The Problem of Evil and Illness Aetiology

The First Millennium BC composition Ludlulbelnemeqi (“I will praise the lord of wisdom”), also known as the Poem of the righteous sufferer? is the latest of a series of texts devoted to suffering and its causes that can be considered a precursor to or parallel of the Biblical Job.

From the day the Lord punished me,

And the warrior Marduk became furious with me,

My own god threw me over and disappeared,

My goddess broke rank and vanished.

The benevolent angel who (walked) beside me split off, My protecting spirit retreated, to seek out someone else.

(Poem of the righteous sufferer I 41-46)^{[140] [141]}

The abandonment of the god brings as a consequence an absence of protec­tion that results in the exposure of the human being to all kinds of vicious attacks. These resolve into a series of misfortunes that affect all the spheres of human life. Physical suffering, thus, cannot be separated from social exclusion and other conditions produced by this state of defencelessness and exposure to evil.

The basic idea is that good and evil are only the result of a god's favour. Without him, man is lost, an idea that is confirmed by parallels in wisdom literature,^[142] as well as by passages in other compositions, such as the introduction of an incantation against the Asakku demon:^{[143] [144]}

It (Asakku) attacks the man without a god

This man has been attacked and it has confused his mind,

It has struck his head and [...] the skull,

It has slapped his face and made his eyes sleeping.

This central theological view, however, is not exclusive but coexists with other aetiological explanations. Particularly in the narrative descriptions, both phys­ical and “mental” suffering are vividly described through the association with demonic attack.