The Survival of Babylonian Wissenschaft in Later Tradition - M. J. Geller

8/3/2019 The Survival of Babylonian Wissenschaft in Later Tradition - M. J. Geller

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THE MELAMMU PROJECT

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The Survival of Babylonian Wissenschaft in later tradition

M.J.GELLER

Published inMelammu Symposia 1:

Sanno Aro and R. M. Whiting (eds.),

The Heirs of Assyria.

Proceedings of the Opening Symposium of the Assyrian and

Babylonian Intellectual Heritage Project. Held in Tvrminne,

Finland, October 8-11, 1998 (Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian

Text Corpus Project 2000), pp. 1-6.

Publisher: http://www.helsinki.fi/science/saa/

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The Survival of Babylonian Wissenschaft

in Later Tradition

T

he Babylonian Talmud records anamusing anecdote which can only beappreciated by someone aware of an

Akkadian idiom. A noted rabbi namedRaba, who flourished in the early fourthcentury AD, is quoted as saying that whenhe saw asses carrying away dust, that hestruck his hand on their backs and said,Hurry, righteous ones, to perform the willof your Master.1 What is the joke? Rabaspun is an allusion to the Akkadian phrasewhich appears several times in Seleucidchronicles and records, namely that thedust of Esagil was removed, indicating re-building works in Babylon.2 A local Baby-

lonian hearing Rabas words would haveunderstood it to mean that Raba approvedof the renovation of the temple, although itis clear from the context that Raba actuallyhas in mind that Babylon will become awasteland. On one hand these observationsmight suggest that Rabbis may have ac-tually visited Babylon in the fourth or fifthcenturies, and that building works were still

ongoing.3 On the other hand, it is also clearthat the Babylonian Talmud is hardly con-scious of its role as witness to Babylonian

life in the Parthian period, nor is much ap-preciation expressed for the greatness thatwas Babylon. The Talmud serves, some-what ironically, as a major source of infor-mation for the end of Mesopotamian anti-quity.

The survival of Babylonian or Assyrianintellectual heritage into later Classical an-tiquity is predicated on some form of trans-lation of cuneiform literature into al-phabetic scripts, and one presumes into thelingua franca of the day, namely Aramaic.

Both the timing and processes of thesetransmissions are difficult to determine be-cause of the lack of original manuscripts onparchment or papyrus which would supplythe necessary data. The only Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual inscription known to meis the Tell Fekhrije statue inscription,4

which is historical but not literary, and afew Aramaic tablets have recently turned up

1 A second anecdote in this same context provides addi-

tional background information. The fifth century scholarMar bar Rabina, who, arriving at the city of Babylon,took some dust in his turban and threw it around toillustrate the prophecy of Is. 14:22-23 that Babylon will

be swept away (b. Ber. 57b bottom). The juxtaposition ofthe two anecdotes probably indicates that both statementswere thought to refer to Babylon.2 Grayson,Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (LocustValley, 1975), 116:6; 117:13, 118:33, and A. Sachs andH. Hunger,Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts fromBabylon, I, (Vienna, 1988) r. 14, reading saharh -sag-gl id-de-ku-. The phrase also occurs in a con-tract, CT 49: 6 = CT 4 (Bu 88-5-12,619), with an Aramaicdocket mentioning removing the dust of the Esagil. All

of these contexts have now been discussed by G. F. Del

Monte, Testi dalla Babilonia Ellenistica (Pisa, 1997),13-16.3 A third story in this same passage in Ber. 57b quotesRabbi Hamnuna as saying, If one sees [the city of]Babylon, he should say, blessed be He who destroyedwicked Babylon. On seeing the palace of Nebuchadnez-zar, he should say, blessed be He who destroyed the

palace of the wicked Nebuchadnezzar. On seeing thelions den or burning fiery furnace, he should say,blessed is He who wrought miracles for our ancestors inthis place.4 See for convenience J.C. Greenfield and A. Shaffer,Notes on the Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual statue fromTell Fekherye,Iraq 45 (1983), 109-16.

M. J. GELLER London

Sanna Aro and R.M. Whiting (eds.)MELAMMUSYMPOSIAI(Helsinki 2000)ISBN 951-45-9043-0

GELLER THE SURVIVAL OF BABYLONIAN WISSENSCHAFT

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from the eighth and seventh centuries whichcontain Neo-Assyrian legal formulae.5

Hence, in order to reconstruct the transferof literature from cuneiform to alphabetsthere are two main possibilities to consider.One is that Babylonian literature occasion-ally appeared to have been translated intoAramaic, Mandaic, or Syriac, although ithas never been possible to identify the exactAkkadian source or Vorlage for a laterAramaic literary text.6 A second possibilityis that already in the court of Assyria liter-

ary texts were being composed in Aramaic,without necessarily having been translatedfrom an Akkadian original, since we knowthat Aramaic was widely used in Assyriafrom at least the seventh century BC. A goodexample of such a composition was theproverbs of Ahiqar, 7 which became popularin Greek circles and were known to Clementof Alexandria and Strabo, as well as in rabbinic literature,8 and such Aramaic textsalso facilitated the transmission of Mesopo-tamian culture into later periods. One im-

portant late source, however, which has yetto be properly mined for cuneiform relics isthe Babylonian Talmud, a rich repository ofinformation regarding Babylonian life inthe second to fifth centuries AD.

There are several reasons why the Baby-lonian Talmud has been neglected as a wit-

ness to late Babylonia. First of all, the per-spective of the 19th century Wissenschaftdes Judentums school of interpretation ofJewish texts is that the Talmud was to becompared with Classical texts, mostly inGreek. There are several reasons for thisapproach, both valid and invalid. On onehand, when dealing with the Mishnah, Jeru-salem Talmud, and various Midrashim, allof which were primarily composed oredited in Palestine, a considerable amountof Greek influence can be detected reflect-

ing strong Hellenistic influences of theRoman East.9 Such is not the case, however,in the Babylonian Talmud, the Aramaic por-tions of which were composed in Babylo-nia, far removed from the Roman Empireand virtually any Hellenistic influence. Al-though some knowledge of Greek may haveexisted in Seleucid Babylonia among theruling classes, or among some foreign peo-ples, certainly by the Parthian and later Sas-sanian periods Greek was not spoken andnot known by the local population, includ-

ing Babylonian rabbis.10 Despite the effortsof the Wissenschaft des Judentums schoolto de-orientalise Judaism by associating theTalmud with Classical texts, the Babylo-nian setting of the Babylonian Talmud can-not be disregarded. There are almost noGreek loanwords in Babylonian Aramaic,

5 See inter alia M. Fales, An Aramaic Tablet from TellShioukh Fawqani, Syria, Semitica 46 (1996), 81-121; E.Lipinski, Aramaic clay tablets from the Gozan-Harran

areaJEOL 33 (1995), 143-50, and T. Kwasman, TwoAramaic legal documents,BSOAS(forthcoming).6 For an example of wisdom texts which appears to befrom Akkadian, cf. R. Murray, Aramaic and Syriacdispute poems and their connections, in M.J. G eller, J.C.Greenfield and M.P. Weitzman (eds.), Studia Aramaica(Oxford, 1995), 157ff, see pp. 158-60.7 See J.M. Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahi-qar (Baltimore, 1983), 16-17, who argues that Aramaicwas the original language of this text, rather than Akka-dian.8 Ibid., 4-5.9 S. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (NewYork, 1962); idem., Greek in Jewish Palestine (New

York, 1965); S. Kraus, Griechische und lateinische Lehn-wrter im Talmud, Midrasch und Targum (Berlin, 1898).10 The great differences between the cultural contexts of

the two Talmuds the Jerusalem and Babylonian Tal-muds were largely ignored in earlier studies. The cul-tural gulf between the Grco-Roman world of Palestineand the Parthian world of Babylonia was large. The veryfew Greek words, such as sanegor and kategor, whichfind their way into the Babylonian Talmud, were intro-duced into Babylonia as Greek loanwords in MishnaicHebrew or Palestinian Aramaic, although words such asapikoros for apostate is a misuse of the Greek termEpicurean. For this reason, no Babylonian Amora can

be demonstrated to have been influenced by Greek wri-ters, nor is it likely for any aspect of scientific thought tohave penetrated into Parthian Babylonia, the arch-enemyof the Roman Empire.


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in contrast to Palmyrene Aramaic11 or eventhe Aramaic of Palestine. On the other hand,one must not criticise the great 19th centurypioneers of Babylonian scholarship in Ger-many too harshly: Akkadian was hardlywell-known in their day, and only now hasit become clear how many Akkadian loan-words one can find in Babylonian Aramaic,and especially in the Babylonian Talmud,many of which are still not recognised instandard dictionaries.

Then there is the problem of comparisons

of texts. One difficulty is that specialists incomparative literature and cultural anthro-pologists look for mythology and literatureoverlapping between one society and an-other, but if one expects to find Gilgameshor Adapa in the Babylonian Talmud, he will be disappointed. While mythology is cul-ture specific, science (in the Europeansense) is universal, and therefore one ac-tually finds technical terms and specificconcepts known from Akkadian within Tal-mudic passages dealing with medicine and

omens, or mathematics and astronomy, andthese are the areas where one should beginto investigate. So the first task is to try toidentify which texts in Aramaic seem to beeither translated from an Akkadian Vor-lage, or were at least loosely based uponAkkadian prototypes. The presence of Ak-kadian loanwords helps, of course, but onlyif contexts match as well. This is not a jobfor lexicographers, since if one has to lookup the words in a dictionary, one is lost. Thepoint is whether the context of an Aramaic

passage resembles the context of an Akka-dian passage, both in form and in content.

Once one identifies such loanwords andtransmissions, the same question arises re-garding when a presumed borrowing from

Akkadian into Aramaic took place. It maybe worthwhile to glance at the other end ofthe spectrum, to see how long Akkadiansurvived. I have argued elsewhere that Ak-kadian was likely to have survivedthroughout the Parthian period, at least untilthe mid-3rd century AD. The so-calledGrco-Babyloniaca tablets do not indicatethat cuneiform was being rejected in favourof Greek scripts; on the contrary, the pur-pose of the Grco-Babyloniaca tablets wasto preserve Akkadian, which was now being

written on leather.12 The crucial consider-ation for the use of scripts is the writingmaterials upon which the script is written:wedges were written in clay, alphabets onleather or papyrus, as a general rule. Hence,the use of transliterations into Greek scripton Grco-Babyloniaca tablets was intendedto preserve Akkadian by teaching scribeshow to transliterate Akkadian when writingon leather, and does not represent a movetowards Hellenisation of Babylonian cul-ture.

The point is that even if Talmudic pas-sages descend directly from older Aramaictranslations of Akkadian texts, Aramaicscience in the Babylonian Talmud wastransmitted or translated while Akkadianwas still a living language. This makes aquantitative difference to the accuracy oftransmission. Jewish Aramaic parallels, forinstance, have been found to such omenseries as umma izbu, umma alu , dreamomens, physiognomic omens, and astro-nomical omens. Rabbinic literature records

many omens listed under the rubric of Dar-kei Ha-emori, Amorite Practices, amongwhich Giuseppi Veltri has found many par-allels with Pliny, suggesting that some ofthe omen traditions in Palestine were based

11 See D.R. Hillers and E. Cussini, Palmyrene AramaicTexts (Baltimore, 1996), and particularly the glossary(pp. 333-421) with its large number of Greek etymo-

logies cited for Palmyrene Aramaic.12 See M.J. Geller, Zeitschrift fr Assyriologie 87(1997), 47-49.


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same way, the Akkadian omens probably donot represent fantastic events or miraculousoccurences, but the example of a womangiving birth to an elephant probably de-scribes some shape of an ordinary dischargeor miscarriage.19 The juxtaposition of thetwo texts is therefore informative for bothgenres.

Another popular type of omens known inboth Akkadian and Talmudic Aramaic weredream omens, and in fact both literaturesinclude lists of dream omens which have

independently been described as dreambooks. Oppenheim drew scant attention tothe Talmud in his seminal work on Akka-dian dream omens,20 nor has anyone at-tempted to compare Akkadian and Tal-mudic dream reports. The usual startingpoint for discussing ancient dream books isthe text of Artemidorus, although the eclec-tic collections of second century omens inGreek may have been drawn originally froma wide range of sources, including Semiticones.21 One interesting comment in Arte-

midorus [book I] refers to the textual composition and sequence of dream omens,which Artemidorus describes as being or-ganised from birth to death. It has escapednotice that Mesopotamian omens followed just this sequence. Although most of theAkkadian corpus of dream omens, known as

saqiqu, is too broken to determine any spe-cific order, nevertheless one early collec-tion of Akkadian omens is relatively com-plete. An Old Babylonian omen text fromSusa, published by Scheil early this cen-tury, is difficult to read and interpret, butthe tablet clearly commences with dreamomens regarding birth and ends with omensreferring to death.22

Although mostly ignoring Oppenheimswork, Philip Alexander has made consider-able progress in trying to explain Talmudic

omens by comparing them with Artemido-rus, having found a few important parallels between the Aramaic and Greek dreamomens.23 Nevertheless, his argument isweak; of the hundreds of Greek omens inArtemidorus and the dozens recorded in theTalmud, only a few can be considered ascomparable. The Akkadian omens, on theother hand, offer a rich basis for compari-son with the Talmud. For one thing, thethematic order of Talmud omens is typi-cally Mesopotamian. Omens are listed in

the Talmud, for example, as being derivedfrom various types of plants, such as reed,gourd, or palm tree, or from seeing animalsin a dream, such as an ox, ass, or elephant.Such lists are characteristic of Akkadiandream omens.24 To counteract such dreams,the Akkadian text recommended the use of

proceeds to ask about the status of an aborted ftus withtwo backs and two spinal columns, which is typical of anizbu or malformed ftus described in Tablet VI ofumma

izbu omens as being double, ie. Siamese twins.19 See b. Nid. 23b: According to R. Meir, an abortedftus which is like an animal, wild beast, or bird is agenuine embryo. But the sages say that only if it hashuman features.20 See A. L. Oppenheim, The Interpretation of Dreamsin the Ancient Near East (Philadelphia, 1956), 206.21 See Artemidorus, The Interpretation of Dreams:Oneirocritica (Park Ridge, New Jersey, 1975), translated

by R. J. White.22 See Oppenheim,Dreams, 256-59, and V. Scheil, MDP14 48ff.23 Bavli Berakhot 55a-57b: the Talmudic dreambook incontext,Journal of Jewish Studies 46 (1995), 231-48.

24 See Oppenheim,Dreams (above, n. 20), 285 for simi-lar examples. Likewise, b. Ber. 57a refers to dreams inwhich a man has sex with his mother, a betrothed virgin,

a sister, or a married worman, which compares with thefollowing Akkadian dream omens:

If a man has sex with the goddess Ishtar,if he has sex with a god,if he has sex with a king,if he has sex with an important person,if he has sex with a priestess,if he has sex with a wife of the king,if he has sex with a daughter of the king,if he has sex with another mans wife,if he has sex with a corpse, etc.

See Oppenheim, Dreams, 290, and J. Bottro, Mesopo-tamia (Chicago, 1987), 117.


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a ritual to be carried out before he hasplaced his foot on the ground.25 The Tal-mud recommends something similar: if onehas various types of dreams, he is repeated-ly advised that he should rise early andrecite an appropriate biblical verse tocounteract any bad effects of the dream (b.Berakhot 56b).

Perhaps most significant is a commonmisunderstanding when comparing dreamomens between different cultures: only theprodoses are relevant, but not the apodoses.

The dream book collections from Mesopo-tamia, Egypt, and Greece are all similar inthat they assemble lists of dreams, but theinterpretation of dreams is always culturespecific and will vary from one society toanother. The task of modern research is tocompare the collections and lists, to seewhat dreams were found to be of interest,and which were common to the variousdreambooks, without including the apo-doses within the comparisons, since theyare probably irrelevant. There are two sep-

arate processes at work here, namely thecollecting versus the interpretation ofdreams.

As for medicine, there is a rich collectionof medical lore in the Babylonian Talmudwhich derives from cuneiform sources, ascan be demonstrated by the format of thetexts and the number of Akkadian loan-words.26 Of particular interest is b. Git. 68b-70a, which has been studied by G. Veltri,although without elaborating Akkadian par-allels.27 The main features of the Gittin pas-

sage is a collection of symptoms and recipes

arranged from head to foot, which is theusual format of a vademecum. Another im-portant area of comparison is hemerologies,which relies upon astral magic in both Ak-kadian and Talmudic sources. Both Akka-dian and Rabbinic sources list favourableand unfavourable days for a variety of do-mestic activities, such as getting married,building a house, or consulting a physician.Much work remains to be done on compari-sons of these texts.28

Suffice it to say that many Akkadian

loanwords and expressions can be found inthese passages which have not previously been recognised in the standard diction-aries. The obvious conclusion is that theTalmud preserved ancient science, but didnot invent it. Hence the appellation of Jew-ish medicine for this period is probablyinaccurate, except where medicine impin-ges on Jewish law, as when it concerns itselfwith circumcision or the ritual purity ofwomen. Similarly, all aspects of the Baby-lonian calendar were adopted by the Rab-

bis, nor is there any reason to believe thatRabbis had a particular academic interest inastronomy which superseded the knowl-edge which they inherited from Babylonianschools. Rabbis probably adopted Baby-lonian science for their own use, and whenthey had questions or difficulties, they con-sulted their Babylonian colleagues priests for answers. It is likely that, atleast until the 3rd century AD, these Baby-lonian scholars gave Rabbis their answersby reading from cuneiform tablets.

25 lama epu ina qaqqari ikunu, see S. Butler, Meso-potamian Concepts of Dreams and Dream Rituals (Mn-ster, 1998), 271, et passim.26 See M.J. Geller, Akkadian medicine in the Babylo-nian Talmud, inA Traditional Quest, Essays in Honourof Louis Jacobs, ed. D. Cohn-Sherbok (Sheffield, 1991),102-12.27 Veltri, Magie (above, n. 13), 239-49, and this passage

has been studied by the present writer in An A kkadianVademecum in the Babylonian Talmud, forthcomingvolume edited by S. Kottek and M. Horstmanshoff.28 See Labat, Mitteilungen des Instituts fr Orientfor-schung 5 (1957), 317, and E. Reiner, Astral magic inBabylonia (Philadelphia, 1995), and the review of the present writer in Orientalische Literaturzeitung 93(1998), 455-58, wit h a brief survey of Talmudic parallels.


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