Which Work is This?

The following line looks like it could have come from the mouth of Jesus:

Despise wealth; save your soul!

It certainly sounds a lot like something out of Matthew 16:24, or Matthew 19:21, or Luke 17:33. No, this line comes from Atrahasis III i 23-24:

makkura zêrma napišta bulliṭ

This is the warning to Atrahasis, the Babylonian Noah, that a flood is coming. A few notes on the passage are in order. The Akkadian term makkuru is the equivalent of Sumerian nig-ga (as in the famous lexical text nig-ga makkuru) and means property in a general sense. It is what Babylonians strove to acquire. Wealth in Babylon was actually tied to property, to concrete physical objects. If your whole world is going to be wiped out by a flood, your property is pretty worthless. The term zêru is usually translated to hate. In the Code of Hammurapi a woman who hates or despises (zêru) her husband is allowed to divorce him. The term napištu is cognate with Hebrew nepeš, "soul" though in Akkadian it usually means something more like "life."  The verb balaṭu means to live; the D-stem used here means to make one live or save a life.

Atrahasis is faced with a rather stark choice, dictated by a mysterious voice heard through the wall of his reed hut. He needs to tear down his hut and build a boat from it. He needs to forget the wealth that he and everyone around him is acquiring and save what he can. Not just anyone would obey such a disembodied voice, yet Atrahasis did and saved his family. Perhaps there is a reason that the name Atrahasis means "exceedingly wise."

Lost in Translation

Hugh Nibley liked to point out that historical texts cannot be adequately analyzed in translation. Here is an interesting example of that phenomenon, a unique document, part of whose uniqueness is lost in translation.

To date, only one letter survives from the Old Hittite empire. It is from the Hittite king Hattusili I (the famous one is Hattusili III) to his vassal Tunip-Teshub, the ruler of Tikunani. Letters from Hittite kings to their vassals are standard fair. We have dozens of Hittite letters from kings to their vassals. The letter starts in a common enough way:

Say to Tuniya, my servant: Thus speaks Labarna, the Great King (translation from Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., Letters from the Hittite Kingdom [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009], 77).

This is all pretty standard. Nothing in the translation betrays how strange this document is. Hattusili requests his vassal's assistance in the war that he is fighting. Again, nothing seems particularly unusual about the request.

If I reproduced the entire letter here, nothing in the translation would tell how strange this document is. The reader might be struck by Hattusili's vivid animal metaphors, but they are common in Hattusili's other surviving records. War accounts from the ancient world are fairly standard fair.

What is so unusual is apparent to anyone who reads the original. This letter, the earliest Hittite letter known, the only one to survive from the Hittite Old Kingdom, is not in Hittite at all; it is in Akkadian.

Sennacherib on Merodach-Baladan

In the ancient world, it was no secret that Sennacherib (Sin-ahhe-eriba) and Merodach-Baladan (Marduk-apil-iddina II) did not like each other. Sennacherib spent most of his second regnal year trying to suppress Merodach-Baladan, only to have the latter vanish, like a Gadianton Robber, into the swamp. Sennacherib's description of Merodach-Baladan, written probably in his third year, is interesting for its vitriol. Sennacherib says that Merodach-Baladan was:

and evil enemy, a rebel with a mind full of lies, and evil-doer whose atrocities were really true (ayyabu lemnu baranu karaš surrati epiš lemmutti ša anzillašu kittu) (Sennacherib 1.6)

We may think that since Sennacherib was a sworn enemy that this is a bit of an exaggeration, but remember that Isaiah told Hezekiah that he should not trust Merodach-Baladan.(Isaiah 39:1-8). Apparently Merodach-Baladan's envoys were real sweet-talkers. Too bad he ended up being such a scoundrel. It would not be the first or the last time that even the righteous trusted a snake.