Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible

by John H. Walton

sensitivity to the poetics of ancient historiography complicates both critical scholars’ dismissal of the validity of biblical historiography and confessional scholars’ apologetic approaches and doctrinal convictions. Critical scholarship needs to rethink its imperialistic and anachronistic imposition of modern standards and values on ancient texts. Confessional scholars need to rethink precisely what constitutes the truth of the text that they seek to defend in light of the text’s own poetics and perspectives.k

The extent to which deity is involved in events or outcomes can never be either verified or falsified empirically. Our dogged empiricism betrays us. The texts offer a different sort of testimony that we must respect.

In previous chapters we have tried to penetrate the ancients’ ways of thinking: their ontology, cosmology, theology, anthropology, and historiosophy. As we engage the area of divination, we are ultimately inquiring into their epistemology, for divination is driven by theories of knowledge.

Prophecies in the ancient Near East generally focused on the king’s activities and responsibilities. They usually concerned politics, military campaigns, and cultic activities.6 Most prophets were associated with particular deities and identified themselves as servants of that deity.7 The prophecies were not intended to reveal the nature of deity; they simply functioned to advise the king in a course of action.

In Israel dream interpretation is given acceptable status only when God’s direct involvement in the interpretation can be affirmed. Israelites preserved no standard, formalized understanding of how dreams signify, nor is there a hermeneutic for scholarly interpretation. Israel agreed with the rest of the ancient Near East that deity could and did communicate through dreams. But they had no semiotic system by which to decipher dreams and no hermeneutic of interpretation that was considered reliable.

It was important to people that they gain access to those signs at every level possible so that they could try to exercise some minimal level of control over the events swirling around them. In our modern world this might be comparable to the psychological benefits some find in financial forecasting provided by the Federal Reserve Board or even the weather forecasting on the nightly news. Though we understand that they do not offer certainty, we regularly base our decisions and actions on the information they provide.

Not only is divination not empirical but it has its own logic, which is not at all like what we today would call logic. Divinatory logic “achieves its effects through indirection, ambiguity, equivocation, contradiction, and subtle shifts from the logical to the figurative.”

we must note some of the significant ways that Jeremiah 31 differs from the divination literature. Most importantly, Jeremiah in no sense seeks to reproduce the literary structure or ritual setting of an extispicy procedure. The comparative question concerns only whether the text is adapting the terminology/metaphor of revelation through the exta for its own theological expressions.

The force of the torah is to show the Israelites how to live in the presence of God and how to participate in his order and his purposes. In this new covenant, the people will find that God has made himself (his ways and his expectations) known to each of them so that they will know how to live in his presence. Thus God is made known through the faithfulness of his people.

God would be known through his people, who would be living out the law faithfully. People with the law written on their heart become a medium of communication. Writing on the heart replaces not the law, but the teaching of the law.

Though astrology has never gone out of style, the prominence it enjoyed was significantly reduced in the latter half of the first millennium when it was learned that the movements of celestial bodies are regular and can be calculated precisely. Thereafter it became more difficult to think of celestial phenomena as communication from the gods, though the practice continues.

Initial indications can be gained by considering why Israelites were permitted to use lots but not extispicy, when both are provoked forms of deductive divination. The two are simply variant mechanisms for placing an oracular request before deity. The major difference between them is found in the basis of how the sign is read. Mystic speculation is not necessary for deriving meaning from lot casting—the answer is transparent. In contrast, the reading of exta is entirely premised on such mystic speculation.

In Mesopotamia, and to a lesser extent in Egypt, the city was the ideal social context.1 Nomadism was inferior and uncivilized. The order that characterized a city was parallel to and contributed to the order of the cosmos. Indeed, the cosmos found its ultimate ordered state in the city. The world could not exist at any meaningful level without cities.

In the early history of urbanization, government and political power were vested in the city-state. So, for instance, in the Sumerian King List, kingship descends from heaven, but it descends into a city. Rule is then passed from city to city. When something more like national states finally developed, they were still seen as extensions of cities.

In the study of divination in chapter 11, we found that many of the omens in the treatises were developed theoretically or hypothetically rather than empirically. Bottéro suggests the same for the medical symptoms, and it is not impossible that we might find the same among the legal treatises.

When the legal treatises are viewed in this light, one can propose that these are not laws (i.e., legislation) but selected samples that can serve the intended didactic function.9 It is in this sense that they offer model justice.

The legal treatises administer justice by offering wisdom by means of real or hypothetical decisions that were considered just.13 Today we think of justice as that which conforms to the law. For them justice was that which conformed to traditions reflected in the paradigms. Bottéro concludes that the “code” of Hammurabi “is clearly centered upon the establishment, not of a strict and literal justice, but of equity that inspires justice but also surpasses it.”14

Courts operated by wisdom, a sense of fairness, a knowledge of the traditions, a knowledge of the king’s decrees, and experience in the administration of justice. Citizens understood their obligations by means of living in society and being taught customs and traditions in the home.

The procedure that Job’s friends were suggesting, rather than advising discovery divination, urges Job to appease God through a procedure of blanket confession, thus more in line with Shurpu than with Murshili’s procedure, though all show the importance of appeasement. In this aspect Job’s friends were representatives of a revered ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition and also, unbeknown to them, the representatives for the case that the adversary was pressing. That is, if they had persuaded Job to follow their advice and make a blanket confession just to appease Deity and be restored to favor, the adversary’s contention would have been confirmed: righteousness was not the issue, only reward. Instead, the integrity that Job maintained (Job 27:1–6) was one that insisted that his righteous standing be considered rather than just his favor restored.50

the book of Job argues pointedly against the theodicy philosophies in the ancient world and represents an Israelite modification. This modification, rather than offering a revised theodicy, seeks to reinterpret the justice of God from something that may be debated to something that is a given. In Yahweh’s speech it is not his justice that is defended but his wisdom. The inference to be drawn from this is that if it is determined that God is wise, then it can be accepted that he is just, even if not all the information to evaluate his justice is available.51

On a personal level, hope for a future on this earth was tied to making a name, either through exploits of renown, building projects that would endure, or, most importantly, by siring the next generation. “The aim of every family was to perpetuate itself forever, it being important to the dead that their descendants not die out. Conversely, everyone had a paramount concern in leaving a son after him, in self-interest and as a duty towards the ancestors.”

On the national level, the ideal future in the ancient Near East was not comprised of some utopian dream. It appears rather to exist only as an extension of the present status quo. Though there were undoubtedly times when tyrants, warfare, plague, or famine made life anything but good, the inevitable hope for better conditions never seems to have coalesced into an eschatological vision or hope.

In contrast, Israel has an expectation for a future that has never before existed, even in the time of the prototypical messiah, David. In their theology, something better was coming, though sometimes only after something terrifying.3 This was not simply an unfocused hope—it was integrated into the covenant and was derived from it.

The question in the ancient world was not: “Is there life after death?” It was universally affirmed that there was. The questions were two: (1) What were the conditions in the afterlife? (2) What courses of action could improve one’s condition or achieve desired conditions in the afterlife?

In conclusion we can now note that beliefs about afterlife in ancient Israel were much more similar to Mesopotamian beliefs than to modern Christian theology. In the ancient world people were much more interested in the continuation of community and personhood than in theological issues involving being in the divine presence and living forever. In Christian theology afterlife is seen as the apotheosis of religious experience, the epitome of theological reality. In contrast, in the ancient world afterlife had the least connection with theology.

Generalizations are always misleading (including that one). As hazardous as a generalization can be, it can also provide a helpful educational tool if it is used in a careful, nuanced way.

The common cognitive environment was not borrowed from one culture to another. A cognitive environment is a cultural heritage shaped by infinite forces and influences generation by generation, through complexities that cannot be traced or identified. Even today when one culture decides to imbibe deeply of the cognitive environment of another (e.g., the Japanese adoption of Western culture), the result is a complex mix of that which is adopted wholesale, that which is adapted, that which is taken at one level without really being understood, that which is utterly rejected, and on and on in innumerable variations.

These points of continuity and discontinuity should have an important role in our interpretation of the Bible, and knowledge of them should guard against a facile or uninformed imposition of our own cognitive environment on the texts of ancient Israel, which is all too typical in confessional circles. This recognition should also create a more level playing ground as critical scholarship continues to evaluate the literature of the ancient world.