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October 19, 2007
Your Servant, the Dog
A couple of the Amarna letters (EA 60 and 61) have an interesting use of the word "dog." Because it is the least damaged, I'll use EA 60:6-7 as an example.
a-mur a-na-ku ÌR(arad) LUGAL(šarri) ù
UR.GI7(kalbu) ša É(bîti)-šu
"Look, I am the servant of the king and
a dog of his house."
This is from a letter to the Pharaoh from Abdi-Ashirta, the leader(?) of the Amurru. It was written in the 14th century BCE. The Mari tablets, ~2000 BCE, use the word "dog" in a pejorative sense but not quite in this way. I've put the most relevant Mari example in a postscript.
Similar constructions to the Amarna examples occur in the Lachish letters 2:3-4; 5:3-4; 6:3 and perhaps 12:1. I will use Lachish 6:2b-4a to illustrate,
The Lachish letters were written in the early 6th century BCE. Notice that in both the case of the Amarna letter and the Lachish letters, the writer uses the term "dog" in a self depreciating way. In both cases, "dog" also further defines what it means to be a servant or at least what he wants his correspondent to think it means in this context.
And then there is 2 Kings 8:13;
Here, very similar to the Amarna letters and the Lachish letters, the narrator has Hazael apply the term to himself as a further characteristic of exactly what kind of servant he is.
What are the implications of all this? As usual, I'm not sure. One thing seems certain; there is no need to follow the LXX and read "the dead dog (ό κύων ό τεθνηκώς)" in 2 Kings 8:13. But, I don't think anyone does that anyway. So do we have here a metaphor for servant that scribes and authors used in the Levant for eight centuries or more? Or is this usage built on a long lasting underlying negative attitude toward dogs that they adopted from time to time in similar contexts without there being continuous usage?
I am not the first to note these parallels, Winton Thomas, 414, (perhaps not the first himself but the first I could find without a lot of work) noted them in 1960.
Postscript
Mari 27:28
[ù š]u-nu lu-ú DUMU.MEŠ(mari) LUGAL(šarrim) mi-nu-um šu-[nu-ma] ka-al-bu
"These are, truly, sons of a king. In what (regard) are they dogs?"
This is in a letter from ShamShi-Addu to his son Iasmah-Addu.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at October 19, 2007 11:30 AM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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Comments
I had a post on dogs recently, too. It's entitled "Emmanuel Lévinas: The Weave of his Life and Thought" and might have escaped your attention because "dog" is not in the title.
An interesting parallel to the use of dog as a term of disparagement and then, self-deprecation is in the New Testament: Mark 7:24-27 // Matthew 15:21-28.
But it's also not the same. "Dog" there seems to be an ethnic slur. The rhetorical force (disparagement and/or self-deprecation) remains constant even when the symbolic content changes.
Thanks for this post, Duane.
ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com
Posted by: John Hobbins at October 21, 2007 2:42 PM
John,
I did see that post and at the time thought it abnormally interesting. Perhaps it even triggered my own post. But at my age and station, do you really expect me to remember something that you posted five days ago? You will recall Mark Twain's observation about himself that I think applies equally well to me "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened."
Posted by: Duane at October 21, 2007 3:19 PM
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