The fate of the ‘foreign’ gods in the Old Testament is to be re-duced to angel status and to sing the praises of Israel’s God. Or worse, according to Psalm 82. This, however, does not exhaust the limits of the reconceptualisation of polytheism within the Old Testament, as may be judged from the afterlife that it permits the ‘Council of the Gods’ or ‘Divine Council’.55The biblical pres-ence of this Divine Council is something more than ‘vestigial’. It is represented in the Pentateuch, the Former Prophets, the Lat-ter Prophets, Psalms, Job and Daniel, sometimes expressly and sometimes implicitly.
As we have already noted, it can no longer be claimed that the Old Testament was unique in envisaging the admission of humans to the Divine Council.56 Mari text 208 recounts a dis-cussion among the gods in Ea’s circle, while text 196 portrays Dagan passing judgment on Tishpak, the god of Eshnunna, in the Divine Council, both occasions being witnessed by the prophets who reported them. On the earthly plane, the Babylonian b¯arˆu diviners were admitted to the royal court when their services were required, and it is a reasonable supposition that it was the experience of the diviners at the level of the earthly court that led to the idea not only of diviners but also of prophets being admitted to the divine court.57 Actual participation in concil-iar decisions in Mesopotamian texts was very much the preserve of the gods themselves. So, already in the Sumerian flood story the decision of the gods in Council to destroy humanity is de-scribed as a ‘final sentence’ (di-til-la, a term borrowed from the Sumerian courtroom).58Decisions of the gods in Council had to be confirmed by an oath at the start or end, or both, of the an-nounced decision. There was no going back, as was discovered by Ningal when she tried to save Ur from destruction:
55Cf. E.T. Mullen, The Assembly of the Gods: The Divine Council in Ca-naanite and Early Hebrew Literature (HSM, 24), Chico 1980.
56Cf. Gordon, ‘From Mari to Moses’, 71-4.
57See the writer in ‘Where Have All the Prophets Gone? The “Disap-pearing” Israelite Prophet Against the Background of Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy’, BBR 5 (1995), 78-9.
58See M. Civil, ‘The Sumerian Flood Story’, in: W.G. Lambert, A. R.
Millard, Atra-h
˘¯as¯ıs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood, Oxford 1969, 142 (iv 158).
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 63
May my city not be destroyed, I said to them.
May Ur not be destroyed.
May its people not be killed . . .
But there was no favourable response from Anu or Enlil.59 Once the decision of the gods in Council was reached, there was no op-portunity for review. Even less was it open to humans to interfere in the decisions of the Council.
While there is evidence in the Mari texts of prophet figures being allowed to witness Council proceedings, there is none that suggests that they participated or in any way questioned the de-crees that eventuated. In Ugarit kings seem to have participated in gatherings of their deified ancestors, and similar phenomena have been observed elsewhere.60 An intercessory role has been claimed for the Balaam of the Deir Alla text,61 but this much is not clear from the text itself. It appears that Balaam weeps and fasts after witnessing the gods in Council,62 but that is a different matter from participation in Council proceedings.
In the Old Testament, prophets not only witness but may on occasion take part in the Divine Council. Micaiah is merely a spectator in relation to the curious goings-on that are described in 1 Kings 22. Isaiah, on the other hand, not only interrupts the proceedings of the heavenly court with his confession of unclean-ness, but also offers his services as messenger and seeks clari-fication as regards the time-range of the message that he is to announce (Isa. 6:1-13; esp. vv. 5, 8, 11). Those who revocalise rm'a;w“(‘And he [or “one”] said’) in Isa. 40:6 to rm'aow:(‘And I said’;
cf. 1QIsa,Ì) envisage prophetic participation in the proceedings
59See ‘Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur’ in ANET, 458; cf. T. Jac-obsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, New Haven 1976, 86.
60Cf. De Moor, The Rise of Yahwism2, 317-61; Idem, ‘Seventy!’, in: M.
Dietrich, I. Kottsieper (eds), “Und Mose schrieb dieses Lied auf ”: Studien zum Alten Testament und zum Alten Orient (Fs O. Loretz), M¨unster 1998, 199-203.
61See H.-P. M¨uller, ‘Die aram¨aische Inschrift von DeirAlla und die ¨alteren Bileamspr¨uche’, ZAW 94 (1982), 214-44 (242); M. Dijkstra, ‘Is Balaam also among the Prophets?’, JBL 114 (1995), 43-64 (52).
62See M. Weippert, ‘The Balaam Text from DeirAlla and the Study of the Old Testament’, in: J. Hoftijzer, G. van der Kooij (eds), The Balaam Text from Deir Alla Re-evaluated: Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Leiden 21-24 August 1989, Leiden 1991, 167-9.
of a Divine Council meeting at which an anonymous figure in the Isaiah tradition is commissioned with a message for the returning exiles.63Zech. 3:5, as pointed in the˜, has the prophet contribute a sentence to the proceedings when he asks that a clean turban be placed on Joshua the high priest’s head.
A different level of engagement is represented in the visionary experiences of Amos 7. There is no direct mention of the Divine Council here, except the possible hint inrm'aow:(‘and I said’) in the first two visions (vv. 2, 5). Indeed, it would hardly be possible to have a conventional Council session in these two visions, since they incorporate acted out judgments upon Israel, in the locust attack on the crops and the destruction of the land by fire (vv. 2, 4).64Nevertheless, it is difficult to divorce the Amos visions from the world of the Divine Council. If not Amos himself, an early interpreter of his sees this kind of experience as God’s revealing of his plan (dwsø) to his prophet-servant (3:7); and the point of the previews in ch. 7 is that they give the prophet the opportunity to intercede on behalf of his endangered people. Here the God of Israel condescends to being entreated and even to ‘repenting’
of his decisions in a way seldom described for an Israelite ruler.
Certainly, Amos 7 differs in this respect from the typical king’s council in Old Testament narrative, whether as in 1 Kings 12 (Rehoboam), or 2 Samuel 16–17 (Absalom), or 1 Kings 22 (kings of Judah and Israel). In Amos 7 God is not seeking advice because of his perplexity, but shows himself willing to have his judgment opposed because of his merciful character.
This aspect of the divine character is most strikingly appar-ent in the account of God’s meeting with Abraham in Genesis 18. Their encounter is not presented as a session of the Divine Council, and yet there are elements in the story that seem to point that way.65 And after all, it is on the basis of Abraham’s intercession for Sodom in this chapter that he is described to
63For the view that the speaker in Isa. 40:6 is a member of the heavenly council see C.R. Seitz, ‘The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and New Prophecy in the Book of Isaiah’, JBL 109 (1990), 229-47.
64Perhaps DeirAlla provides a parallel in the vision that reduces Balaam to tears; Weippert has already suggested a parallel between the Balaam text and the Amaziah narrative in Amos 7:10-17 (‘The Balaam Text’, in: Hoftijzer, Van der Kooij (eds), The Balaam Text, 164, 177; cf. M. Dijkstra, ‘Response to H.-P. M¨uller and M. Weippert’, ibid., 216).
65Cf. G.J. Wenham, Genesis 16–50 (WBC, 2), Dallas 1994, 50.
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 65
Abimelech in 20:7 as ‘a prophet’: ‘he is a prophet and he will pray for you’.66What God decides to reveal to Abraham is noth-ing other than his dwsø (‘plan’). When it is recognised that 18:17 introduces a flashback (cf. The Revised English Bible, ‘The Lord had thought to himself’), it becomes evident that God’s decision about Sodom has not yet been reached when he visits Abraham.
His ‘going down to see’ is not the taking of the road from Hebron to Sodom – about which the text has nothing further to say, for only the two accompanying angels reach Sodom (cf. 18:17, 22;
19:1)67– but, as we would ordinarily expect, his descent from his heavenly abode to investigate what his human subjects are doing (‘I shall go down and see whether they have done according to the outcry that has reached me’, v. 21; cf. Gen. 11:5). So Abraham is truly in the position of a prophetic intercessor whose bargaining takes place before the divine plan is finalised. The result is the remarkable picture of Abraham the Hebrew haggling with God over the fate of a pagan city, which might in its entirety be spared if there were, finally, but ten righteous people in it. In Genesis 18, then, God is memorably shown as being open to persuasion by a mere mortal (cf. ‘dust and ashes’, v. 27).
We may perhaps hear echoes of the Council in the book of Hosea, in the self-deliberations of God over Israel. There are scarcely any speech formulae to punctuate the text, and in that respect oracles and soliloquies go seamlessly on. Something of Hosea’s own perplexities are, doubtless, surfacing in the divine fretting over Israel. Hosea has stitched his heart on the sleeve of God.68 This God has no colleagues or even juniors to whom he turns, no Council where decisions can be debated. All is happen-ing in the mind of Israel’s God. So he asks, ‘What can I do with you, Ephraim? What can I do with you, Judah?’ (6:4); ‘How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?’ (11:8).
Andersen and Freedman attribute the seeming lack of structure in Hosea to the consideration that Yahweh’s self-deliberations oc-cur within the context of the Divine Council, or even that they
66Genesis 18 and 20 are traditionally assigned to different sources, but the portrayal of Abraham as a prophet of intercessory accomplishment is found only in ch. 18.
67Verse 22a then fulfils its proper function of being a resumptive repetition picking up verse 16 after the flashback material of verses 17–21.
68The standpoint of the text is, of course, that of the reverse process.
represent a stage preliminary to the Council.69 So God solilo-quises, and we hear him debating the pros and cons of the policy that he is hammering out. Only Jeremiah among the later proph-ets comes close to such a depiction of God (cf. Jer. 5:7-9). The debating of pros and cons also seems to be a feature of Hos. 2:4-25 (2-23), and David Clines has written suggestively about this chapter as presenting, not a sequence of actions, but a series of options, the last of which is the course that God actually decides upon, viz. forgiving Israel and loving her out of her rebellious ways.70Andersen and Freedman, in their commentary published a year later, and in apparent independence of Clines, view with some favour the possibility that the first two options in Hosea 2 are discarded in favour of the third.71 If so, the conceptuality of the Divine Council is not too far away.
In Conclusion
In the second part of this paper comparisons and contrasts have not been of crucial importance. A different question has been addressed: How does the Old Testament, committed to the one God Yahweh, respond to the environing traditions and practices in which its own views of God and reality developed? Whether there were parallel developments elsewhere was not so important.
But that was a self-denying ordinance on the writer’s part, for there is no reason why the making of cultural comparisons should be abandoned, even if the results must always have an element of provisionality about them. That the sum total of the Old Testa-ment vision witnesses to something unique in the ancient east is self-evident, and it is hard to disagree with David Jobling when he remarks that ‘[i]t argues little maturity on the part of bib-lical scholars that we sometimes seem to be arguing passionately against the distinctiveness of our material in any respect.’72
69F.I. Andersen, D.N. Freedman, Hosea: A New Translation with Introduc-tion and Commentary (AncB, 24), Garden City 1980, 45.
70D.J.A. Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, in: E.A. Living-stone (ed.), Studia Biblica 1978, I: Papers on Old Testament and Related Themes – Sixth International Congress on Biblical Studies, Oxford 3–7 April 1978 (SJSOT, 11), Sheffield 1979, 83-103 (= pp. 293-313 in Clines’s On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1967-1998, vol. 1 [=JSOT.S, 292], Sheffield 1998).
71Andersen, Freedman, Hosea, 263.
72D. Jobling, ‘Robert Alter’s, The Art of Biblical Narrative’, JSOT 27
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 67
The analogy of apocalyptic and the New Testament may serve a useful purpose in this regard. Part of the exegetical task in the book of Revelation is to distinguish between standard apoca-lyptic features and specifically Christian elements in the book.
They are interwoven in the text, but proper exegesis does not stop there. If verse 11 of the last chapter expresses classic apo-calyptic determinism, as most would still recognise it – ‘Let the evildoer still be evil and the filthy still be filthy!’ – then this is overwritten in verse 17 in the unrestricted offer of the water of life to any thirsty hearer.73 That is a specifically Christian ele-ment in the text. In the same way, the eleele-ments within the Old Testament that modify or rewrite the underlying near eastern
‘script’ are a legitimate concern of the Old Testament specialist.
There will never be a complete match, or, if there is, it will be Yahwism by another name, or not even that. In fact, Egyptian Atenism comes closest to the monotheism of the biblical tradition (if one may disregard the chronology), yet the Aten was a ‘non-anthropomorphic, nonspeaking god’ who ‘required an interpreter for humanity, a role taken by the king, who claimed exclusive
“knowledge” of the deity.’74Nonanthropomorphic, nonspeaking!
That, surely, is real monotheistic sterility.
(1983), 87-99 (90).
73‘Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life freely.’
74J. Baines, ‘Egyptian Deities in Context: Multiplicity, Unity, and the Problem of Change’, in: B.N. Porter (ed.), One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World (Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute, 1), n.p. 2000, 60.
‘Who would invite a stranger from abroad?’
The Presence of Greeks in Palestine in Old Testament Times
Herrn Prof. Dr. Matthias K¨ockert zum 60. Geburtstag
In Homer’s Odyssey1 we read in the 17th book:
tiv" ga;r dh; xei'non kalei' a[lloqen aujto;" ejpelqw;n a[llon gΔ eij mh; tw'n oi} dhmioergoi; e[asi,
mavntin h] ijhth'ra kakw'n h] tevktona douvrwn, h] kai; qevspin ajoidovn, o{ ken tevrphÛsin ajeivdwn…
ou|toi ga;r klhtoiv ge brotw'n ejpΔ ajpeivrona gai'an:2 [Who, pray, of himself ever seeks out and invites a stranger from abroad, unless it is one of those that are masters of some public craft, a prophet, or a healer of ills, or a builder, or perhaps a divine minstrel, who gives delight with his song? For these men are invited all over the boundless earth.]
These lines have led scholars such as W. Burkert to postulate a flourishing culture of migrant craftsmen in the Eastern Levant during the late Bronze and early Iron Age.3 It is generally as-sumed – and archaeological evidence seems to support such a view – that craftsmen from the East worked in Greece during this period and that, in turn, their craftmanship deeply influ-enced archaic Greek art.4 The ‘orientalising period’ of Greek his-tory, literature and art has been sufficiently examined and does
1Unless otherwise stated, all translations of Greek authors are taken from the Loeb Classical Library. In addition to the usual abbreviations, the fol-lowing are used: FGH = F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Leiden 1956ff.; IG = Inscriptiones Graecae; ICret = Inscriptiones Creticae;
LSJ = H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, H.S. Jones (eds.), A Greek–English Lexicon, with a Revised Supplement, Oxford 1996.
2Homer, Od. 17.382–385.
3Cf. W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Revealing Antiquity 5), Cam-bridge21992, 9-40 and Idem, ‘Itinerant Diviners and Magicians: A Neglected Element in Cultural Contacts’, in: R. H¨agg (ed.), The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century B.C.: Tradition and Innovation – Proceedings of the Second International Symposium at the Swedish Institute in Athens, 1–5 June 1981 (Skrifter utgivna av Svenska Institutet i Athen 4/30), Stockholm, 1983, 115-9.
4Cf. B. Borell, D. Rittig, Orientalische und griechische Bronzereliefs aus
‘Who would invite a stranger from abroad?’ 69
not need to concern us here.5 Rather, I would like to turn the picture around and consider Greek migrant craftsmen, travelling from Greece to the Eastern Levant and more specifically to Syro-Palestine. As such, this study is not intended to evaluate the significance of the Greek world for the history or theology of the Old Testament,6 but, rather, to explore possible areas of con-tact and what we can learn from these concon-tacts about the social identity of the Greeks in Palestine.7 I hope to demonstrate that cultural contact is not exclusively a process among elites.8
Olympia: Der Fundkomplex aus Brunnen 17 (Deutsches Arch¨aologisches In-stitut – Olympische Forschungen, 26), Berlin 1998, who were able to demon-strate on the basis of bronze-reliefs from a fountain in Olympia that the fragments originated in the workshop of an oriental craftsman in Crete. For a more cautious view on immigrant presence in Crete see G.L. Hoffman, Imports and Immigrants: Near Eastern Contacts with Iron Age Crete, Ann Arbor 1997, 153-89.
5Cf. S. Dalley, The Legacy of Mesopotamia, Oxford 1998, 85-106; H.
Matth¨aus, ‘Zur Rezeption orientalischer Kunst-, Kultur- und Lebensfor-men in Griechenland’, in: K. Raaflaub (ed.), Anf¨ange politischen Denkens in der Antike: Die nah¨ostlichen Kulturen und die Griechen (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 24), M¨unchen 1993, 165-86; S.P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origin of Greek Art, Princeton 1992; R. Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford History of Art), Oxford 1998, 43-51; C.
Penglase, Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Ho-meric Hymns and Hesiod, London 1994; M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon:
West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford 1997.
6This has been done magnificently in the study by O. Kaiser, ‘Die Bedeu-tung der griechischen Welt f¨ur die alttestamentliche Theologie’, in: Idem, Zwischen Athen und Jerusalem: Studien zur griechischen und biblischen Theologie, ihrer Eigenart und ihrem Verh¨altnis (BZAW, 320), Berlin 2003, 1-38.
7On the other hand, scholars of the Ancient Near East have started to explore views of Greece and her inhabitants found in Ancient Near Eastern sources. Cf. A. Kuhrt, ‘Greeks’ and ‘Greece’ in Mesopotamian and Persian Perspectives: The twenty-first J.L. Myres Memorial Lecture, Oxford 2002;
G.B. Lanfranchi, ‘The Ideological and Political Impact of the Assyrian Im-perial Expansion on the Greek World in the 8th and 7th Centuries BC’, in:
S. Aro, R.M. Whiting (eds.), The Heirs of Assyria (Melammu Symposia, 1), Helsinki 2000, 7-34; H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, ‘Yauna by the Sea and across the Sea’, in: I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquia, 5), Washington 2001, 323-46.
8For reasons of space we will disregard the interesting phenomenon of intermarriage, which could possibly result in bilingual children (cf. Xeno-phon, Anab. 4.8.4 and Herodotus, Hist. VI.138); on the topic see M.L. West, East Face of Helicon, 618-21 and the remarks by J.N. Coldstream, ‘Mixed Marriages at the Frontiers of the Early Greek World’, Oxford Journal of
The presence of travelling ‘foreign specialists’, as I prefer to call them, is well known from the Old Testament. Thus we read
The presence of travelling ‘foreign specialists’, as I prefer to call them, is well known from the Old Testament. Thus we read