The Mesopotamia-Palestine Nexus and the Jewish Diaspora
‘Peace be with you, Rabbi Judah b. Bathyra, for you are in Nisibis, and yet your net is spread in Jerusalem!’Footnote 1 Judah ben-Bathyra (I) lived in the first century ad in Nisibis, a major centre in the land of Adiabene, which both Classical and Jewish writers identified with Assyria.Footnote 2 He apparently visited Jerusalem several times. Thanks to his work collecting and transferring funds for the Jerusalem temple from the Jewish diaspora in northern Mesopotamia,Footnote 3 he was well known to the highest level of Jewish society in Palestine.Footnote 4
The vignette from the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) casts light on the lively connections between the Jews of Palestine and their kin in northern Mesopotamia in the period in which the New Testament was being written. Indeed, the Adiabenians supported the Palestinian Jews in the ad 66–70 war with Rome.Footnote 5 The Jewish communities of Southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia) enjoyed equally intensive contact with Jerusalem.Footnote 6 The account in Acts 2:8–9, 11 of the pilgrims who had arrived there for the Shavuot festival corroborates this: ‘How is it that we hear, each of us in the dialect of our birthplace – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and those dwelling in Mesopotamia – … we hear them relating in our languages the mighty works of God.’ Neusner estimates a Jewish population of between 600,000 and one million in Babylonia in the third century ad.Footnote 7 The number of Jews in Mesopotamia in the first century ad is unknown. Josephus’ estimate of one million seems inflated.Footnote 8 Undoubtedly, the population swelled significantly in the wake of the displacement caused by the Palestinian Jews’ disastrous rebellions against the Romans in ad 66–70 and 132–35, possibly including considerable numbers of Jewish Christians.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, the facts that the royal family of Adiabene converted to Judaism in the first half of the first century ad and that, in the period from ad 20 to 35, a region of Babylonia was under Jewish administration indicate that these communities were populous and held considerable sway even before ad 70.Footnote 10 Herod the Great’s appointment of a Babylonian as high priest in Jerusalem highlights the significance of the Babylonian Jewish diaspora in Palestinian affairs.Footnote 11
Acts 2 states that these first-century Mesopotamian Jews were conversant in the language(s) of the territories in which they lived. What were the languages? One was Aramaic, which was widely spoken in the period throughout Mesopotamia,Footnote 12 as it was in Syro-Palestine.Footnote 13 Even in many religious texts, contemporary Jewish scribes followed the compilers of Ezra-Nehemiah, Jeremiah and Daniel, and employed Aramaic as well as Hebrew.Footnote 14 While the use of Koinē Greek was widespread – particularly in urban areas – in the Fertile Crescent, Aramaic retained its importance.Footnote 15 Jesus’ discourse was primarily in Aramaic.Footnote 16 There was no insuperable obstacle to communication in writing and, notwithstanding dialect differences,Footnote 17 speech between Mesopotamian and Palestinian Jews and, furthermore, between them and other Aramaic speakers in the contemporary ancient Near East.Footnote 18
The shared language facilitated the dissemination of the tenets and accomplishments of Mesopotamian culture to diverse Aramaic-speaking communities from the Iranian highlands to Egypt.Footnote 19 Among them was the Jewish community. In fact, from the Neo-Babylonian era onwards the Jews were excellently placed to participate in the transmission since they were prominent in the occupation ‘alphabet scribe’, which was to write in Aramaic.Footnote 20 Evidence from Qumran indicates that Mesopotamian scholarly compositions reached the sectarians in Aramaic versions.Footnote 21 Aramaic fragments of the Enochic Book of Giants contain the names of Gilgameš and Humbaba, as well as more oblique references to the Gilgameš epic.Footnote 22 Enoch’s visit to the realm of the dead (1 En 17:1–8) may also reflect Gilgameš.Footnote 23
As late as the third century ad in the city of Assur, situated not far from the Adiabenian capital Arbela, inscriptions in Aramaic attest to the continuation there of the cults of the king of the ancient Assyrian pantheon, Aššur, with his consort Šerua, and other Mesopotamian gods.Footnote 24 The names of some of their adherents, inscribed in the second and early third centuries ad, have Aššur as a theophoric component.Footnote 25 The name Aššurbēl is attested in second-century ad Hatra, a neighbouring kingdom.Footnote 26 According to Stephanie Dalley, in Arbela itself, Egašankalamma, the temple of Ištar, the Mesopotamian goddess of battle, sexual love and, particularly at Arbela, prophecy (‘queen of the divine decrees’),Footnote 27 functioned into the first centuries of the new millennium.Footnote 28 Indeed, a Syriac tradition relates that a priest of Ištar in the city who converted to Christianity was put to death in ad 355.Footnote 29 At the same time, the sanctuaries of Bēl (Marduk) in Babylon and of his son Nabû in neighbouring Borsippa aroused rabbinic condemnation.Footnote 30 The Bavli in a discourse on the Tower of Babel records Rav Joseph’s dictum that ‘Babylon and Borsippa are evil omens for the Torah’ (bSan 109a). The Bavli includes their two great sanctuaries among its five ‘established pagan temples’ (bAboda Zara 11b). It defines ‘established’ as ‘they are established permanently; regularly all the year round worship is taking place in them’.Footnote 31
Marduk and Nabû, who over time syncretized aspects and symbols of Marduk’s identity,Footnote 32 retained their appeal into the first centuries of the Christian era in Syria as in Babylonia.Footnote 33 In Hadrian’s reign, a temple to Bēl was built in Syrian Apamea (a Seleucid foundation), while in Palmyra, the Nabû Temple contained a relief sculpted in Late Antiquity portraying three generations of its priests. Palmyra, too, boasted a temple to Bēl.Footnote 34 An inscription in Greek and Palmyrene Aramaic of ad 24 commemorates a donation to the temple by a Palmyrene resident of Babylon.Footnote 35 Over 450 years after the birth of Christ, the Syrian Neo-Platonist Damascius was knowledgeably discussing the genealogy of Babylonian gods including Anu, Enlil, Ea as well as Marduk, and demonstrating a familiarity with Enūma eliš.Footnote 36 Around ad 500 a form of Enūma eliš was apparently recited in the Syrian city of Edessa on the eighth day of Nisan in the context of worshipping Marduk and Nabû.Footnote 37 In Assur Nabû was venerated into the third century ad.Footnote 38
The cults of Ištar/Nanaya and other ancient Babylonian deities such as Šamaš, Nergal and Tammuz also remained features of the religious landscape in Mesopotamia, Syria and beyond well into the first millennium ad.Footnote 39 Mandaean magical texts recognize Nergal, Ištar and Šamaš, as well as Marduk and Nabû as the spirits operating in the planets. Each retains something of the attributes of their Babylonian precursor. Thus, Nirigh (Nergal, Mars) rules over war, Nbo (Nabû, Mercury) is ruler over knowledge, skill and wisdom.Footnote 40 Ancient Jewish and Mandaean incantations invoke these divinities.Footnote 41 As late as the second half of the first millennium ad, the Sabeans in Harran recalled the Tammuz cult in their religious practices.Footnote 42 All these gods had long been venerated over a vast territory stretching from the eastern Persian Gulf deep into Anatolia, Palestine and Egypt.Footnote 43 The cults of Marduk and Nabû had been adopted into the western Elamite pantheon.Footnote 44 The patron god of Tarsus was associated with Marduk; aspects of his iconography bore unmistakeable Assyrian features into the first Christian centuries. The cult of the goddess Išh̬ara, closely identified with Ištar, was prominent in Tarsus in the second and first millennia bc.Footnote 45
When the New Testament was being written, Jewish communities had long lived and worked in this vast territory and their exposure to these cults was intense.Footnote 46 Typically, in Late Antiquity the Jews reimagined these divinities as demons rather than denying their existence altogether.Footnote 47 Thus, Nergal appears in a late-antique Jewish magic text as Nerig in a list of malevolent supernatural forces.Footnote 48
Over millennia, Syria, in particular, was a vector for transmitting ideas and customs, among them Mesopotamian, into Palestine,Footnote 49 paralleling the way Aramaic in the first millennium bc functioned as a vector of numerous Akkadian words into Hebrew.Footnote 50 These lexical items chiefly reflect the cultural sphere.Footnote 51
Even the Greeks, whose culture and language had by the turn of the era acquired some of the prestige formerly attached to Akkadian, were far from impervious to Babylon’s lustre.Footnote 52 Indeed, Euhemerus associates Zeus himself with that city,Footnote 53 and the cult of Serapis, which the Ptolemies vigorously sponsored, was alleged to derive from Babylon.Footnote 54
Mesopotamia’s most captivating quality was the eminence of its scholarship, which derived from the perception that it possessed divinely imparted knowledge and practices of timeless importance. This perception reflects the perspective of Berossus, a Babylonian priest of Marduk who penned the three-volume Babyloniaca in Greek and may owe something to his works.Footnote 55 To some degree, the status of its scholarship compensated Mesopotamia for its loss of political power. Diodorus waspishly contrasts Babylonian scholars’ life-long dedication to study with the Greeks’ ‘confused wandering’.Footnote 56
The scholarship that he admired was enriched by the abiding legacy of Assyrian erudition.Footnote 57 While the debt Assyria owed Babylonian (and Sumerian) culture was immense,Footnote 58 the transfer was far from one way. Rocío Da Riva observes that: ‘intellectual and religious aspects of Assyrian origin survived and were reshaped and adapted to the Babylonian cultural and political context. These elements were later transmitted to Persia, from where they entered the stream of historical tradition with the Macedonians and survived in many elements of the political rationale in the regimes of the Ancient World.’Footnote 59 Omen texts found in a Seleucid-period private library in southern-Babylonian Uruk offer a modest but instructive glimpse of this. They are written in Neo-Assyrian ductus and possess an Assurbanipal colophon.Footnote 60 Salvatore Gaspa is unequivocal concerning Assyria’s impact on Achaemenid Persia in shaping ‘the organization and administration of the Persian empire, the imperial court life, the forms of visual and written communication’.Footnote 61 This influence was particularly felt in conceptions of kingship. Gaspa contends that much of this Assyrian impact on the formation of the Persian empire was directly transmitted, rather than refracted through Babylonian derivations. Nebuchadnezzar settled many of the Judean exiles in the border territory of Babylonia and Assyria,Footnote 62 thus exposing them to both cultures.
Long before the third century, Christianity was well established in Adiabene and Hatra.Footnote 63 Abercius, who visited the area in the second half of the second century, reports that Christians were present in the ‘plain of Syria and Nisibis’, and implies that they were ubiquitous.Footnote 64 The meagre evidence may indicate that these Christians were Greek-speakers; the medium used by their co-religionists in Babylonia, however, was Aramaic. Christian communities, principally comprising Jews, were present there by the end of the first century.Footnote 65 An early Syriac text announces, ‘Satan fled from the disciples to the land of Babylon: and the story of the crucifixion had gone before him to the Chaldaeans.’Footnote 66 These data support the observation that Rome’s eastern frontier was porous with respect to ideas and human traffic.Footnote 67 Merchants, itinerant craftsmen and soldiers in particular disseminated beliefs and tales over long distances.Footnote 68 Among the tales were Babylonian myths, which enjoyed a revival of interest in the Hellenistic period, at least among the literati.Footnote 69 Dalley affirms that, as well as myths, ‘almost every other type of text known in Babylonia before the sixth century is now attested also from the Seleucid to the early Parthian period’.Footnote 70 The appearance of fish-apkallu motifs in Hellenistic seals that are modelled on late Assyrian types further attests to this revival.Footnote 71
In the Seleucid and Roman/Parthian periods, then, not only were many of the ancient traditions of Sumero-Akkadian culture known and studied, but there was no appreciable hindrance, either linguistic or political, to their circulation between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.Footnote 72 Given this custom of transmission, it is unremarkable that Babylonia became a hub from which Jewish theological innovations also spread throughout the diaspora, although the number of known Tannaim there was apparently modest.Footnote 73
Viewed more broadly, the mobility of ideas in the region simply reflected the fact that, from the earliest archaeological records, major trading and migration routes ran through Mesopotamia.Footnote 74 Indeed, Israel’s first recorded sin in the Promised Land – Achan’s transgression – sprang from lust for a Mesopotamian product found at Jericho, ‘one fine mantle from Shinar’ (Josh 7:10–26). Mesopotamia was both creator and receiver of fine commodities: products, knowledge and ideas that shaped the ancient world.Footnote 75 It is no wonder that the climactic scene in the Bible concerning Babylon, perhaps amplifying Isaiah 47:15,Footnote 76 describes the merchants and sea-traders of the earth, as well as kings, bitterly mourning her desolation (Rev 18:9–19). Rabbi Judah’s net reaching to Jerusalem is simply an expression of Mesopotamia’s enduring reach into the Levant and far beyond.
Mesopotamian Learning and Its Afterlife
Augmenting the effect of Aramaic as a channel of transmission, some Judeans, exilic and post-exilic, knew Akkadian.Footnote 77 Among scribes this included a facility in cuneiform.Footnote 78 Indeed, evidence from research on the Covenant Code (Exod 21:1–22:16)Footnote 79 and the Book of Judges (see below) indicates that as early as the Neo-Assyrian period some biblical writers possessed a mastery of cuneiform sources. The account of Daniel and his three companions taken to Babylon and compelled to master ‘the writing (sēfer) and the language of the Chaldeans’ (Dan 1:4) may reflect a tradition that some exiled Judean literati in Mesopotamia became expert in cuneiform literature.Footnote 80 Donald Wiseman posits that this story indicates a policy of Nebuchadnezzar II’s court to train high-ranking hostages from subject nations in Babylonian learning.Footnote 81 Nebuchadnezzar was a serial user of Neo-Assyrian administrative structures and processes,Footnote 82 and Neo-Assyrian kings extensively applied this policy. Their goal was to inculcate an appreciation of and loyalty to the hegemonic culture and its ruler.Footnote 83 Wiseman proposes that Zerubbabel, whom we will consider in detail, was possibly a recipient of such an education.Footnote 84 The proposal has merit: Babylonian and biblical sources agree that Jehoiachin, Zerubbabel’s grandfather, received royal attention and support.Footnote 85 Moreover, ration-list data confirm that this provision extended to other noble Judeans.Footnote 86
Competence in cuneiform would have given such individuals access to a fund of Mesopotamian scholarship, concomitantly enhancing their value and, therefore, status in their communities, and perhaps further afield.Footnote 87 Indeed, Daniel 5:11 makes the claim for Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar appointed him his chief astrologer. F. Lelli considers that this text may imply the widespread study of astrology by Jews during and after the exile.Footnote 88
Opportunities to learn Akkadian existed and perhaps beckoned. In the exilic period, Babylonian culture was dominant and made little allowance for other traditions. Paul-Alain Beaulieu asserts that in Babylonia, despite its multi-ethnic character and the ubiquity of Aramaic, ‘Babylonian civilization in its traditional form [remained] the ideal and common denominator of society, and above all the only culture that enjoyed official support from the monarchy and the civic institutions that regulated the life of Babylonian cities’.Footnote 89
The Judean community was subject to Babylonian law, which was recorded in cuneiform. An Akkadian marriage contract drafted by a scribe with the West-Semitic name Adad-šamā in the northern Babylonian town of Āl-Yahudu, ‘city of Judah’, a settlement known from sixth- and fifth-century bc records, is written in cuneiform. It is dated to the early Persian period (Cyrus’ reign). The majority of witnesses to the contract possess names with the theophoric element –yah.Footnote 90 The document, like others from Āl-Yahudu, is otherwise indistinguishable from local Babylonian documents. The Judeans maintained records of their financial, administrative and legal transactions on tablets in Akkadian.Footnote 91
Scholars incline to the view that Āl-Yahudu was located near Nippur.Footnote 92 Nippur was a celebrated centre of cuneiform (and astronomical) scholarship into the late first millennium bc.Footnote 93 Its principal temple, which was dedicated to Enlil, was still functioning in 160 bc.Footnote 94 Evidence suggests that consequent to the Assyrian devastation of Israel and swathes of Judah, Israelite and Judean deportees were settled in the environs of Nippur.Footnote 95 Later, Judeans – Ezekiel among them – taken by the Babylonians may have joined them there.Footnote 96 Others went to Babylon and Borsippa.Footnote 97 Borsippa, the city of Nabû, patron deity of scribes, rivalled Nippur’s renown as a seat of learning.Footnote 98
Although information on transmission is patchy, especially in the Parthian era when the area was ‘just out of the range of Greek and Roman historians’,Footnote 99 I shall consider evidence that Jews living in Mesopotamia absorbed and disseminated knowledge derived directly or indirectly from cuneiform sources. While many Babylonian texts of a theological and ‘(pre)philosophical’ nature carried a prohibition against distribution to the ‘uninitiated’,Footnote 100 the opposite obtained with other major cuneiform compositions, such as Enūma eliš and the Erra epic. Readers/hearers were enjoined to propagate their contents.Footnote 101 The latter composition may have left its mark on 1 Enoch.Footnote 102
Furthermore, Jewish priests seem somehow to have accessed Babylonian sacred knowledge classified as restricted to its scribal community. Expositors present substantial evidence from Ezekiel that indicates its author possessed specialist knowledge of Assyro-Babylonian cult.Footnote 103
In the first century ad, texts continued to be composed and copied in cuneiform, although by then Akkadian had joined Sumerian as a language employed solely in specialized religious and scholarly contexts.Footnote 104 The latest datable extant cuneiform tablet derives from ad 75. So long as temples existed in Babylonia dedicated to Mesopotamian deities, it is likely that Akkadian and Sumerian continued to be used.Footnote 105 Pliny, writing in ad 77, states that ‘to this day [Babylon’s] Temple of Jupiter-Belus [Marduk] continues there entire’, a statement that Babylonian sources confirm.Footnote 106 Cuneiform was, therefore, being read and written when the New Testament was being composed.Footnote 107
The Syrian Neo-Platonist, Iamblichus, who was active in the early third century ad, appears to have taken lessons in Akkadian from a Babylonian teacher.Footnote 108 An interest in Babylonian magic may have prompted his studies.Footnote 109 Numerous so-called ‘Graeco-Babyloniaca’ tablets, on whose obverse Akkadian or Sumerian texts are written in cuneiform, while their reverse sides have the texts transliterated into Greek characters, attest to the tenacity of cuneiform learning in Babylonia. They have been provisionally dated to the period 50 bc–50 ad, though they may be considerably later.Footnote 110 The transliterations are based on the phonology of Neo-Babylonian cuneiform.Footnote 111 Scholars debate whether they are the work of Greeks studying cuneiform or of Babylonians literate in Greek learning cuneiform.Footnote 112 Among the texts is tablet I of the much-copied second-millennium Babylonian esoteric topographic composition TIN.TIRki, magic incantations and Akkadian prayers.Footnote 113
If Jewish scribes in Babylonia during the Parthian period were, like Iamblichus, drawn to Babylonian erudition, it seems that direct access was possible. After the fall of the Babylonian empire in 539 bc, Babylonian scholarship was predominantly preserved by priestly communities centred on the temples where scribes copied texts, including various omen and medical series, until the end of cuneiform culture.Footnote 114 If this statement suggests a sterile intellectual environment, it is misleading. Babylonian divines combined profound respect for past learning with the determination to extend their repertoire of knowledge in new ways. This approach is witnessed most clearly in astronomy,Footnote 115 mathematics and medicine. As Philippe Clancier remarks, they engaged in research.Footnote 116
The Bavli recounts that even in the third century ad Babylonian lore and learning still attracted eminent rabbis.Footnote 117 It betrays indications that Babylonian omen series such as Šumma izbu and Šumma ālu informed its composition.Footnote 118 According to a Neo-Assyrian text, only with expert guidance could one hope to fathom the meanings in Šumma izbu.Footnote 119 Thus, the rabbis must have consulted Babylonian priests for instruction, whose reference sources were the cuneiform tablets.Footnote 120 The rabbinic borrowings included Akkadian medical, calendrical and, apparently, astronomical terminology.Footnote 121
The rabbis’ involvement may have affected early Christian epistemology. The system for transliterating Hebrew in Greek that Origen used bears more resemblance to that employed in the Graeco-Babyloniaca tablets than to the system the Septuagint translators adopted,Footnote 122 notwithstanding that Origen shared with them an Egyptian background.
Rabbinic engagement with Babylonian scholarship may provide the most cogent explanation for the transmission of astrological and brontological material from the Mesopotamian source to Jewish compositions at the turn of the era.Footnote 123 The similarities between them extend beyond the borrowing of observational information to the forms in which information is presented and analysed.Footnote 124 While it appears that astrological/astronomical texts studied by the Qumran sectarians exhibit no awareness of near-contemporary discoveries in Babylonian mathematical astronomy, they are equally silent concerning contemporary Greek advances. This may indicate nothing more than either that the Qumran community lacked the mathematical expertise to exploit the Mesopotamian (and Greek) findings, or that they did not consider the mathematical advances relevant to their astrological purposes.Footnote 125 Whatever the case, it is indisputable that the sectarians received their astronomical knowledge ultimately from Babylonia.Footnote 126 Their astrology is informed by the seminal texts MUL.APIN and Enūma Anu Enlil and is familiar with the zodiac – a Babylonian invention of the fifth century bc – and the Lunar-Three scheme, possibly an even later development.Footnote 127
Gideon Bohak and Mark Geller describe the impact of Babylonian astrology on the ancient Near East in Late Antiquity thus:
Babylonian celestial omens are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls around the first century BCE or CE, in a Demotic Egyptian astrological text copied in the second century CE, in a late-antique Aramaic astrological compendium that probably was composed in the East but is still found in an eleventh-century copy from the Cairo Genizah, in a late-antique Palestinian poetic composition … and in more recent Syriac and Mandaic manuscripts.Footnote 128
The diverse material that they cite represents accurate quotations of Akkadian material, applied to local contexts. The Aramaic text Papyrus Amherst 63 provides another example of the afterlife of Akkadian material in Egypt. In fact, Egyptian astrologers were still consulting lunar computations of Babylonian origin in the fourth century ad.Footnote 129 Scholars in Byzantium had access to works that originated in ancient Mesopotamia. Byzantine material attests to Babylonian eclipse and lunar omens. Byzantium’s debt to Babylonian astrology is still evident in the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote 130 The sixth-century monk Cosmas Indicopleustes was acquainted with Babylonian material including Berossus.Footnote 131 As late as the ninth century, Patriarch Photius, whose substantial library earned him the sobriquet Myriobiblos (‘of countless books’), boasts of reading an immense anthology of material comprising ‘testimonies and whole books’ originally composed by, among others, ‘Babylonian and Chaldaean … authors highly regarded in each nation’.Footnote 132
To the present day, Mandaean New Year rituals recall Babylonian practices and beliefs surrounding the Akītu, namely the gods’ annual decreeing of destinies for the nation. To facilitate their prognostications, the priests refer to the Sfar Malwašia (Book of the Zodiac) whose roots lie in Babylonian omen compendia.Footnote 133
Hellenism
It is worth restating at this point that in my judgement Mesopotamian ideas reached the New Testament through three channels. The first was the Hebrew Bible and the early Jewish writing it inspired. The second was Israel’s absorption of Mesopotamian epistemology. Over time, this mode of interrogating and comprehending the world determined the nature of intellectual inquiry in the Judean community, irrespective of abrupt differences in theology between the two civilizations. The process was accelerated during the exilic period.Footnote 134 The third channel was New Testament writers’ direct apprehension of Mesopotamian sources.
I present here two propositions. The first is that the New Testament’s conceptual landscape is essentially indebted both to the Hebrew Bible and to the scholarship of earlier and contemporary Jewish scribes active in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine.Footnote 135 This is unexceptionable. Chadwick notes that the theology of the earliest Christians was purely ‘exegesis of the Old Testament’.Footnote 136 Chilton and Neusner ‘understand the New Testament’s religious system (indifferent to whether we call it Judaism or Christianity) as Judaisms among Judaisms’.Footnote 137 Aspects of Essene theology were influential in early Christian circles,Footnote 138 and, in some respects, strict demarcation between Judaism and Christianity did not occur for centuries.Footnote 139 This is not to deny that frequently Greek translations mediated the New Testament’s reception of the Hebrew Bible.Footnote 140 New Testament books vary considerably in this respect as a comparison of the first Gospel with Revelation demonstrates.
We have seen that one need look no further than the first seventeen verses of the New Testament to detect the influence of the Hebrew Bible. Earlier and contemporaneous Jewish scholarship also left its mark there.Footnote 141
My second proposition is that both influences, the biblical and the post-biblical, had been substantially affected by Mesopotamian literature and theology.Footnote 142 There is consensus that the Priestly author of the Enoch account in Genesis 5:18–24 and the writers of certain Enochic texts and the Book of Jubilees were familiar with and exploited Mesopotamian material, including Atra-ḫasīs, and the legends of Adapa as well as Erra and Gilgameš. The influence of Mesopotamia on their writing extended much further than the borrowing of motifs; their compositions are grounded in Mesopotamian literature.Footnote 143
The present book breaks new ground in positing that New Testament writers were receptive to Mesopotamian sources. The receptivity was based in part on the contemporaneous conception that the roots of Jewish identity were to be found in Babylonia. Just as Mesopotamia is strongly present in the Matthean genealogy, so Mesopotamia enjoys a prominent place in the New Testament’s conceptual ‘genealogy’. Mesopotamian theology is, by this analysis, a direct ‘ancestor’ of the New Testament.
Hellenism had an effect on the New Testament writers’ appreciation of the world around them, and provided the language they used to describe it. Hellenism’s imprint is clearly evident in certain early Jewish works, particularly the Wisdom of Solomon and 4 Maccabees.Footnote 144 As a rule, sapiential material proved to be more portable to different linguistic and religious environments than other forms of religious dogma, as Jesus’ reference to the Queen of Sheba’s journey to hear Solomon’s wisdom reminds us (Mt 12:42; Lk 11:31).Footnote 145 Although Hellenism’s impact on the New Testament lies outside the scope of this book and therefore will not be treated in detail, it will enter the discussion when I consider the origin of a given aspect of kingship or hermeneutical procedure evinced in the New Testament. Many commentators lament the tendency to overstate the effect of Hellenism on the first Jewish Christian writers.Footnote 146 Even a feature so apparently reliant on Greek thought as Paul’s appeal to ‘allegory’ in Galatians 4:21–31 is less clear-cut than one anticipates. This is evident when one compares his application with Philo’s more Platonist treatment of the same Genesis episode.Footnote 147
In an influential article, Rudolf Bultmann discerned two sources at work on the Evangelists: that deriving from ‘Palestinian soil’, that is, the rabbinical, and that deriving from ‘Hellenistic soil’.Footnote 148 He ascribed the miracle episodes to the latter.Footnote 149 This perspective gained a foothold in New Testament studies,Footnote 150 despite subsequent exposure of its weakness.Footnote 151 In his exegesis of Col 1:15–20, John Barclay conceives of only two sources of influence, namely, ‘Hellenistic theological and philosophical notions’ and ‘Jewish texts’.Footnote 152 Occasionally, this dyadic perspective is expanded by a third source: Roman customs and ideology.Footnote 153 It exists within a broader hermeneutic framework that is essentially Euro-centric and consequently exaggerates the legacy of Hellenism in the ancient Near East relative to other sources.Footnote 154 Some scholars claim that in Babylonia’s ancient cities Hellenization was superficial; the impact of Greek culture on Babylonian religion and scholarship as well as on daily life in Babylonian cities was insignificant. New temples were constructed but they were dedicated to Babylonian gods.Footnote 155 In Babylon, the editors of the Bavli appear to have had limited, if any, familiarity with Greek.Footnote 156 Many aspects of Babylonia’s material culture remained unchanged.Footnote 157 Indigenous institutions and religious and literary traditions showed great resilience throughout the Seleucid and into the Parthian period.Footnote 158 It appears that in the Parthian domains the Arsacids privileged Aramaic over Greek. On the whole they resisted Hellenization, albeit with some exceptions.Footnote 159 The practice of Babylonians in Uruk using Greek names died out within ten years of the Parthian conquest.Footnote 160 A similar picture emerges in eastern Syria from the first century bc.Footnote 161
In an essay on the second-century ad composition De Dea Syria, Lucinda Dirven highlights the consequences of exaggerating Hellenism’s impact: ‘the attention to the Hellenistic traits in the work has led to a neglect of the equally or more important “native” elements.’Footnote 162 Fergus Millar also urges a rebalancing of the argument, observing that even in those Syrian urban environments especially susceptible to Greek influence, local traditions coexisted with receptivity to Greek ideas and practices.Footnote 163 In his study of first-to-third-century ad inscriptions in Hatra, André Caquot concludes that the city resisted cultic innovation from the West.Footnote 164
The distortion that over-emphasis of Hellenization creates is aggravated by a frequent lack of recognition of how much Hellenism itself owes to Near Eastern cultures, including Sumero-Babylonian and Assyrian.Footnote 165 J.G. Droysen had already acknowledged this debt during the nineteenth century.Footnote 166 ‘All the evidence,’ asserts Nicolas Wyatt, ‘suggests that before the time of Alexander contact between the Semitic and Greek worlds was very largely in a westward direction’;Footnote 167 and Alexander did not entirely reverse the process. Plutarch’s description of the Macedonian’s court in Babylon strikingly resembles accounts of Esarhaddon’s court in Nineveh: ‘if the least unusual or extraordinary thing happened, [Alexander] thought it a prodigy or a presage, and his court was thronged with diviners and priests whose business was to sacrifice and purify and foretell the future.’Footnote 168
Scholars ascribe qualities to ‘Greco-Roman Wisdom’ that had long been stock features of Assyro-Babylonian theology. Ben Witherington enumerates five: ‘(1) a concern for maintenance of cosmic order; (2) human beings held accountable for their actions; (3) oracles making clear the purpose of the universe; (4) a belief in divine choice of human agents to fulfil God’s purposes; and (5) imagery used to express these expectations drawing on traditional mythical language.’Footnote 169
Systematic empirical studies are first recorded in Mesopotamia.Footnote 170 Astrology was initially ‘ungriechisch’, with little evidence of it even in the early Hellenistic period.Footnote 171 Ben-Dov asserts, ‘Hellenism is no more than the sum of its constituents, and in the … case [of Jewish texts in the Graeco-Roman period] the constituents, or at least some of them, come from the East.’Footnote 172 Beaulieu has demonstrated that Babylonian practice informed even such a prominent and essential product of Hellenism as the establishment of the Mouseion and Library of Alexandria.Footnote 173
A recent monograph on the first Gospel provides an example of what I mean. In treating Matthew’s account of the magi, Matthias Konradt remarks that ‘The star was a common symbol of authority in the Graeco-Roman world since the time of Alexander the Great. Against this background, the mention of “his star” reads as an indication of the universal dimension of the reign of the “newborn king”.’Footnote 174 The Matthean passage in question seems to invite us to consider the broader context of its referents, ‘magi from the east’, rather than restricting enquiry solely to the Graeco-Roman sphere. Babylonian astrologers, from as early as the second millennium bc, identified a specific star – Regulus (α Leonis), known as mulLUGAL ‘the King’ – precisely as a ‘symbol of (royal) authority’.Footnote 175 It emblematized the king of Akkad (Babylonia), as seventh-century bc astral omen reports attest.Footnote 176 In fact, the Greeks borrowed the association of α Leonis with the figure of the king.Footnote 177
Matthew’s report of the magi conferring with King Herod recalls a trope of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian court life – the king and his astrologers earnestly consulting one another on celestial omens. Until recently, scholars assumed that the Achaemenid era saw the existence of court astrologers cease, not least because the rise of mathematical astronomy transformed the role of such experts away from speculative divination.Footnote 178 We now know, however, of at least one case of a Seleucid ruler employing a Babylonian astrologer.Footnote 179
Deidre Good’s book on kingship in Matthew illustrates the constraints a perspective that ignores the Mesopotamian dimension can impose on biblical exegesis. It, too, seems to presuppose that serious intellectual endeavour in the Near East began only with the Macedonian conquest. Early in the book, we are alerted to its limited grasp of the broader cultural landscape when it credits Hellenism with the following innovations: grammar, lexicography and theology.Footnote 180 They are attested in Sumer some two millennia before Homer.Footnote 181 To compound the problem, she tends to conflate ‘Hellenistic’ with ‘Greek’.Footnote 182 This misapprehension occurs frequently in the scholarly literature,Footnote 183 in part because there is no generally accepted definition of ‘Hellenism’,Footnote 184 further obscuring the contribution Near Eastern cultures made to Hellenism.
Given Good’s starting point, she naturally perceives Matthew’s presentation of kingship as reflecting a Hellenistic model; she does not envisage any influence unmediated by Hellenism. She argues that the use of praos/praotēs in Matthew’s Gospel betrays an implicit claim by Jesus to being a good king judged according to Hellenistic values. Her contention that praos in Matthew’s diction is, above all, a signifier of kingship is controversial in itself, not least because praus is an archetypal descriptor of Moses (LXX Num 12:3; Sir 45:4) and Matthew frequently intimates Mosaic parallels in his portrayal of Christ.Footnote 185 Her cardinal proof-text to support her thesis is Matthew 21:5, a quotation of Zechariah 9:9,Footnote 186 whose Hebrew text reads ‘Behold your king comes to you …, humble (‘ānî) and riding on a donkey’. The LXX renders ‘ānî here with praus. From this, Good extrapolates that Jesus’ self-description in Matthew 11:29 – ‘I am praos and lowly in heart’ – is ‘that of a Hellenistic ruler’,Footnote 187 notwithstanding some scholars’ insistence that a rabbinic hermeneutic informs Matthew’s presentation of Zechariah 9:9.Footnote 188
Praos is a difficult lexeme to translate. Nevertheless, by analysing its semantic field and the context that Matthew 11:29 supplies, we can at least adumbrate its meaning. In the verse, it stands in synonymous parallel to the adjectival phrase ταπεινὸς τῇ καρδίᾳ, ‘humble/lowly of heart’. We may deduce that the lexeme’s semantic field includes ‘humble’, ‘gentle’, and ‘meek’, as the English translations of the verse reflect. Barclay defines praos as human strength under divine control.Footnote 189 Good marshals much evidence to corroborate her assertion that the qualities of humility, gentleness and meekness, together with their corollaries servanthood and non-retaliation, were traits of exemplary kingship in the Hellenistic period,Footnote 190 without asking the question whence came these traits to Hellenism. However shaky the inference is that, in describing himself as praos, Jesus identifies himself with the paradigmatic Hellenistic king, the attendant contention that royal humility, gentleness, piety and submissiveness/servitude to the divine will were values that stemmed originally from Hellenism is plainly wrong. They were owned by rulers in much earlier periods. Consider, for instance, the mighty Esarhaddon’s self-description: ‘pious slave, humble, submissive, the one who reveres [the gods’] great divinity’.Footnote 191 It accords perfectly with Barclay’s definition of praos. Mesopotamian monarchs from Hammurabi (eighteenth century bc) to the last indigenous king of Babylon, Nabonidus, avowed their humility.Footnote 192
I am not proposing that the writer of Zechariah 9:9 or of Matthew 21:5, for that matter, drew consciously on a Mesopotamian archetype to describe the character of the king in the passages cited above. This would be unprovable. No more provable, though, is the assertion that Matthew in his application of praos had a Hellenistic kingly model in mind. More generally, I submit that disregard of plausible sources apart from Hellenism skews and impoverishes New Testament exegesis. This disregard is as untenable as an argument that, since much Hebrew biblical textuality was composed during the Assyro-Babylonian domination of the Hebrew-speaking area, Mesopotamia was ipso facto the sole external contributor to the texts concerned, thus ignoring Canaanite and Egyptian contributions.Footnote 193 All these religions, in Klaus Koch’s memorable simile, ‘stood like godfathers at the cradle of Israelite religion’.Footnote 194
In fact, Hellenism’s impact on the New Testament pales against the much older, more solid and vigorously maintained cultural apprehension founded on Jewish traditions, beliefs and modes of thinking that one encounters on its pages,Footnote 195 and that I have begun to probe. Dominant contemporaneous attitudes in Judaism sought to protect its spiritual heritage from the impact of Greek ideas,Footnote 196 though as I discussed, the reality was a complex intermeshing of resistance and adaptation.Footnote 197 Even the Qumran sectarians were not immune.Footnote 198 That said, these attitudes perforce affected Jewish Christian writing.Footnote 199 One notes, in this connection, the credentials that Paul cites as a God-fearing Jew (Phil 3:4–6). They are alien to Hellenism,Footnote 200 despite his use of Greek to enumerate them and the fact that some scholars consider him a ‘Hellenist’.Footnote 201
In Christianity’s first century, Mesopotamian ideas encountered much less resistance in both faith communities. For one thing, those ideas were not identified with a current or recent political oppressor. Josephus remarks that while the Egyptians and Tyrians are ‘our bitterest enemies [,] of the Chaldaeans I could not say the same’.Footnote 202 Babylon, Assyria and Judea had all been deprived of genuine political independence centuries earlier (the Hasmonean interlude in Palestine had been short-lived). For another thing, the ideas bore the patina of ancientness. Over time, though, as the balance shifted between Jewish and Gentile Christians, Hellenistic influence grew deeper and more extensive in Christianity.Footnote 203 This development is evident in influential patristic writings, such as those of Justin, Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria.Footnote 204
In light of these remarks, I seek to redress over-emphasis on Greek and Hellenistic influence on the New Testament where this impinges on the discussion. More essentially, I attempt to present the two propositions I outlined above in a logical chain of causation and to apply them to the topic of kingship. Thus, Mesopotamian conceptions and modes of expression strongly influenced the writers and editors of the Hebrew Bible; the Hebrew Bible was a major determinant of the world view of the writers and editors of the New Testament; consequently, the imprint of Mesopotamia is felt in the New Testament. This imprint was consolidated by the impact of Mesopotamian traditions on the broader intellectual environment of the Near East and specifically on Jewish modes of conceptualization and exegesis. This includes those that New Testament authors espoused. This statement holds despite the differing exegetical approaches maintained in first-century ad Judaism.
We see the imprint in biblical texts that New Testament writers drew upon, such as Isaiah,Footnote 205 Jeremiah,Footnote 206 ZechariahFootnote 207 and Daniel.Footnote 208 It is also evinced in texts that inform the New Testament presentation of Jesus, but are not explicitly quoted there. A case in point is the account of Gideon and his son Abimelech (Judg 6–9), which I analyse in Chapter 5. Since Judges is not a book generally held to contain messianic material beyond loose typological parallels largely centred on Samson,Footnote 209 this finding supports the claim in the New Testament, most explicitly by Luke, that not only the Law but the Prophets predicted and spoke of the coming Messiah, anticipating Jesus.Footnote 210 Notwithstanding Luke’s tendency to use ‘all’ hyperbolically,Footnote 211 the New Testament is concerned to demonstrate that Jesus constitutes the fulfilment of the Prophets as well as of the Law of Moses.Footnote 212 Examples are: ‘Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the ScripturesFootnote 213 the things concerning himself’ (Lk 24:27; likewise Acts 3:18, 20–22a; 10:42–43a); ‘All this happened in order that the Scriptures of the prophets be fulfilled’ (Mt 26:56; also 5:17); ‘the Gospel of God, which was promised in advance through his prophets in sacred writings, concerning his son’ (Rom 1:1–4). Evidently, the form of the prophets’ predictions was ‘multifarious’, and they were delivered in ‘many ways’ (Heb 1:1).
These verses substantiate the conclusion that the prophets were pre-eminent for the early Christians and that they interpreted the legal provisions of the Torah as prophecy.Footnote 214 Jack Kingsbury argues that Matthew’s presentation of the Heilsgeschichte is bipartite: ‘The “time of Israel (OT)” (= the time of prophecy) and the “time of Jesus” (= the time of fulfilment)’.Footnote 215 A corollary, then, of our exploration of the Mesopotamian legacy will be the analysis of some passages in the Hebrew Bible germane to our subject that influenced the New Testament presentation of the Messiah but which commentators have generally not recognized as such.
‘Sentiments of Affinity’: Babylon and Israel
The immense debt New Testament writers owe to the Hebrew Bible is explicitly asserted and implicitly evident throughout. The Evangelists present Jesus appealing to its authority in a way that is mutually validating. The Law, the Prophets and the Writings confirm that he satisfies the model of the promised Messiah; in turn, as the Son of God, he confirms their veracity.Footnote 216 This dialectic receives graphic expression in the transfiguration. Moses and Elijah, representing respectively the Law and the Prophets, appear with the effulgent Jesus, manifested as God’s Son, in the presence of the three apostles (cf. Mal 3:22–23 [E. 4:4–5]). This moment sees the baton passed from the heroes of the old covenant to those destined to be heroes of the new, each, according to Ephrem the Syrian, recognizing the other: ‘they looked to one another: the Prophets to the Apostles and the Apostles to the Prophets. There the authors of the old covenant saw the authors of the new.’Footnote 217 Even early Gentile followers of Jesus, who had not been acculturated to Judaism and whose interest in it per se was probably limited, appreciated the badge of venerable antiquity that the Jewish Scriptures bestowed on their nascent faith in an age when antiquity lent authenticity.Footnote 218
In Contra Apionem, Josephus contends that the Jewish religion is superior to its Greek counterpart on account of its greater age. On this reasoning, Babylonian religion, the custodian of the most ancient theological traditions ever recorded, could claim pre-eminence. Actually, Josephus acknowledges the superiority of the traditions of the Chaldeans and Egyptians over those of the Greek arrivistes and the Jews,Footnote 219 noting that ‘our first leaders and ancestors were derived from [the Chaldaeans]’ (1.13).Footnote 220 This seems a remarkable admission for a Jewish intellectual of priestly descent to make.Footnote 221 It reflects, however, a conviction widely held by contemporary Jewish scholars that is echoed in later rabbinic texts.Footnote 222 We meet it, too, in Acts 7. Stephen starts his address to the high priest and the assembled crowd of enraged Jews by referring to Abraham’s origins in Chaldean Ur. From his audience’s silence we may infer this to be one of his less controversial pronouncements (vv. 2–4). The notion obtained even earlier. In late-third-century bc Greek text fragments attributed to Pseudo-Eupolemus, God commissions Abraham to instruct Egypt and Phoenicia in astrology and ‘Chaldean learning’.Footnote 223 Abraham’s teaching astrology to the Egyptians is a trope found in later works – Philo and Jubilees (Jub 12:16–20).Footnote 224 Moreover, Jubilees (11:7) implies that Ur was a centre of Chaldean astrological knowledge and states that Abraham’s great grandfather and grandfather were expert in it.
The conviction that Josephus expresses proceeds from the Genesis account of Abraham’s origins (Gen 11:28–31; 15:7), repeated in the post-exilic Book of Nehemiah (9:7) as well as in Chronicles.Footnote 225 In the biblical cosmogonic tradition, the only decipherable fixed points for the Urheimat of the first human beings are the Tigris and Euphrates, not Palestine (Gen 2:8–14).Footnote 226 Other ancient peoples – Sumerians, Egyptians, Canaanites (insofar as Ugaritic material reveals their cosmogonic beliefs) and Akkadians – locate the origins of humankind in their ancestral homelands.Footnote 227 The Babylonians’ cosmogony represented in Enūma eliš takes the Tigris, Euphrates and Babylon as its cradle.Footnote 228 The rivers flowed from the right and left eyes respectively of the dismembered Tiāmat.Footnote 229 The Hebrew writers situate it whollyFootnote 230 or partly in the Mesopotamian region, notwithstanding the fact that later writings make the temple mount in Jerusalem the site of Adam’s altar, renewed by Noah after the Flood.Footnote 231 Jubilees (8:19), composed in the second century bc, makes Mount Zion the centre of the earth. Notwithstanding it envisages the Garden of Eden as the ‘holy of holies’.Footnote 232 Furthermore, consonant with Babylonian tradition as reflected by Berossus, Genesis also places the cradle of postdiluvian humanity in Babylonia (Gen 11:2; note also Jub 10:19), with it, together with Assur, becoming part of Shem’s patrimony in the Table of the Nations (Gen 10:21–25).Footnote 233
The Bible, then, links both antediluvian and postdiluvian humanity with Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian setting of humanity’s Urheimat serves, in fact, to introduce Abraham, the central figure in Genesis. Abraham’s family, declares Joshua (24:2), dwelt in Mesopotamia mē‘ôlām, ‘from forever’. Using the same phrase, Jeremiah describes Babylon as gôy mē‘ôlām, ‘a people from forever’ (Jer 5:15).Footnote 234 This conception of Babylon accords with Berossus’, itself a reflection of the city’s status in Enūma eliš.Footnote 235 In Jeremiah and Isaiah, the locution ‘land of the Chaldeans’ ’ereṣ kaśdîm frequently functions as the synonymous parallel of ‘Babylon’ (for instance, in Jer 50:1; Isa 47:1).Footnote 236
John Hill demonstrates that Jeremiah supplies some of the clearest expressions of the notion that metaphysically Israel qua Yahweh’s people and Babylon are indissolubly bound, that their relationship is one of ‘metaphorical identification’.Footnote 237 In the oracle against the nations conveyed in Jeremiah 25, Judah and Babylon serve as the beginning and end points of Yahweh’s judgment. The use of the atbash form of Babylon, šēšak, in v. 26 reinforces the sense that in the theological construct presented by this narrative Babylon possesses symbolic and mystical properties.Footnote 238 Like Jerusalem/Zion, Babylon stands for more than merely a capital city. She encapsulates an idea that becomes clear only in her juxtaposition with Jerusalem. Together, in Louis Dumont’s felicitous phrase, they ‘exhaust the universe of discourse’.Footnote 239 They are opposites and yet the same. As we shall see, this relationship reveals a dialectic that is axiomatic in the Mesopotamian world view. Deutero-Isaiah in one of his oracles concerned with Babylon juxtaposes her and Yahweh’s people, and Marduk and Yahweh in a series of chiasms.Footnote 240 The Judeans and the Babylonians represent poles that, paradoxically, are indistinguishable: they both practise idolatry;Footnote 241 weariness, defeat and exile affect them equally.
At first blush, Jeremiah provides some of the earliest indicators of the existential bond between Babylon and Israel. The situation is, however, more complex. Several of the passages that support the metaphorical and metaphysical identification (25:1–14; 27:5, 6, 20) are largely absent from the LXX or treated differently there. While the redaction history of Jeremiah is not our concern, it would seem rash to disregard the consensus that the tradition evinced in the LXX (and Qumran manuscripts) concerning this matter antedates the Masoretic text. Thus, the data in Jeremiah are probably post-exilic and, so, contemporary with the composition of Nehemiah or even Daniel.Footnote 242 Certainly, in Daniel 1–6, Babylonian hegemony is not repudiated; rather it is presented as a facet of Yahweh’s divine economy.Footnote 243 Noble kings such as Nebuchadnezzar come to acknowledge the supremacy of the God of the Jews; vexatious kings such as Belshazzar are punished.Footnote 244 Similarly, the Book of Daniel does not denigrate Babylonian learning but, rather, recognizes Yahweh as its ultimate source.Footnote 245 In their apprehension of divination, Ezekiel and Matthew subscribe to a comparable view, as does Josephus.
What we are beginning to see in these late canonical texts is the emergence of a strand of Jewish theology that contained ‘sentiments of affinity’ towards Babylon. It seems to have gained considerable currency by the turn of the era.Footnote 246 In the spectrum of diverse and competing beliefs jostling in contemporaneous Judaism,Footnote 247 Josephus and the writer of Acts, among others, viewed Babylon not as Judah’s nemesis, but as her kindred. In Josephus’ conception Babylon’s traditions, albeit differently formulated, were traditions that ‘Moses’ enshrined. Josephus may even imply in c. Apion 1.19 that the origins of the Flood episode in the Torah derived from Abraham himself who would have grown up with the story in Ur. From this viewpoint, Babylon is both the progenitor of Israel/Judah and, mystically, her mirror image. In Jeremiah, both lands are condemned to destruction because of their idolatry,Footnote 248 and, like Israel, Babylon was expected to turn to Israel’s God precisely as Daniel 4:25–37 portrays her most famous king doing (cf. Zech 2:15 [E. 2:11]).Footnote 249
This brings us to another aspect of the relationship between Judah and Babylon: the messianic hopes placed in the descendant of Abraham and David, Zerubbabel, in the early post-exilic period.Footnote 250 The significance of this figure in the books of Haggai and Zechariah is immense.Footnote 251 He remained a critical element in the messianic narrative, despite fulfilling few if any of the expectations that those prophets placed on him.Footnote 252 The genealogies of Jesus prepared by Matthew and Luke attest to his continuing significance. Although they diverge in the generation after David, with Matthew claiming Solomon as Christ’s forebear while Luke locates his line in Nathan, the lines merge a second time in Zerubbabel’s father Salalthiel/ShealtielFootnote 253 and Zerubbabel, before bifurcating once more.Footnote 254 The Gospel genealogies converge again only in Joseph, Mary’s husband.Footnote 255
The Matthean and Lukan genealogies were both skilfully compiled to prosecute the theological agendas of their authors.Footnote 256 One may reasonably ask why, for both agendas, Shealtiel and Zerubbabel were considered such essential elements in Christ’s lineage that the genealogies were flexed to accommodate them despite the lists’ general incompatibility after David. Given that a Hebrew appellation is complete only with its patronymic, the appearance of Shealtiel serves to complete Zerubbabel’s name.Footnote 257 This explains the former’s participation in both genealogies but not the latter’s.Footnote 258 Zerubbabel represented for Zechariah and Haggai the promise of the messianic king. In fact, Haggai, who brackets his book with mentions of ‘Zerubbabel ben-Shealtiel’ (1:1; 2:23),Footnote 259 prophesies that, in the day that he overthrows kingdoms, Yahweh will make him ‘as a seal, for I have chosen you’ (2:23). As Yahweh’s seal, Zerubbabel assumed the divine identity and authority.Footnote 260
Seals that were believed to be owned and used personally by the deity to invest their authority in the contents of a document are a feature of Mesopotamian cult that can be found already in the Old Assyrian period.Footnote 261 In Enūma eliš IV:121–22, Marduk regains the tablet of destinies and seals it with his seal. Divine seals are a prominent feature of the expression of divine authority exercised through the king in first-millennium bc Babylonia and Assyria.Footnote 262 Some not only depict the god but also the king revering the god. Such seals are connected with the tablet of destinies. They serve to validate and activate the destinies decreed on the tablet for the divine and human realms.Footnote 263
The Mesopotamian material elucidates Hag 2:23. Its imagery suggests that Yahweh will use Zerubbabel to shape destiny;Footnote 264 Zerubbabel will metaphorically impress the clay of the new dispensation and thereby realize it. He is chosen to be its determinant, with the seal bearing, metaphorically, his royal image together with Yahweh’s divine image.
The Mesopotamian data provide a broader context in which to set Driver’s exposition of Hag 2:23: ‘the Messianic aspirations that attached formerly to the Davidic king are transferred by Haggai to Zerubbabel, who becomes … a type of Christ.’Footnote 265 For the Evangelists, it was obvious that Jesus as the realization of the messianic king would be linked through descent to Zerubbabel and fulfil the prophecies attached to him.Footnote 266 The prophecies are steeped in Babylonian allusions, as the oracle of the seal suggests, and are therefore germane to our enquiry. I explore them below.
A further aspect of Zerubbabel warrants our attention: his name. Haggai underscores its significance by citing it seven times.Footnote 267 One does not really expect a deliverer figure of impeccable Davidic pedigree to bear the name ‘Seed of Babylon’. In Hebrew culture, as in Babylonian and Egyptian (and Greek and Roman), name-giving was a predictive cum performative act: nomen est omen.Footnote 268 Names were believed to encapsulate the nature and determine the destiny of their bearers.Footnote 269 ‘The name is the person, and to give a name to another is to grant him the attributes of which the name speaks.’Footnote 270 Zerubbabel’s grandfather’s appellation, Jehoiachin/Jeconiah, is freighted with meaning.Footnote 271 Given this, the significance of Zerubbabel’s name merits more attention than it receives in commentaries. Its distinction is underscored by the fact that personal names with the zǝru-prefix are unattested elsewhere in the Bible. Its affixation to the name of an alien city compounds this distinction.Footnote 272 In fact, Zerubbabel is a calque on the Akkadian Zēr-Bābili,Footnote 273 which, by contrast, was a relatively common Babylonian name in the first millennium bc.Footnote 274
Like Babylonian rulers, authentic ‘seeds of Babylon’, Zerubbabel is associated with building/restoring a temple:Footnote 275
This is Yahweh’s word to Zerubbabel, declaring, ‘Not by might, nor by power, but my spirit/wind’, says Yahweh. Who are you, Great Mountain, before Zerubbabel? You will be reduced to a plain. And he shall bring out the capstone with cries of ‘Grace, grace be upon it!’ … Zerubbabel’s hands have founded this house, and his hands shall bring it to completion.
The king portrayed as divinely inspired temple-builder is a staple of Mesopotamian royal imagery from the Early Dynastic period. The late third-millennium ruler of Lagaš Gudea builds the temple of his divine patron Ningirsu: ‘[Gudea] placed on his head the carrying-basket for the house, as if it were a holy crown. He laid the foundation, set the walls on the ground. He marked out a square, aligned the bricks with a string. … He built his master’s house exactly as he had been told to.’Footnote 276
This general allusion to Mesopotamian imagery is concretized in the locution ‘Great Mountain’ in the passage, since ‘Great Mountain’ (Sumerian KUR.GAL) was the stock epithet of the king of Sumer’s pantheon, Enlil.Footnote 277 The climax of Enūma eliš (VII:135–49) has Enlil apparently bestowing his name – a name that conveyed divine hegemony – on Marduk, rendering him king of the pantheon. While this is implicit in the epic, a Babylonian commentary on tablet VII states it explicitly.Footnote 278 Thus the two deities were identified, with Marduk becoming the ‘Enlil of the gods’.Footnote 279
The significance of Enūma eliš for Mesopotamian religion and political thought can hardly be overstated.Footnote 280 The earliest cuneiform copies of the epic date from the early ninth century and the latest possibly from the Parthian period.Footnote 281 Moreover, it was an extraordinarily influential work throughout the ancient Near East. Its influence derived from three factors: first, the political and cultural dominance of Mesopotamia in a formative period for the cultures of the region; second, the performance aspects of the work in the context of the apogee of the Babylonian and Sargonid calendars, the Akītu in Nisan; finally, the injunction to disseminate it. These factors combined to ensure that Hebrew writers were familiar with its contents.
The displacement of ‘Great Mountain’/Enlil-Marduk by Yahweh and the nexus of building from the plain of Shinar, that is, Babylonia (cf. Gen 10:10; 11:2–9; 14; Dan 1:2),Footnote 282 to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, mediated through a Jewish ruler whose Babylonian roots are explicit, emphasize Babylon both as antecedent and as mystical mirror image of the revitalized Judah. To highlight the interchangeability further, the next chapter of Zechariah recounts the prophet’s seventh night vision: the flying ephah containing the woman designated ‘Wickedness’. Traversing the interval between heaven and earth, two women with the wings of storks convey her in the opposite direction, namely, from Jerusalem to the Shinar plain (5:5–11).Footnote 283 Their act releases Jerusalem from sin and imposes it on Babylon.Footnote 284 In Mesopotamian theology, the space between earth and heaven, that is, the air, is the domain of Enlil.Footnote 285 Zechariah makes clear that it is Yahweh who is sovereign of this cosmic zone. No less revealing of the God of Israel’s displacement of the chief divinity of Mesopotamia, Marduk-Enlil/Great Mountain, is the affirmation that the prophecy concerning Zerubbabel and the temple will be fulfilled by Yahweh’s spirit/wind. Many authorities interpret EN.LÍL as ‘Lord Wind’,Footnote 286 since LÍL signifies ‘wind, air, breath, spirit’.Footnote 287 Zechariah contends that Yahweh is the true ‘Lord Wind’: the ‘four winds (rûḥôt) of heavenFootnote 288 that go back and forth’ are under the command of ‘the Lord of all the earth’ (Zech 6:5).Footnote 289 His wind (rûaḥ) propels the women’s flight (5:9). Zechariah 4:6–10 portrays Yahweh’s rûaḥ as the agent of cosmic transformation, energizing Zerubbabel’s hands (instrument) to build the house (object). In Neo-Babylonian, a single cuneiform sign could render the values for LÍL ‘spirit, wind’ and É ‘house, temple’.Footnote 290 If this informed the juxtaposition of the two nouns in the passage, it demonstrates a sophisticated knowledge of contemporary cuneiform on its author’s part. Regardless, Yahweh’s wind/spirit as the vehicle and expression of his performative word transforms the chaos of devastation into ordered existence. This motif, too, occurs in Enūma eliš.Footnote 291
Antti Laato detects other Mesopotamian referents in this pericope.Footnote 292 Even if some of the parallels that he, other scholars and I adduce prove invalid, Zechariah 4–6 unarguably contains a range of motifs drawn from detailed acquaintance with Babylonian culture. These motifs are then reworked by the writer to realize his theological aims.Footnote 293 The focus the book gives to a royal builder, who bears a name calqued on Akkadian, underscores its Mesopotamian heritage. ‘Made in Babylon’ is Zerubbabel’s name and the section’s context; ‘transformed by Yahweh’ is its message. If Wiseman’s conjecture be entertained, Zerubbabel was a royal hostage trained in Babylonian learning and lore, yet, like Daniel remaining faithful to Yahwism.Footnote 294 Indeed, in 1 Esdras (3:1–5:5), Darius rewards Zerubbabel for his peerless wisdom, thus recalling Nebuchadnezzar’s treatment of Daniel (Dan 2:47–49). Abraham, who marks the beginning of Yahweh’s Heilsgeschichte and consequently stands at the head of the Matthean genealogy, is susceptible of precisely this formula, ‘made in Babylon, transformed by Yahweh’.Footnote 295 Abraham was raised in a family who worshipped Mesopotamian gods (Josh 24:2). He abandoned them in favour of Yahweh.
If the ‘classical hypothesis’ is correct that Zechariah 6:9–15 concerns the coronation of Zerubbabel and not Joshua,Footnote 296 the Babylon-Judah mirror-image relationship is rendered even more evident by the chiasm of Zerubbabel’s establishment as ruler in Jerusalem and his building of Yahweh’s house with the woman’s establishment in Shinar and her building a house there. The prominence that Zerubbabel enjoys in the New Testament genealogies, further underlined by the Matthean list’s emphasis on the exile, indicates that Matthew and Luke employ ‘Seed of Babylon’ as a heuristic for interpreting Christ, the fulfilment of Yahweh’s soteriological design.Footnote 297
Thanks to their engagement with and perspectives on Mesopotamia, Jeremiah, Zechariah and Daniel are the prophetic books on which we have chiefly focused. In fact, Michael Goulder dubs Jeremiah ‘the prophet of the Fall of Babylon’, Daniel ‘the prophet in Babylon’, and Zechariah ‘the prophet of the return’.Footnote 298 Equally concerned with the exile is Deutero-Isaiah. It is striking that all these writers are key to the Synoptists’ presentation of Jesus, especially Matthew’s.Footnote 299 While it would be imprudent to rush to conclusions concerning these correspondences, it is evident that some New Testament writers liberally exploited books with an explicit Mesopotamian background to illuminate Jesus’ status and role, and that this background was significant for them.
