garden

Beyond the issue of the age of the Pentateuch, the comparative analysis of Genesis and Berossus yields an interesting glimpse into the “making of” the myth of the Garden and Eden in Genesis 3.

Biblical scholars have long recognized the polemical background of Genesis 3, whose author seems to be attacking a foreign tradition by turning it upside down. The assumption used to be that the targeted tradition was some unknown Canaanite initiatory cult linked to some serpentine symbolism or a Samaritan heterodox cult of the bronze “Serpent of Moses” named Nehushtan that king Hezekiah “smashed” according to 2 Kings 18:4. But the minimalist hypothesis opens up new and more satisfying possibilities. Gmirkin notes:

The serpent of Gen 3 was a very unusual creature. The serpent had the capability of speech and carried on conversations with humans. He was the “wisest of all the animals” and the agent by which primitive humans acquired the knowledge of the gods. Apparently the serpent initially had legs and could walk, for at Gen 3:14 God’s curse on the serpent was that he would henceforth crawl on his belly in the dust.[16]

The best parallel is found in Berossus’s reference to the antediluvian apkallu (“wise”) Oannes, a divine being represented as a fish-cloaked figure. George Syncellus, one of our sources on Berossus, writes (fragment FGrH 680 F1b):

Berossos says that this monster spent its days with men, never eating anything, but teaching men the skills necessary for writing and for doing mathematics and for all sorts of knowledge: how to build cities, found temples, and make laws. It taught men how to determine borders and divide land, also how to plant seeds and then harvest their fruits and vegetables. In short, it taught men all those things conducive to a settled and civilized life.[17]

Gmirkin suggests that the apkallu Oannes is the archetype of the serpent of the Garden of Eden; “the benevolent apkallu Oannes, sent to humankind by the gods with the gift on knowledge, has been transformed into a figure of treachery and evil, much as knowledge itself has been transformed from a blessing into a curse.”[18]

The “demonization” of the divine being from whom the Babylonians learned to build their civilization is clearly an attack on Babylonian civilization. But more than that, it is an attack on civilization itself. The Garden of Eden story states that men and women were at their best when they were naked and unashamed, and that this is the way their Creator wanted them to remain.

According to Gen 1–2, creation was a paradise, and man’s created state was that of ruler of paradise. Man in the Garden of Eden was like one of the animals. The animals were his companions. He ate the herbs of the field like the other animals. He was naked and without shame or fear. He ruled as king, his dominion being all of nature.

A very similar picture of primitive humans exists in early Sumerian stories of creation. There, too, humans were naked, living like the animals, eating grass. Yet in Mesopotamian literature, this primitive natural state was portrayed as an utterly miserable way of life.[19]

In the Biblical account,

Humankind’s life with their animal companions, naked and without knowledge of the elementary arts of civilization, was natural and good, not deplorable. Humanity did not benefit by obtaining knowledge from the gods: rather, this first sin constituted a fall from a state of innocence and paradise. Knowledge of the arts of civilization was evil, not a boon. Agriculture was a curse, not a blessing. … In Gen 4:20–22, though we see advances in the arts of civilization, these were all attributed to the wicked line of Cain. … The Mesopotamian literature saw humankind progressing by means of revelations of the arts of civilization by the gods. In Genesis, humankind was corrupted from his original state of innocence by these same arts, as concretely represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.[20]

The Tower of Babel

The disparagement of Babylonian civilization — and perhaps of civilization in general — is repeated in the final episode the Primordial History: the myth of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Beyond the obvious satisfaction of the authors at the collapse of Babylonian civilization, the tale sounds like a dystopian warning against urban civilization (reminding of the opposition between the semi-nomadic shepherd Abel and the farmer Cain, whose offspring founded the first city). Yahweh is disturbed by the sight of men of various origins sharing one language and building a great city with “a tower whose top reaches into the heavens.” He gets suspicious, and says to himself: “If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do. Let us then go down and there confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says” (Genesis 11:6–7).

“The Tower of Babel,” Gmirkin explains, “referred to the ziggurat of Babylon, a multi-tiered temple tower dedicated to the cult of Marduk, with sanctuaries both at its base and at its summit.”[21]

The interest Genesis displayed in the construction of Babylon and its tower was paralleled by many classical references to Babylon. The vast size of the city of Babylon, only exceeded by that of Nineveh, elicited frequent comment. Descriptions of architectural wonders were common in Hellenistic ethnographies. Several ancient sources made reference to the various “wonders” visible at Babylon, including the walls, the embankments of the Euphrates and bridges over it, and the Hanging Gardens. The Temple of Bel (i.e. the Tower of Babel) was also frequently mentioned, and both Herodotus and Ktesias emphasized its great height.

That the city of Babylon, “the greatest city of its day,” later lay abandoned in ruins was also a cause for comment, and the ruins of the temple of Bel were also sometimes mentioned. Like Genesis, classical sources thus commented on the size of Babylon, its impressive tower, the unique building materials employed at Babylon, and Babylon’s later state of abandonment and ruin. The fascination with Babylon’s public structures at Gen 11:1–9, without parallel in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, has extremely close affinities with the description of the wonders of Babylon by Greek and Roman historians, geographers and ethnographers.[22]

Despite the lack of mention from the sources quoting Berossus’s Babyloniaca, there can be no doubt that it included extensive references to the wonders of Babylon, including the temple of Bel-Marduk (of which Berossus was actually a priest). “The essential descriptive features of Babylon and its tower in Genesis could easily have derived from Berossus.”[23] However, “the confusion of languages and scattering of humankind from Babylon after the flood are not themes found in Mesopotamian sources” and must be biblical innovations.[24] The authors of the Pentateuch plagiarized Berossus, but only to deride the civilization that Berossus was exalting.

How strange, by the way, that a tradition obsessed with monotheism would consider monolingualism a curse. But not so strange once you understand that Jewish monotheism is in fact the opposite of what it pretends to be: it is the monolatrist cult of the jealous god of Israel pretending to be the cosmic God choosing Israel and hating Babylon.

Go to Part 2.

[1] From Thompson’s own account: “A view from Copenhagen: Israel and the History of Palestine.”

[2] Oswyn Murray, “Hecataeus of Abdera and Pharaonic Kingship,” Journal of Egyptian Arachaeology, 56, 1970, pp. 141-71, quoted in Russell E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, T&T Clark, 2006, p. 256.

[3] Russell E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, T&T Clark, 2006, p. 256.

[4] Bezalel Bar-Kochva, Pseudo-Hecataeus, “On the Jews”: Legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora, University of California Press, 1997.

[5] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 66.

[6] Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, op. cit., p. 31.

[7] Ibid., pp. 29-30.

[8] James L. Kugel, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times, 2017; How to Read the Bible, 2007.

[9] Russell E. Gmirkin , Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History, Routledge, 2022, p. 28.

[10] Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, op. cit., pp. 246-247.

[11] Ibid., p. 137.

[12] Ibid., p. 135.

[13] Ibid., p. 136.

[14] Ibid., p. 136.

[15] Ibid., p. 137.

[16] Ibid., p. 106.

[17] Ibid., p. 107.

[18] Ibid., p. 107.

[19] Ibid., p. 100.

[20] Ibid., pp. 101-102

[21] Ibid., p. 120.

[22] Ibid., pp. 121-122.

[23] Ibid., p. 123.

[24] Ibid., p. 124.