PARABLES AND LOGIA

Reiner also demonstrates that some Babylonian omens remind the hearers of traditional stories, some of which are present in the New Testament. Sometimes an omen apodosis cor­responds to a saying that we find in the New Testament logia, like “He who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Reiner 1998: 652).

manhood (= masturbates?), that man will have hap­piness and jubilation bestowed upon him; wherever he goes all will be agreeable; he will always achieve goal” (see Guinan 1998: 43).

place was probably used as a metaphor for several thousand years before the gospels, being an image used in wisdom sayings. Moreover, the first omen of the compendium Summa alu, “If a city is situated on a hill, the inhabitants of that city will be depressed; if a city is situated in a valley, that city will be elevated” is nonsense, because most cities in the ancient Near East were situated on a hill, as N. Veldhuis observes (1999: 170). He continues that “a city on a hill” and “a city in a valley” may well be understood as referring to moral maxims concern­ing pride and modesty (Veldhuis 1999: 170).

PROVERBS AND COUNSELS

Some omens listed in the compendia may have had a currency as proverbs and may have even their origin in proverbs. The proverbs or similes were traditional tools of ancestral and fatherly instruction in ancient Mesopotamian literature, from the Sumerian Instructions of Shuruppak to the Aramaic Teachings of Ahiqar. Some proverbs tend to relate specific actions to equally specific prognostics, which is a feature common to omen collections, with the dif­ference that the proverbs are characteristically admonitory, rather than casuistic. Thus in the Instructions of Shuruppak, one finds a warning, “Do not curse a ewe, you will give birth to a daughter; do not throw a lump (of clay) into a money chest, you will give birth to a son” (lines 256-57). This example, which does not exhaust the available witness, is to be compared to many omens that bear on the question of the sex of future offspring (Cryer 1994: 192). The omen format is most transparently used by the famous Akkadian literary text known as Advice to a Prince, which lists a number of instances of princely behavior to be approved or censured, like “If the king does not heed justice, his people will become confused, and the country will be destroyed. If he does not heed his magnates, his own days will be shortened.” These are statements of instruction, but they sound very much like conditionals used in omens.^[9] The Advice to a Prince is a text in which didactic and ominous traditions flow together in the interests of political ideology which borders on forming a concept of natural law, above the demands of which not even the king is elevated (Cryer 1994: 193). More generally, many omens found in the compendia have their more natural origins in everyday common sense, in the instruction of proper behavior and the morals of the day.

LAW STIPULATIONS

Many scholars have noted the formal similarity between the casuistic form of omens and the law stipulations in so-called “law codes” of ancient Mesopotamia (Bottero 1992: 187-94). According to A. Guinan, this similarity is deceptive because in individual laws “we can under­stand the connection between protasis and the apodosis. We can also deduce the underlying principles that govern the structure of the text” (Guinan 2002: 19), which is not always the case for the omen texts. However, J. Fincke has recently put forward a stronger argument for

intelligible. Advice to a Prince is a literary composi­tion and does not belong to the inner core of the omen compendia. Y et given its contents the omen format is understandable” (Veldhuis 1999: 170).

defining the omens as laws, namely, as “the god-given laws of divination” (Fincke 2006­2007). As is pointed out above, there is some evidence that ancient Mesopotamians considered the future predicted by observed omens like sentences handed down by a divine court, and according to the texts pertaining to the release rituals Namburbi, the effects of sinister omens could be temporarily revoked by appealing to a higher divine court.

According to Namburbis, the person to whom the evil omen was announced had to placate the anger of the gods that had sent it to him and effect the gods’ revision of their decision. By so doing, the person tried to achieve a correction of his fate which the gods had decreed. He or she had to appeal to the Judge of Heaven and Earth, the sun-god Samas, who was supposed to revoke the evil judgment against him (Maul 1999: 124-25). The divine triad Samas, Ea, and Asalluhi form the assembly for the person whom a sinister omen had threatened. He comes as plaintiff before the gods to implore them to change the evil fate which they had allotted him, a revision of the judgment. The next part of the ritual is a trial in which the affected person as well as his opponent, the omen carrier or its image, appear before the highest divine judge. The ritual before Samas had all the elements of a regular earthly trial, where the sun-god plays the part of the judge, whereas the person and the carrier are the two suitors of equal rights. There could be no appeal beyond the decision of this court, no other god could challenge or alter Samas’s final judgment once it was rendered (Maul 1999: 126). Accordingly, the ancient Mesopotamians reacted to some evil omens as they were unfavorable judgments made by the court of gods, which may be similar to or even taken from the contemporary practice of law (Koch, this volume).