PREFACE Mark sits to read his newspapers while the bombs blast in the vicinity. The windows are properly covered so that light can’t be seen from the outside. At that point, the children come running into the room. Hearing the bombs they turn off the lights, out of fear and habit. Mark, not being able to see what he reads any more, looks up from his newspapers and says in the darkness: “So, now I don’t know anything.” Revelation by Visual Effects in the Twentieth Century A Real Event Against all the turmoil of postmodernism that science undergoes and in reaching the digital age, society has always expected scientific theories to make accurate predictions and to explain adequately the relevant data. 1 Of the two scientific activities that involved Joseph--divination and dream interpretation--divination has proven to be the most problematic in the history of scholarship. It is commonly categorized as magic, with little to do with science. This classification reflects neither the prevailing understanding of divination in ancient societies–that will be treated in detail by this study–nor the current situation in modern science. With the contribution of Einstein and Heisenberg in the early twentieth century scientific fields opened up to include many non-orthodox notions. Post-industrial society and the information age are unwilling to accept the term pseudo-science uncritically, and do not classify any phenomenon easily as magic. Magicians in our modern society are associated with the circus in a derogatory sense. Diviners are equated with palm readers and fortune-tellers in a circus booth. Divination in domestic setting ranges from Mediterranean socializing by reading the future in the drops of “oriental” coffee to the 1Richard DeWitt, Worldviews: an Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science (Blackwell, 2004), 71,76. 1 “The Complete Idiot's Guide to Palmistry” and the electronic fortune teller. Is this image the right one with which to imagine Joseph, a highly educated prime minister of the greatest empire of the ancient world, Egypt? Could the president of the United States be compared to a circus magician? Readers who saw divination in this context, either ignored the few references in Genesis story to Joseph as a diviner, interpreted the text as an erroneous reading or a misinterpretation, or they ignored the whole story, as is apparently the case in the most of the Hebrew Bible. 2 Thanks to Freud, dream interpretation fares better in the modern society as it has earned recognition as a scientific method. It is no longer convenient to discard dream interpretation as a para-science or para-religion. Interestingly enough, in Mesopotamia, while divination belonged to the essence of scientific approach, dream interpretation had a more problematic status. Modern scholarship, which treats divination as magic in a derogatory way, comes from the same tradition--the same mindset as groups in the Hebrew Bible (HB) which condemn divination and/or ignore Joseph’s story. Unfortunately, the classification of divination under “magic” is still in our reference texts and even in recent scholarly treatments. 3. Frederick H. Cryer goes so far as to argue that magic is a more inclusive term for divination and that divination was assigned to magic in antiquity. Although he attempts to go beyond the HB main line theological bias and to present magic in a more 2 The objection that Joseph story may not be composed before the Hellenistic times, and thus, could not be “ignored,” by the earlier books of the HB is in a great deal based on assumption that such a story was unacceptable to the main line theology of the HB. Thus, either the impossibility of its composition, or its negligence by the religious literature of Ancient Israel before Hellenism presupposes the same frame of thinking. 3 “Magic,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online 2 007. <http://search.eb.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/eb/article-9108514 >. Frederick H. Cryer, Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation. (JSOT Sup. 142; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994) , 42. 2 favorable light, he does not try to define the term magic as understood in antiquity or to compare it with magic used in modern society. They have different semantics. The matter becomes even more complicated because of the division between black and white magic. White magic did not have a negative connotation in antiquity; black magic was feared and consequently taken very seriously. The feeling of anxiety related to magic distanced divination even further from reasonable scientific scrutiny, pushing it into the religious sphere of supernatural evil forces. However, Cryer is in a good company. CANE , 1995, whose main subject is the treatment of ancient civilizations, treats magic under “religion and science” and promotes the treatment of divination as a science. Nevertheless, it keeps a separate chapter on “witchcraft, magic and divination.” It may be argued that it is the transitional chapter between science and religion, but it might have worked better to separate these three terms from each other. Moreover, the proceedings from the 1995 conference on Mesopotamian magic and divination, which espouse new direction towards theoretical frameworks for Mesopotamian magic and divination, do not seem to question the established conceptualization of magic and divination. 4 There are some scholarly attempts to redeem our notions of magic and divination. 5 Magic can be anticipated as a reasoned system of techniques to influence the supernatural and the divine realm that can be learned and taught. It is a practical and empirical science seeking to alter or maintain earthly circumstances or arrange them 4 T. Abusch and K. van der Toorn, eds., Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretive Perspectives (Studies in Ancient Magic and Divination 1; Groningen: Styx, 1998) 5 Gabriella Frantz-Szabó, “Hittite Witchcraft, Magic, and Divination” in CANE (ed. Jack M. Sasson; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 2007, 2013. 3 anew. 6 In this view, divination is a research science, as it investigates supernatural realm in order to extrapolate the information about the future. Cryer gives us a very good survey of the history of modern anthropological scholarship on magic. For R. Taylor, “magic is a pseudo-science.” For J. Frazer, “magic is a spurious system of natural laws as well as fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.” Further, magic is a “bastard sister of science. ” Mauss and Hubert stress the “irreligiousness of magical rite; it is, and its practitioner wants it to be, anti-religious.” 7 Classicists have not done better by ancient Greek magic. Despite Herodotus’ claim that magic and scientific inquiry go hand in hand and that engaging in the inquiry of nature and the belief of divine intervention in it are not mutually excluded (e.g. Hist. 4:205, 7:129 or 10:302ff.), G.E.R. Lloyd, the doyen of ancient Greek science, sharply separates science from magic. Magic represents pre-logical and pre-scientific, representing at its best belief systems that are in opposition to philosophical and scientific thinking, according to rationalistic ancient Greek intellectuals of the sixth and early fifth 8 century B.C.E. If we go beyond the classifications, the treatments of ‘magic’ in the ancient world clearly show that it was considered a science as we consider ‘science’ in our contemporary understanding. Scholars almost unanimously acknowledge that a considerable learning was expected from the diviners of the ancient world and magic was 6 ibid., p.2007. 7 Frazer, Golden Bough, 53, and Mauss and Hubert, Esquisse , 15 as cited in Cryer, Divination , 8 Geoffrey E. R Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek Science. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) , 2, 13, 31 4 closely related to wisdom in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, and in Anatolia. 9 Cryer even criticizes Assyriologists in general for “understanding the phenomenon of divination as a species of science.” 10 David, in difference to Cryer, distinguishes between our definition of ‘magic’ and that of Ancient Egypt. 11 Under the word, heka (‘to control powers’) which we translate ‘magic’, Ancient Egyptians understood “a sacred science and creative force that had existed prior to the establishment of the universe.” 12 For her, there is a direct connection between science, magic and religion, as Egyptians equated exact science with temple magic. “Through the temples cosmic magic sought by means of the daily rituals to maintain the balance and order of the universe and to prevent the return of chaos.” 13 It certainly reminds us of the function of the exact sciences in our society today. “Scientists” correspond to David’s description of “priest-magicians.” 14 She confirms again, as Parpola does for Mesopotamia, that magicians were regarded as scholars, adding her twist that they were priests as well. They were trained for years in the “House of Life” where the official “Book of Magic” was stored as a part of royal archive. Thus, magic was “an integral element of the state system, and magicians were never regarded as ‘strange’ or abnormal.” Magicians were not only familiar with the secrets of the earliest times, but they were able to recreate the conditions of the time of creation. “With their unique knowledge the magicians were expected to guide others along the path of wisdom.” 15 9 Cryer, Divination, 135, Rosalie David, Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt (rev. ed. New York: Facts on File, 2003), 119, Frantz- Szabó, “Hittite,” 2009. 10 Cryer, Divination, 136. 11 David, Handbook, 119-121. 12 ibid., p. 119. 13 David, Handbook, 120. 14 ibid., p.121. 15 ibid., p.121 5 Subsequently, the counterparts of these ancient magicians are scientists.