Complete collapse

Broadly speaking, the collapse of the Assyrian Empire was one of the most sudden and absolute in history: some provinces were already in a state of profound crisis while others retained a measure of vitality, but Assyria itself suffered a vertical crash. The most densely urbanized and populated region, the great cities, and the infrastructure of irrigation were all transformed into a desert. The process common to other empires, which after their collapse survive as “commonwealths”— that is, as cultural, linguistic and religious communities—does not apply to Assyria.—Mario Liverani, Assyria: The Imperial Mission, 258

<idle musing>
That's it for this book. It really is a great book, but it didn't lend itself well to extractions. I highly recommend it for understanding how empires, not just the Assyrian one, work.

Not sure what I'll be excerpting from next. I've been reading Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular as well as Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah. Oh, and at the local bookstore, I picked up a used copy of Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw, but that doesn't lend itself well to excerpting, so it probably won't show up here.

As if that weren't enough, I checked out of the library the third book of the Wingfeather Saga. I read the first two way back in 2020 during Covid on the recommendation of a friend. Delightful books, but I got sidetracked and am only now coming back to finish the series. And, I'm editing a few books. Most of the summer was spent editing the forthcoming Eerdmans NICOT volume on Daniel 1–6. It's a monster at around 400K words! Between that and the garden, it's been a pretty busy summer. But, with the garden winding down, I'm looking forward to more reading time. We'll see how that works out : )
</idle musing>

Assyria, remorse, and fools

In a previous study, I suggested that the Assyrians, who were required to provide men for wars and expeditions from which not everyone returned, needed reassurance In relation to two problems that have always confronted soldiers in war: fear of death (open, self-evident) and repugnance of or remorse (more subliminal) for killing fellow human beings.

To counteract the fear of death, Assyrian records relate that enemies die, and their deaths are counted in the hundreds and thousands; Assyrian losses are always omitted. Remorse for killing, buried deep in the human conscience, is exorcised by the conviction that the Assyrians are not to blame for these deaths. Instead, the enemies who foolishly oppose the universal order are at fault; they are the ones who began hostilities (or at least provoked war with their attitude): they force us to kill them. There is no shortage of modern and contemporary parallels.—Mario Liverani, Assyria: The Imperial Mission, 89

<idle musing>
I had read bits and pieces of this book over the years. Back before it was published, Jim forwarded the introduction to me, which immediately sold me on how important a book it is. Because I was the marketing guy at Eisenbrauns at the time, I made sure that the introduction was posted to the book's page. I figured that anyone who read the introduction would want to read the whole thing. It's still posted; you can find it here.

We'll only dip lightly into the book for the next week or two, but if you are at all interested in empire or the Assyrians, this is an excellent resource. So many of the succeeding empires learned from the Assyrians—both positively and negatively!
</idle musing>

And even then…

This inability to live more than one tradition at a time means that in a crucial and, truth be told, rather sobering sense, even the central patterns of reasoning in one tradition—as that tradition understands them—will not be understood in another. Moreover, insofar as we do not participate in the alien tradition we seek to query, we cannot know what it is that we do not know. Short of conversion, we are literally shut out of one by the life we live in another. Rival rationalities are not surmountable by learning.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 204

<idle musing>
And that should make us humble. And cause us to lower our expectations on what we can discover about the past. Part of it will always be unretrievable. No matter how much we dig up or how much we read, the past is still the past and much of it is beyond our grasp.
</idle musing>

How do I get out of this mess?

Since the ancients typically believed that their suffering was the result of the god’s anger, they naturally sought to appease that anger. Appeasement could theoretically be accomplished by the identification of the offense and the offering of an appropriate sacrifice. A clear example of this procedure is found in the Hittite Plague Prayers of Murshili II. In response to the severe plague that decimated his kingdom over several decades, he asked the gods the reason for the disastrous conditions. The results of divinations eventually allowed him to identify offenses both in the cultic realm and in treaty violations by his father. His plea to the gods shows the appeasement mentality. “If the servant has incurred a guilt, but confesses his guilt to his master, his master may do with him as he likes. But because he has confessed..., his master’s heart is satisfied, and he will not punish that servant. I have now confessed ... the sin; ... restitution has been made twenty fold.... If you demand additional restitution from me, just tell me about it in a dream, and I will give it.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 287

Imperialism takes many forms

It is clear, then, that sensitivity to the poetics of ancient historiography complicates both critical scholars’ dismissal of the validity of biblical historiography and confessional scholars’ apologetic approaches and doctrinal convictions. Critical scholarship needs to rethink its imperialistic and anachronistic imposition of modern standards and values on ancient texts. Confessional scholars need to rethink precisely what constitutes the truth of the text that they seek to defend in light of the text's own poetics and perspectives. In this light N. Winther-Nielsen sounds the death knell for the popular activities of proving and disproving the Bible that have prevailed in academia since the Enlightenment. "All current and past history writing will call on our hermeneutical trust, and the days of confessionalist, positivist, or minimalist absolute ’proof' are gone forever. [N. Winther-Nielsen, "Fact, Fiction, and Language Use" in Windows into Old Testament History]

No amount of empirical information is able to accomplish that end. The extent to which deity is involved in events or outcomes can never be either verified or falsified empirically. Our dogged empiricism betrays us. The texts offer a different sort of testimony that we must respect.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 209

Who is talking to whom?

Ancient Near Eastern historiography desired to reveal the king to the people and to the deity. Israelite historiography desired to reveal the Deity to the king and the people. Here we have an important reversal similar to that which has been noted in other chapters. In Israel the historiography purports to be communication from the Deity, whereas in the ancient Near East the royal inscriptions serve as communication to the deity. Consequently, the audience is neither future kings nor the gods——it is the people of the covenant: ”Then you will know that l, Yahweh, am God——there is no other.”—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 207

Facts? Who needs 'em?

The historiography of the ancient Near East, whether represented in royal inscriptions or chronicles, king lists or annals, has by all accounts a polemical agenda that is intended to reinforce the royal political ideology. As in the campaign speeches of our day, facts can be useful, but they are not central or essential. The intention of the preserved records is to serve not the reader but the king. The recorder is trying to provide answers to the question: “Why should you consider this king to be a good and successful king?” In most cases it cannot be determined whether concealment and/or disinformation are part of the strategy, but negative information is uniformly lacking. We do receive negative assessments of some kings, but, as we might expect, they come from later dynasties seeking to enhance their own reputations.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 203

Why?

When we consider similarities and differences between the ancient cultural river and our own, we must be alert to the dangers of maintaining an elevated View of our own superiority or sophistication as a contrast to the naïveté or primitiveness of others. Identification of differences should not imply ancient inferiority. Our rationality may not be their rationality, but that does not mean that they were irrational. Their ways of thinking should not be thought of as primitive or prehistorical. We seek to understand their texts and culture, not to make value judgments on them.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 7

<idle musing>
We're starting a new book today, John Walton's Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd edition. The first edition was very good, but this second edition is even better. If you an interest in the ANE backgrounds to the OT, then this is the book to get!

I hope you enjoy the extracts over the next couple of weeks. Oh, and special thanks to Jeremy Wells at Baker for giving me a copy!
</idle musing>

Lego Classicists?

I didn't know there was such a thing as Lego Classicists! But this showed up on Eisenbrauns Twitter feed today!

Boring?

Charles Halton has a delightful read on the first known poet over at LitHub. Here's a snippet to whet your appetite:

Have you met a professor of Mesopotamian studies? There are only a couple dozen or so of us scattered around the world, but we are very strange individuals. Meet one of us in person, and you may discover that we can hardly string together a coherent sentence. We stare at our hands and speak a German-English patois that neither the Germans nor the English can decipher. Our social problems must have begun in grad school; holing up by ourselves in small, windowless library carrels for hours on end reading the teeny tiny wedges the Mesopotamians etched into clay does something to our brains. In any case, we have an almost divine-like ability to take ultra-fascinating ideas and make them slightly less exciting than a traffic ticket. This is not the skill you need when trying to present the results of your research to a Netflix-addled public.

<idle musing>
I love it! And the worst of it is that he's correct!
</idle musing>

Stop the chaos!

Although defense against aggressors is an easily understood casus belli today, the idea of protection against chaos is more difficult for us to grasp. Contrary to the belief of many today that each person should allow others to possess their own personal narrative without any critique, the people of the ancient Near East thought that the world should be ordered in a certain way and a change in that order brought chaos. Even if this chaos happened outside the nation’s boundaries, it threatened the order of the entire world and needed to be dealt with before it spread and affected other areas.—Charlie Trimm in Fighting for God and King: A Topical Survey of Warfare in the Ancient Near East, SBL Press, forthcoming

But nothing like this

Sometimes [in the ancient Near Eastern prophecies], mild criticism of the king is combined with grandiose promises, when the prophets remind the king of his duties toward the gods, their temples and priests, as well as toward his subjects. This criticism, however, is very different from the fundamental doubts about the cultic system or the existing social order as we find them in the Hebrew Bible.—The Prophets of Israel, page 15

Speaking of ANE backgrounds...

The previous post spoke of the ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to the prosperity gospel—tongue firmly in cheek, of course. But, there is a serious resource that just became available today: The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. The notes in the Old Testament are based on the Zondervan monster 5-volume Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary on the Old Testament and the New Testament is from the IVP equivalent.

I was given a copy of the Bible to review, but don't have time to write up a full-blown one right now. I will say this, though: It is a well-done condensation of the bigger versions.

<Rabbit trail>
Generally, I'm not a fan of study Bibles for the simple reason that people equate the inspiration of the scriptural text with the notes.

Don't believe me? Actual experience...I was in a Bible study one time and they were debating what the text meant. One person (a pastor!) asked someone, "What does your Bible say?" and the person read the notes, not the text. The pastor responding by reading the notes in his study Bible! Ouch! No disclaimer that these were simply notes. The assumption was that they had authority because they were on the same page as the sacred text.
</Rabbit trail>

OK, with that note aside, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this Bible to anyone as a reference. (I don't recommend it as your reading Bible—but as you probably guessed, I wouldn't recommend any study Bible as your reading Bible.) In fact, I've already added it to the bibliography of the seminar I teach for YWAM on the ANE backgrounds to the OT. So, two thumbs up to Zondervan for a good resource (and thanks to Emily Varner for the promo copy)!

The womb as tomb

I'm in the process of reading The Overturned Boat right now. I wasn't aware of the following:

Birth incantations aid the woman in labour to break free the “boat” from the darkness of womb, to wash out the baby bound by the umbilical cord to the “quay of death” (Stol 2000: 69). The following recitation is intended for a woman having difficulty in giving birth:

The boat is detained at the quay of death; the magurru boat is held back at the quay of hardship. ... May it come out from hardship; [may it see] the sun (Scurlock 2014: 601, half brackets omitted).

The association between the drowning boat and dying woman was used in scientific texts, e.g. in the apodosis of an Old Babylonian liver omen: “the full(y loaded) boat will sink; or: the pregnant woman will die in her giving birth” (Stol 2000: 62). Therefore the unborn baby in the womb that was too voluminous to be delivered could be regarded as being fatally locked in the netherworld prison, failing to find its way out from the amniotic fluids. Nobody except the divine exorcist Asalluhi could see what was inside of these waters (Frymer-Kensky 1977: 603). In the following Old Babylonian incantation, the locks and doors are broken down to let the baby out:

In the waters of intercourse, the bone was created; in the flesh of muscles, the baby was created. In the ocean waters, fearsome, raging, in the far-off waters of the sea: where the little one is – his arms are bound, inside which the eye of the sun does not bring light. Asalluhi, the son of Enki, saw him. He loosed his tight-bound bonds, he made him a path, he opened him a way: “Opened are the paths for you, the ways are [alo]tted for you. The [divine mid]wife is sitting for you, she who creates [...], she who creates us all. She has spoken to the doorbolt: ‘You are released’. Removed are the locks, the doors are thrown aside. Let him knock at [the door], like a fish (dadum), bring yourself out!”

Those who are not released are detained in the ordeal prison, which prevents them to advance to the world of the living. In the Maqlû incantations the terms “ford, entrance” (nēberu) and “quay” (kāru) are used for such places of detention. The exorcist binds the witches and their sorceries to remain there (I 50-51):

Incantation: I have blocked the ford, I have blocked the quay, I have blocked their sorceries (coming) from all the lands!

The exorcist intends to prevent the entrance of the witches to the world of the living, leaving them eternally blocked on the “quay of death”. The opposite is the case in exorcistic birth incantations where the child is expected to become delivered from the “quay of hardship” to the world of the living (BAM 248 I 44-50):

“The boat is detained [at the quay] of narrowness (pušqi), the magurru-boat is held back [at the quay] of hardship. [Whom should I] send to merciful Marduk? May the boat be loosed [from the quay] of difficulty, may the magurru-boat be freed [from the quay] of hardship. [Come out to me] like a snake; slither out to me like a snake. May the woman having difficulty having birth bring (her pregnancy) to term so that the infant may fall to the earth and see the sunlight” (Scurlock 2014: 595, 601).

In comparison to Maqlû passage, the birth incantations intend to achieve just the opposite – to release the unborn bodies from the “quay”. The same Akkadian verb for “holding back” (kalû) is used in both contexts. This difference is related to the positive and negative outcomes in the reintegration stage that is crucial for the Self going through a religious experience. While child’s birth assures the positive integration of the Self from the point of view of a healthy mother and her baby, the witches and demons experience a failure in their binding process and remain stuck at the quay of death, unable to leave the netherworld.— The Overturned Boat, pages 52–53

<idle musing>
Fascinating, isn't it? This is a very interesting book, if you are into ANE religion, that is. Some of the stuff is highly speculative and reminds me somewhat of reading the early 20th century history of religions—which I love to read, but take with a pound of salt : )

Anyway, here's the details on the book:

The Overturned Boat
Intertextuality of the Adapa Myth and Exorcist Literature
State Archives of Assyria Studies - SAAS 24
by Amar Annus
Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project - NATCP, 2016
Pp. xii + 148, English
Paper, 17.5 x 25 cm
ISBN: 9789521094910
Your Price: $59.00
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/ANNOVERTU

Now it's off to clean a few cabins...
</idle musing>

What would the early church do?

Yesterday SCOTUS decided that same-sex marriages were legal. So, I ask, "What would the early church have done if the emperor had allowed same-sex marriages?"

You think this is unique to the United States and a few other countries? That we have (depending on your perspective) advanced/declined beyond any other civilization?

Hardly! The ancient world knew a good bit about sexuality—the sexual revolution of the 1960s has nothing on them. Why did Achilles in the Iliad get so mad about the death of Patrocles? It certainly wasn't because they were merely comrades! They were lovers. Or, have you heard of the Theban Band of 300? They were gay lovers who formed the core of the Theban army that dominated Greece for a while. Or what about Alexander the Great? He had his male lover. Or Julius Caesar? His troops had him as the butt of a joke about infamia—the passive role in homosexual sex. Or Marcus Arurelius? Or...well the list is long.

OK. Those are relationships. But what about marriage? Well, that wasn't all that uncommon either. Check out the wiki article, which seems pretty accurate.

OK. But what would the apostles say? Surely Paul—or Peter especially—would call down judgment on the emperor if he declared same-sex marriages legal! Guess what? Nero, you know the emperor who beheaded Paul and crucified Peter, was married to another man, not once, but twice! Once as the groom, and again as the bride. And probably at the same time. So, bigamy besides. You can read about it in Suetonius here, chapter XXIX.

And what do we hear from the apostles? No especial condemnation, just the generic condemnation of sexual sins of all types. There isn't any wringing of hands, worries that the world as we know it is ending. Just a proclamation of the Good News that God in Christ has come to redeem us and set us free from sin. All sin. Sexual sins. Greed. Lying. Cheating. Murder. Envy. Gluttony. All of them.

As for whether or not homosexuality is a sin, the Bible is very clear about it. It is. Period. But it isn't listed as any worse than lying, cheating, stealing, divorce, etc. All are sins. And Christ came to set us free from them.

So our response should be the same. The world needs the freedom from self that only Christ can bring. As Christians, we have the responsibility to live in that freedom ourselves and proclaim it by our lives and words to those around us. And, above all, to love others with a selfless love.

Is it ever complicated...

Curses cause disease. An Akkadian incantation against sorcery makes the following observation: u2-ša-aṣ-bit-an-ni GIG-su lim-nu ša2 ṣi-bit ma-mit ‘She (the kaššaptu) has imposed on me her evil disease caused by the attack of a curse’. Other texts also show that diseases caused by supernatural agents, which strictly speaking cannot be killed, are readily managed with maledictions. The idea here is to separate and then dismiss both the disease and the supernatural agents to the correct place and make sure that they stay there.... The use of a peg (Sum., gag, line 197) is instructive. According to lines 207/208, this is the vector that will carry the disease into the earth. One suspects that in order to achieve this outcome the peg was nailed into the ground at the conclusion of the ritual.

Due to the verbal shift from the second person (207/208) to the first person (209–10), we may additionally speculate that the closing curse was uttered as the incantation specialist pounded the peg into the earth. Such an act as this would constitute the formal transferral of the disease demon into the ground but not necessarily its departure from the created world. The malediction “May you leave!” still depends on the cooperation of the “great gods” to coerce the diʾiu disease to depart. The reference to KI as the underworld would make an infinite amount of sense because disease demons cannot die. Even so, they can be expelled to the Netherworld, which is of course equivalent to “death” for these supernatural beings. It still remains that, in order for these hostile forces to get there, they must be disengaged from the victim, attached to a vector, and finally dispatched to a place where they will be restricted so that they can no longer do harm. Separation is consequently a necessary intermediate state that must be fully achieved before the harmful powers can even be sent to the underworld.— Cursed Are You!, pages 216-17

<idle musing>
Wow. Talk about complicated. No wonder Jesus said that the truth would set you free! He takes care of all that because he is Lord of all (to borrow from the other book I'm excerpting from, World Upside Down).
</idle musing>

What's with the delay?

OK, here we go again. We've got Ben-Hadad coming back to battle the next year with a stronger army—fewer kings and more soldiers. Too many managers in the old one, I guess : ) Anyway, we've got this tiny little Israelite army surrounded by the Arameans—don't you love the poetic way that the Bible puts it?

Here's the rub. If the Israelite army is so outnumbered and outgunned, why do the Arameans wait seven days? You would think they would join battle right away. Again, the commentaries I consulted ignored it. Here's the text:

So in the spring of the year, Ben-hadad assembled the Arameans and marched up to Aphek to fight with Israel. Now the Israelites had already been assembled and provisioned, so they went to engage the Arameans. The Israelites camped before them like two small flocks of goats, but the Arameans filled the land.

Then the man of God came forward and said to Israel’s king, “This is what the Lord says: Because the Arameans said that the Lord is a god of the mountains but not a god of the valleys, I am handing this whole great army over to you. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”

The two armies camped opposite each other for seven days. On the seventh day, the battle began. The Israelites attacked and destroyed one hundred thousand Aramean foot soldiers in a single day. 1 Kings 20:26–29 CEB

<idle musing>
Well, I have a tentative answer (you knew that was coming, didn't you!). As I repeatedly say, in the ancient world, no battle was ever fought without consulting the gods. My theory is that the omens were bad. Bad omens, no battle.

Don't underestimate the psychological power of bad omens in the ancient world (or in the modern one, either—just take a look at the sports world...). Consider the interpretation of the Midianite dream in the story of Gideon (Judges 7:13–14); bad omen/portent = disaster.

I submit that the Arameans were waiting for good omens and the Israelites were waiting for the prophets to say it was time to attack...what do you think? Got a better idea? Just an
</idle musing>

More books!

I received two more recent books from Eisenbrauns last week but forgot to mention them (thanks, Jim!).

Feasting in the Archaeology and Texts of the Bible and the Ancient Near East

Edited by Peter Altmann and Janling Fu
Eisenbrauns, 2014
xii + 303 pp., English
Paper
ISBN: 9781575063232
List Price: $47.50
Your Price: $42.75
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/ALTFEASTI

The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose
Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic - LSAWS 9
by Hélène Dallaire
Eisenbrauns, 2014
xii + 250 pages, English
Cloth, 6 x 9 inches
ISBN: 9781575063072
List Price: $49.50
Your Price: $44.55
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/DALSYNTAX

I'm looking forward to reading them. You will probably be reading excerpts from both of them sometime this winter : )

Of kudurrus and massebot

Sometimes the weirdest thoughts come my way...

We use some very large rocks in places to mark where people can and can't park. We're talking 20–30 pound rocks. We don't want them to be moving around : )

Well, twice this summer, guests have moved them. Once, it was raining and they wanted to park closer to their front door. So they moved a rock about 3 feet to get through. And another time someone wanted to park another car behind them, so they moved 3 rocks about 15 feet to make the parking space bigger.

OK, what's so strange about that? Well nothing, except the first thing I thought of was kudurru stones...OK, not a perfect match in that I haven't inscribed the rocks—yet : )

Maybe a better match would be from Proverbs 22:28 or 23:10, after all, the rocks are bit bigger than the kudurru stones were...

There are a few rock gardens behind the bed & breakfast. Being rock gardens, the borders are of rock (duh!) and I have to mow around them. Well, this summer Max and Sherri have been rearranging the border rocks and standing some on end. The first time I came across that, I couldn't help but think of the massebot in the Hebrew Bible (there's a good book about the ones in Jordan here: Megalithic Jordan). Sure, they're shorter, but...well the mind does strange things when you've studied ancient stuff too long!

Just an
</idle musing>

Thought for a Friday

Paganism sees existence as a struggle between chaos and order, with chaos being “bad” and order being “good.” These two principles have always existed and always will, and we simply need to face the fact that disorder, evil, is as necessary a part of existence as order, good, is. It is all right to attempt to maximize order and to minimize disorder, but disorder is always going to be there, and you are just going to have to learn the tricks to try to hold it at bay. So the universe is full of these forces of disorder. To all of that the Old Testament says a resounding “No!” Evil is nothing more nor less than the results of a refusal to submit to the creative purposes of our Father. In the sense that He made a world where that refusal is possible, He is responsible for the existence of evil in the world. That means that when you face the realm of evil within you and without, He is the only One you need to deal with, and if you have Him in the right place in your life, you can forget about your fears.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 345