Ancient Mesopotamian historian Abraham Winitzer has been selected to be a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2024-2025, where he will advance his study of the links between the Bible stories of origins and Mesopotamian mythology.
Winitzer likens his research in the ancient Akkadian language to taking a time machine to biblical times, through which he is almost able to encounter the ancient world.
“It’s the closest you get to going there,” said Winitzer, an associate professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
“The Bible is the most decontextualized book ever, but it was composed in a particular place and time. Without understanding the ancient world, you have no historical access to it. You can read it theologically perfectly fine. But if you want to understand what the Bible is about from a historical angle, you need to situate it in the ancient world.”
The Wissenschaftskolleg, modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, attracts scholars from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to share and further their scholarly work.
Winitzer’s fellowship at the German institute begins in September and concludes July 2025. Over the year, he will work on his project titled “Mesopotamian myth and biblical demythologization,” which will examine the intellectual and religious history of the ancient Near East and its reflection in the Bible.
“The idea is that one of the areas in which the Bible that really benefits enormously from understanding Mesopotamia — the Assyrian and Babylonian world — is in mythology,” Winitzer said. “What I’m trying to do is look more systematically at it and ask ‘What’s going on when you have this adaptation of Mesopotamia and mythology in the Bible?’ And what you see is the Bible takes away elements of the myth.”
An example is the story of Noah, which parallels the Mesopotamian flood myth of Gilgamesh. In addition to similarities between the swirling storm, both stories conclude with a higher power making gestures to avoid further destruction. At the end of Noah’s story, the sign of the covenant is a rainbow. In the Gilgamesh tale, the gift is a clear bead necklace which was thought to be connected to a rainbow, with the words “rainbow” and “necklace” even appearing as synonyms in ancient Mesopotamian dictionaries.
“Usually, the argument is if you have a myth, you don’t have science and philosophy,” said Winitzer, who is a part of the history and philosophy of science program at Notre Dame. “I want to challenge that and say that would be a formality because they’re basically saying the same thing, time after time.”
A native of Haifa, Israel, who grew up in the United States, Winitzer has spent his entire 18-year academic career at Notre Dame. He ultimately plans to compose a book over the next several years, intended to appeal to a broader audience, building on prior articles he has penned.
Winitzer said he appreciates the freedom he has had at the University to analyze the works that influenced biblical authors “to see the development of the intellectual history and look at what this world gave to the book that was the foundation for three religions in the Western world.”
“Notre Dame allows me to do that,” he said. “I love teaching. I love Notre Dame. We have phenomenal students at the undergraduate level — and at the graduate level, it’s the best in the country for biblical studies.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on August 16, 2024.