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Worshiping Idols

What Isaiah didn’t know

By Michael B. Dick

30 The Hebrew prophet scholars call Second Isaiah loved to make fun of idols. He scathingly mocks them in as powerful a parody as anything in the Bible. But does he really understand the idols he condemns? I grant the literary artistry and effective polemic of this prophet, who is believed to have written the second section of the Book of Isaiah (chapters 40–55) in about 540 B.C.E., while exiled in Babylon. But would an Assyrian or Babylonian worshiper give us a different, perhaps more favorable, not to say evenhanded, picture? “To whom then will you liken God?” the […]

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Endnotes

1.

For the source of this text, see Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, “The Mesopotamian miµs piÆ Ritual,” in Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, ed. Dick (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), pp. 64–65.

2.

Gebhard J. Selz, “‘The Holy Drum, the Spear, and the Harp’: Towards an Understanding of the Problems of Deification in Third Millennium Mesopotamia,” in Sumerian Gods and Their Representations, ed. Irving Finkel and Markham J. Geller (Groningen: Styx, 1997), pp. 185–186, n.8.

3.

EnuÆma Elish I.94, 95–96.

4.

Alisdair Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Words of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 93.

5.

See Walker and Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Miµs PiÆ Ritual, State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts 1, ed. Simo Parpola (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), p. 6.

6.

Edward M. Curtis, “Images in Mesopotamia and the Bible: A Comparative Study,” in The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature: Scripture in Context III, Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies, ed. William Hallo, Bruce W. Jones and George L. Mattingly (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 42.

7.

Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987), p. 35.

8.

Novus Ordo Missae (1970).

9.

See Walker and Dick, Induction, pp. 8–9.

10.

Walker and Dick, Induction, p. 141. Lines 70–71, tablet 3, of Miµs PiÆ.

11.

Sultantepe Tablets 199; Walker and Dick, Induction, p. 130.

12.

See Walker and Dick, “The Mesopotamian miµs piÆ Ritual,” pp. 25–26.

13.

This translation is from Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muse: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1993), pp. 779–780.

14.

Erra Epic I.127–129. Translation from Luigi Cagni, The Poem of Erra, Sources from the Ancient Near East, ed. Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1977).

15.

Riekele Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien, Archiv für orientforschung 9 (Graz: Weidner, 1956), Esarhaddon 14 Ep 8a:44.

16.

Maximilian Streck, Assurbanipal und die letzten Assyrischen Könige bis zum Untergange Niniveh’s, Vorderasiatische Bibliothek 7 (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat, 1916), p. 55.

17.

H.W.F. Saggs, The Encounter with the Divine in Mesopotamia and Israel (London: Athlone Press, 1978), p. 15. I have frequently heard this marvelous quotation attributed to me. Alas, it is not so. I only wish I had said it first.

18.

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958; repr. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 29. This is actually based on a quotation from the 14th-century Franciscan William of Ockham.