Thursday, June 1, 2023

Dispelling the Sargon Comparison

And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink. Exodus 2:3

"Some try to find a parallel between Moses deliverance in his ark
and
Sargon of Akkad, in which Sargon survived at birth in a chest floating on the Euphrates. 
 
However, there are several problems with this: Saying Israel used this to invent the account in Exodus would undermine its reliability. 
 
But there are other difficulties with the Sargon comparison, not the least of which is the fact that the meaning and function of the Sargon story are unclear. 
Second, there is no outside threat to the child Sargon. The account simply shows how a child was exposed, rescued, nurtured, and became king. 
Third, other details do not fit: Moses’ father is known, Sargon’s is not; Moses is never abandoned, since he is never out of the care of his parents, and the finder is a princess and not a goddess. 
 
Moreover, without knowing the precise function and meaning of the Sargon story, it is almost impossible to explain its use as a pattern for the Biblical account. 
 
--By itself, the idea of a mother putting a child by the river if she wants him to be found would have been fairly sensible, for that is where the women of the town would be washing their clothes or bathing. If someone wanted to be sure the infant was discovered by a sympathetic woman, there would be no better setting” (See note 10 in “Exodus 2,” NET Bible, https://netbible.org/bible/Exodus+2). 
 
The parallel of Moses’ ark is clearly the account of the ark in Genesis 6–8." AIG