by Eckart Frahm
The fact that the Babylonians resorted to an alliance with the Medes to destroy Assyria meant that the two powers could equally claim the Assyrian inheritance, and in fact for a long time historians doubted that the Babylonian kings laid any serious claim to the former core of Assyria. Manuscripts of inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar which have surfaced in the past few years have put this notion to rest. Some inscriptions mention Assyria by name as a province of Nebuchadnezzar’s realm and contrast it with Akkad (i.e. Babylonia); alternatively they refer to Assyria as “Subartu,” and to Babylonia as “Sumer and Akkad” (Vanderhooft 1999: 38; Da Riva 2008: 20–3). Nebuchadnezzar presumably claimed control of historical Assyria with a view to exert kingship over all of Mesopotamia, not only Babylonia and its Levantine possessions.
One fact must be noted: no Assyrian king is mentioned by name in the inscriptions of Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar, and the latter’s immediate successors. With Nabonidus, however, we witness an abrupt change. Not only does the last king of Babylon allude directly to the unholy acts of Sennacherib, but he also mentions in his inscriptions the Neo‐Assyrian kings Shalmaneser III and his father Aššurnaṣirpal II, Esarhaddon, Assurbanipal, and Aššur‐etel‐ilani. In all cases he carefully identifies these rulers with the title “king of Assyria” (šar māt Aššur). In most cases these references are found in the context of temple rebuilding and the discovery of foundation deposits of these kings at Ḫarran, in the Eḫulḫul temple (Schaudig 2001: 418–19), and at Akkad, in the Eulmaš temple (Schaudig 2001: 454). Other references occur in the account of the life of Adad‐guppi on her funerary stele from Ḫarran, which was also composed in the context of the rebuilding of Eḫulḫul (Schaudig 2001: 503). In his stele from Babylon, Nabonidus mentions the cylinder seal with a depiction of Sîn which Assurbanipal had deposited in the Esagil temple and which probably provided the features of the renewed image of the moon god of Ḫarran (Schaudig 2001: 522; Lee 1993). It seems obvious that Nabonidus, whose roots may have been partly Assyrian through his mother, had a vested interest in linking his rule to that of the Sargonids.
Assyria in Everyday Documents
The memory of Assyria did not live on solely in the royal scriptoria. Neo‐ and Late Babylonian archival texts contain thousands of personal names. Some of these names contain the name of the god Assur as theophoric element, but are linguistically Babylonian. They may have been popular among descendants of Assyrian families transplanted in Babylonia. Some of the best evidence for such names comes from sixth century Uruk, where a colony of Assyrians was very probably resettled in the seventh century and was still operating a temple of Assur (written AN.ŠÁR) in the sixth century (Beaulieu 1997b). Several texts from the Eanna temple archive record deliveries of commodities for the offerings in that temple of Assur, and one text in particular (UCP 9/2, 57) lists members of the college of brewers and bakers officiating in the sanctuary of Assur whose names are in some cases not only theologically, but also linguistically Assyrian (e.g. Pani‐Aššur‐lamur). The text also refers to these priestly servants as men of Libbi‐ali, a common designation of the city of Ashur in Assyrian sources. The designation AN.ŠÁR is the only one attested for this god in the Eanna temple archive, which suggests that their arrival at Uruk postdated the theological reforms of Sennacherib and the systematic adoption of that name for Assur. It is probably no coincidence that a high official of the Eanna temple during the early reign of Assurbanipal bore the name Aššur‐belu‐uṣur (IAN.ŠÁR‐EN‐ÙRI), a name which seems highly unusual for a Babylonian, especially a temple functionary. These texts constitute the only solid evidence we have for the importation of the cult of Assur in Babylonia and its survival after the fall of Nineveh.
Assyria in the View of the Persians
With the advent of Persian rule, cuneiform became confined largely to the temples and the private sphere. The Achaemenid rulers ceased to sponsor building inscriptions in the traditional Babylonian style. The most notable exception is the Cyrus Cylinder, which in principle commemorates repairs on the defensive walls of Babylon, yet stands out more plainly as an apology for the Persian takeover. The Cylinder lashes out at the defeated Babylonian king Nabonidus and mentions the discovery of a foundation deposit of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal during the repair work (Kuhrt 2007: 70–4). The intent of this juxtaposition seems obvious. Cyrus, having deposed an illegitimate ruler and destroyed the short‐lived Babylonian empire, now posed as direct continuator of the Assyrians. The seeds were sowed for the eradication of imperial Babylon from the historical memory of the ancient world. This process culminated in the fourth century with the works of the Greek physician Ctesias, who propagated the Persian view that their empire had been the natural successor of the Assyrian one, Babylon being essentially a foundation of the Assyrian queen Semiramis. Later, in the first decades of the third century, the Babylonian priest Berossus, in his account of the history of Babylon written in Greek and dedicated to the Seleucid ruler Antiochus I, described the architectural achievements of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon and criticized the Greeks for attributing these works to Semiramis (Verbrugghe and Wickersham 1999: 59, no. 142). He also implicitly tried to overturn the Ctesian narrative which ignored the Babylonian empire as successor state to Assyria (Beaulieu 2007: 136–8). Berossus, however, enjoyed a limited audience, and his contribution to historiography circulated mostly among Jewish writers and the Church Fathers.
Hellenistic Babylonia Remembers Assyria
The Hellenistic period witnessed a revival of Babylonian civilization, now confined largely to the temples and the social groups that gravitated around them. The sanctuaries of Uruk and Babylon, and in some cases the private homes of priests and scholars, have generated libraries with hundreds of manuscripts of traditional cuneiform texts. A few of these texts preserve Assyrian material or memories of Assyria in various forms. At Uruk we have evidence for the preservation of Assyrian textual traditions (Beaulieu 2010). SpTU II 46, which contains part of the commentary to Tablet 42 of the series bārûtu, is unique in many respects; it is written in the Neo‐Assyrian script and bears a colophon of the library of Assurbanipal (Type L). The text had probably been kept as heirloom in a learned family. Another example is SpTU II 31, a fragmentary text inscribed with a prayer mentioning Assurbanipal and with part of a royal inscription, possibly of that same king. Other scholarly texts appear to adhere to manuscript traditions that are specifically Ninevite, or specific to other Assyrian centers of learning. This is true not only for hepatoscopy, but also for the field of astrology. Recent studies of the manuscript tradition of the astrological series Enūma Anu Enlil have determined that, in some ways, the late Uruk scriptoria followed a Ninevite tradition in the numbering of the tablets, as well as Assyrian traditions in the recension of specific portions of the series (Fincke 2001; Beaulieu 2010: 11–12). One must recognize, however, that late Uruk scholars may not necessarily have realized that these manuscript traditions originated in Assyria. Yet, the list of antediluvian apkallus and historical ummânus discovered in the library of the Reš temple contained a powerful reminder of the importance of Assyria in the intellectual history of Mesopotamia, as it paired the legendary sage Ahiqar with the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (Van Dijk and Mayer 1980, no. 89). At any rate, the presence of at least one completely Assyrian manuscript (SpTU II 46) proves that some scholars of Hellenistic Uruk cultivated an awareness of the Assyrian past and its culture. The evidence, discussed above, that Assyrians had come to Uruk in the seventh century to organize the cult of Assur leads us to speculate that still, in the Hellenistic period, local scholars influenced by that imported tradition traced their intellectual pedigree back to Assyria.
A somewhat different outlook prevailed at Babylon and Borsippa. There too, local scriptoria preserved memories of Sargonid Assyria as center of power, and of Nineveh as intellectual storehouse. Three literary letters relate to Assurbanipal’s requisition of tablets for the royal libraries of Nineveh: BM 45642 records the reply to Assurba
nipal’s request by the scholars of Borsippa; BM 28825 a similar reply by the scholars of Babylon, while CT 22, 1 preserves a direct order by Assurbanipal to the authorities of Borsippa to collect tablets from private houses and the Ezida temple (Frame and George 2005). The manuscripts cannot be precisely dated but probably come from the Hellenistic period in their majority, although they seem to reproduce much older traditions. The question of the authenticity of the letters cannot be solved satisfactorily. Like the two letters between Nabopolassar and Sîn‐šarru‐iškun, they fall within the genre of “royal correspondence,” which may contain factual threads but was later considerably embellished for exemplary purposes. Nonetheless, their general context seems entirely plausible since we have extensive evidence from the seventh century for Assurbanipal’s collecting activities in Babylonia (Parpola 1983). One important aspect of the Babylon and Borsippa tradition is their reductive view of Nineveh as recipient of Babylonian knowledge, contrary to the situation at Uruk where the channel of transmission was acknowledged as having gone in the other direction. One possible reason for this divergence is that the library of the Esagil temple may have functioned as a royal library already under Assyrian rule, as it probably did afterwards (Clancier 2009: 306–7).
Memories of Assyria also survived in Chronicles. The majority of manuscripts of Babylonian Chronicles can be assigned to the late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods and belonged to the libraries of Babylon, chiefly the Esagil, although some may have come from Borsippa. These Chronicles focus on Babylonian history exclusively and, with only a few exceptions, mention Assyrians only insofar as they intervened in Babylonian affairs. Nevertheless, they contain a non‐negligible amount of information on Assyria and its rulers, especially those who assumed the Babylonian crown. Although the Babylonian chronographic tradition originated in the second millennium, it is only with the reign of Nabû‐naṣir (747–734) that Chronicles began to record systematic information. This is also the period when Assyrian intervention became systemic. Five Chronicles deal with events between 745, the accession year of Tiglath‐pileser III, and the end of Assyrian rule in Babylonia with the advent of Nabopolassar in 626 (Glassner 2004, Chronicles 16–20). They contain a good deal of information on the triangular conflict between Assyria, Elam, and Babylonia in the seventh century. Two of these Chronicles (Glassner 2004, nos. 19–20) focus on interruptions of the New Year festival and, as already mentioned, the latter one seems to draw an implicit connection with Sennacherib’s desecration of Babylon and the collapse of Assyrian rule in Babylonia. Two other Chronicles (Glassner 2004, nos. 21–2) detail the events of the reign of Nabopolassar down to the capture of Nineveh, furnishing considerable details on the military operations and political alliances which led to the downfall of Assyria.
Some Chronicles relate the earlier history of Assyrian relations with Babylonia. Two partly overlapping Chronicles (Glassner 2004, nos. 46–7) cover the history of Babylon from the last Kassite rulers down to 822, with some mentions of Assyrian intervention. Of considerable interest is a Chronicle which deals with the conflicts between Assyria, Elam, and Babylonia between the 14th and 12th centuries and draws material from the Assyrian Synchronistic History as well as from unknown sources, possibly an epic in honor of the Kassite king Kurigalzu (Glassner 2004, no. 45). This Chronicle thus preserves in a late Babylonian manuscript what must have been an earlier Babylonian response to claims laid by Assyrian historiographers. Finally, one notes that the Chronicle of Ancient Kings (Glassner 2004, no. 39) ends with a mention that the Old Assyrian king Ilušuma was a contemporary of Suabu (= Sumu‐abum) of Babylon. In short, Babylonian scholars of the Hellenistic period had at their disposal a small body of information about Assyria, most of it relating to the Sargonid kings. It is therefore no wonder that Berossus, whose work centers exclusively on the city of Babylon, provides some details on the Assyrian kings of the seventh century, and it may be more than coincidence that these surviving fragments relate almost entirely to Sennacherib, although they do not allude specifically to his crimes against Babylonia (Verbrugghe and Wickersham 1996: 53–6).
References
Al‐Rawi, F.N.H. 1985. “Nabopolassar's Restoration Work on the Wall ‘Imgur‐Enlil’ at Babylon,” Iraq 47, 1–13.
Beaulieu, P.‐A. 1997a. “The Fourth Year of Hostilities in the Land,” Baghdader Mitteilungen 28, 367–94.
Beaulieu, P.‐A. 1997b. “The Cult of AN.ŠÁR/Aššur in Babylonia After the Fall of the Assyrian Empire,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 11, 55–73.
Beaulieu, P.‐A. 2003. “Nabopolassar and the Antiquity of Babylon,” in Hayim and Miriam Tadmor Volume (= Eretz‐Israel 27), 1–9.
Beaulieu, P.‐A. 2007. “Berossus on Late Babylonian History,” in Y. Gong and Y. Chen (eds.), Special Issue of Oriental Studies: A Collection of Papers on Ancient Civilizations of Western Asia, Asia Minor and North Africa. Oriental Studies 2006, Beijing: University of Beijing, 116–49.
Beaulieu, P.‐A. 2010. “The Afterlife of Assyrian Scholarship in Hellenistic Babylonia,” in J. Stackert et al. (eds.), Gazing on the Deep: Ancient Near Eastern and Other Studies in Honor of Tzvi Abusch, Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1–18.
Brinkman, J.A. 1993. “Babylonian Influence in the Šēḫ Ḥamad Texts Dated under Nebuchadnezzar II,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 7, 133–8.
Clancier, Ph. 2009. Les bibliothèques en Babylonie dans la deuxième moitié du Ier millénaire av. J.C., AOAT 363, Münster: Ugarit‐Verlag.
Da Riva, R. 2008. The Neo‐Babylonian Royal Inscriptions: An Introduction, GMTR 4, Münster: Ugarit‐Verlag.
Da Riva, R. 2014. “Assyrians and Assyrian Influence in Babylonia (626–539 BCE),” in: S. Gaspa et al. (eds.), From Source to History: Studies on Ancient Near Eastern Worlds and Beyond Dedicated to Giovanni Battista Lanfranchi on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday on June 23, 2014, AOAT 412, Münster: Ugarit‐Verlag.
Fincke, J. 2001. “Der Assur‐Katalog der Serie enūma anu enlil (EAE),” Orientalia 70, 19–39.
Frame G. and George, A.R. 2005. “The Royal Libraries of Nineveh: New Evidence for King Ashurbanipal’s Tablet Collecting,” Iraq 67, 265–84.
Gerardi, P. 1986. “Declaring War in Mesopotamia,” Archiv für Orientforschung 33, 30–8.
Glassner, J.‐J. 2004. Mesopotamian Chronicles, Writing from the Ancient World 19, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Kuhrt, A. 2007. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period, London: Routledge.
Lambert, W.G. 2005. “Letter of Sîn‐šarra‐iškun to Nabopolassar,” in I. Spar and W.G. Lambert (eds.), Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art II: Literary and Scholastic Texts of the First Millennium B.C., New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brepols Publishers, 203–10.
Lee, Th. G. 1993. “The Jasper Cylinder Seal of Aššurbanipal and Nabonidus’ Making of Sîn’s Statue,” Revue d’Assyriologie 87, 131–6.
Parpola, S. 1983. “Assyrian Library Records,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 42, 1–29.
Postgate, J.N. 1993. “The Four ‘Neo‐Assyrian’ Tablets from Šēḫ Ḥamad,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 7, 109– 24.
Schaudig, H.‐P. 2001. Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Großen, AOAT 256, Münster: Ugarit‐Verlag.
Vanderhooft, D. 1999. The Neo‐Babylonian Empire and Babylon in the Latter Prophets, Harvard Semitic Museum Monographs 59, Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Van Dijk, J.A. and Mayer, W.R. 1980. Texte aus dem Rēš‐Heiligtum in Uruk‐Warka, Baghdader Mitteilungen Beiheft 2, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag.
Verbrugghe, G.P. and Wickersham, J.M. 1996. Berossos and Manetho: Introduced and Translated, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Further Reading
Important studies include Beaulieu 1997b and 2010, Brinkman 1993, and Frame and George 2005; see now also Da Riva 2014.
CHAPTER 29
Assyria in the Hebrew Bible
Eckart Frahm
Introduction
/> During the late Middle Assyrian period and then again in the ninth century BCE, Assyrian armies fought repeatedly against local polities in the Levant, and several Assyrian monarchs were able to boast that they had “washed their weapons” in the Mediterranean Sea. In 853 BCE, king Shalmaneser III went into battle against a large coalition of Levantine states, including Israel, which was ruled at that time by king Ahab, the first Israelite monarch to be mentioned in an Assyrian inscription. But it was only during the reign of Tiglath‐pileser III (744–727 BCE) that Assyria began to systematically conquer, subjugate, and annex the states of Western Syria and Palestine, initiating a new, “imperial” phase in the history of Western Asia (for details, see Chapters 8 and 13 in this volume).
Both Israel and Judah were thoroughly affected by these new expansionist policies. In 722/720 BCE, Assyria completed the annexation of Israel, which ceased to exist as an independent kingdom. In 701 BCE, Judah, after suffering heavy losses of life and property, became an Assyrian vassal state. These central events, as well as several others, explain why Assyria’s imperial domination and eventual downfall, and the history of the period from roughly 744 to 612 BCE in general, are so prominently reflected in the Hebrew Bible.
One might be inclined to argue that the Biblical authors’ fascination with Assyria is of no more than “historicist” interest. But such a view would overlook something rather crucial: the fact that Assyria’s penetration into the Levant helped initiate and catalyze the “axial” revolution of religious and political thought that is codified in the Bible. To phrase it differently: the emergence of a new religious and “national” identity in Israel and Judah in the wake of Tiglath‐pileser’s campaigns to the West can be seen as a direct response to the political and intellectual challenges posed by Assyrian imperialism. Consequently, the following pages will not only discuss the historical references to Assyria found in the Bible, but also the question of Assyria’s impact on the Bible’s legal, theological, and ideological positions.
