Questions re the Mesopotamian Influence in the Hebrew Bible

Let’s look a little more closely at the parallels between the Judean literature (canonical and pseudepigraphical) and that of Mesopotamia to see what might have been going between them. It’s one thing to say that we can see signs of Mesopotamian written records in Judean writings but a critical question to ask is by what means, how, the one came in contact with and influenced the other. That is the particular question Seth Sanders explores in chapter 5 of From Adapa to Enoch. I will highlight a few of the points he raises.

Esarhaddon Inspires Yahweh

Here is an adaptation of the chart from pages 171-172:

Did the author of the Deuteronomy passage have a copy of the vassal treaty before him? It is unlikely. It does not appear so. Deuteronomy is evidently not a translation at any rate.

Were these simply ancient Near Eastern clichés? Furthermore, while the Hebrew-Assyrian parallels have long been assumed to derive from historical contact, questions remain about the social and physical locations of contact, especially if the thesis of literary translation is unsustainable. A convincing account requires a plausible, well-documented mode of transmission.

Examining whole parallel passages side by side in light of known patterns of textual transmission in the ancient Near East suggests that rather than cuneiform and papyrus, the relationship between the two texts can most plausibly be explained by memory transmission, based on the oral performance of the curses in a ceremony of the sort required in VTE. (p. 173)

From pages 174-175:

Such treaties were lodged in temples throughout Middle Eastern cities where Assyria held sway.

Again, memory is offered as the preferred explanation for the similarities:

The combination of uniquely Assyrian thematic clusters with significantly different wordings in the two texts is best explained by memories of an Assyrian original which provided the basis of a new Hebrew composition. Recent work in the composition and transmission of texts in cuneiform, Egyptian, and North-West Semitic writing cultures shows the important and varying role of memory. Paul DelNero (2012) has demonstrated how key educational texts – but not all literature – in Sumerian were learned then recalled in varying ways, and therefore reproduced differently than visually copied texts in the Old Babylonian period. . . .

Among the typical features of memory transmission DelNero pointed out are omission or shortening, the loss of proper names and specific numbers, and a tendency to update and recontextualize, replacing elements that did not seem logical to the readers with material that better fit their experience, or substituting familiar expressions for more archaic language. Each of these seems to be at play, along with literary and poetic elaboration, in the Deuteronomy parallels to VTE. But what situations would give rise to such memories and reinventions?

With the geographic expansion of the empire, Assyrian rulers aspired to control broad groups without the direct use of military force. One concrete result of this was the increasing elaboration of the vassal treaty, the earliest surviving written texts of which appear in the ninth century. This imperial genre was designed to impress itself on the minds, memories, and behavior of its chief subjects. It did not just present the king’s power, but mandated a role for local rulers and people through public performance and spoken ritual. In the oath that the Assyrian kings required of conquered rulers, a group standing in for the whole population ritually took part in the oath, uttering scripted responses. They are addressed by the words of the treaty, commanded and threatened along with the vassal ruler. And they speak as “we” in the ritual portion, taking the treaty’s political obligations on themselves as a whole. (pp. 176 f)

Again, the similarities do not look like direct copying or translating:

The text of Deuteronomy 28 gives no sign that its creators chose to draw on any physical text or careful translation to create their curses – instead they created a text that never mentions Assyria and echoes Neo-Assyrian curses only in clusters. The Neo-Assyrian source of Deuteronomy 28 is a constellation of loose but indisputably connected memories, most plausibly configured in Hebrew in the late Iron Age when the genre of loyalty-oath was politically potent. (p. 179)

I wonder, though, if there is something missing here in Sanders analysis. My understanding of the evidence is that there is nothing to corroborate this form of worship in the pre-exilic period and that the archaeological record opens up questions about the existence of the sort of social stratification and infrastructure necessary for the support of a scribal class that would produce such literature in the pre-exilic kingdom of Judah. (The story of Josiah’s discovery of the book of Deuteronomy has little to commend it as history — unless there have been significant discoveries since I last took up any extensive reading around the topic.) Sanders is hewing to the conventional wisdom; an alternative thought about the inspiration for the adapting of an Assyrian vassal treaty as above was posted at The Law of Moses, a Reflection of the Law that Condemned Socrates and Other Greek Philosophers.

Exodus, Hammurabi and the Ox

Again, an adaptation from a chart on pages 179-180:

The laws of Hammurabi are widely known but in fact the Exodus passage has more detailed parallels with the law code of Eshnunna that dates before Hammurabi.

Here an explanation for the closely matching details between two texts originally separated by many centuries is readily at hand.

The type of legal proclamation which LH represents was originally a public demonstration of justice on the part of a new king. By the late Iron Age [Laws of Hammurabi] had become a school-text in Mesopotamian scribal culture, no longer serving a political function. (p. 181)

In earlier posts we have addressed the later Judean literature, too: the Astronomical Book of Enoch and the Aramaic Levi Document. I find the following point of Sanders telling in the context of thinking through an alternative hypothesis:

We have already examined the evidence of the Astronomical Book and Aramaic Levi Document and here it suffices to emphasize two final points. First, as we have seen, the Babylonian scholarly material found in the AB and Levi has been integrated into the text in same way as earlier Babylonian legal and political material was integrated into the prior texts of the Pentateuch – by framing it in a narrative about an early founding figure. (p. 188)

Do we not observe exactly the same process with the earlier Mesopotamian material, the law codes and vassal treaties? As Enoch and Levi are used in new narrative frames for certain texts, so Moses and Yahweh are used as the new narrative frames for early political and legal texts.

Do we not see here evidence of a very similar process between the activity of the “canonical author” and that of the pseudepigraphical author?

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that the two types of texts were composed within the same historical milieu?

Rather than “a shift in genre from political to esoteric content” with implications that the two are separated by major political upheavals, exile and return, etc. (Sanders, p. 188), why not propose the two are operating in the same world, whether in competition or in progressive dialogue?

I have not covered Sanders’ earlier chapter in which he engages with the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel is seen as a link to the “pseudepigraphical” literature with its themes of trance, divinely powered transportation, the observation of measurements made by divine beings. The subject matter clearly resonated since we encounter interest in the same themes of measurements, of astronomy, divine ordering of history, in Qumran texts.

But a couple of pages earlier Sanders does make a comment that I think might support this “radical” viewpoint:

Unlike both Judahite and Mesopotamian scribal cultures, which retained a focus on native kings long after their regimes fell, Aramaic literature does not remember native kingship. Instead of tracing a lineage back to the Akkad period, with Sargon, or the early Iron Age with Saul, David, and Solomon, known Aramaic literature begins its political memories with other people’s empires. (p. 186 )

Here is the catch.

The stories of David have been argued as clearly deriving from the Persian matrix. See, for example, the five posts on this page.

The stories of David and Solomon were not looking back to a lost past, but were rather, more likely in my current view, created out of Persian era motifs. A past for returnees was being created, not remembered. Sanders writes:

The patterns of the [Astronomical Book of Enoch] and [Testament of Levi] take on added significance because they correlate with the limited but clear attested evidence of Aramaic adaptation of Babylonian textual material during the Persian period. (p. 194)

One can argue, I believe, the same for the stories of David. Stories of David do not contain any evidence, as far as I am aware, of a harking back to earlier times and reliance upon figures and events in the period of around 1000 BCE.

Sanders writes concerning the Aramaic script,

Perhaps the most remarkable change that the linear alphabet in its Aramaic form on parchment underwent was turning the tables on cuneiform. By the Hellenistic period it replaced cuneiform as the default writing system in many parts of the Near East. (p. 195)

Sanders posits a Near Eastern spread of scribal culture through the medium of Aramaic:

Pervasive in the training of writers all over the ancient Near East by the fifth century, Aramaic was a scribal culture whose power resided precisely in the fact that it did not seem like a culture at all.

The invisibility of Aramaic scribal culture helps explain what Babylonian and Judean scribes came to share in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Already in the Neo-Assyrian period intellectual traditions that had long been written down in the time-honored medium of cuneiform on clay were routinely translated and explained in Aramaic . . . . (p. 196)

At least by the Persian era,

Babylonian scribal culture was no longer marked as foreign knowledge. It was now simply scholarship, their own unmarked universal heritage as experts and scholars. (p. 196)

Questions remain. But the scope for answers is surely wider than that of the conventional wisdom.

Sanders, Seth L. 2017. From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.

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