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July 10, 2009

Have A Snake Problem? Try Prayer

What follows is my translation of a prayer to Shamash. The original, written in the neo-Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, is found all by itself on tablet VAT 5 in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin collection or if you prefer The Berlin State Museums collection. I'm guessing the Pergamon Museum to be exact, the Vorderasiatisches Museum to be more exact.

Let us pray,

O Shamash,
King of heaven and earth; lord of Kittu (truth) and Mišaru (justice).
Lord of the Anunna-gods; lord of the spirits of the dead.
Whose approval not a single god can revoke; whose command is unalterable.
O Shamash,
Reviving the dead, releasing the bound is in your hands.
O Shamash,
I am your servant, so-and-so, son of so-and-so,
whose own god is Marduk and (whose) own goddess is Zarpanitum:
I stand before you; I seize your hem.
Because of an evil omen, a snake that I saw proceeding to hunt in my house,
I am in fear and anxious and constantly frightened.
Save me from this evil omen!
Let me proclaim your greatness; let me praise your glories.
Let those who see me declare your praises forever, let them sing your glories.

Yes, the text does say "so-in-so son of so-in-so" or rather NENNI DUMU NENNI, which amounts to the same thing. So if you do have a snake problem, fill in your own name and your father's name at this point. You might want to update your personal god and goddess also. I consulted Foster, 729-30; Seux, 364-365; and Maul, 297, in preparing my translation. Their work may show through here and there. The arrangement into individual lines is mine and in some ways part of the translation. The scribe of VAT 5 organized it into rather short lines of two or three words per line with no apparent interest in preserving or observing individual linguistic units. Some tablets with prayers and other poetry are beautifully organized into lines that clearly demark the individual linguistic units and even sub-units. As far as I can tell, this tablet isn't one of them. Another abnormally interesting point is that the text does not fill the whole tablet. The reverse has blank space at the bottom with room for at least three additional lines. Does this indicate a student exercise? If so, very little else on the tablet would make one think it.

While we may not like snakes hunting in our house, most of us don't bother ourselves worrying about bad omens these days. But that was far from true in the ancient Near East. Several Akkadian omens refer to problems with snakes: entwined snakes, nesting snakes, snakes hanging from door beams, snakes showing their fangs, snakes spattering their venom on someone, snakes biting someone. Bad as some of these things may seem to us, their portent was even more troubling to the ancients. A section of Šumma Alu, a section some scholars call the snake tablet, has many of these snake omens. And all have bad portents. So far, I haven't found one that exactly matches the situation that this apotropaic prayer seeks to mitigate. I plan to keep looking. But whatever the apodoses of the underlying omen may have been, it wasn't good.

Now for a little wild, likely irresponsible, speculation: Another thing I want to look into is the possibility that there is a snake omen and not just a snake lurking in the background of Genesis 3:1-6, perhaps a snake omen that entails death. Does anyone know of any bibliography on this blasphemy? Does anyone think that saying the proper prayer to Shamash would have helped Adam and Eve?

Special note: for this post, and this post only, I decided to drop my "unseemly hero-worship of Mark Twain." I also realize that I'm a little behind in posting pictures of my Shirley's garden and our cat. I do hope this post will continue to feed Chris Heard's abnormal interests a while longer.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at July 10, 2009 3:25 PM | Read more on Akkadian |

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