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it means the opposite. Life in this world was believed to be cursed by the gods. The call to heaven was not the result of a normal journey after death for, in this culture, the dead went below ground. An ascent to heaven in dreams, privileged though it might have been, presaged death in real life. One sees this dilemma even in the conventions of writing in Mesopotamia and Canaan. The determinative dingir, which indicates that the word which follows was the name of a god or a theophoric name (one in which the name of the god appears), was a depiction of a star. This scribal convention only underlines this society’s notion that the heavens were where the gods were; they were the stars.15 Humans were believed to inhabit the earth until their deaths and then, even if they had visited heaven, they went below ground.

In the famous Wisdom lament, Ludlul Bel Nemeqi (“I Will Praise the God of Wisdom,”) one sees other casual references to the afterlife, heaven and hell, in a context that reiterates the limitations of life on earth. The writer of the poem, Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan, observes that one can never divine the will of the gods:

Who can know the will of the gods in heaven?

Who can understand the plans of the underworld gods?

Where have humans learned the way of a god?

He who was alive yesterday is dead today.

One moment he is worried, the next he is boisterous.

One moment he is singing a joyful song,

A moment later he wails like a professional mourner.

Their condition changes (as quickly as) opening and shutting (the eyes).

When starving they become like corpses,

When full they oppose their god.

In good times they speak of scaling heaven,

When they are troubled they talk of going down to hell.

I am perplexed at these things; I have not been able to

understand their significance. (2.35-47; ANET, 597)

This entire poem is one of praise, as the first line tells us. But in the middle of the poem, the author tells of his terrible anomie, especially when his luck was down. Indeed, his description of the meaninglessness of life seems more convincing than his affirmation. He believes that we are silly creatures, expansive in good fortune yet heedless of the gods’ wills and depressed in bad times. The wise course, therefore, is to realize our limitations and keep a good will towards the divinity. Sickness and bad fortune are described as a kind of death itself, a motif that appears regularly in the Bible. Good fortune is salvation from the bad. In this context, Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan uses the image of scaling heaven and going down to hell. But the phrases do not mean what they normally mean to us: All the dead go below, while only the great heroes like Etana are given a glimpse of heaven, where the gods dwell. Thus “heaven” and “hell” have no moral meaning as they do for us; they may simply be addresses. The heroes return with great wisdom because they have seen sights normally reserved for the gods. Like Etana, their wisdom was realized in the acceptance of their mortality. The themes of wisdom and mortality are unconditionally wed in the ancient Near East.

Seeing the God

IN ONE RITE, however, all cultures in the ancient Near East are united. Both Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as Canaan and later Israel, attach great importance to seeing a god face-to-face. Indeed, seeing a god seems to be the most basic purpose of a heavenly ascent. Although the gods did not usually appear to humans in Mesopotamia, rather they made their wills known by divination, the myths frequently depict men speaking to gods face-to-face. In Mesopotamia, statues of worshipers were dedicated by rich patrons at the altars of gods, so that they could eternally gaze on the divinity in statue form, give them obeisance, and bask in their presence. The large eyes of the worshipers’ statues expressed the religious importance of the cultic viewing, just as the large noses of the statues of the gods emphasized their pleasure at smelling the sacrifices humans gave them. Even as early as Sumer, wide-eyed Gudea was depicted before the goddess of Lagash:

When