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July 13, 2007
Nabu-šarrussu-ukin on a Tablet
I'm a little late to the party. Many abnormally interesting things about a recently announced tablet with the name Nabu-šarrussu-ukin have already been said. Nabu-šarrussu-ukin is a name that may or may not be related to a possible Nebo-sarsekim who may or may not be mentioned in Jeremiah 39:3. While many people have said useful things about this tablet, I think Chris Heard at Haggaion has the most complete discussion(s). It's always good to see someone debate with them self and others. John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has a very good post with a discussion of neo-Babylonian names.
As is my usual practice, I decided to start with the neo-Babylonian tablet rather than the Hebrew Bible. And so my problems began. As far as I know, all that is publicly available is the picture of the obverse (front) of the table. While I've seen a lot worse pictures than this one, pictures of Akkadian tablets are notoriously hard to make heads or tails of. The good news is that unlike half of the published pictures of tablets this one was published right side up. And then there's the problem of the neo-Babylonian administrative writing and "spelling." There are people who can read a tablet like this with as little effort as most of us can read the newspaper. I am not one of them. So I needed to go to school. I used the tablets published in Neo-Babylonian Texts in the Oriental Institute by Davis B. Weisberg for a quick tutorial and reference. There are dozen of publications of similar tablets. I chose this one because it was online and easy to access.
When I was about half way through the tablet, I discovered that a translation was available. As far as I have worked my way through the text, the translation seems very good. With the understanding that I am a rank amateur when it comes to this kind of text, I would like to point out a couple of things about the name and title that have raised so much abnormal interest. The name begins near the end of the first line and continues undo the second line. The title "Chief Eunuch" immediately follows the name. Together they are "spelt:"
mdAG.LUGAL.(su?).GUB(?) GAL SAG
I can't really read the su sign and, because of that, there might be a little more to it than just a simple su sign. As far as I can tell, this sign or whatever may amount to about the same thing is on the right edge of the table and not in the picture. Now don't panic and think this name has nothing to do with Nabu-šarrussu-ukin. In fact, that is exactly how one would expect such a name to have been written on such a tablet. Why that is relates to how various signs were actually pronounced in various contexts and is will beyond the scope to this post or any other single post. Also, I'm not completely sure about the GUB sign. It would normally be read "ukin" in such a name. However, it is possible that the scribe of this tablet used an alternative spelling, GI.NA. What can be read of the broken sign looks more like a GUB than any part of GI.NA and I'm not sure there is room for two signs. If I had the tablet in my hand I could tell in a minute (well, perhaps several minutes to an hour in my case). I am not questioning Jursa's reading in any case. I'm describing the problems I had in reading from the photograph.
GAL SAG was likely read rab rēši, "Chief Eunuch." From what I have been able to find, this is a somewhat defective spelling. I think GAL LÚ ša SAG is more common. But I don't see either a LÚ or ša and there isn't room. However, again, there is no question that this person is a "Chief Eunuch." Note: there may well be a problem with this translation but as John says, "Discussion of the issue is not possible here."
The Claremont School of Theology, which when I was there was called School of Theology at Claremont, has a collection of several dozen, perhaps a hundred neo-Babylonian tablets. In 1931, Carl Knopf published all or most of them in Miscellaneous neo-Babylonian documents chiefly from Erech. The story of how they came to be at School of Theology is beyond the scope of this post but those who are interested might want to look at the academic careers of Carl S. Knopf and Willis W. Fisher. Anyway, when I was at the seminary and later at Claremont Graduate School University, various students and faculty occasionally would borrow one or more of the tablets for a "show and tell" somewhere or other. It was standard practice, when returning borrowed tablets, to report that all of them were accounted for except the one that had "Jeremiah" written on it.
Posted by Duane Smith at July 13, 2007 3:45 PM | Read more on Akkadian |
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