The Splintered Divine

Spencer L. Allen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501500220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book investigates the issue of the singularity versus the multiplicity of ancient Near Eastern deities who are known by a common first name but differentiated by their last names, or geographic epithets. It focuses primarily on the Ištar divine names in Mesopotamia, Baal names in the Levant, and Yahweh names in Israel, and it is structured around four key questions: How did the ancients define what it meant to be a god - or more pragmatically, what kind of treatment did a personality or object need to receive in order to be considered a god by the ancients? Upon what bases and according to which texts do modern scholars determine when a personality or object is a god in an ancient culture? In what ways are deities with both first and last names treated the same and differently from deities with only first names? Under what circumstances are deities with common first names and different last names recognizable as distinct independent deities, and under what circumstances are they merely local manifestations of an overarching deity? The conclusions drawn about the singularity of local manifestations versus the multiplicity of independent deities are specific to each individual first name examined in accordance with the data and texts available for each divine first name.

1 Considering Multiplicity and Defining Deity

One might think that a plain-sense reading of the seventh-century Assurbanipal’s Hymn to the Ištars of Nineveh and Arbela (SAA 3 3) would cause one to conclude, without reservation, that the entity identified in the text as Lady-of-Nineveh was a distinct and separate entity from the other, who was identified as Lady-of-Arbela. Not only does this hymn use feminine-plural verbs and pronominal suffixes throughout its approximately forty lines, but the undeniably plural noun “goddesses” (^diš₈-tar₂^meš-ia, r. 5) is also used to describe Assurbanipal’s objects of praise, and this would not change if we instead translated “goddesses” as the plural proper noun “Ištars.” Likewise, one goddess is described as a birth mother, while the other is referred to as “my creator” (⌈ba^!⌉-[ni]-⌈ti-ia⌉, r. 14). Semantically, “mother” and “creator” may overlap, and both terms are feminine, so we could easily expect that these terms refer to the same woman if they referred to a human person. However, the entities addressed here as “mother” and “creator” are decidedly not human, so these terms are not necessarily redundant in reference to the divine world as they would be to ours; a divine creator could easily be distinct from a divine mother.^r A third way by which this hymn distinguishes between Lady-of-Nineveh and Lady-of-Arbela is its reference to the Emašmaš-temple and the Egašankalamma-temple (l. 10), which belonged to the patron goddesses of Nineveh and Arbela, respectively.^s

Together the plural vocabulary and syntax, dual roles, and two corresponding places of worship should all indicate to the reader that Assurbanipal was praising more than one deity, each of whom he respectfully called “Lady” rather than calling them by their divine first names. With this in mind, Porter’s central thesis and conclusion that Lady-of-Nineveh and Lady-of-Arbela are two distinct goddesses should be so obvious that the article need never have been developed, presented at the 49^th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in London in 2003, and published along with the conference’s proceedings in Iraq 66 the following year. The fact that Porter even considered arguing for a plain-sense reading of SAA 3 3 as a hymn praising two distinct goddesses itself suggests that the dominant opinions held by Assyriologists were based on the assumption that in the polytheistic system that operated during the Neo-Assyrian period Lady-of-Nineveh was actually the same goddess as Lady-of-Arbela. Because Lady-of-Nineveh and Lady-of-Arbela can be considered the respective titles or epithets for a local Ninevite goddess known as Ištar and a local Arbelite goddess also known as Ištar, it was generally assumed that these two localized Ištars represented the one goddess Ištar whose geographic allegiance was unspecified. Because both ladies had also been called by the divine name Ištar, they were both the same Ištar.

1.1 An Early History of Identifying and Equating Divine Names

Porter’s “Ishtar of Nineveh and her Collaborator, Ishtar of Arbela, in the Reign of Assurbanipal” needed to be developed and written precisely because there was a long and influential history of dismissing localized Ištar goddesses as distinct and individual deities. Consider, for instance, George Barton’s work from the early 1890s, the two-part essay “The Semitic Ištar Cult.”^t Barton developed two methodological approaches in order to demonstrate that there were fewer distinct Ištar goddesses than the available geographic epithets permitted. This is not to say that Barton’s conclusions are the sole foundation upon which subsequent scholarship identified each localized Ištar goddess with other Ištar goddesses – indeed, he initially allowed for the existence of a few distinct Ištar goddesses – but his investigations of the many localized Ištars do reveal, at minimum, a frame of mind from which modern examinations of Mesopotamian religious traditions stem.

Barton surveyed “the great mass of material extant in the Assyrian language” and concluded that these texts needed to be classified in order to reconstruct the history of Ištar in Mesopotamian religious thought.^u His interest in this classification arose primarily in response to the three main localized Ištar goddesses from the Neo-Assyrian period, namely, Ištar-of-Nineveh, Ištar-of-Arbela, and Assyrian-Ištar. In order to optimize his potential history or histories of these potential divine personalities, he employed two separate methodologies. The first relied upon his assumed link between each localized goddess and her cult at that place, and it assumed that each of these three Ištar goddesses possessed her own unique personality and characteristics. Barton began this first line of inquiry with the premise that each Ištar goddess was independent of the others until he uncovered texts to demonstrate otherwise. This process was aided by his belief that a text could be traced to a particular temple (TN) or to a particular city (GN). After ascertaining each text’s provenance, he identified the Ištar from that text as specifically Ištar-of-TN/ GN. He then sorted the texts into three different collections according to their cults of origin (i.e., Nineveh, Arbela, and Assur) and used each collection to reconstruct an individual personality for each local Ištar goddess.

Barton based his second methodological approach on the texts’ historical settings rather than their geographical associations. This tactic downplayed the need to determine each text’s provenance before deciding to which Ištar the text referred because, he argued, provenance and origins were irrelevant compared to when the text was written.^v This also allowed him to avoid another primary assumption of the first methodology because he no longer needed to assume that localized Ištars had distinct personalities. Because his second methodology depended on royal inscriptions and administrative texts rather than cultic or mythic texts to isolate potentially distinct Ištars, Barton presumed that each king invoked the Ištar who was worshipped in his capital city rather than any other potential Ištar. This meant that texts from Sennacherib’s reign that happen to mention (the unspecified) Ištar must have implicitly meant Ištar-of-Nineveh because Nineveh was Sennacherib’s imperial capital. Barton inferred that if the king had meant to address a different Ištar, then he would have expressly indicated this in the inscription.^w This allowed, for example, Barton to treat the myth Ištar’s Descent (and, secondarily, other texts discussing Ištar and her divine paramour Tammuz) as a myth specifically about Ištar-of-Nineveh because this material was recovered from Assurbanipal’s library in Nineveh.^x Barton considered this second methodology the more reliable of the two because it provided “a tangible rather than a speculative basis on which to rest, and in investigations of such antiquity such a basis should always be sought.”^y This “speculative basis” was the idea that drove this first methodological inquiry: divine personalities were distinct enough to distinguish accurately between two gods.

Barton began his dual-approach reconstruction for divine personalities with the goddess Ištar-of-Nineveh because he believed that she was first worshipped by Assurnāṣirpal I, a king whom Barton dated to the Old Assyrian period in the early second millennium.^z Although we know now that this king reigned from Assur during the eleventh century, Barton was forced to consider Assurnāṣirpal’s prayer to Ištar a Ninevite text about the Ninevite Ištar goddess because of the copy’s provenance.^aa This prayer referred to this Ištar as Lady-of-Nineveh (be-let ^uruNINA, AfO 25 38:5) and the goddess Who-Resides-(in)-the-Emašmaš-temple (a-ši-bat e₂-maš-maš, l. 3).^ab This Ištar-of-Nineveh was also called Sȋn’s daughter and the beloved sister of Šamaš (DUMU.MUNUS ^d30 tali -mat ^dšam-ši, l. 6), as well as the wife of the supreme god Assur (na-ra-mi₃-ki AD DINGIR^meš … q[u^?-ra]-du ^daš-šur, AfO 25 42:81). Elsewhere in this psalm, Assurnāṣirpal claimed to be the one who introduced the worship of Ištar to the people of Assyria, who had previously neither known or recognized her divinity (UN^meš KUR ^daš-šur^ki ul i-da-ni-ma ul im-da-ḫa-ra AN-ut-ki, AfO 25 39:24), which Barton rightly regarded as a pious hyperbole.^ac

Like the extant copy of the prayer to Ištar-of-Nineveh, the remainder of the material available to Barton belonged to the Neo-Assyrian period.^ad Although no texts from Assurnāṣirpal II’s reign explicitly identified a goddess by the full name Ištar-of-Nineveh, statements made about Ištar in the available texts indicated to Barton that she was a warrior goddess and Assurnāṣirpal’s patron goddess (e.g., RIMA 2 A.0.101.1 i 70).^ae The earliest text available to Barton that explicitly named an Ištar-of-Nineveh was from the end of the eighth century, from Sennacherib’s reign.^af Significantly, Sennacherib was the king who moved the Assyrian capital to Nineveh, and this was also, according to Barton, when Ištar-of-Nineveh joined Assur as a chief deity of the Assyrian Empire.^ag

Compared to the numerous texts that Barton found and associated with Ištar-of-Nineveh, texts invoking other Neo-Assyrian Ištars were limited, so Barton concluded little more abou...

Table of contents

• Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Additional Abbreviations
• 0 Introduction
• 1 Considering Multiplicity and Defining Deity
• 2 Comparative Insights
• 3 The Divine Hierarchy and Embedded God Lists (EGLs)
• 4 The Ištar Goddesses of Neo-Assyria
• 5 Geographic Epithets in the West
• 6 A Kuntillet ‘Ajrud Awakening
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Appendix: Tables 1.1–7.1
• Notes
• Indices
• Primary Texts Index
• General Index