WHY A DISTINCTION SHOULD BE MADE BETWEEN PROPHECY AND OMEN DIVINATION

To put it simply, the distinction between prophecy and omen divination should be made because most prophets probably had nothing to do with livers of sacrificial animals or with the observation of the movements of stars; to all appearances, prophecy was not a “science” by any definition.

This is not to say that the prophets were not familiar with the religious language of their communities, or that they had no techniques of accomplishing their divinatory task. Prophetic oracles were predominantly verbal messages that were believed to be of divine origin, and the language used in them indicates a thorough knowledge of the oral/aural repertoire of the reli­gious communities within which they were produced. The specific techniques of the prophets probably had to do with achieving the altered state of consciousness that enabled them to act as mouthpieces of the divine; heuristic examples of how such techniques of mediation between human and superhuman worlds could have worked are provided by shamanistic rites.¹⁵ The prophetic messages were more often than not accompanied by a characteristic behavior that served as their identity-marker and a cultural signifier that made it possible for the audience to acknowledge their performances as prophetic.¹⁶ Such behavior was evidently not expected of haruspices or astrologers.

Another feature that sets the prophets apart from the diviners of the scholarly type is their social location. While the prophets regularly communicate with kings in our sources, whether Mesopotamian, West Semitic, biblical, or Greek, they usually seem not to have belonged to the innermost circle of the kings who mostly were informed of their sayings through go- betweens. Prophets were clearly not part of the ummanutu. This is not to say that the prophets represented a marginalized group or that their political agency was insignificant; however, the communication between the kings and the prophets is clearly not as intensive as that between kings and the scholars who maintained a regular correspondence with each other both at Mari and in Assyria.¹⁷ As a matter of fact, it is the Hebrew Bible where the prophets and kings get together more often than anywhere else, the recurrent problems in their mutual appreciation notwithstanding.

Moreover, prophets seem to come from different backgrounds. There were probably per­sons whose role as a mahhu, raggimu, nabi°, hoze, prophetes, or promantis was more or less permanent, but we also encounter slave girls uttering prophecies,¹⁸ as well as gender-neutral persons called assinnu, who feature as prophets several times.¹⁹ The typical venue for pro­phetic performances is the temple, which suggests that the persons who assumed the prophetic role were more or less closely affiliated with temples, either as members of their personnel or otherwise belonging to the worshipping community. The temples of Annunitum at Mari and Dagan at Terqa, those of Istar in Arbela and Assur in Assur, temples of Apollo at Delphi and Didyma, and the temple of Jerusalem are well-known centers of prophetic activity, and the image of a prophet, whether biblical, Near Eastern, or Greek, virtually always shows a temple as the backdrop. This is something that cannot be said of practitioners of extispicy, at least when it comes to the second millennium and later.²⁰

In Assyria in particular, prophecy was deeply rooted in the worship of Istar, and it is probable that the Assyrian prophets were mainly recruited from her devotees.²¹ This may, at least in part, explain an intriguing difference in the gestalt of the prophets in contrast with Mesopotamian omen diviners: the prophetic role was open to all sexes: women, men, and the genderless assinnus.

A final difference between prophecy and omen divination is that prophecy is basically an oral performance that neither presupposed written texts nor necessarily ever took a written form. This becomes quite evident when we compare the scanty number of written prophetic oracles available to us with the cornucopia of omen compendia and other divinatory texts. But the very fact that prophecy actually was written down, however exceptional this might have been, is the point where the difference between prophecy and omen divination begins to reduce. Namely, when prophecy was written down, it became a document available to schol­arly application; for example, the Assyrian scribes could use the prophecies in the archives of Nineveh as sources of their scribal works.²³ The Hebrew Bible, again, reflects a process of the written prophecy becoming literary prophecy through centuries of scribal exegesis especially in Second Temple Judaism.²⁴ The literary conglomerate of biblical prophecy can, therefore, not be straightforwardly equated with ancient Israelite or Judahite prophecy.

The literarization of prophecy resulted in an authoritative set of texts that were acknowl­edged as prophecy and used as a basis for further exegesis; this development begins already within the Hebrew Bible and continues in later Second Temple Judaism as demonstrated, for example by the literary phenomenon of the “rewritten Bible,”²⁵ and by the Dead Sea Scrolls.²⁶ It is here that the power of the text with an “esoteric inner coherence”²⁷ brings prophecy very close to the realm of omen divination. By way of their textuality, even historical events could

be interpreted as signs.²⁸ Especially in the Qumran Pesharim, quotations from the prophetic books are used in a way reminiscent of the interpretation of omens.²⁹

When prophecy once was written down, it enabled, in Scott Noegel’s words, “the exegeti- cal process as an act of performative power that legitimates and promotes the cosmological and ideological systems upon which divination is based.”³⁰ This leads us to my second point: