A Rejoinder to Professor George A. Barton

Abstract

FOR YEARS I have been endeavoring show that certain theories and claims popularized and advanced by Professor Barton concerning Semitic origins should be abandoned. One of these, formulated years ago in Germany, is that the Arabian desert emitted its surplus population of hungry tribesmen in successive eruptions or waves upon the adjoining territory, and that it was upon this periodic disgorging or spilling over of savages from the desert into neighboring lands that Babylonia and Amurru, including Israel, were dependent for their Semites. Among his own views are his claim that the Arabs worshipped a mother goddess, whose existence is not known other scholars; that this imaginary Arabian mother goddess became the masculine Arabian deity Athtar, the Babylonian Ishtar [i. e. Ashtar], who in turn was transformed into the gods Ea, Sin, Shamash, Marduk, etc. Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, also had his origin in this imaginary goddess. Tammuz, whom we know as a king of Erech, was her son. Eden was in southern Babylonia, but Paradise, he holds, originally was located in an Arabian oasis. Professor Barton maintains, like others, that the Hebrews, who were semi-barbarous Arabs from the desert, and whose history prior Joshua is a fiction, borrowed Babylonian nature-myths for their religious literature. His views as the origin of the names in Genesis are however, distinct from others. Aripi, the eleventh king of Kish, became Adam. The Hebrews by the help of philological gymnastics, transformed Bar-sal-nun-na, the name of the sixteenth king of Kish, into Seth; En-me-nun-na became Enosh; the Sumerian words siba lu the shepherd who, becoming hiba lu, were the origin of ilebel or Abel; an-shu to heaven was misread an-k7u, and this became Hanok or Enoch; the woman's name Zirtu lost its Z and became Irad; Melam-Kish, the name of the fifteenth king, lost its beginning and end, Me[lam-K]ish, and became Lamech (Archaeology and the Bible, 1925), etc. As is well known, my own studies have led me believe that these conclusions rest upon unproved assumptions and mistaken 119