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Moses in Babylon: Struggles for Power in the Middle East (or Why Reading the Bible Matters, Even if You Aren’t Religious)
March 4, 2015, 4:00 PM
FreeWhat do Bob Marley, Nebuchadnezzar II, and the ancient Israelites of the Hebrew Bible have in common? In the third millennium BCE, Sargon of Akkad created the world's first empire and located his capital city on the Euphrates in what is now Iraq. Since his time, Babylonia has been a magnet for warriors, prophets, poets, and priests in search of conquest or meaning. Alison Acker Gruseke, a Ph.D. candidate in religious studies at Yale, will focus on a particular remnant of those journeys: a cuneiform tablet inscribed with the legend of Sargon's birth, its links to the story of the infant Moses in his basket on the Nile, and the ways in which geography, religion, and history contribute to the making of meaning in texts from the past and present.