Title: The Art of Divination in the Ancient Near East: Reading the Signs of Heaven and Earth by Stefan M. Maul
Abstract: Reviewed by: The Art of Divination in the Ancient Near East: Reading the Signs of Heaven and Earth by Stefan M. Maul Andrew R. Davis stefan m. maul, The Art of Divination in the Ancient Near East: Reading the Signs of Heaven and Earth (trans. Brian McNeil and Alexander Johannes Edmonds; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018). Pp. xiii + 345. $59.95. This translation of Maul's Die Wahrsagekunst im Alten Orient: Zeichen des Himmels und der Erde (Munich: Beck, 2013) provides English readers with an authoritative overview of divination in ancient Mesopotamia. The book is rich in detail, visual aids, and textual [End Page 712] citations; it should be required reading for anyone interested in cult and prophecy in the ancient Near East, including Israel. In chap. 1, M. offers a brief introduction to the ancient Near Eastern sources that provide insight into divinatory practices and, in chap. 2, situates divination, especially extispicy (examination of animal entrails), in the context of sacrificial cult. The book's longest chapter is chap. 3, which provides a step-by-step guide through Mesopotamian extispicy ritual. Two points of emphasis are especially noteworthy. The first is the juridical framework of extispicy; much of its language and ritual have been borrowed from the legal system. The animal entrails represented the divine verdict on whatever question the suppliant had submitted for judgment. Second, M. emphasizes the binary system of extispicy, including the "landscape" of the liver, which was divided into a favorable side and a hostile side. Because of this system, extispicy offered glimpses of the future only insofar as diviners were able to formulate questions whose positive or negative answers could be interpreted for their future significance. The importance of well-designed questions is further explored in chap. 4. Examples of such questions survive in collections, which accumulated over centuries and provide fascinating insight into the concerns that led individuals to seek out the services of a diviner. Many of these concerns were family matters, but business and legal interests are also represented. Of course, these examples represent the small percentage of individuals who could afford an extispicy, but they nonetheless expand our view beyond the palaces, whose archives contain extensive collections of oracular questions. The palace collections reflect state concerns, such as military campaigns, but also more quotidian matters, such as staff scheduling. In the next two chapters, M. examines less-expensive modes of divination, such as extispicy of bird entrails (chap. 5) and rites involving flour, incense smoke, and oil (chap. 6). Although the evidence of these alternative practices is meager, consisting mostly of a small number of omen lists, their prevalence can be inferred from their inexpensiveness. Furthermore, M. shows that these practices were more than divination "on a shoestring"; they were employed by the upper classes, including kings, as a stand-alone ritual or in combination with extispicy. The expediency of divination with flour, incense, and oil also made these modes of divination advantageous during military campaigns. M. emphasizes that these more modest practices were not separate branches of divination but variants of a single discipline, which followed the same hermeneutical principles as extispicy. Parallels include the sacrificial setting of the ritual, the judicial framework, and the division of the interpretive matrix into favorable and hostile sides. In chap. 7, the book's second longest, M. returns to extispicy to provide a diachronic tour of the practice from the first attestations of the words "diviner" and "extispicy" in the mid-third millennium b.c.e. to the extensive collection of divinatory texts in Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh. Along the way M. explores various aspects of divination: its relation to palace politics, especially the interdependence between the king and his diviners; the existence of a second, nonbinary form of extispicy whose results were not committed to writing; the textualization of extispicy results, first as a way for students to demonstrate their mastery of material and later, after these teaching texts coalesced into a unified curriculum, as a canonlike collection of divinatory texts; the expansion in the mid-second millennium b.c.e. of Babylonian divinatory practices throughout the ancient Near East (including at Megiddo and Hazor) [End Page 713] and...
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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