Not long ago Prof. Herman Hilprecht gave to the world, in a lecture before a woman's club in Philadelphia, the translation of a new tablet found at Nippur. His translations and statements have been subject to a great deal of criticism. We give the following as Dr. Hilprecht's translation:
"[I declare unto] thee that the confines of heaven I will loosen, a deluge I will make, and it shall sweep away all men together; but thou [the Babylonian Noah] seek life before the deluge cometh forth; for to all living beings, as many as there are I will bring overthrow, destruction, annihilation. Build a great ship and Total height shall be its structure. It shall be a houseboat carrying what has been saved of life. With a strong deck cover it. The ship which thou shalt make, into it bring the beasts of the field, the birds of heaven, and the creeping things, two of everything instead of a number and the family *"
The words enclosed in brackets are supplied words. It is these emendations and also some of its translations which are especially attacked by the Higher Critics. The age of the tablet is said to be somewhere about 2,100 years before Christ, because it is in a Semitic dialect. If this be so, it is one of the oldest records that we have outside of the Scriptures. But the great age of the tablet is also denied.
The Christian Advocate, after thorough review of what has been said on both sides, sums up the matter in the following judicial way:
"The Babylonian Deluge Tablet discovered by Professor Hilprecht is clearly of great importance and is undoubtedly a fragment of a larger tablet. The following reservations are necessary: (1) The translation of its words is in some particulars doubtful, tho in the main almost certainly correct. The additions which Professor Hilprecht has made are, on the other hand, extremely doubtful. He has added in brackets phrases which can not properly be drawn from the words of the tablet. They may be correct, but from various authorities, some of the highest grade, we learn that presumption is always against extensive additions to the translation of any ancient text, and in previous cases duplicates have several times shown that proposed additions were wrong, especially of the duplicate creation tablets, which have in several cases shown emendations to be wrong.
The Nippur Deluge Tablet (Courtesy “The Scientific American”)
"The date of the tablet which Professor Hilprecht has translated is absolutely uncertain. The only evidences for its date are the general appearance of the tablet and its paleography, and these are too uncertain in so small a fragment."
