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April 27, 2007
The Weapon of God
I found, via ABZU, a 1997 dissertation by Niek Veldhuis called Elementary Education at Nippur; The Lists of Trees and Wooden Objects. It's over 400 pages long so I haven't read it through as yet but it contains a good review of research on scribal training in Sumerian and cuneiform in general up to 1997. Veldhuis does discuss the lexical texts from Ugarit and Emar as well as the Mesopotamia material. But his main focus is on the GIŠ List from Nippur, a list of trees, other woody plants, parts of trees and things mostly made of wood.
Line 500 of the GIŠ List has this interesting entry, gišTUKUL-DINGIR. What is thought to be a teacher's master tablet shows this most clearly. The tablet is CBS 14143 for those of you keeping score at home. Veldhuis tells us it can be understood, even read, in a couple of different ways: "gišmiddu2, meaning mace, or gištukul-dingir, weapon/mace of a god." He notes "gišmiddu2 (TUKUL.DINGIR) MIN ša ilānī, 'weapon of the gods'" from MSL 6, 84f. and the somewhat related reading from Ugarit (RSO VII, p.107: 20). The entry comes between gištukul-kun, "weapon with a tail?" and gištukul-gaz, "shattering weapon." Interestingly, the line is missing in one student copy (N 5223). I don't think too much should be made of this but it is interesting. See Veldhuis 98-99 for more details. Believe it or not, there are more details.
One the one hand, perhaps one should think behind the use of the Hebrew word שבט in places like Psalm 23:4 and see a very physical club in the hand of the god of that poem. Of course, one cannot avoid seeing a real, as opposed to metaphorical or analogical, weapon in places like Exodus 21:20 where the club (שבט) is in the hand of a slave owner. So the GIŠ List contributes only slightly to this discussion. On the other hand, I'm not so sure whether the gišTUKUL-DINGIR from the GIŠ List is a weapon used by a god or a weapon used by a man that was simply called a "mace of god." The "rods from god" is a concept for a space-based weapon that is all too human in origin.
Posted by Duane Smith at April 27, 2007 3:00 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |
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Comments
I've downloaded a copy of the dissertation as well. It looks very useful. Pretty interesting tie in with the Bible!
Posted by: Charles Halton at April 28, 2007 5:51 PM
With such thngs as Tukul-Dingir there is always an additional question. One needs to always entertain the question, "is this the il of magnificence?" ((UT # 163 "tlhn il). Another example (see UT 2168) is smd il: is it the club of god or the great club? Perhaps he deals with this.
Posted by: Loren Fisher at April 29, 2007 9:14 AM
Loren,
Veldhuis only deals with the possibility that it is "the il of magnificence," indirectly. Without being as clear as I should have been, that was what I was trying to get at in my last comment. Veldhluis does cite a late version of ur5-ra (7A) that "has collected all possibilities (MSL 6, 84f.):"
9 gištukul-dingir-ra MIN (=kakku) ili divine weapon
10 gišmiddu2 (TUKUL.DINGIR) MIN ša ilānī weapon of the gods
11 gišmiddu (TUKUL.BAD) MIN ša tāhāzi combat weapon
It appear to me that line 9 may represent the il of magnificence while line 10 may not. But it is hard to tell in these lists.
Duane
Posted by: Duane at April 29, 2007 10:35 AM
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