Kingship and Wisdom in Mesopotamia

Concluding his section on the King as Wise Man, Ronald Sweet says,

“The conclusion to be drawn from this evidence is clear.  In Mesopotamian society the king was regarded as possessing an unusually large measure of god-given wisdom, and was thought to manifest that wisdom by performing deeds pleasing to the gods, in particular the building of temples.  The Israelite tradition of King Solomon, the wise king whose greatest achievement was the building of a temple, reflects a similar point of view.”

Concluding his essay, he says concerning the wise man in Akkadian literature,

“Who, on the evidence of Akkadian literature, was the wise man in ancient Mesopotamia?  If the answer is to be decided by a frequency count of claims to wisdom,or by the passion and eloquence of the claims, the answer cannot be in doubt: the king was the wise man par excellence.  Yet only three kings claim to have been literate in two thousand years of Mesopotamian history. The wisdom of kings was therefore not a bookish or intellectual affair.  It was largely a matter of recognizing the supremacy of the gods and performing deeds pleasing to them.  Reverence for the gods was the beginning of wisdom.”

Now, Akkadian literature also knows of “commoners” as wise men (craftsmen, architects and builders, soldiers, cult officials, diviners, exorcists, musicians, physicians, scribes,counselors, teachers[he rejects the meager evidence of this category], and nonspecific). Concerning them Sweet concludes,

“The evidence has also shown that the vocabulary of wisdom was applied to certain classes of the king’s subjects.  What is common to the classes so identified is that they are all in some way professions that required an obvious and special skill, ranging from carpentry through the leadership of armies to vocations requiring mastery of writing.  It is interesting that wisdom terms are not applied to agricultural workers, shepherds, or boatmen, for example.  Such people certainly required professional skills, but they were the widely shared skills of daily life.  If the wise man of Mesopotamia is to be defined as the man who is called wise in Mesopotamia, the definition must emphasize his possession of special know-how, whether in the realm of material concerns or in affairs of the unseen world of the gods.”

(The preceding quotes came from Ronald F. G. Sweet, “The Sage in Akkadian Literature,” in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East, edited by John G. Gammie and Leo G. Perdue, 57, 65.)

Does this picture in Akkadian literature shed any light on the biblical data?  Furthermore, does this evidence aid those who argue that the kingdom/kingship theme runs through all of Scripture, even the wisdom literature?  It seems to me that Scripture also places the emphasis on the wisdom of the king (Proverbs 1:1, Ecclesiastes 1:1; Deut. 17:18-19), but not to the exclusion of others (Exodus 35:31ff, Proverbs 30:1ff; Proverbs 1:8-9:fin? = Homilies of the teacher, which Sweet denied as a category in Mesopotamia?).

Let me know your thoughts on this matter.

Determining Dependency Between Ancient Versions (part 2)

In this post, I comment on the nature of the translation of the Syriac Peshitta (S) in Qoheleth, which is an important consideration when trying to determine whether S is dependent on the Septuagint (G).

The Former Thesis

At an earlier time in research, scholars considered S to be a daughter version of the Septuagint (for this view see G.W. Anderson, “Canonical and Non-Canonical,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans, vol. 1, (Cambridge, 1970), 158-9.), which means they considered S to be a direct translation of G.  What ailed this thesis was that it did not conform to the evidence of S itself. One is not able to read past Genesis 1:1 (ܒܪܫܝܬ ܒܪܐ ܐܠܗܐ. ܝܬ ܫܡܝܐ ܘܝܬ ܐܪܥܐ) without seeing the essential Semitic character of S and its faithful translation of the underlying Hebrew text (M or proto-M).  But however faithful S was to M, scholars still have noted that in some places S seems to be dependent on G, and the challenge was to explain this phenomenon leading to a new thesis.

Determining Dependency Between Ancient Versions (part 1)

I realize I have not been posting frequently, but I can say that I have been making progress in preparation for comprehensive exams, and I have been bringing long standing projects to a close.  One of those projects is my work on the relationship of the Peshitta of Qoheleth to the Septuagint of Ecclesiastes for Peter Gentry’s critical edition of Ecclesiastes in the Goettingen Septuaginta series.  This project began as a seminar paper for Dr. Gentry’s Introduction to the Septuagint seminar at Southern Seminary last Fall and has turned into a contribution to his forthcoming edition.  I hope in the future to publish the entire article, but it will take some time to clean it up for publication.

In the mean time, I would like to comment on some of the salient points of the work in the next few posts.

In this post I will attempt to date the sources.  In the second post I want to say something about the nature of the Peshitta as a translation of the Hebrew Bible (proto MT). In a third post, I want to work through the nature of the dependency of the Peshitta on the LXX.