Akkadian Commentaries from Ancient Mesopotamia and Their Relation to Early Hebrew Exegesis

Dead Sea Discoveries 19 (2012) 267–312 brill.com/dsd

Uri Gabbay* The Hebrew University of Jerusalem [email protected]

Abstract Commentaries from ancient Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform script and in the Akkadian language, are known from the eighth century B.C.E. up to the last centuries B.C.E. The article investigates the authority of the texts about which commentaries are known, often considered canonical and divine, vis-à-vis the authority of the commentaries themselves, considered oral tradition transmitted by scholars. This is comparable to the authority of the biblical texts that serve as the base for early Jewish interpretations, and to the authority of the commentaries containing these interpretations, both in Qumran and in early Rabbinic literature. The article also surveys and analyzes various hermeneutical terms and techniques found in ancient Mesopotamian commentaries in relation to early Jewish commentaries. In addition, the article discusses the pesharim from Qumran in their divinatory context, in light of omen interpretations from Mesopotamia which use the noun pišru.

Keywords cuneiform commentaries; pesher; midrash; hermeneutics; divination; canonization; authority To Professor Shalom Paul, in appreciation

* I would like to thank Prof. Eckart Frahm, Prof. Wayne Horowitz, Ms. Avigail Wagschal and Mr. Yakir Paz for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to acknowledge the many useful remarks by two anonymous reviewers and by the editor of this volume, Prof. Mladen Popović. My research on this article beneﬁtted from a post-doctoral fellowship at the Scholion Center in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2008–2011) and from joint work with Prof. Wayne Horowitz on his project on the transmission of Babylonian knowledge to Jewish literature, funded by the Israel Science Foundation.

1. Introduction

Although tablets containing commentaries are known from the very begin- ning of Assyriology, the research on them remains very limited. Many tablets containing commentaries are not even published, let alone edited. This is partly due to the difficulties in editing such tablets, the first of which is the fact that many of the texts commented on are not yet fully recon- structed or lack reliable editions, and the second is the very laconic nature of the commentaries themselves.1 Recently, Eckart Frahm published a monographic introduction to the corpus of text commentaries, including descriptions of all known commentaries.2 This work will definitely serve as a starting point for further studies. As a result of the limited research on commentaries in Assyriological scholarship itself, very few attempts have been made to compare the Akkadian commentaries with Jewish materials.3

1 A ﬁrst attempt at collecting commentaries was made by R. Labat, Com- mentaires assyro-babyloniens sur les présages (Bordeaux: Imprimerie-Librairie de l’université, 1933). Since then many commentaries came to light, especially from scholarly libraries in Uruk dating to the late Achaemenid and early Hellenistic periods; see H. Hunger, Spätbabylonische Texts aus Uruk, Teil I (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1976); E. von Weiher, Spätbabylonische Texte aus Uruk, Teil II (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1983); idem, Spätbabylonische Texte aus Uruk, Teil III (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1988); idem, Uruk: Spätbabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadrat U 18, Teil IV (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1993); idem, Uruk: Spätbabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadrat U 18, Teil V (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998). 2 E. Frahm, Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Origins of Interpreta- tion (Münster: Ugarit, 2011). 3 For previous comparative studies on Akkadian commentaries and Hebrew midrash, see W. G. Lambert, “An Address of Marduk to the Demons,” AfO 17 (1954 –1956): 310–21 (311); J. Tigay, “An Early Technique of Aggadic Exege- sis,” in History, Historiography, and Interpretation (ed. H. Tadmor and M. Wein- feld; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983), 169–89; M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 452–57; A. Cavigneaux, “Aux sources du Midrash: l’herméneutique babylonienne,” AuOr 5 (1987): 243–55; S. J. Lie- berman, “A Mesopotamian Background for the So-Called Aggadic ‘Measures’ of Biblical Hermeneutics?” HUCA 58 (1987): 157–225; Frahm, Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries, 373–80; U. Gabbay, “Actual Sense and Scriptural Intention: Literal Meaning and Its Terminology in Akkadian and Hebrew Com- mentaries,” in Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews, Iranians, and Babylonians in Antiquity (ed. U. Gabbay and S. Secunda; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming).