Old Babylonian literary tablets implied that the divinity of the king reflected the vital role he had to play to ensure an ordered cosmos in the face of divine unpredictability. The texts, however, registered an underlying unease at having to rely on the king’s ability to restrain his own destructive tendencies. Looking at how divine government was portrayed, I will focus on four themes: the nature of the divine regime itself, primeval acts of creation that provided a charter for all subsequent cosmic order, individual divine decrees dealing with specific issues, and the way in which human institutions derived their inspiration from the divine world.
As legitimate sovereignty in the material world of ancient Mesopotamia was always envisaged as monarchic, it might be expected that sovereignty in the divine world would be too. But surprisingly in the Old Babylonian literary tablets there was no clear head of the divine pantheon. Supreme cosmic power was held by both the sky god, An, and the patron deity of the city of Nippur, Enlil, with little attempt to harmonize this apparent discrepancy. Cosmic sovereignty was imagined in terms of a number of gods rather than one alone: a dyarchy of An and Enlil together; a triumvirate of An, Enlil, and Enki, the god of wisdom; a tetrarchy of An, Enlil, Enki, and a mother goddess, either Ninmah or Ninhursag; or the totality of all the gods meeting in assembly.
None of these versions of divine government came with strong connotations of stable cosmic order. The sky god An was something of a cipher. Enlil certainly wielded force, but tended to do so in a destructive manner such as unleashing either the flood as in Atra-hasis or barbarian invaders as in Cursing of Agade (Foster 1993a: 158-201; Black et al. 1998-: 2.1.5). Enlil could be characterized more in terms of his absence from human life than his presence. The composition called Enlil and Ninlil imagined ordered human life in the city of Nippur as possible only when Enlil vacated the city (Black et al. 1998-: 1.2.1). As a team, An and Enlil’s word was often characterized as unchangeable, but some contexts suggested it was both unfathomable and erratic.
In a similar manner, Old Babylonian depictions of divine actions at the dawn of time did little to suggest a settled cosmos. Neither of the putative heads of the pantheon, An or Enlil, was shown creating ordered space in the manner familiar to us from Yahweh’s actions at the beginning of the Biblical book of Genesis. In the Song of the Hoe Enlil was depicted as separating heaven from earth (Black et al. 1998-: 5.5.4). But his only contribution to social and cultural order was to create that most versatile of implements, the hoe. This gave humanity the potential to create its own social and cultural order, but by no means guaranteed it. The efforts of other gods at primeval organization were more far-reaching, but essentially flawed. Both
Enki and his realm, the Abzu, the mythological subterranean ocean of fresh water, were closely associated with the qualities of intelligence and rational thinking. They would therefore obviously have had a role to play in any conception of cosmic order. Indeed, in Enki and the World Order, Enki organized the primeval world and delegated the responsibility for each facet of that organization to a specific deity (Black et al. 1998-: 1.1.3). However, he subverted his own efforts by assigning the wilful goddess Inana the role of negating all that he had achieved. Ninurta, the son of Enlil, imposed order on foreign lands in the poem the Exploits of Ninurta, but achieved no such imposition on the homeland itself (Black et al. 1998-: 1.6.2). Atra-hasis began with junior deities working the land (Foster 1993a: 158-201). Their work, however, was unfinished as they went on strike and their task was left to be completed by human hands.
Generally lacking imagery of either a steady hand on the tiller or primeval organization, Old Babylonian literary texts commonly presented the idea of cosmic order in terms of divine decrees. Their promulgation was usually termed ‘‘decreeing a destiny.’’ On rare occasions these decrees were visualized as a finite and predetermined set recorded on the ‘‘Tablet of Destinies’’ possessed by one of the major gods. More regularly, they were presented as a set of ad hoc declarations in response to particular events or prompted by petitions (George 1986; Polonsky 2002: 73-168).
In Old Babylonian thought divine inspiration of human institutions was encapsulated in the concept of the m e, the divine archetypes that underlay all aspects of civilized life. They could originate with An or Enlil, but more fittingly they were generally associated with Enki and the Abzu, the source of divine wisdom. One of the major agents of their transfer from the Abzu to the human realm was the goddess Inana. The process of transfer was celebrated in some detail in the composition Inana and Enki, which described how she brought the m e to her spouse Dumuzi and her city Uruk (Black et al. 1998-:1.3.1). While Inana’s explicit associations with the m e were constructive, her reputation for irrational behavior imbued her conveying ofthe m e with an ominous air. Furthermore, descriptions of the m e in human contexts often stressed the fragility of their integrity (Farber-Flugge 1973: 150-2).
The implications of these divine contributions to cosmic order were not comforting for humanity. The cosmos was characterized as an unpredictable and dangerous place. Humanity’s worst fears found expression in both the provoked and unprovoked anger of the gods. While offerings to the gods represented humanity’s fulfillment of its cosmic role, pleasing the gods was by no means simple. In Atra-hasis Enlil became hostile to humanity simply because the din of everyday life prevented him from sleeping (Foster 1993a: 158-201). He sent plague, famine, and drought to reduce humanity’s numbers. Each time, through the advice of Enki, people were able to target their offerings to the gods best able to alleviate their suffering. When Enlil finally coerced the rest of the gods into unleashing the ultimate divine weapon, the flood, even Enki was rendered powerless to intercede. He was able to arrange for only the survival of a single human family, that of Atra-hasis, the Babylonian Noah.
The unpredictability of unprovoked divine displeasure was well illustrated by the figure of Inana herself. In Enki and the World Order she was characterized as the power that could overturn any cosmic order (Black et al. 1998-: 1.1.3). Furthermore, Inana’s involvement also lent a degree of contingency to conceptions of the divine inspiration underlying human institutions.
The two modes of divine anger, provoked and unprovoked, were both found in Cursing of Agade (Black et al. 1998-: 2.1.5). King Naram-Sin attempted to gain a favorable omen to build a temple to Inana in his city of Akkad. Enlil, however, reacted with only silent displeasure. This set in train a course of events that led ultimately to the invasion of the land by the barbarian Gutians. Naram-Sin resolved to destroy Enlil’s temple. In retaliation, Enlil sent the barbarian hordes to obliterate the city of Akkad.
The nature of divine government and its implications required other means of countering the vagaries of the cosmos. There were numerous hymns to deities and temples that attempted to prompt a wide variety of gods and goddesses to exert their influence on their fellow divinities on humanity’s behalf. More strikingly, they used the figure of the king to evoke cosmic order. This provided the intellectual context for the king’s divinity. The nuances of the king’s role were conveyed by a subtle set of comparisons both positive and negative with various traditional deities.
The active aspect of his role in preventing the provocation of divine wrath involved a delicate balance. He had to ensure that human actions did not displease the gods and that the temples were provisioned without exercising undue force on his own subjects. This dilemma was reflected in comparisons of the king with two gods. The king was associated with the sun god (Polonsky 2002: 436-9, 471-529). This was expressed by Hammurabi (1792-1750 bce) in the prologue to his law code:
At that time, Anu and Enlil, for the enhancement of the well-being of the people, named me by my name, Hammurabi, the pious prince, who venerates the gods, to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to rise like the sun god over all humankind, to illuminate the land. (Roth 1997: 76-7)
The sun god was the divine judge. The sun god provided a role model for how the king should positively contribute to human order. Furthermore, the royal hymns often alluded to successful provisioning as a reason for the gods to reward the king with a good fate. It was the sun god who was imagined as presiding over the divine assembly as it met to pronounce its satisfaction or dissatisfaction with human actions through the medium of the innards of a sacrificed sheep (Polonsky 2002: 224-39).
Implicitly, however, a comparison of the king with an even more powerful deity loomed over Old Babylonian royal depictions. The warrior god Ninurta was often acclaimed as ‘‘king’’ in mythological texts. Furthermore, while contemporary royal inscriptions rarely alluded to royal warfare, Ninurta’s role of terrorizing or oppressing foreign lands was one for which many royal hymns frequently lauded the king. However, in the composition Ninurta’s Return to Nibru, Ninurta’s return from victories abroad caused a cosmic crisis as he toyed with challenging his father Enlil for supreme power (Black et al. 1998-:). The exercise of force and violence that was so necessary to deal with enemies abroad would only lead to chaos if turned upon the homeland (Jones in press).
The king’s task was to prevent enemies from harming the homeland by either destroying or subduing them. But the fragility of the king’s position in the face of external threat was conceptualized through his relationship with Inana. The king incarnated Dumuzi, the divine consort of Inana herself, and married the goddess in the sacred marriage ceremony. Most obviously, the power and capriciousness personified by Inana rendered the position of any spouse, divine or human, precarious (Jones 2003).
World History
