Over the course of human history, plagues and epidemics have been a horrific part of life. The past two years have shown us clearly that such afflictions are not going away any time soon. We have fought back against the COVID-19 pandemic with medical science, especially with the recent vaccination efforts, to combat it on the physiological level. And we have also struggled with ways of conceptualizing and explaining the pandemic in religious and symbolic terms to deal with the emotional, social, and spiritual tolls it has taken.
The various cultures of the ancient Near East fought against outbreaks of fatal disease with their own systems of medicine. In the cases of Egypt and Mesopotamia, we have textual evidence of these traditions: diagnostic texts, collections of recipes for treatment, and lists of medical ingredients. But ancient peoples also had ways of conceptualizing disease and plague on a symbolic level within their religious systems. This often took the form of anthropomorphized personifications of epidemics as spiritual beings and of viewing certain gods or demons as the causes of outbreaks of disease.
In the Hebrew Bible, for example, plague was often seen as being at the command of YHWH. The most famous example of this is in some of the plagues (Hebrew: mofet or nega’ ; in later tradition, they are often collectively called makkot, “strikes”) that God delivers to the Egyptians in the lead up to Passover, especially the skin afflictions, the death of cattle, and the slaying of the firstborn. Elsewhere, plague and pestilence (Hebrew: dever and reshef ) are envisioned as soldiers who march before and behind YHWH when he goes into battle (Habakkuk 3:5). Elsewhere, in 2 Samuel 24:10-25 and 1 Chronicles 21:1-30, God sends a plague (dever and maggefah) on Israel to punish David for commissioning a census, and this plague is executed by an angel who operates at YHWH’s command. The Chronicles account gives a much more intense description of the 059 angel, who wields a sword and terrifies David. A related event seems to occur with the angelic annihilation of the Assyrian army as it threatened to attack Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:35; 2 Chronicles 32:21).
The ancient Mesopotamians (the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians) associated several deities with disease and plague. One was Nergal, who was the king of the underworld, married to its queen, Ereshkigal, as told in the mythological narrative Nergal and Ereshkigal. He was also a war god, and, starting in the early second millennium B.C.E., he became explicitly associated with plague. He also merged with another god associated with war and pestilence, Erra, around this time. Nergal/Erra seems in many ways to be the causal agent of disease, just as he causes death on the battlefield. Fatal disease is just another one of his weapons. Plagues march at his command. This is most visible in the Middle Babylonian version of Nergal and Ereshkigal, where Nergal invades the underworld with a gang of demons, most of whom are named after diseases.1
Another Mesopotamian supernatural being associated with epidemics and disease was Namtar. He was the second-in-command under Nergal’s wife, Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld. Like Nergal, Namtar was associated with death, but his role was more similar to that of the grim reaper of modern folklore. He is described in several Sumerian texts as “Namtar, who has no hands, has no feet, who takes away/goes about by night.” 2 The name Namtar means “fate” in Sumerian, and his job seems to be to carry out the deaths “fated” by the higher gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon. His method of causing death was usually disease, and he is one of the most common disease-causing demons exorcized in Sumerian and Akkadian incantations. Sometimes incantation texts even portray removing a disease as washing Namtar out of a person, so he seems to have been a personification of the effects of disease itself within a person.
The dynamic between Nergal/Erra and Namtar is complex, partially due to diachronic factors—over time, Nergal seems to have usurped some of Namtar’s roles and associations as he became a more dominant underworld deity—but the main difference between these two gods and their roles is the different ways in which Mesopotamians dealt with them. Nergal was the recipient of prayers and petitions that humans used to beseech him to relent, often through praising him and his power. Namtar, on the other hand, was usually driven away through aggressive means: Other gods were summoned to drive him out, or he was sworn by oath to leave a person, or other healing rituals were performed to remove him like a poison. Nergal was the king of the underworld, and he could be appealed to as a judge, while Namtar’s role was closer to that of the executioner sent to carry out his task, who could not be reasoned with.
In some ways, this dynamic is not unlike that between YHWH and personified pestilence. As in Habakkuk 3, plague and pestilence are sometimes YHWH’s instruments, but elsewhere we find prayers to YHWH against plague and disease. Returning to 2 Samuel 24:10-25 and 1 Chronicles 21:1-30, we can see this distinction: The angel bringing the plague cannot be reasoned with, but YHWH can be. When YHWH is moved to compassion by his people’s suffering, he is the one who tells the angel to halt the plague.
There are significant differences between the Mesopotamian and Israelite conceptions too, of course, but the analogy between these figures illuminates how epidemics and plagues were generally perceived in the ancient Near East. Plagues and epidemics were subject to deities who commanded them—but were also compassionless, inhuman executioners who could not be reasoned with directly.
Over the course of human history, plagues and epidemics have been a horrific part of life. The past two years have shown us clearly that such afflictions are not going away any time soon. We have fought back against the COVID-19 pandemic with medical science, especially with the recent vaccination efforts, to combat it on the physiological level. And we have also struggled with ways of conceptualizing and explaining the pandemic in religious and symbolic terms to deal with the emotional, social, and spiritual tolls it has taken. The various cultures of the ancient Near East fought against outbreaks […]
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1. For a translation, see Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, 3rd ed. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2005), pp. 509–512.
2. See references in The Death of Gilgamesh, line 19 (see the translation in Benjamin R. Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, Analogues, Criticism and Response, 2nd ed. [New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019], p. 147); the Sumerian hymn Shulpa’e A, lines 32–33; and lines 11–12 in a spell from the Sumero-Akkadian bilingual incantation series alan-nigsag-illa.
