Review of History’s Greatest Mysteries S06E20 “Lost Places of the Old Testament”

​I’m not much of a fan of History’s Greatest Mysteries, Laurence Fishburne’s History Channel series that rather pompously recycles stories familiar from History Channel series going back to History’s Mysteries (which launched in 1998) and sister channel A+E’s earlier versions like Ancient Mysteries—all the way back, indeed, to In Search of… from the 1980s. I tuned in to S06E20, which aired Monday, because it promised to explore whether locations found in the Hebrew Bible have archaeological evidence of their existence. It was, let’s say, a bit of rough going that left me feeling like I just watched a commercial trying to sell me on converting to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that somehow dispensed with all that God-and-Jesus stuff.

I don’t care for Fishburne’s grandiose narration with its overdramatic inflection thundering atop soaring musical cues like it’s some weird Wagnerian opera. But I especially don’t like the way the History Channel mixes in a couple of actual experts in ancient history with talking heads who are simply on retainer. For instance, John E. Moser, a professor chairing the history and political science department at Ashland University, has no specific training in ancient history. His specialties are modern Western history and East Asian civilization. He appeared in seven episodes, commenting on everything the origins of the Great Sphinx to Franklin Expedition. At the start of this episode, he tells the History Channel’s viewers that the stories found in the Pentateuch derive from an oral original which predates Moses by “thousands of years.” If we assume Moses lived around the traditional period ascribed to him, sometime between 1500 and 1300 BCE, that would place the origins of the Jewish myths and legends more than a millennium before the oldest evidence for Yahweh.
 
Only biblical literalists who trace the stories back to Seth and Adam would agree with that. Indeed, it’s rather impossible since the patriarchs did not live that long before Moses in the first place, and in the second, because most scholars believe the history of the patriarchs to largely be the invention of the Persian period, around the sixth century BCE.
 
The episode itself is rather strange, serving primarily as an apology for the Bible as a book, but not really as a statement of faith. The narration seems to assume that viewers have heard in school and may believe the Bible to be a series of myths and legends that are not true, while the talking heads, such as Episcopal priest Kelly Brown Douglas (identified here only as a theologian), repeatedly attempt to convince the audience that the Bible is not just true but also the ultimate truth and that faith and science do not need to be in conflict. It’s rather weird and at times feels almost propagandistic.
 
The first segment seeks the Tower of Babel, and Moser again shows his ignorance, conflating the Biblical account of the Tower (Genesis 11:1-9) with later Jewish legends about it. The Bible never says that the tower collapsed or that the surrounding city fell to ruin. It doesn’t even say it was located in “Babel.” It only says that God confounded their languages and construction on the city in Shinar ceased. The legend that the Tower collapsed emerged sometime in the intertestamental period; Flavius Josephus refers to it in his Antiquities (1.115), but only in quoting the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles (3.91-107). It became identified with Babel because that was the name of Nimrod’s kingdom, and the legend recorded in the Oracles identified Nimrod as the builder of the Tower.
 
I will give the show credit for trying to drag out the suspense in suggesting that the Tower of Babel was built in … wait for it … Babylon. Repeating the common identification of the Tower of Babel with the Etemenanki in Babylon, the show tries to say that there is a “perfect” match between the Babylonian structure and the biblical description. This is ridiculous since there is no description in Genesis other than the use of mud bricks, and mud bricks were the standard building material of every Mesopotamian structure, not just the Etemenanki.
 
The show uses footage of Saddam Hussein’s reconstructed Great Ziggurat of Ur without telling viewers that it is not, in fact, the Etemenanki.
 
“Babylon could be the site where God changes the course of humanity forever!” one of the talking heads says. Not unless he did it in the 500s BCE.
 
The show attempts to use seventh century BCE tablets (though the Esagila Tablet is actually a third century BCE copy—never mind the details for TV!) to argue that Nebuchadnezzar II brought in Jews to help build the Etemenanki, which they weirdly don’t want to name, and only later do they acknowledge the chronological problem that Genesis places the Tower of Babel in primeval times, long before Moses, and Nebuchadnezzar II lived in the sixth century BCE—oh, and that the Etemenanki was finished without any divine punishment. But, to their credit, they do actually discuss this, which is more than Ancient Aliens would do. On the other hand, they place the Tower of Babel in 2250 BCE, based on what they confidently assert was the real date of Noah’s Flood, 2350 BCE, the date Bishop Ussher calculated when he placed creation at sunset on October 22, 4004 BCE.
 
For what it’s worth, very few calculate the Flood date the same way. The chronographer Sextus Julius Africanus, for instance, famously placed it in 3,238 BCE (Syncellus, Chronicle, pp. 17 and 83), while the great astrologer Abu Ma’shar placed the Flood during the Great Conjunction of 3101 BCE. As the medieval polymath al-Biruni wrote, when it came to Flood dates, “there is such a difference of opinions, and such a confusion, that you have no chance of deciding as to the correctness of the matter” (trans. C. Edward Sachau).
 
Unfortunately, while the show comes ever-so-close to realizing that the Tower of Babel story is a myth likely invented in the sixth century BCE, but the show doesn’t want to leave viewers thinking the Bible isn’t literally true, so after a break Fishburne tells us that we will need to go find an older tower to help prove the Bible true. Therefore we hear about David Rohl, a British musician-turned-Egyptologist with a longstanding interest in revising ancient chronology to agree with the Bible. (He also has a side hustle in “proving” the Trojan War real.)
 
So we are on to the “Nimrod theory” that a Sumerian king named Nimrod build the Tower of Babel around 2000 BCE. Amir Hussain of Loyola Marymount University tells us that the Book of Genesis states that “Nimrod built this extremely tall tower in Mesopotamia to provide an escape in case God floods the world.” I don’t know how to say this nicely, but no it does not. Flavius Josephus says that. It is, I repeat, not in the Bible.
 
Instead, Rohl used Josephus’ story to identify Nimrod with the Sumerian king Enmerkar because the Sumerian king list said Enmerkar built Uruk. Fishburne tells us that “both were known as great hunters,” but that isn’t true. Nimrod was surely identified as a mighty hunter, but there is no evidence of Enmerkar being one except for Rohl’s argument that the -kar suffix in his name means “hunter,” therefore the name n-m-r-kr would be “Nimro(d) the Hunter.” I am not expert enough in Sumerian to analyze this, but I could find no Sumerian expert outside of Biblical apologists who endorsed the claim, and the dictionaries I checked did not list -kar as “hunter.” (Taka is the most common word for hunting, while kar/kur more typically refers to mountains.)
 
Rohl also identified the unfinished ziggurat of Eridu as the Tower of Babel because, and this is true, Eridu is located near Ur, even though neither is Uruk. To get to that conclusion, you have to accept that Enmerkar is Nimrod and that Genesis 10:10 is correct in identifying the extent of Nimrod’s kingdom as all of southern Mesopotamia. It’s a lot of assumptions given that Enmerkar is known only to have ruled Uruk itself—if the legendary culture-hero ever actually existed. (You need a whole sub-argument about whether he is the Euechous if Berossus to even get to whether there is any Mesopotamian evidence, and I don’t care that much.)
 
The segment leaves us with an unpleasantly reactionary conclusion. Robert Cargill, a Classics professor and biblical archaeologist from the University of Iowa who was raised a fundamentalist Christian before moderating his views, says that the Bible is trying to tell us about “the ills” that happen when “all these people” from different cultures “come together,” so he is all but explicitly stating that God hates immigration and multiculturalism.
 
With that, having convinced its audience that diversity is bad, the show moves on to an even more conservative narrative—Sodom and Gomorrah—to stick it to the queers.
 
This half of the show begins with a summary of the Biblical narrative—though in an incomplete way that does not explain the crimes of the people of Sodom. They do not explain that the Sodomites violated the rules of hospitality, nor do they mention what they planned to do when the male angels were to be “taken away” by the town’s men nor that Lot offered his daughters for rape in their place. This strategic omission of any kind of sex leads the show to refer to the threatened rape of the angels only as “the evils” of the Sodomites, which the narration intends the audience to understand as gay sex that so enraged God he had to kill them all. By omitting specifics and avoiding nuance—the modern understanding of the actual crimes were violation of hospitality and rape, not homosexuality per se—the show allows the viewer to maintain the traditional conservative view of Sodom as an anti-gay polemic.  
 
Then it moves on to trying to find Sodom’s wreckage. One candidate, proposed in 1973, is Bab edh-Dhra, a Bronze Age city that burned around 2350 BCE. It isn’t located in the right place, and the show notes that it fell long before the time the Biblical chronology assigns to Sodom. This leads to a long segment on Tall el-Hamman, the subject of controversy over the retracted study claiming that an airburst destroyed the city. I’ve covered cable TV shows about this twice and don’t really need to repeat myself here, and the show gives such little attention to the subject, that it seems to just be filler. It seems that they really didn’t want to deal with the contradiction at the heart of their inquiry: If Sodom died in a random meteor crash, then God did not actually punish them for being gay. The Bible would be telling “true” stories with a false theology.
 
After the short Sodom segment, the show asks where the real Mount Sinai was. This segment takes it as a given that the Exodus was real and that Israelites actually fled Egypt en masse under Moses—a claim that lacks historical or archaeological proof—and thus tries to use the Exodus narrative to find Sinai. (They ignore that Deuteronomy says the events occurred on Mount Horeb, instead, which has led to many efforts to identify Sinai and Horeb as the same place.) The show suggests the Egyptian mountain of Hashem el-Tarif on the Sinai Peninsula could be the biblical mountain, or perhaps a volcano in Saudi Arabia, Hala-‘l Badr, thus making the appearance of God nothing more than a misunderstood eruption. How they supposedly got to that mountain, across the Gulf of Aqaba, with no boats is beyond me. I don’t have much interest in whether Moses experienced a theophany on one mountain or another, and at least twelve peaks have their supporters. For what it is worth, Judaism recognized Jabal Musa as Mount Sinai long before Christians took over the identification, going back at least to Hellenistic times, making it the peak with the longest history of being connected to the Moses story.
 
The show ends with one of the talking heads saying that finding the true sites of biblical events won’t turn skeptics into believers, but it will make the Bible “more real,” while Douglas, the Episcopal priest, tells us that Bible stories are “rooted in history” and therefore the Bible is real. The don’t really deal with the fact that the Jewish and Christian faiths are rooted in the moral reasoning and the mythology of God, the patriarchs, and the prophets, so proving that these stories are based on distorted memories of material events that had nothing to do with Yahweh & Co. actually undermines the faith they hope to make tangible.