Between Magic and Method

As the history of research shows, comparison of the biblical depictions of Yhwh as a divine warrior and its possible ancient Near Eastern counter-parts is extremely complex. It not only involves the idea of cosmogony and Chaoskampf, as inspired by tablet IV of the Mesopotamian creation story of Enūma eliš and developed by Gunkel in relation to biblical texts, but is also related to the interpretation of the Baal Cycle and to other attestations of storm-gods in the Ancient Near East in general. Gunkel’s evocative conclu-sion that biblical motifs in Genesis and Revelation both referred to two related events happening at the beginning and at the end of creation, seemed to offer a convincing explanation of the wide range of monster bashing that is common to many mythologies of the ancient world. Its aftermath, however, revealed that Gunkel’s theory not only made a connection between biblical and Assyriological materials, but also forced them into a framework that fit perfectly into the Zeitgeist of his own time. Eventually it even turned out to be one of the steps in the direction of an anti-Semitic interpretation of Scripture in the Babel-Bibel Streit.21 In a similar way the Ugaritic tablets were interpreted

21  Steven Lundström, “Chaos and Creation. Hermann Gunkel between Establishing the

‘History of religions School,’ Acknowledging Assyriology, and Defending of Faith,” in:

Scurlock, Beal (eds.), Creation and Chaos, 147–171; Bill T. Arnold, Daniel B. Weisberg,

within the well-known Israel-versus-Canaan paradigm of the Albrightean School, with its depiction of the Canaanite religion being an extreme fertility cult and a polytheist and mythic religion with its rituals and stories described in poetry, while the Israelite version having a clear preference for narrative was monotheistic and historical in nature. This paradigm reflected a certain view of the relation between biblical and non-biblical material and also served as a cornerstone in a scholarly polemic with the Chicago Oriental Institute about the cultural identity of the United States.22 Accordingly, it was no surprise that, as more material showed up, this appeared to be an unnatural interpretation of the sources. No religion in and surrounding the Levant, whether Ugaritic, ancient Israelite or something else, “had a monopoly of fertility or cult or myth or epic or historiography or polytheism.”23

Interestingly, these observations perfectly reflect the general develop-ment in comparative religion during the last decades of the 20th century.

Postmodernism denounced order and ordering principles in favour of other-ness and difference and created a substantial distance between language and reality. Hence, it was highlighted that cross-cultural comparison is often implicitly imperialistic, because it takes the compared objects from their origi-nal cultural matrix and construes an abstraction, which often can be decon-structed as a political act aimed at domination. Needless to say, scholars still trying to connect religion and history rightly countered with the claim that such criticism, based on the assumption that “everything human is foreign to me,” easily leads to intellectual relativism, for as a consequence there can be no real communication between religions, cultures and even among human beings. This, however, did not mean that the issues raised by the postmodern approach of anthropology and the history of religions were dealt with in a sat-isfactory way. Therefore, the methodological question arose, how comparison could be more than just a kind of magic or an affair of recollection of similarity.24 In a famous essay addressing this quest for method in comparative studies, the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith intriguingly refers in a positive way to the Pan-Babylonian School of the Babel-Bibel debate. This school was

“A Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s ‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures,” JBL 121 (2002), 441–457.

22  See e.g. Neil A. Silberman, “Power, Politics, and the Past,” in: Thomas E. Levy (ed.), Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, London 1995, 16–17; Bruce Kuklick, Puritans in Babylon. The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, Princeton 1996, 176–195.

23  Mark S. Smith, “Recent Study of the Israelite Religion in the Light of the Ugaritic Texts,” in:

K. Lawson Younger (ed.), Ugarit at Seventy-Five, 5.

24  For an overview of the debate, see K.C. Patton, B.C. Ray (eds.), A Magic Still Dwells.

Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, Berkley, CA 2000.

definitely wrong on both a factual and a theoretical level. But at the same time its intuition was right that a good comparison of religious phenomena offers an integration of systematic patterns and concrete historical situations, and a view of the process of transmission. According to Smith, the debate showed that it is important

to ground comparison and patterns in a historical process, to develop a complex model of tradition and the mechanisms for its transmission, to balance generalities and particularities in a structure which integrates both, and to prioritize comparative systematics over the catalogue of iso-lated comparative exempla, and to see the power of pattern as a device for interpretation. This creates a rich range of possibilities and also makes us familiar to the problems as well.25

During the last century, the research of ancient Near Eastern religions and cultures indeed developed slowly in this direction. This already started in 1926 with a dense and often misunderstood essay by the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger on the Eigenbegrifflichkeit of the Babylonian world.26 Many years later, it was followed by the development of a two-sided comparative method and the more fine-tuned and multifocal contextual approach.27 As a result, it is generally acknowledged nowadays that all textual (and iconographic) phe-nomena should be studied in their own context first, while a cross-cultural comparison should reckon with both differences and similarities, genre, func-tion, geographical and chronological distance, and with spheres of cultural contact and channels of transmission.28 With regard to literary similarities this means that they are more often explained successfully by assuming a

25  Jonathan Z. Smith, “In Comparison A Magic Dwells,” in: Imagining Religion. From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago, IL 1982, 28–29 (= Patton, Ray [eds.], A Magic Still Dwells, 33–34).

26  B. Landsberger, “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt,” Islamica 2 (1926), 355–372.

27  See e.g. S. Talmon, “The ‘Comparative Method’ in Biblical Interpretation: Principles and Problems,” in: Congress Volume Göttingen 1977 (VT.S, 29), Leiden 1978, 320–356; M. Malul, The Comparative Method in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Legal Studies (AOAT, 227), Neukirchen-Vluyn 1990; W.W. Hallo, “Compare and Contrast: the Contextual Approach to Biblical Literature,” in: W.W. Hallo et al. (eds.), The Bible in the Light of the Cuneiform Literature (Scripture in Context, 3), Lewiston, NY 1990, 1–30; idem, “Sumer and the Bible.

A Matter of Proportion,” in: W.W. Hallo, K.L. Younger (eds.), The Context of Scripture.

Vol. 3. Archival Documents from the Biblical World, Leiden 2003, xlix–liv.

28  See e.g. K.L. Younger, “The ‘Contextual Method.’ Some West Semitic Reflections,” in: Hallo, Younger (eds.), The Context of Scripture. Vol. 3, xxxv–xlii; John H. Walton, Ancient Near

common cultural heritage or cognitive environment than by presupposing lit-erary borrowing. Thus, the option that the scribes of biblical texts made use of Mesopotamian and Canaanite literary motifs and texts cannot be excluded.29 Yet, it is very important to take a look at the larger cultural environment and to consider the possible modes of transition before such an hypothesis is raised.

Consequently, in order to avoid the trap of assuming a linear development from one type of literature to another, the next section concentrates on the spectrum of storm-gods in the Ancient Near East and on the specific meaning of Enūma eliš and the Baal Cycle in their own cultural and historical context.