Botschaften deiner Engel und Himmelswesen: In Verbindung mit der unsichtbaren Kraft (German Edition)

Otto, Recht und Ethos in der ost- und westmediterranen Antike: Entwurf eines Gesamtbildes, in: Polytheismus und Monotheismus in der Welt der Antike. Dass unsere Fragestellung in der weiteren Wissenschaftsgeschichte relevant geblieben ist, zeigt sich v. Hier scheint also die Physik eine wichtige Rolle als gebender Part gespielt zu haben. Rechtsgeschichte und Naturinterpretation haben nicht nur in der Antike untereinander interagiert. Francesca Rochberg In the historical discourse about nature, especially about nature s relationship to gods, or God, the use of the conception of law as a way to describe perceived order and regularity in the world of physical phenomena shows nearly continuously from Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity down to the 17 th century.

Even today the several related conceptions, the laws of nature, laws of physics, and laws of science perpetuate a metaphor of law to refer to structures purportedly embedded in a world apart from human thought or intervention, and in the view that the aim of science is the discovery of these laws. It is precisely the power of the metaphor of the laws of nature to connect what is seemingly outside the sphere of human culture with what is human and cultural. Real and independent as we may think nature and its orderliness are, the very notion of physical phenomena being subject to laws is a profoundly cultural claim, one which imparts a human value to the world external to human society.

In so doing, that noble part of civilization, law, is further dignified by being written into the very substance of the world, and, in turn, the world is made intelligible and even predictable by its law-like behavior. Endemic to the development of Western science are three conceptions in which the metaphoric extension of the idea of law is projected outside of human society and into the realms of nature and the gods, or God. They are divine law, the order imposed upon nature from a transcendent source, the laws of nature, seen as a property of the physical world, and the natural law, an ethical theory grounded in a commitment to a universal human reason.

Scholarship on the origins of the conception of laws of nature or physical law, as well as of the natural law, has traditionally focused on the classical and Greco-Roman periods, with a view to tracing that history down to the fully nomological and secularized laws of nature in early modern Europe. Zilsel, The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law, Philosophical Review 51 , , places the origins of the idea of nature as fully and independently nomological and as emerging from the view of natural phenomena being law-like as a result of obeying God s commands, in the period of Descartes, Hooke, Boyle and Newton Ruby, however, in The Origins of Scientific Law, Journal of the History of Ideas 47 , pushes the idea further back into the Middle Ages, saying, although prima facie, the explanation of scientific law as arising from the idea of divine legislation is highly plausible, it is for the most part mistaken.

The idea of legislation by God or Nature does account for much of ancient use of law for natural phenomena. However, the modern use emerged through different processes at different. Needham cited it as a key point of difference with science in China. In Western civilization, Needham wrote, ideas of natural law in the juristic sense and the laws of Nature in the sense of the natural sciences go back to a common root.

For without doubt one of the oldest notions of western civilization was that just as earthly imperial lawgivers enacted codes of positive law, to be obeyed by men, so also the celestial and supreme rational creator deity had laid down a series of laws which must be obeyed by minerals, crystals, plants, animals and the stars in their courses. Though distinct in the domain of their effect, natural law applying to human social life and the laws of nature to physical phenomena, they interconnect historically in Stoicism and its philosophical times in three distinct fields, in only one of which the idea of divine legislation had any part.

In all three it appeared before For the argument against this position, see D. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry in to Science and Worldmaking Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , 65 74, where he sets Ruby s modern criteria for a law of nature against those of J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China.

History of Scientific Thought New York: Needham, Human Laws and Laws of Nature, Striker says that the idea that the natural law theory was invented by the Stoics would be an exaggeration, but they maintained that the reason which governs the universe can be described as a universal lawgiver it prescribes what ought to be done, and prohibits what must not be done. Keyes; Loeb Classical Library; London: The context of such ideas about physical order as a function of theocratic order, implied in the terms ius divinum divine law and deus legislator divine lawgiver, has thus far been looked for in earlier Greek materials and in the various relationships assumed between the terms nomos law and physis nature.

Asking the question where the Laws of Nature were before there was Nature is meant to dislodge the discussion of the laws of nature from the mostly Greco-Roman period and later Greek and Latin sources that speak explicitly in those terms, and to bring with the framework and history of this concept cuneiform evidence from the second and first millennia B. Whereas the cuneiform corpus altogether lacks a lexical counterpart to the word or the conception nature, and thus, strictly speaking, belongs prior to and outside the bounds of the Western discourse about nature, that is to say, it is literally before nature, a relation between the divine and the world is nonetheless described in the Akkadian language in legal and juridical terms.

What I do set out to show is that a language of law and of judgment in the Babylonian sources bears relation to what is later quite clearly a laws of nature metaphor.

Botschaften deiner Engel und Himmelswesen

Whether Stoic natural law theory actually emanated from Babylonian cosmology 7 is a question that would be significant for understanding the very roots of an important point of Western jurisprudential and theological thought. Scholfield said, with Stoic natural law the stage is set for ius naturale as it appears in Cicero s de officiis and the Digest and in 6 7 Having a lexical counterpart to nature is obviously not a requirement for the application of the legal metaphor in cosmological thought, as Bodde s study cited above, n.

See further his follow-up, Chinese Laws of Nature: A Reconsideration, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39 , One could also say that having a lexical counterpart to nature is obviously not a requirement for the interest in, observation of, and theorizing about the phenomena. The presence or absence of the divine in nature is also beside the point, as demonstrated by the history of mediaeval European science.

It would probably be better to avoid the use of the modern term cosmology, as there was no study of the universe in its totality in cuneiform texts, nor a study of the universe absent of consideration of the role of the gods in its functioning. As will certainly be noticed in this paper, sources for the variety of ideas on the universe and its relation to divine agency, including references to parts of the universe inhabited or governed by various deities, consist largely of text types such as prayers, hymns, incantations and ritual texts.

Neither do texts focusing on the physical functioning of the celestial bodies, such as the Astrolabes, MUL.

APIN, or the late Babylonian observational and predictive mathematical texts, articulate what we would recognize as cosmological ideas. My goal is simply to review the cuneiform sources relevant to the connection between divine law and cosmic order, leaving specialists to draw their own conclusions about its later Western legacy. To that end I would like to consider first the Mesopotamian trope of the divine judiciary, second its extension to the physical world, and lastly, and in all brevity, to take up the question of the casuistic, or case-law, formulation of Akkadian omen statements as they appear in codified written series.

Cuneiform sources reflecting on the ancient Mesopotamian conception of law run the gamut of chronological periods, geographical locations, and genres. None are philosophical in nature, and so do not afford second order articulations on the nature of cuneiform law. Strictly speaking, second order thinking about the contents of texts is precisely what is represented in commentaries, although they are not forthcoming on the nature or principles of law.

The single legal text for which a commentary is preserved is the Codex Hammurabi and this provides alternative words as explanations such as hazannu mayor for rabannu high functionary; the same equivalence is found in a commentary to the omen text Izbu, see CAD s.

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For the Hammurabi Laws commentary, see W. Talon; Akkadica Supplementum 6; Leuven: Peeters, , 96 98; and E. Frahm, Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Ugarit-Verlag, , From as early as there are texts that bear on the administration of justice, law was attributed to a divine source and was legitimated by a claim to divine foundations.

As Assyriologist and legal historian R. Westbrook emphasized, the gods stood behind and above the entire judicial system. Moreover, oaths and the ordeal 14 effectively moved the court of appeal directly to the gods, whose judicial authority was final. The large See C. A History of its Beginnings. Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, , See the address to the River Euphrates , line 7: You judge the case of mankind, in L. Hinrichs, , ; see also STC, The Writings of Raymond Westbrook ed. Magdalene; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, , The attribution of the power of judicial command and decree to gods is also a part of Sumerian religious discourse, the full exposition of which would take us far afield.

To illustrate, see e. After you have extended yourself in the bright, the daylight, after you have established on earth, on the day of the disappearance of the moon, as you have completed the month, you summon? Enki and Ninki, the great lords, the great princes, the lords who determine fates, await your utterances, father; they the newborn?

Hinrichs, , Although the meaning and purpose of Hammurabi s stele in all its complexity is beyond the present scope, 20 the firm rooting of the conception of justice in divine truth or rectitude is of central interest here. On this basis, N. Yoffee defined the notion of law underpinning the code as law in the sense of natural law, i. Speiser had also stated that in the cuneiform tradition, law is an aspect of cosmic order and hence ultimately the gift of the forces of the universe, 22 seeing the term truth kittum as an immutable aspect of the Other gods can extend the rod and ring toward royal figures.

Walther de Gruyter, , Carsten Niebuhr Institute, forthcoming. Stolleis put it that the metaphor is indicative of something that is not, in itself, law, but which underpins law, lending it validity and, as it were, making it right or just. Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy ed. Ashgate, , For a summary and discussion of the debate concerning the legislative status of the cuneiform law codes, see R.

Eisenbrauns, , See also ibid. Toland; Political Anthropology 6; New Brunswick: Transaction Books, , , my emphasis. Contemporaneous with Hammurabi s law collection are Old Babylonian petitionary prayers ikribu to Shamash and Adad, gods of judgment and the divinatory inspection of the exta, respectively. These prayers are a particularly evocative source for the whole complex of ideas about the relation of the divine to the world in its Mesopotamian form.

Spoken in preparation for the performance of an extispicy, the inspection of the sheep s liver for the purpose of taking omens, the prayers ask the gods directly for judgment and a true that is, just, or, reliable verdict. At daybreak, the diviner, having made himself ritually clean by means of cedar, addressed Shamash and Adad, saying: Another Old Babylonian ikribu makes clear that the divination on behalf of the client is a legal case, and the sun god is asked to put truth or a true verdict in the offered lamb: Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, Vol.

CDL Press, , , where he in his introduction to this text points out that the procedure is a case; inducements are offered for a favorable decision; the outcome is a verdict. For the edition, see A. On the right of this lamb place a true verdict, and on the left of this lamb place a true verdict. The function of Babylonian divination was therefore to give the diviner a hearing with the gods and to receive truth, as J. Undena, , 30 and See also line 7 for the case of so-andso. Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Cambridge University Press, , with n.

Writing, Reasoning and the Gods trans. University of Chicago Press, , , where he says, each oracle [omen] was like a verdict against the interested parties on the basis of the elements of the omen, just as each sentence by a tribunal established the future of the guilty person based upon the dossier submitted to its judgment. The divinatory future, the predicted future, was what had to be expected at the moment that the gods publicized their decision by means of and in the omen Jeremias, Kleinere Mitteilungen, ZA 43 , For discussion of the two senses of heaven s interior, one located below the horizon and the other in the faraway hence invisible heavens, see W.

Horowitz, Astral Tablets in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, ZA 90 , ; and G. While various gods are named as judges who convene before an extispicy, the sun god presides as supreme judicial authority in the cosmos, both in heaven and in the netherworld. That the sun god held sway above and below the horizon, over the heavens and into the netherworld, is further reflected in epithets showing him to be lord and ruler in the Great City, in Arali, and over the Anunnaki and the spirits.

In the first part, the images of the witches are raised up to the divine judge Shamash before being placed in the brazier for burning. The incantation is as follows: Judge my case, render my verdict! Burn the warlock and the witch! Steinkeller, Of Stars and Men: Gianto; Biblica et Orientalia 48; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, , T. Brill, , n. See also Steinkeller, Of Stars, 26 n.

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The incantation is from M. Studies in Honor of Ake W. University Museum, , , lines 31, For the original identification and elucidation of this usage of alaktu, see T. Akademie-Verlag, , rev. To reveal the future I stand before you, to give a right judgment I pray with uplifted hands to you.

An inscription of Esarhaddon states: The stars of the heavens went according to their positions, taking the right i. There, the Babylonian god Marduk fixes the heavenly bodies in specified areas of the sky, called the paths of Ea, Anu, and Enlil. Their regularity is coordinated with the marking of time in a manner correlated with a scholarly text known as the Astrolabe, which lays out in detail the arrangement of three stars for each month of a month ideal year, one star for each path.

Eisenbrauns, , , Esarhaddon See Leichty, Royal Inscriptions, , Esarhaddon 57 col. No juristic terminology is found in this passage, nor is Marduk referred to as judge. In Tablet VII, Marduk s role as the god who regulates the celestial universe is reiterated with the line: In the Sumerian, the moon s course is next established as an indicator of the month iti as well as of a sign giskim.

The Akkadian version describes the celestial markers of time in both sun and moon, referring to the creation of the day and the renewal of the month. What is of interest in the present context is that these acts of cosmological ordering are, as elsewhere, effect DDD, The earliest exemplar of the Astrolabe comes from a Middle Assyrian copy datable to the time of Tiglath-Pileser I , though W.

Horowitz has suggested that its composition is even Old Babylonian. Mohn, , Glassner, Droit et divination: One last example for the legal metaphor for divine cosmic order must be adduced. BAR , who draw the lots, who fashion the designs, who apportion the lots, establish temples and keep the rites pure, who know the ritual purification.

To determine the fates NAM. The fates destinies of life you alone determine. The designs of life you alone fashion. The decisions of life you alone make. You alone are the great gods who direct the decisions of heaven and earth, and of the depths of the seas. East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 25 ed. Vogel; Special Issue in Honor of Prof.

Asien-Orient-Institut, , 77 n. See duplicates in Ebeling ed. First, legitimation of civil law is secured by the transmission to the king of the principles of right and justice from Shamash, chief justice over the whole of the cosmos. Again, this places divine law at the center of the interaction between human beings and the gods, where the human stands humble before that law awaiting judgment. Creation and arrangement of a celestial order was conceived of as the product of divine decree. One expression of this idea was that Marduk assumed the role of organizer of the cosmos and, in that capacity, fixed the regular positions of the stars, thereby creating the sun and moon as visible indications of time and as celestial omens.

Another expression of the same idea was that the cosmic gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea produced the celestial positions and their meaning as signs. The nature of heavenly appearances as conveying written judgments of the gods, the so-called heavenly writing, is in the background of the prayer literature when the plea is made to reveal, or make known the course of the stars , meaning to deliver a See Enlil in the E-kur, ETCSL: The fate he decides is everlasting.

Brill, , From a different point of view, B. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, , , sees these principles as transcending the divinities themselves, considering them a moral cosmic standard and an innate force of the universe. These various cuneiform references to cosmic order point to a conception of a divine law with universal legitimacy, whether it is the divine judge Shamash and his cosmic jurisdiction, Marduk as the cosmic regulator of heavenly phenomena, Anu, Enlil, and Ea s decision to lay down a cosmic plan, or the association of Shamash, Ea and Marduk with cosmic law.

In view of this evidence, it is difficult to argue against some connection between the Babylonian legal metaphoric language used to express divine cosmic order and the later history of the topoi of the natural law and laws of nature, particularly inasmuch as they too were deeply rooted in the idea of divine law. Cicero stated that one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. For the universe obeys God; seas and land obey the universe, The view that the stars form a decipherable language, written by the gods upon the sky as though on a tablet, is a trope that continues within the history of astrology well into the early modern period.

Grafton points out that Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, who published his treatise On Celestial Things in , argued explicitly that the language of the stars conformed in all essential ways to the language of humans. Stars and planets, Pontano argued, formed the letters of a cosmic alphabet. Every planet played the role of a letter with defined qualities.

Every astrologically significant configuration of two or more planets for example, when two of them met, or came into conjunction resembled a word or a phrase, the sense of which the astrologer could determine. See Grafton s Cardano s Cosmos Cambridge: Harvard University Press, , 6. To the sky as a surface upon which gods could write, and the ominous phenomena as a written language, see my Path of the Moon n. A History of Heaven on Earth [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ], Cicero, On the Republic 3.

Keyes; Loeb Classical Library ; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ,. The omnipotence of God, in Armogathe s words, manifests itself by its decrees, which constitute a juridic apparatus of government gubernatio. Milton, the idea of nature being governed by laws had become widely acceptable. Francis Bacon quotes James I as saying that kings ruled by their laws as God did by the laws of nature.

Juridical or legal terminology in cuneiform texts has no reference to nature, that is to say, no reference to a domain of physical phenomena qua phe Cicero, Laws Vol. Harvard University Press, , Philo, On Moses 2. Colson; Loeb Classical Library ; Cambridge: Brill, , , argued for Philo being the earliest philosopher to articulate the theory of natural law. Horsley, however, in his The Law of Nature in Philo and Cicero, Harvard Theological Review 71 , 35 59, proposed an earlier voice on natural law in Cicero, which derived from a Stoic source on universal law and right reason 36 , namely in Antiochus of Ascalon.

Armogathe, Deus legislator, italics in the original. The divine-human relation, whether effected by means of divinatory techniques to obtain knowledge directly or indirectly from the gods, or by means of ritual acts of entreaty to gain a response from a divinity, is what was described juridically, not the phenomena themselves i. However, insofar as phenomena were taken as signs of divine communication, legal terms were extended to them as well, as in Esarhaddon s use of the word kittu truth to denote the regular path of the stars, 57 and in the formulation of omen statements as laws.

On the other hand, as philosopher N. Goodman put it, confirmation of a hypothesis by an instance depends rather heavily upon features of the hypothesis other than its syntactical form. It was of concern to Goodman, for example, that lawlike generalizations were to be distinguished from statements of mere contingent or accidental generality.

He said, only a statement that is lawlike regardless of its truth or falsity or its scientific importance is capable of receiving confirmation from an instance of it; accidental statements are not. Today, what separates law-like physical phenomena from other kinds of regularities is a quality of necessity and universality in all cases.

Beebee described the difference between physical laws and non-law-like, or accidental, regularities in the following way: We tend to suppose that laws as opposed to accidental regularities govern what goes on in the universe. We tend to suppose that laws are rather like pieces of divine legislation; decrees that the universe must obey certain rules rather than mere general description of what in fact happens.

See Rochberg, Heavenly Writing n. Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast 4 th ed. Harvard University Press, , Ibid. Beebee, Causes and Laws: Elsevier, , Zilsel, in what is still one of the principal essays on the history of the concept of physical law, said, the concept of physical law, as it is used in modern natural science, does not contain any ideas of command and obedience. Yet it obviously originates in a juridical metaphor.

He stated that the roots of our concept go back to antiquity. They consist in a few passages of the Bible and the Corpus Iuris. A few other ancient ideas are of less importance. As has been noted elsewhere, omen statements were formulated in just the same way as the laws in law collections, i. Despite discussion and debate over the precise nature of the cuneiform civil law collections and the degree to which they represent legislative codifications or a kind of royal display of righteousness, they can be called codifications by virtue of being systematically arranged rulings.

Similarly, omen series are also codifications, in the sense of their being systematic arrangements of rulings in accordance with various criteria or subject matter. As far as the historical relation between omen collections and laws of nature as recognized in later Western tradition, the crux lies in the respective criteria by which the collected statements If P, then Q are taken as law-like.

Conceived or perceived as omen statements, the law-like nature of phenomena is a function of their being correlated with other, mostly social, phenomena, rather than there being a conception of lawhood intrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Kraus, Ein zentrales Problem des altmesopotamischen Rechtes: Was ist der Codex Hammu-rabi? Genava 8 , The case law formulation of omen collections constitutes yet another aspect of the legal metaphor as it was projected onto divination.

Just as in Hammurabi s law code or the others where case rulings represent what was decided in the case of P, so the omen statements refer to what was decided by the gods in the event of P, where P is some possible physical phenomenon. And just as in the use of precedent by judges to make the same decision as in a prior case where the material facts are the same, so the diviner would find the ruling in his case in the same way each time the same ominous phenomenon occurred.

There was no need for physical or efficient causality to connect the event with its consequent; indeed, the Babylonian omen statements do not represent causally connected events in that way. One is hard-pressed to find Nature within such a cosmic picture. Omens are law statements because they were meaningful within a juridical frame of reference extended to the divinities of the cosmos. Though formulated in a law-like way, criteria such as causal necessity, necessary condition, physical possibility, and real connections between matters of fact will not be met by the elements of Babylonian omen statements.

It is on this basis that I might begin to argue that the legal, juridical, and judicial language applied to divinatory practice and signs was in fact metaphoric, though admittedly, this could be a function of my thinking in modern, not ancient, terms. As I said at the outset, my interest in the subject of legal terminology for universal order in ancient Mesopotamia was neither for tracing the transmission of ideas from the Near East to the West nor for determining the origins of the concepts of laws of nature or natural law in Mesopotamia, and certainly not for claiming a direct linear evolution of these ideas from the ancient Near East to Athens or to the Stoics and on to the Christian West.

I only hope I have shown that cuneiform texts have a place in that complex history. Perhaps apparent commonalities are a function of even See F. Although our subject is by no means restricted to the history of science, it has direct relevance for it in that science, in its desire to understand physical phenomena or as we would say, natural phenomena is still susceptible to the use of metaphor, the legal metaphor being particularly attractive and entrenched.

By means of it, whether it functioned metaphorically or not, recurring cyclical phenomena were described as being regulated by some outside agency gods, or God , with the transfer of this same notion only much later to one of internal regulation through physical law, altering but not relinquishing the metaphor. The commitment to the view of nature as having laws has had a longstanding claim on our conception and representation of nature, and even though, strictly speaking, ancient Mesopotamian cosmological texts are before nature, their juridical language has a place in the history of that claim.

Lewontin, review of L. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?

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A History of the Genetic Code, Science , , said, It seems impossible to do science without metaphors. But the use of metaphor carries with it the consequence that we construct our view of the world, and formulate our methods for its analysis, as if the metaphor were the thing itself. It did not begin as a research project, like the work leading to my books Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography or Cuneiform in Canaan: Cuneiform Sources from the Land of Israel in Ancient Times, 1 but rather as a result of personal experience.

Only later did this interest lead me to an academic study of rainbows in cuneiform sources. So too this paper will begin with personal observations, and only later present the cuneiform evidence for rainbows and their significance in ancient Near Eastern texts. This paper in its truest sense began one rainy night outside my house in the Judean Desert in Israel.

It had rained and thundered for what seemed to me like hours, but had finally stopped, so I went out to do some errand or another, and happened to glance at the now clearing sky. What I saw there shocked me: It looked to me as if someone had strangled all the color out of a daytime sunshine rainbow and placed it in the sky to scare me.

This inquiry led to me to thinking about rainbows in cuneiform. All this happened not long before I was invited to our Laws of Heaven Laws of Nature meeting, and so it came about that I gave a version of the following paper about rainbows in the ancient Near East. As with the original paper, the written form below will be divided into two parts. First will be a study of the rainbow in modern civilization, the biblical flood story, ancient Near Eastern parallels, and some related texts. Leiden, , W. Eisenbrauns, ; W. Oshima, Cuneiform in Canaan: Israel Exploration Society, Lunar rainbows may only be observed at the middle of the month when the Moon is at its brightest.

Moonbows have all the colors of the rainbow yet are most often perceived as devoid of color, just black and white and shades of grey. The light from the sun reflecting off the face of the moon passes through the droplets of water that cause the moonbow, but this light is too faint to excite the cone color receptors in the human eye.

It seems obvious why. They are beautiful, very colorful with, literally, all the colors of the rainbow. In our world they are taken as a sign of good times, happy places, and an even better future to come. Later, in The Muppet Movie of , Kermit the Frog sings the song The Rainbow Connection with his ukulele as a rainbow-covered paradise is seen on the screen. Likewise, tradition and cereal boxes of Lucky Charms agree that leprechauns with a pot of gold are waiting for anyone who can reach the foot of a rainbow, and rainbows are used as emblems or symbols by all types of organizations promoting anything from universal human rights to peace in our time to mundane products and services which can be found listed under rainbow in any city s Yellow Pages: Again, each reference is positive!

In terms of the ancient Near East and its omens, one could say universally benefic. From the perspective of the biblical text, this is also the case as is made clear by the story of what is probably the most famous rainbow in history: Here the rainbow serves not only as a reminder of the flood, but more importantly of the divine promise: This is the sign that I set for the covenant between Me and you, for all ages to come.

I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall serve as a sign of the covenant between Me and you. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures, all flesh that is on the earth. That, God said to Noah: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who remembers the covenant, and is faithful to his covenant, and keeps his promise.

The flood in general, and the closing episode of the bow in the clouds, have made a deep impression on our civilization. The rainbow has become an iconic symbol of the biblical flood narrative, no less so than the animals marching two by two, Noah s ark, the dove with the olive branch, and in some cases the sad unicorns who miss the boat. The flood narrative also occupies an important place in the history of Assyriology, dating back to G.

Smith s discovery in the s of a flood story written in cuneiform on a tablet from Nineveh.

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Today, the ancient Near Eastern flood story is still best known among the general population from Gilgamesh XI, though a fuller version of the flood story is to be found in Akkadian in The Atrahasis Epic, which was last published in full edition in by W. Millard 4 along with a fragment from a short Akkadian version of the flood from Ugarit, the flood as reported in the Babyloniaca of Berossus, and an edition of a Sumerian flood account.

Penguin Press, , xxii xxiii. For a general overview of ancient Near Eastern flood narratives, see e. Scribner, , A. American Oriental Society, ,. I brought out a raven, setting it free: It was eating, bobbing up and down, it did not come back to me. I brought out an offering and sacrificed to the four corners of the earth I strewed incense on the peak of the mountain. Seven flasks and seven I set in position, below them I heaped up sweet reed, cedar and myrtle. The gods smelled the savour, the gods smelled the sweet savour, the gods gathered like flies around the sacrificer.

O gods, let these be lapis lazuli beads around my neck, so that I remember these days, and never forget them! As pointed out by Kilmer, 9 these are but two of a larger number of allusions to flies in the Mesopotamian tradition that impact on the significance of the flies in the flood accounts, but it is not until the very end of her article that Kilmer reaches her ultimate conclusion: That is, a necklace of flies was a symbolic reference to the rainbow as a chain of flies that appears at the end of the storm.

It also suggests an etiological explanation of a rainbow as the Great Goddess cosmic jewelry. The translation is from Kilmer s article. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Oxford University Press, , , Symbolism of the Flies,. XI that the lapis lazuli around her neck remind her of the days of the flood, so that she may never forget them, even echoes God s similar promise in Genesis that the bow in the clouds would remind him of his vow never again to flood the earth.

Yet there remains the question of exactly how we get from a necklace of flies to the rainbow. Part of the answer is given by Kilmer herself. As she points out, one can see the spectrum in a fly s wings in sunlight. Further, the shape of a necklace, or chain, as a piece of jewelry around one s neck is that of the rainbow, only inverted, upside-down. Finally, the Mesopotamian stone typically translated as lapis-lazuli in English, Sumerian na4 za.

Note for example the following entries in the na4 za. Thus, the beads of lapis-lazuli of the necklace of the goddess in Atrahasis and Gilgamesh XI may very well have been thought to be multi-colored, and somehow to reflect how Mesopotamians perceived the Symbolism of the Flies, The series as a whole is edited in volumes V XI of B. A general description and discussion of the series is available in M. In the Bible, as we have seen above, this fear is mitigated by God s promise to never again bring a worldwide flood, with the rainbow as the symbol of this divine promise. In Mesopotamia, no such promise is made by the goddesses who wear the necklaces after the flood, or any other deity The problem of perception of colors across cultures is quite complex.

For ancient Mesopotamia, the classic study of colors remains B. The entry from Qatna places the tradition of flies as jewelry in the west. In the spoken form of this paper, this allowed me to start a chain of speculation which brought me to the observation that the name of Gilgamesh in examples of the Gilgamesh Epic at Megiddo and Boghazkoi and only at Megiddo and Boghazkoi is written with the PAN sign; m PAN. If so, the final resting place of Noah s biblical ark at Mt.

Ararat in eastern Anatolia may be relevant here, betraying the fact that the flood narrative was transmitted to Canaan from the Hittite realm in Anatolia, rather than directly from Mesopotamia without intermediaries. Symbolism of the Flies, Instead Enlil elevates the flood-hero and his wife to divine status. They are Sumerian d tir. Of these, by far the most common is Sumerian d tir.

A quick glance at the dictionaries confirms the meaning for the two as rainbow, with the divine determinative dingir usually occurring with tir. Thus, we learn that rainbows were normally considered divine in ancient Mesopotamia. This land will experience hard times; weakening of the land. If the Moon wears 2 rainbows, there will be abundance in the land. Context requires that these omens all refer to rainbow-colored halos around the Moon. Likewise, on a much more mundane level, one finds Sumero- Akkadian rainbows, or rather mini-rainbows in more earthly contexts, for example, in mini-oil slicks as in the following oil omen: See CAD T At least two explanations may be given for this divine status: Although it is unclear if these two homonyms are related, 25 one might guess that marratum originally referred to the bird, and then was expanded in meaning to include the rainbow, perhaps because the marratum-bird was particularly colorful.

CAD M I list the two as separate words: This same Sumerian term IM. This same instrument is also to be found aboard ship in an Akkadian literary fragment W. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature [Oxford: Clarendon Press, ], , lines 11 Brill, , Ghirshman van Loon asked: Could the string of beads, possibly thought of as multicolored stones, be another symbol for the rainbow?

Thus, we find in art as well as in texts scattered evidence and possible evidence supporting Kilmer s understanding of rainbows as a divine necklace, as a chain of flies , in the flood narratives of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh XI. This then brings us to the last part of our discussion, the question of how an ancient Mesopotamian would have reacted to seeing a rainbow. Would he have seen it as a positive sign as is the case in our modern culture, being reassured by the rainbow that the gods would never again bring a flood of biblical proportions as is the case in Jewish tradition, or would the appearance of the rainbow have raised other types of emotions and associations in This word does not appear in CAD D.

In search of an answer to this question, let us review the place of rainbows in the omen tradition of first-millennium Assyria and Babylonia. Gehlken, 32 occurring between sections for lightning and earthquakes that are also to be found in this tablet of the series. Omens relating to rainbows are also quoted in the astronomical reports, edited by H.

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