Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [451]
Chapter 2. Mesopotamia and Canaan
1. This chapter will not attempt a history of the Sumerians. See “Sumer” pp. 454-63 in IDB, vol. 4. See also The Anchor Bible Dictionary. This chapter will also ignore Hittite views, which are not important to the development of biblical notions of the afterlife. For a summary see, Dorn, “The Beatific Vision,” pp. 46ff. For cuneiform, see Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p. 200.
2. See Lambert, “Myth and Mythmaking.”
3. See also Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia. In many ways this is a more accurate translation but it lacks line numbers.
4. See Scurlock, “Death and the Afterlife.” The bird-like qualities of the dead can be seen in the Egyptian ba, as well as in Canaan, Israelite, and in Islam.
5. See Lambert, “Myth and Mythmaking.”
6. See Geller, “Some Sound and Word Plays.” Geller shows that similar wordplays to those in Genesis [Adam (man) created from the Adamah (ground), Isha (woman) from Ish (man)] are present in this Babylonian creation story. In the Atramhasis myth, the eemmum (ghost) comes from temum (wisdom, report, instruction, command), thus reprising the notion of wisdom inherent in knowing our mortality.
7. For a good description of the problem, see S. L. Sanders, “Writing Ritual and Apocalypse,” pp. 22-54.
8. Ibid., p. 143.
9. See Ibid., p. 140.
10. Jacobsen, “Investiture and Anointing of Adapa.”
11. See Izre’el, Adapa and the South Wind, p. 137.
12. Ibid.
13. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, pp. 80-81.
14. Oppenheim, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 259, see also pp. 267, 282, and 287. Also see Tabor, Things Unutterable, p. 102.
15. More exactly, Anu and Dingir were the same sign (and Anu was, of course, an astral god). Later, it became the sign for all gods. Thanks to Ben Sommer for this observation.
16. Keel, Symbolism of the Biblical World, p. 308; Moscati, Face of the Ancient Orient, p. 41.
17. See S. L. Sanders, “Writing Ritual and Apocalypse;” Dorn, “The Beatific Vision,” pp. 78-103; Arbel, “Beholders of Divine Secrets.”
18. koḥl, collyrium, a blue eye-shadow, is cognate with the Arabic Alkahool, which is, in turn, evidently the source of our word “alcohol,” perhaps from blue impurities that were part of its manufacture.
19. The Urnammu text demonstrates Dummuzi’s return. In the text, after Urnammu, the founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, dies, Inanna intervenes and complains to Enlil that she wants him back. This closely resembles her intervention for Dummuzi. See Mettinger, “The Riddle of Resurrection,” p. 196.
20. A strong form of this observation, studied as “Dying and Rising Gods,” has been recently revived by Mettinger, “The Riddle of Resurrection.” He himself gives a very full account of the opposition to this position, starting with the “Covent Garden” school of myth interpretation (based on its use of agricultural metaphors to explain the myth), its dependence on Christian scholars looking for earlier patterns similar to Christianity, and the further helpfulness of the metaphor in the study of several pagan cults, particularly in Syria in the Hellenistic period. An impressive piece of scholarship, the book nevertheless does not completely establish the continued usefulness of the term, though in some “soft” form it does designate a series of possibly related myths, which report the death of the god. “Resurrection” when applied to an annually reviving god does not mean the same as the resurrection of historical humans in Judaism and Christianity, as we shall see in the following chapters.
21. See Garelli’s review of “Cuneiform Texts from Cappadocian Tablets;” Hirsch, “Gott der Väter,” pp. 56ff. For more information, see Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, p. 10 n. 25.
22. Soden, “Zum Schlusstück von Istars Unterweltsfahrt,” p. 194, the quotation is from Sladek, “Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld,” p. 262, quoted from Mettinger, “The Riddle of Resurrection,” p. 193.
23. Mettinger, “The Riddle of Resurrection,” p. 204.
24. See,