Dear Sir,
Back in the April issue of en, Martin Haywood wrote concerning Genesis 1-11. He says that he does not know of any scholar who thinks the Genesis text is of greater antiquity than c.1600 BC. He has clearly not read Clues to Creation In Genesis, by Squadron Leader P. J. Wiseman (edited by his son, Professor D. J. Wiseman, and republished by Marshall Morgan and Scott in 1977).
P. J. Wiseman was a British archaeologist and Babylonian expert; in the 1920s and 1930s he translated many clay tablets dating from circa 3000 BC. He drew attention to the 11 colophons (‘These are the generations of …) in Genesis, pointing out that the Sumerians placed a colophon at the end of a series of tablets, referring back to the ‘top’ and noting the writer or owner.
You can check for yourself in your Bible that each colophon (apart from the first), assuming it comes at the end of a section, could have been written or held by the person named, and whose death is recorded in a later tablet. Genesis 1 appears to have been written on six clay tablets; Genesis 2.1-4 is the colophon.
These Sumerian-style colophons could well be embedded traces of the original records from which Moses compiled our book of Genesis. They indicate that the early chapters of Genesis were written in Sumerian – the first known written language – on clay tablets, more than a thousand years before Moses.
Wiseman’s analysis of the colophons has never been disproved or even seriously disputed. Given the interest in the sources of the biblical writings, one would expect it to have been the subject of further scholarly investigation; but his work has been ignored (no doubt because it rubbishes the late-date multiple author theories) by most theologians, the late Professor R. K. Harrison being a notable exception.
Yours sincerely,
