9 Keyholes for Comparative Reconstruction

Can anything be really known about ancient prophecy? Yes, certainly—we just have to be aware of what can be known and how it can be known. The first and last thing to be taken into account when attempting to reconstruct ancient divination is the nature of the source material. Every single text tells us something about the historical phenomenon. When put together, the texts provide a set of keyholes that indeed show parts of the historical prophetic landscape, but at the same time, hide even bigger parts of it. No complete picture of ancient prophecy is available; the texts give us disconnected views to haphazard details instead of showing a harmonious whole. This must be kept in mind when looking at ancient landscapes for the purpose of reconstruction and comparison. One keyhole may show nothing but mountains, while the other yields a view to a coastal plain, and yet another to a city. Why should anyone think that these three dramatically different views actually would belong to the same large landscape? Perhaps there are cues, like cables of a ski lift in the mountain view and a corner of cultivated field in the view to the coastal plain that make the researcher ask questions about the farmers’ markets and winter sports shops to be seen in the city view.

As outlined in the introductory chapter of this book, the intention of this book is to draw a big picture of ancient Eastern Mediterranean prophecy, whereby comparisons between Near Eastern, Greek, and biblical material are not made by pondering whether differences weigh more than similarities for the purpose of finding out the existence and direction of influence of one thing on another. Rather, the diverse sources are placed next to each other in order to pay attention to family resemblances including similarities and differences, and to look for questions concerning one source material that would not emerge without the knowledge of the other. Similarity does not prove historical influence any more than difference disproves it, but differences are often more question-provoking and hence more useful than similarities.

It is important that each material is first studied in its own right. Greek prophecy cannot be reconstructed to conform to a biblical model and neither should biblical texts be read as if they were written in Assyria. However, without the comparative perspective, the picture would never grow bigger, and the question of the larger landscape visible through different keyholes would not emerge. Why should it, then? Because the family resemblances recognized by the comparative perspective may reveal things akin to the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” famous from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze” included in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.¹ Things that fail to attract our attention in one source material may become noticeable only by way of comparison with another source material.

Texts were written and preserved for different purposes, and the types of textual transmission ultimately determine what kind of information is obtainable from each source. The textual genre, therefore, serves as the gateway to the historical phenomenon, but only as far as the gatekeepers let us go. The words that once came out of the prophets’ mouths were necessarily exposed to material restrictions, selection, and memory of the persons who wrote them down. The scribal process that produced the texts we have at our disposal is always a secondary development with regard to the spoken, “authentic” prophecies. Therefore, sources of prophecy are ultimately sources of the reception of prophecy; the texts often hide as much as they reveal, and our picture of ancient prophecy will always be incomplete and partially distorted.

The ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and biblical sources tell us different stories of the way of prophecy from oral communication to written record. Depending on the source, this route has side roads and shortcuts, and sometimes it covers up its tracks altogether. Nevertheless, seen from a distance, the different stories seem to provide variations of an essentially similar plot, involving the oral utterance, its eventual recording by means of writing, and the subsequent use of the written record, whether in the form of a letter, an inscription, an oracle collection, or a quotation in a literary context.

In all three textual corpora, doubtless reflecting the practices of the cultures they originate from, prophecy appears as both an oral and a written phenomenon. As a rule, it appears, prophecy was oral transmission of divine messages by the prophet to their recipients. The use of writing was not necessary if the addressee was present or the message could be transmitted to him or her orally. In some cases, however, prophetic oracles were written down, and this is the prerequisite of our knowledge of ancient prophecy. The written form enabled a continuation of the prophetic process of communication, involving the interpretive community of people not immediately connected with the oral performance and its first recording and, hence, constituting an expanded speech act (zerdehnte Sprechsituation)² no longer dependent on the words spoken by the prophet in the oral performance situation. Theoretically, the written product could be prepared by the prophet him- or herself in order to guarantee the accuracy of the message, and there is some evidence of prophets actively involved in the communication of the prophetic message by written means.³ However, the prophets do not seem to have belonged to the class of literati anywhere in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, and even if they were, the written products, once prepared and sent away, were no longer under their control but in the hands of their users.

The information on prophecy obtainable from ancient Eastern Mediterranean sources is genre-specific. Some texts, such as letters and written oracles, are indeed written for the purpose of informing their readers or users on prophecy, whereas in others, such as lexical lists and administrative documents, the evidence of prophecy comes as an unintended by-product in a text written for a different purpose. Literary texts and prophetic books, again, emulate and recontextualize prophetic speech in their own specific ways, typically with a considerable distance from the historical event they describe.

Ritual texts, administrative texts, and lexical lists are (quasi-)primary sources of prophecy only available from Mesopotamia. They yield a relatively coherent picture of the presence of prophets in Mesopotamian temples. Each of these genres has a distinct purpose. Administrative texts are written as records of what was actually done and delivered, serving the purpose of bureaucratic control. Lexical texts were used for training of scribes, dealing primarily with words and only secondarily with realities, while ritual texts either prescribe or describe ritual actions, creating expectations of ideal ritual performances. Since it would be nonsensical to mention people receiving food rations or performing in ritual descriptions if they did not actually exist, the sources representing these three genres can be taken as a proof of the presence of prophets in Mesopotamian temples and their participation in their worship, even though the nature of the prophets’ ritual tasks and the frequency of their performances remains for the most part unknown.

Letters form the main type of transmission at Mari, and it is also known from Assyria and, to a very restricted extent, from Judah.⁴ The distance between the oral performance and the written record depends on whether it was witnessed by the letter-writer or whether he or she was informed about it by go-betweens. The letter-writer was probably free to paraphrase the wording of the prophecy, although the very words used by the prophet may sometimes have come through; the best example is the saying “beneath straw runs water”⁵ embedded by three different writers within an otherwise different wording of the same prophecy spoken at Mari.

Letters, in the absence of any audiovisual records, can be seen as the best available evidence of real-life communication in the ancient world. They provide authentic glimpses of ancient people’s concerns and interpretations of what happened in their physical and social environment. Some restrictions are set by the very genre itself, however. Being personal communications written for a specific purpose, letters may also turn out to be precarious evidence which hides as many things as it reveals. The letter-writer’s interpretation of the circumstances around the message and his/her description of people involved in them is dependent on the letter-writer’s agenda and cannot be uncritically assumed to fully correspond to the historical reality, however many accurate descriptions the letter may contain. Prophetic quotations are often accompanied by interpretations and suggestions of the writer. Strategies of informing, convincing, warning, advising, persuading, encouraging, or reprimanding the addressee are dependent on the purpose of the letter, which always exceeds the mere recording of facts.

As sources of ancient prophecy, all caveats considered, the letters allow the most immediate access to the ancient prophetic phenomenon available to the modern scholar. Unlike lexical lists, administrative documents, or ritual texts, the prophetic performance often appears as the subject matter of the letter, thus making the historical information on prophecy more than just a fortunate by-product of a communication originally meant for other purposes. Letters also contain clues to the historical circumstances surrounding the message, and they can sometimes be dated rather precisely. All this makes letters important evidence of ancient prophecy and its use and appreciation in the societies from where correspondence on prophecy has been preserved to us. It goes without saying, however, that everything that can be known about ancient prophecy on the basis of letters must be reconstructed from the more or less distorted and in any case insufficient information mediated by persons other than prophets.⁶

Apart from the letters, the most immediate written record of a prophetic oracle is a written oracle report inscribed immediately after the oral performance. Such reports are known from Assyria,⁷ and one letter from Mari and another from Assyria fulfill the same function, since they are likely to refer directly to oral performances.⁸ In the normal case, as it seems, the Assyrian oracle reports were disposable documents, but in some cases, archival copies were prepared for later use. Oracles could even be re-edited as oracle collections. This practice is best known from Assyria, where a few collections have been preserved, and even the Transjordanian Deir Alla inscription constitutes a compilation of at least two separate prophecies.⁹ Furthermore, collecting prophetic oracles in Jerusalem is suggested by the Hebrew Bible,¹⁰ and such collections may have served as initial phases of the biblical prophetic literature. The significance of oracle collections in Greek divination and the activity of the chresmologues as their compilers and performers is acknowledged, and sometimes debated, by several Greek writers; however, no extant copies of these collections are available to us.¹¹

An oracle collection represents a more advanced stage in the process of communication, implying that in some cases a number of prophecies were considered significant enough to be recorded as an edited compilation. This practice implies that the selected prophecies enjoyed a high degree of authority and a transgenerational significance. The oracle collections transcended the prophecies from their primary historical contexts to a much greater extent than the reports and letters, enabling the use of the prophecies as sources of other written works. Assembling the oracle collections necessarily required editorial work; as a result of the process of selecting, copying, arranging, and eventually rewriting the material, the oracle collections are essentially the work of their editors.

Written oracles can be considered transcripts of a once-spoken prophetic oracle, but they cannot be straightforwardly identified with the wording of spoken oracles, and they are not likely to be written by the oral performers themselves; prophets, to all appearances, were not expected write their oracles down, whether in the Near East or in Greece. Nevertheless, the written oracles can be considered summaries of the spoken words attempting at an accurate transmission of the essential contents of the divine messages as perceived by their authors—especially if the act of writing was commissioned by the temple in which the prophet was active or even the prophet him/herself. The scribes may have intended to do their best to reiterate the verbal expressions used in the oral performance in so far as stylistic conventions (such as hexameter) and restrictions of space (such as a cuneiform tablet) permitted.

In the case of the Assyrian oracles, for example, the main criterion would have been the orthodox proclamation of the Assyrian royal ideology, while virtually all material contradicting this ideology remains invisible and inaccessible to us. The written oracles from Assyria and Ešnunna are the result of state-sponsored scribal activity, providing important evidence not only of the divine words uttered by prophets and the occasional use of written media in their communication, but also of the use and significance of such oracular utterances in the context of the royal ideology. The oracular process antedating the written product is difficult to reconstruct from the written oracles from Mesopotamia, but the Assyrian texts give rare evidence of the scribal continuation of the prophetic process of communication in oracle collections which represent a second step of recording prophecies, that is, a combination of selected oracles reusing earlier pronounced divine words in a new historical situation. The Deir Alla inscription may be considered another specimen of such a combination, even though the purpose of its writing on the wall plaster escapes our knowledge.

Greek epigraphic evidence of prophecy consists of sources of a very different kind, both in comparison with the Mesopotamian sources and with each other. While the documents of the Mesopotamian oracles were filed away in royal archives which were accessible only to a very restricted number of people, those of the Greek oracles were designed for public display. The inscriptions recording the oracles of Apollo at Didyma¹² sometimes contain written versions of responses to oracular questions by visitors of the temples of Apollo, composed by professional scribes and secondarily inscribed on stone slabs. The inscriptions from Claros, again, do not quote oracles but memorize the visits of delegations sent by different cities to the sanctuary of Apollo in Claros;¹³ however, oracles of the Clarian Apollo can be found in inscriptions from a number of other places.¹⁴ While yielding some evidence of oracular practice in these oracle sites, these inscriptions inform first and foremost of the consultants of the oracles, who came from different parts of the Mediterranean and sponsored incriptions to be erected either at the oracle sites themselves or in their own cities, publicly commemorating the visit to the sanctuary and/or the fulfillment of the divine orders expressed in the oracles received there. The case of the two stones containing four oracles found at the Phrygian Hierapolis presents a unique Greek case of a privately sponsored oracle collection.¹⁵

Compared to either the Mesopotamian or the Greek written oracles, the lead tablets from Dodona are a completely different kind of evidence of prophecy.¹⁶ They were found neither in archives nor in publicly displayed inscriptions but scattered all over the holy precinct of Dodona. These tablets typically contain only the oracular question of an individual consultant, while an answer can be found written on the tablet only in a few cases. The tablets do not reveal much of the oracular process at Dodona; it is far from clear what kind of divinatory method was used by the female diviners at Dodona, and who actually wrote the tablets.

In the case of the written oracles, the process of transmission form the oral to the written is probably at its shortest, and in this sense, they can be regarded as the easiest-to-pass gateway to ancient prophecy. This may be true in some cases; however, we must not forget that the evidence in front of us is still textual evidence, that is, the product of scribal activity, which gives no access to the very words actually spoken in prophetic performances. The scribes are the primary authors of the written product and, hence, the ultimate gatekeepers of our information of the prophetic phenomenon. Meager and uneven the corpus of written oracles at our disposal is, it cannot be expected to yield a full picture of the prophetic phenomenon in the Near East or in Greece. Prophetic oracles ended up written on a surface—whether clay, stone, plaster, or lead—only if there was a reason for that. This is where the gatekeepers play the most decisive role in determining what kind of material was considered worth preserving in archives, inscriptions, or in secondary compositions.

The most advanced stage of the prophetic process of communication is constituted by the references and quotations of prophecy in secondary contexts. A substantial part of the evidence of the prophetic phenomenon in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean comes from secondary sources classified here under the rubric of literary prophecy. In fact, the best-known and most-researched sources of prophecy, such as the biblical prophetic books and the sources informing on the Delphic oracle, belong to this category, which is to be set apart from (quasi-)primary sources such as administrative texts, letters, and the “written prophecy” documented by written oracles. Quotations of prophecy or references to them can also be found in Assyrian and West Semitic inscriptions, and even the prophetic episode at Byblos recorded in the Egyptian report of Wenamun belongs to the category of literary prophecy.¹⁷

Narratives and other literary texts, whether written in Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, or Greek, are prime examples of ideological fiction narrated to the implied audience with the purpose of constructing collective memory, an interpretation of the past the narrator wants to impose upon the audience.¹⁸ This does not mean that narrative as a genre has no historical value, but it is much harder to get through this gateway compared with letters or administrative documents. Prophetic characters featuring in narratives may or may not have real-life models, and prophecies quoted in narratives may or may not be based on records of real-life performances. Even if this could somehow be shown to be the case, the prophets and their activities are contextualized in the narrative and serve the purposes of the narrator in the first place. What the narratives let us know about ancient prophecy, then, is first and foremost how their authors appreciated this phenomenon; in other words, the narratives can be taken as only secondary evidence of the prophetic phenomenon wie es eigentlich gewesen, but as primary evidence of the use (and usefulness) of prophecy and divination for the purposes of the construction and maintenance of collective memory by way of an ideological fiction.

The references to prophets and their words in the literary sources no longer belong to concrete contexts in time and place; instead, they have become part of textual contexts created by the craftsmen of the literary works and inscriptions. Even in cases that may indeed originate from actually spoken words in concrete situations, it is the historical and ideological paradigm of the textual world that serves as the interpretative framework for prophecy. Hence, the literary references to prophecy should first and foremost be taken as evidence for the use and interpretation of prophecy by contemporary or succeeding generations. To some extent this is true for all written documents of prophecy; however, the evidence for prophecy in literary works and inscriptions belongs to a more advanced phase in the process of communication, and thus is further away from the actual prophetic performance.

In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the gatekeepers were the scribes who took care of the prolongation of the prophetic process of communication by interpreting, selecting, and rewriting earlier texts for the concerns of their own communities, thus claiming the prophetic role for themselves and, in a way, closing the gate in front of the visitors. The Hebrew Bible represents a full textualization of the prophetic tradition. The Deuteronomistic History and the books of Chronicles display a significant interest in prophets and prophecy. A genre of its own, not to be found anywhere else, is constituted by the biblical prophetic books, in which the fragments of once spoken oracles are recontextualized, edited, and augmented through several centuries. The prophetic books are the result of a centuries-long process of redaction and Fortschreibung, which was initially triggered by the prophetic phenomenon and, eventually, collections of written prophecies, but grew gradually into an independent and canonized literary entity. This again served as the basis of interpretation in subsequent writings, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament.

The basic steps of prophetic process of communication can be found in Mesopotamian, West Semitic, Greek, and biblical texts. There are significant differences between the source materials, both when it comes to the material, genre, purpose, and transmission of written prophecy. To take just a few examples:

These differences are partly due to the textual transmission that never reveals the full and authentic past, but they also go back to varying socio-religious contexts and practices and different uses of prophecy. What matters everywhere is the appreciation, authentication, and authorization of prophecy by the community, without which we would not have any sources of ancient prophecy at all at our disposal.

Prophecy appears as a part of the divinatory apparatus used by rulers, communities, and individuals all over the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. The socio-political position of prophetic divination varies in the Mesopotamian, Greek, and biblical sources, but in all of them, prophecy is generally acknowledged as a legitimate method of divination and certain specialists are recognized as its accredited practitioners: the āpilum/āpiltum, the muḫḫûm/muḫḫūtum and the raggimu/raggintu in Mesopotamia; the nābî’/nĕbî’â, the ḥōzê and the rō’ê in the Bible; and the prophētis/prophētēs and the promantis in Greece. All three source materials also acknowledge the possibility of a non-specialized individual to prophecy under a divine possession, but the accredited background of prophecy is generally appreciated.

However, the position of prophetic intermediation among other methods of divination varies according to the source material. In Mesopotamia, the distinction between technical and intuitive divination was virtually absolute and the mandates of diviners of different kinds did not overlap. Haruspices did not prophesy, astrologers did not read sheep’s livers, and prophets did not observe stars. The Mesopotamian divinatory system was highly differentiated as the result of the millennia-long institutional development, whereas in Greece, divination was much less institutionalized, it was not based on a long scholarly tradition, the diviners did not work under a centralized authority, and—perhaps for these reasons—the distinction between technical and intuitive divination was far from being an absolute one.

In the Hebrew Bible again, the most important distinction regarding divination is that between the forbidden and the acceptable: most, but not all, methods of technical divination are condemned, while prophecy is presented as the foremost of the acceptable modes of divine–human communication—however, ultimately, under strict scribal control. The divinatory role-casting is not so absolute in the Hebrew Bible as it is in Mesopotamian sources. Biblical prophets are primarily presented as intermediaries of the divine word, but people with prophetic titles can be found in other kinds of divinatory activities as well.

That the sources present the divinatory practices as being so differently organized in biblical, Greek, and Mesopotamian sources may partly go back to the purposes and preferences of the written sources themselves. Nevertheless, divination is always part of a socio-religious system, and it is quite probable that the historical scenes of divination in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Israel were in many ways distinctive, due to their characteristic socio-political structures and the position of divination within them. The Assyrian empire functioned differently from a Greek city state, the community of Yehud in the fifth century bce was not similar to that of the kingdom of Mari in the eighteenth century bce, and so on. Divinatory practices were malleable enough to meet each community’s expectations, taking the shape that best served the needs of the community or its leaders.

While the sources make it possible to reconstruct the oracular process to some degree in the cases of Delphi, Didyma, and Claros, the Near Eastern and biblical descriptions of prophetic performances (excluding the so-called “symbolic acts” of some biblical prophets and one reported case at Mari¹⁹) do not reveal much about how they actually took place. What matters more than the performative aspect is which deity speaks what to whom through whom—that is, the basic components of the prophetic process of communication presupposed by the Mesopotamian, Greek, and biblical sources alike. An important distinguishing feature between Greek and Near Eastern sources is that while Mesopotamian and biblical prophets are often presented as public performers, the prophets of Apollo at Delphi, Didyma, and Claros appear as prophesying only in adyton of the sanctuary. At Delphi, the consultants may have been able to see the Pythia prophesying,²⁰ while in the sanctuaries of Apollo at Didyma and Claros, the direct contact of the inspired speaker with the consultants is improbable.²¹

All divination implies the idea of communication between human and divine agents, who are consulted as sources of information normally inaccessible to humans. An overview of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean evidence has shown that, no matter if the sources come from Greece, the Hebrew Bible, or the ancient Near East, prophesying is in one way or another associated a patterned public behavior. This behavior is very often marked by an element of an altered state of consciousness enabling the alleged divine agent to use the prophet’s mouth as her/his channel of communication. This is not only suggested by the “lunacy” language (Akkadian maḫû; Greek mania; Hebrew nibbā’/hitnabbē’; cf. mĕšugga‘) but also by the context of the references to the prophets’ performances. The idea of divine possession, that is, that the prophet is possessed, or at least thoroughly inspired, by a divine agent, is not often mentioned explicitly, but is presupposed by the very idea of the prophets as mouthpieces of the divine.²²

Both ancient texts and anthropological evidence recognize the altered state of consciousness, a physio-psychological state called “ecstasy” or “trance,” or, especially when believed to be caused by a superhuman agent, “possession” or “inspiration.” This terminology pertains to different aspects of an altered state of consciousness: while the words “trance” and “ecstasy” denote the psycho-physiological state of the performer, “possession” and “inspiration” refer to the explanation of the state of mind as being believed to be caused by an external agent. The altered state of mind is a so-called “randomizing” aspect indicating the absence of human control, usually accompanied by a culturally patterned performance which makes the performer recognizable as an inspired speaker.

Even the scanty descriptions of prophetic performances in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean sources strongly suggest that the altered state of consciousness was an acknowledged element of the public behavior of the prophets, corresponding to the audiences’ expectations. The Greek inspired speakers, the Pythia at Delphi, the prophets and prophetesses of Apollo at Didyma and Claros, as well as the female diviners at Dodona, were believed to experience divine possession when prophesying. A number of persons in the Hebrew Bible engage in prophetic ecstasy, make spirit journeys, and see heavenly things, and the Hebrew verb denoting prophetic behavior, nibbā’ or hitnabbē’, has a distinctly ecstatic connotation. The Akkadian verb maḫû likewise implies frantic behavior, giving a name to Mesopotamian prophets called muḫḫûm/maḫḫû. An Assyrian prayer compares himself to a prophet, capturing in a nutshell what was thought to happen in a prophetic performance: “I have become affected like a prophet (maḫḫû): what I do not know, I bring forth.”²³

The phenomenology of the prophetic performance as such is never a topic in its own right in ancient sources and has, therefore, to be reconstructed from fragmentary information provided by sources that mostly take its appearance for granted. Questions remain as to what extent the comparative evidence allows us to know “what really happened” in prophetic performances, whether they all imply a similar kind of prophetic behavior, and how much relevant information actually can be taken from the picture drawn from the great variety of textual and anthropological material. It is also difficult to know how significant some common features in the above discussed texts, such as the function of triggers like music and liquids in the oracular process, actually were, since they are reported to us only in scattered individual cases.

The sources are remarkably silent about the techniques of trance, and descriptions of how prophets achieved the altered state of consciousness are rare. In Greek sources, the possessed state of the prophet is sometimes explained to have been induced by vapors or water, but descriptions of the “raving Pythia” are neither common nor historically reliable. Letters from Mari sometimes use the verb maḫû, and the Assyrian verb for prophesying, ragāmu, may have an ecstatic connotation. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophetic state of mind is ascribed to the spirit or the “hand” of God, as in the case of Saul to whom Samuel says: “the spirit of the Lord will possess you, and you will be in a prophetic frenzy along with them and be turned into a different person” (1 Sam. 10:6). This expression is reminiscent of two Akkadian texts in which the expression šanû ṭēmu “change one’s consciousness” is used. One of these two texts is the latest known reference to prophecy in cuneiform literature from the Seleucid Uruk,²⁴ and the other is the newly discovered tablet containing the fifth tablet of the Epic of Gilgameš, where Enkidu says to Gilgameš: “Become wrathful, change your consciousness like a prophet! Let your shout boom loud like a kettledrum!”²⁵

As important as the divine inspiration or possession must have been thought of, neither Greek and Mesopotamian nor biblical authors seem to have felt the need for giving an explanation of how the prophetic state of mind was reached. Plutarch, for instance, may theorize about the source of the Delphic Pythia’s inspiration,²⁶ without, however, giving an account of how it concretely influenced her behavior. Therefore, we do not know exactly how it affected the behavior of the prophets, how long the altered state of consciousness was typically expected to last, or how wild and frantic the comportment of the prophets was.

What matters most is that in ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and Greek sources, it seems equally important that the prophetic figures assumed a specific role in which they were acknowledged by their audience as capable of acting as mouthpieces of the divine. Following Morton Klass, we could conceptualize this as a patterned identity marked by the altered state of consciousness acknowledged by the prophet as well as by the audience.²⁷ There is no lack of anthropological parallels for such an identity and role-taking; as several footnotes of this volume have already shown, shamanistic activities in particular may provide useful analogies of how the ecstatic prophetic performance might have worked.²⁸ The most significant thing the prophets and shamans have in common is the role of an intermediary between the heavenly and earthly realms.²⁹ Further commonalities with the shamanic practice include the altered state of consciousness and its occasional triggers, such as liquids or drugs, and music or sounds, as well as the ambiguous gender role of some prophets and shamans.³⁰ Not all typically shamanistic roles are shared by the Near Eastern prophets, though. What is lacking in the documentation of ancient Near Eastern prophecy is, as Herbert Huffmon notes, “any indication of the traditional shamanistic characteristics of the mastery of spirits, spirit journeys, and the focus on healing, as well as the matters of heredity of role and the initiation process.”³¹ To be sure, as we have seen, one type of mania is beneficial in curing sicknesses according to Plato, and male and female prophets do feature once in the above-mentioned healing ritual together with “frenzied” men and women (*118);³² but in comparison with the wide-ranging social functions of shamanism, those of prophetic activity appear as rather more restricted and focused on the transmission of divine knowledge.

What seems like the common expectation in Greek, Mesopotamian, and biblical sources is that what came out of the prophets’ mouths was not incomprehensible gibberish but coherent speech that could even be written down. The Delphic Pythia probably expressed herself in an entirely comprehensible manner,³³ and the ancient Near Eastern texts do not even once give the impression that the prophets’ messages were not fully articulate and immediately understandable. When the prophets of Mari “went into trance (immaḫḫu) and said” something, there is nothing to suggest that what they said needed any interpreting by the informer or some other third party. The same is true for biblical prophecies (including early Christian ones, cf. 1 Cor. 14:5), which are never ambiguous in any way. This is not to say that the texts repeat verbatim what the prophets actually said; it only indicates that it was a common expectation that the prophets, however ecstatic, spoke in an intelligible manner. Indeed, there is enough historical and anthropological evidence to show that the altered state of consciousness, in whatever manifestation, does not necessarily result in an inarticulate speech. For instance, Kuden, the Chief State Oracle of Tibet, provides highly articulated utterances while in an altered state of consciousness.³⁴ Another example is provided by the female Finnish sleeping preachers who, while in an altered state of consciousness, gave lengthy sermons.³⁵

At first sight, the Greek literature seems to portray the prophetic performance very differently from the ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts; however, a closer look reveals that the basic elements of its representation do not differ dramatically. The most significant dissimilarity between the three sets of sources may be the very nature of the source material resulting in a difference of the type of presentation. Letters to the king are written for purposes quite different from those of ritual texts and lexical lists. Herodotus’ historiography and biblical historical narrative serve other ends than a Late Babylonian astronomical diary, and the prophetic book is a genre unknown outside the biblical literature. Greek texts, Plato and Plutarch in particular, also discuss the prophetic performance within a philosophical framework not to be found in any Near Eastern source. To whatever extent the difference of presentation reflects actual phenomenological differences, it affects our image of the ancient prophetic performance, which in any case remains incomplete.

The close affiliation between prophets and temples becomes evident whether one looks at Mesopotamian, Greek, or biblical sources, and prophecy is the type of divination that takes place in temples more often than other divinatory performances. However, the sources do not allow us to draw a full picture of prophets and temples in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. The constructs of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible are made of elements similar to those in Near Eastern texts, although the comparison between these textual transmissions is like comparing the ruins of a Near Eastern temple with a cathedral that, rebuilt and renovated countless times, is still in active use. Either way, it is difficult to imagine a prophet without a temple.

In the Greek world, the temples of the “big three” sites of Apollonian prophecy at Delphi, Didyma, and Claros, were the typical (and famous!) venues of inspired prophecies, as was the sanctuary of Zeus in Dodona. The oracular process in these sites was designed and administered in a way that made the prophetic performance closely identified with the place where it took place. Even in Mesopotamia, there were temples where prophecies were delivered particularly often and which provided the institutional background for the prophets, especially the temple of Dagan in the city of Terqa in the kingdom of Mari and the temple of Ištar in the Assyrian city of Arbela.

Many prophets are identified by the name of a deity in cuneiform sources à la “Annu-tabni, prophetess of Annunitum,”³⁶ which can be taken as a reference to the prophet’s affiliation with a temple. In the letters from Mari it is reported many times how prophets “arise” in temples to deliver a divine message, and their participation in cultic activities is attested in the case of the ritual of Ištar, which includes an interplay between prophets and musicians. Neo-Assyrian letters, too, sometimes mention prophecies uttered in temples and the colophons of written oracles localize prophets by the name of a city. When the colophon indicates that a prophecy came “by the mouth of Aḫat-abiša, a woman of Arbela,”³⁷ this can be understood as a reference to a prophecy uttered in the temple of Ištar in Arbela by a prophet belonging to that temple, which was the principal source of Assyrian prophecy.

A temple can often be imagined as the implied setting of the prophetic oracle even where this is not explicitly mentioned, as in the Zakkur inscription where the word of Baalšamayin follows the prayers of the king of Hamat.³⁸ In the Hebrew Bible, the books of Samuel and Kings include narratives in which a place of worship is explicitly or implicitly presented as the venue of the prophetic performances. The prophetic books tend to juxtapose priests and prophets, and prophets such as Jeremiah are brought to the temple or to its precincts over and over again. Even in the Hebrew Bible, hence, there is a recurrent, even though sometimes disturbed, connection between the prophets and the temple.

The prophets of Apollo in Greece were strictly temple-based, while in the Near Eastern and biblical sources, belonging to the temple personnel does not appear to be the prerequisite of the prophetic role. Prophetic dreams and oracles could be received and communicated basically by anyone, even by persons whose agency and social status were otherwise limited in that community, such as slaves. It is often difficult to know whether a prophet who performed in a temple actually was employed by it, but Mesopotamian administrative documents from different times do mention prophets among the temple personnel, and the strong presence of prophets in the temple of Ištar in Arbela indicates their permanent function in the worship of the goddess. The temples provided the most likely setting for the activity of those persons who were permanently involved in prophetic intermediation.

Prophets are often to be found as advocates of temples and their worship. The king of Mari was reminded by prophets to perform sacrifices, sometimes receiving divine reproach for his negligence in this respect. Letters to Assyrian kings include prophecies concerning the temple property, reporting also on some clashes between prophets and temple administrators. Assurbanipal was prompted by dreams and prophetic oracles to renovate the temple of the Lady of Kidmuri in Calah, and the same happened later in the Greek world: the Didymean priests consulted the oracle in order to speed up the completion of the construction works of their temple. In Greek temples, dedications to gods were based on instructions pronounced by an oracle, for instance: “Hermias to Zeus Hypsistos, a thank-offering in accordance with an oracle.”³⁹ Oracular responses from Delphi and Didyma recorded in inscriptions are, for the most part, related to cult and religion, and many of the preserved oracles from Claros typically give cultic instructions to people tormented by plagues and other catastrophes.

The temple of Jerusalem is the principal site and symbol of the divine presence in the Hebrew Bible, and this is noted also in biblical prophetic texts. In the books of Haggai and Ezekiel, the temple of Jerusalem exceeds every other topic in importance, and even in Zechariah, its rebuilding is a prominent issue.⁴⁰ The so-called cultic criticism in biblical prophetic books, often interpreted as an expression of ideological anti-ritualism, should rather be regarded as a concern for, rather than as an antagonism to, the temple worship. That these texts present the religious order as failing to maintain the symbolic universe does not diminish the significance of the temple as its center.

Because of their long history of transmission, the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible do not draw one single picture of the prophets and the temples but many pictures that are intertwined in the composition of the volume, merging together several, even contradictory, images. Many of these pictures are easily comparable with those drawn by Near Eastern texts, making the relationship of biblical prophets to the temple and worship well compatible with the evidence we have from Mari, Assyria, and Greek sources in many significant aspects. Prophets tend to speak in temples, sometimes participating in their worship, and this is more or less favorably recognized by the communities and their authorities; they appear as advocates of the temples, seldom as their opponents; their activity has been significant enough to have been recorded by contemporaries. The textual data discussed in this volume warrants the conviction that the socio-religious reality in what is called “ancient Israel” was not all that different from prevailing long-term cultural patterns of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean.

This is not to lump all evidence together as if there were no differences between and within different ancient sources and the cultures that produced them. The existence of differences, due to historical circumstances as well as the origin and nature of the textual sources, is something to be expected, hence “[d]ifferences of period and cultural values as well as ideological factors should be allowed for in any comparative study of the available data.”⁴¹

A comparison of the texts from Mari and Assyria does not reveal major discrepancies between the symbolic universes that legitimized the temples as contexts of prophetic activity; in fact, with regard to the chronological gap of eleven centuries between these textual corpora, the prophetic landscape looks surprisingly similar. It may be that the prophets at Mari were temple-based even to a greater extent than in Assyria,⁴² and the Assyrian prophecies known to us are clearly more focused on proclaiming the state ideology which certainly was more developed in Assyria than at Mari. At any rate, it must be borne in mind that the information concerning the prophets comes through different types of textual transmission. The Mari letters mostly relate individual events that were brought to the king’s attention, while the Assyrian oracles are concerned with royal succession and the king’s position between gods and the people. This inevitably makes even prophecy appear in a different light.

Greek sources concerning inspired prophecy represent, again, different types of textual transmission. The epigraphic sources are mostly written from the point of view of the clientele, which in the light of these sources suggest to have consisted primarily of private citizens and city states, and the issues consulted are related to private and communal matters. As especially the dedications demonstrate, visiting the oracle sites provided one way for members of the elite to foster the remembrance, performance, and guidance of common tradition and identity.⁴³ The lead tablets from Dodona represent an entirely different type of divinatory writing than the inscriptions from Didyma or Claros. Secondary sources such as the works of Greek historians, again, deal with the role of the oracles (or their failure) in political and military issues, often involving kings and other leaders who appear as narrative figures whose actions are appraised from the narrator’s point of view. What is common to both kinds of sources is the centrality of the oracular sanctuaries as the accredited source of divine knowledge.

When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, the most blatant characteristics that set it apart from other Near Eastern sources are, first, the irreconcilable dichotomy between the God of Israel and other gods, and second, the nature of the textual transmission concomitant to this ideological framework of the Hebrew canon. The result of this textual transmission is an unprecedented interplay of cultural values, belief systems, and ideological factors within one literary corpus. Unlike the Near Eastern texts available to us, this textual corpus gives voice to disturbances in the symbolic universes of the people who experienced the crises caused by the Assyrian invasion leading to the end of the kingdom of Israel, the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem—and even the re-establishment of the temple, which can also be characterized as a crisis that caused deep dissension about the position and maintenance of the temple. Such traumatic events caused the trust and security of those involved to be seriously disturbed, and this led to antagonisms that ultimately served the purpose of regaining the consistency of the symbolic universe.

This inevitably affects the way prophecy is constructed in the Hebrew Bible. The prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible seem to cope with the post-traumatic stress caused by disruptions and apparent inconsistencies in the shared experience and belief system that had traditionally legitimized the position of the temple as the point of convergence between human and superhuman worlds.⁴⁴ In the ancient Near Eastern and Greek documentation of prophecy, this position is never challenged, and even in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, the temple mostly maintains its central position. But there are also (sub)constructions of prophecy that build upon an antagonism between prophets and representatives of the religious order, redefining the role of the temple in the universe-maintenance.

Prophecy, as divination in general, plays a role in political decision-making throughout our source materials. In the Near Eastern texts, the primary addressees of prophetic oracles are kings: Zimri-Lim of Mari, Ibalpiel of Ešnunna, Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal of Assyria, Zakkur of Hamath, even the Prince of Byblos. The Hebrew Bible likewise connects prophets with kings of Judah and Israel from the first (Saul) to the last (Zedekiah) and beyond (Zerubbabel, Nehemiah); both the rise and the fall of kingship in Jerusalem is accompanied by prophetic activity. Rulers of Greek city states can often be found consulting oracles, and even kings from afar keep visiting major oracle sites, especially Delphi.

It becomes abundantly clear that prophecy had a political function throughout the ancient Eastern Mediterranean as the source of divine knowledge necessary for the appropriate maintenance of the society. Kings turn to prophets to receive divine advice, and prophets provide the kings with the Herrschaftswissen they needed, either in response to a king’s inquiry or on their own initiative. The communication, hence, is bidirectional. Prophecies may be solicited or unsolicited, the former being typical of the Greek sources and the latter of the Near Eastern ones; both options, however, exist both ways. The prophetic oracles may be supportive and favorable to the kings, as is usual in the Near Eastern sources, but they may also entail critical or otherwise negative messages to the king, as often happens in the Hebrew Bible but is not unheard of in the mouth of Mesopotamian and Greek prophets either.

The relationship of the prophets with kings and their courts varies according to the status of the prophets as members of the divinatory apparatus. In Mesopotamia, technical diviners belonged to the king’s immediate entourage—especially the haruspices and, in the case of Assyria, astrologers and exorcists. Prophets were rather to be found in the outer circle. They, too, could be summoned by the king and receive royal assignments, but whereas the learned diviners maintained personal correspondence with the king in both Mari and Assyria, prophecies were typically conveyed to the king by go-betweens, unless the king was himself witnessing the prophetic performance; how often this happened, we do not know. Prophets, like other diviners, depended on the royal recognition of their divinatory skills. In both kingdoms, prophecy features as an important medium through which the king was informed and reminded of his position, both in terms of divine favors and responsibilities. Indeed, in the ancient Near Eastern sources the prophets appear predominantly prophesying for the king, whereas the non-royal functions of prophecy remain largely invisible. This is interesting with regard to the fact that the prophets do not seem to have been directly employed by the palace but rather by temples. The primary reason for the royal emphasis of the preserved oracles may be that the texts derive from royal archives; but it may also be that the (fairly unusual) transmission of prophetic words by means of writing first and foremost served royal needs.

If private persons consulted prophets in the ancient Near East, it did not leave many traces in the documentation available to us; only scattered hints at private consultations can be found in Near Eastern or biblical texts. The Greek sources, by contrast, allow us to see the private dimension of prophetic divination. The typical inquirer of an oracle is not a king but a citizen of a city state consulting the oracle for private matters. Foreign kings, in fact, do not appear as consultants of Greek oracles in the epigraphic evidence, but only in literary texts.

The less dominant featuring of kings as consultants of Greek oracles probably goes back to different political structures. Divination in general was much less institutionalized in Greece than in Mesopotamia, and Greek diviners did not work for or under a central authority. As Jan Bremmer argues: “the weaker the kings, the stronger the seers”; tyrants attempted to monopolize access to the gods, but in democratic Athens, leading politicians were not in a position to command the diviners.⁴⁵

Inspired divination, in fact, was even more institutionalized in Greece than in the Near East since it was administrated by the temples where it exclusively took place. However, the principal Greek oracles were more independent of the rulers than the Near Eastern prophets and less dependent on the state ideology which characterizes the prophecies preserved from Mesopotamia, especially from Assyria. The major Greek oracle sites drew their authority from their independent tradition rather than from prevailing political structures. On the one hand, the oracles were in the service of the city states in their vicinity (Delphi, Miletos, Colophon), and on the other hand, they had an international character. The Delphic Pythia and her colleagues in Dodona, Didyma, and Claros delivered oracles not only to the citizens of neighboring city states but also to kings and delegations coming from different corners of the Mediterranean, while the Assyrian prophets would rather communicate with the Assyrian king only.

The Hebrew Bible gives a double-edged picture of the relationship between prophets and the kings of Judah and Israel. On the one hand, the image of biblical prophets is presented as relatively independent of kings and political leaders, but on the other hand, biblical prophets such as Isaiah seem to have a more immediate and personal access to the king than any of their Eastern Mediterranean colleagues, which would speak for a well-established position of the prophets in the royal court. Kingship and prophecy go hand in hand in the Hebrew Bible, but the relationship between kings and prophets is often presented as a troubled one, especially when the prophets are presented as opponents of the royal policy, perhaps even of kingship as an institution. What is unique about the Hebrew Bible in comparison with the Near Eastern and Greek sources is its editorial history. The narratives about prophets and kings are always embedded in a secondary literary setting, either in prophetic books or in the Deuteronomistic or Chronistic historical narrative, which makes the reconstruction of historical institutions and their relationships much more difficult than is the case with Greek or Near Eastern sources. The oftentimes harsh ideological antagonism towards kings and kingship in the Hebrew Bible is unparalleled and may reflect post-monarchic rereading and interpretation of the circumstances before the destruction of Jerusalem.

Prophecy is gendered agency everywhere in ancient Eastern Mediterranean sources. This is true for both the divine and human participants of the prophetic chain of communication. Deities speaking through prophets can be male and female alike, and both male and female persons appear as prophets—even persons beyond the conventional gender categories, such as the assinnu who sometimes acts as a prophet. The distribution of the prophetic agency between (or among) sexes is different depending on the source material and the socio-historical circumstances reflected by them.

In Greece, the gender distribution in the major oracle sites is the clearest: the inspired prophets at Delphi, Dodona, and Didyma were all women, while those at Claros were men. As far as the picture given by the sources is correct, there were more male than female prophets in the world of the documents from Mari; about two-thirds of the prophets appearing in them are men. The Assyrian texts, again, present a statistical mirror-image: two-thirds of the Assyrian prophets are women. This can be explained by the prominence of Ištar, the foremost divine speaker of Assyrian prophecies, whose temples played an important political role in the Neo-Assyrian era, employing a significant number of female functionaries, including prophets. In the Levantine/West Semitic sources, every known prophet is of male gender, and male prophets hold sway also in the Hebrew Bible, which mentions some fifty male prophets and only half a dozen prophetesses. Whether this is the historical fact of the gender distribution of prophets in Judah and Israel is difficult to know, but the presence of female prophets such as Huldah, whose prophecy has a huge political importance (2 Kgs 22:14–20; 2 Chr. 34:22–8); the anonymous female prophet who gives birth to Isaiah’s child (Isa. 8:3); and Noadiah who opposes Nehemiah with “the rest of the prophets” (Neh. 6:14) give reason to believe that female prophecy existed in Jerusalem.

As to the divine speakers of oracles, the most uniform case is the Hebrew Bible with only one deity, Yahweh, from whom any true oracle could ever come from. Other sources documenting prophecy in the Levant also present male gods as speakers of prophecies, although their small number makes it difficult to draw many consequences concerning the gendering of the prophetic agency, whether divine or human. Even in Greek sources, the picture is not very complicated, since the deity behind inspired prophecy is usually Apollo, whose oracles the prophets of Delphi, Didyma, and Claros delivered; at Dodona, however, the oracular deity was Zeus himself. There were, of course, oracles of many other deities in Greece, but these typically did not involve inspired prophecy. Mesopotamia with its many deities presents a more complex picture.⁴⁶ At Mari, the two gods who most often speak through prophets are Dagan, the state god, and Annunitum, an Ištar-like goddess of war. In addition, a number of male and female deities speak or appear as the patron deity of a prophet: Adad, Ikrub-El, Itur-Mer, Nergal and Šamaš (male), Belet-ekallim, Diritum, Hišamitum and Ninhursag (female). Ištar in one of her manifestations is by far the foremost deity of prophecy in other Mesopotamian sources. The two oracles from Ešnunna are spoken by Kititum, and in Assyrian prophecies, Ištar of Arbela is the prophetic deity par excellence, sometimes together with Mullissu, that is, Ištar of Nineveh. Only a few Assyrian prophecies are introduced as words of male deities such as Assur, Bel (Marduk), Nabû, and Nusku.

The correspondence between the gender of the prophets and that of the deities follows more or less strict rules: the Levantine/West Semitic sources including the Hebrew Bible seem to favor the male god/male prophet pattern, while in Greece, the male god/female prophet model prevails. In Mesopotamia there is no strict correspondence; at Mari, the prophets, of whom the majority are male, speak words of male deities more often than of female ones, while in Assyria, female prophets outnumber the male ones, and the deity speaking through a prophet is usually female.

The very idea of prophetic intermediation implies the “notion of penetration of a human by a divine agent, and casts the prophet into the role of the passive, penetrated, god-possessed female, even when the prophet is, as is usually the case, male.”⁴⁷ Perhaps this is why the prophetic agency could be claimed and enacted by men and women alike: in the divine–human gender matrix, humans play the passive role anyway,⁴⁸ hence even women or other non-male persons could act as mouthpieces of the divine. This notwithstanding, the agency of the prophets was not purely instrumental but enabled especially non-male individuals to make their own voice heard as well. In Greece it seems that the political agency at the oracle sites was shared between the prophets themselves and the administrators of the temples, the latter ones perhaps being more influential in this respect. The Mesopotamian and biblical sources indicate that prophets, both male and female, executed an independent agency, some of them having even some political influence. It is worth noting, however, that there are signs of suspicion of the male-dominated environment towards prophecies spoken by non-male persons. This may be one of the reasons why female prophets are so few in the Hebrew Bible; why at Mari, prophecies spoken by a woman or by an assinnu were more frequently verified by another method of divination than those transmitted by male prophets; and why the prophecies of Cassandra and the Delphic Pythia are sometimes downplayed by Greek writers.

One of the “curious incidents” that only attract attention by their absence is the virtual disappearance of documentation of prophetic divination in the Near East in the Persian period. Unlike some other methods of divination, prophecy did not rely on written tradition in the Near East, and this may explain the paucity of primary documents of prophetic divination. Prophetic oracles were not routinely written down, and the tradition of prophetic divination was not a matter of scribal education and transmission. Therefore, the written documentation that we are fortunate to have at our disposal may represent the exception rather than the rule.⁴⁹ On the other hand, scribalization of prophecy did emerge in Jerusalem in the course of the Second Temple period as a new practice of divination that overshadowed and turned against the traditional non-scholarly type of prophetic divination by which it was initially inspired.

There is a marked difference between the documents of prophecy from the eighth to seventh centuries bce and those coming from later periods. The Neo-Assyrian period provides the second-largest set of sources consisting of not only prophetic oracles proclaimed to kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, but also letters reporting on prophecies and administrative texts documenting their presence in certain Assyrian temples. The Neo-Assyrian texts belong roughly to the same historical period as the few West Semitic documents of prophecy: almost all of them derive from the first half of the seventh century bce, postdating the Zakkur inscription and the Deir Alla inscription, and predating the letters from Lachish. In addition, we may note that the period conventionally regarded as the golden age of Israelite prophecy coincides with the Assyrian evidence which postdates Isaiah but predates Jeremiah.

The last document of Assyrian prophecy before it vanishes from our sources altogether dates to the year following the downfall of Nineveh. In a document from the northern city of Tušḫan, a prophet is awarded for his divinatory services in 611 bce, when Nineveh was already destroyed, and the Babylonian army was moving forward.⁵⁰ The Babylonians do not seem to have documented prophecy the way the Assyrians did; at least the number of Neo-Babylonian documents of prophecy is minimal. No oracles have been preserved; what we have is only a couple of temple-related texts, one lexical list, and a few legal documents not concerning prophets, but their descendants: some persons bear the rather untypical patronym “son of prophet” (mār maḫḫê).⁵¹ The word-list coming from Nippur mentions the word “prophet” (maḫḫû) in the vicinity of exorcists, diviners, musicians, and men-women, and in so doing belongs firmly to the lexical tradition deriving from Old Babylonian times.⁵² That the Babylonian temples actually accommodated prophets can be seen from the Neo-Babylonian list of temple offerings, where certain parts of the sacrificial animals are distributed among the temple personnel: the high priest, the prophet, the kurgarrû (man-woman), and the butcher.⁵³ The Neo-Babylonian ritual text from Uruk presents a prophet (maḫḫû) participating a ritual of the Lady of Uruk together with a musician, going around the statue of the goddess and carrying a water basin; nothing is mentioned about his actual prophesying here.⁵⁴

The Neo-Babylonian documentation is enough to demonstrate that there were prophets in Neo-Babylonian temples; otherwise, their role in the society remains unknown. After the collapse of the Neo-Babylonian empire, the cuneiform documents of prophets and prophecy exhaust almost altogether. No single document from the Persian period mentions prophets; interestingly, however, a few texts from the Late Babylonian, that is, Hellenistic period are worth mentioning. A lexical text lists both maḫḫû and raggimu (this is the only non-Neo-Assyrian occurrence of the word raggimu),⁵⁵ and two versions of an astronomical diary refer to an incident that happened in Babylon and Borsippa in the year 133 bce. A certain person called Boatman presents himself as the messenger of the goddess Nanaya, goes into frenzy, wins huge popularity among people and arouses the anger of local religious authorities, eventually leading to a public riot.⁵⁶ While these texts doubtless report an actual prophetic performance, a ritual text from Hellenistic Uruk includes what sounds exactly like a prophetic oracle to the king, except that it is not spoken by a prophet but by the high priest.⁵⁷

Turning to the Hebrew Bible, it is interesting to compare the Babylonian evidence—or the lack thereof—with the biblical evidence, which barely recognizes any prophets after Haggai and Zechariah. The most notable prophetic figure set in the early Persian period is the female prophet Noadiah, whom Nehemiah presents in a most negative light as having “intimidated” him together with “the rest of the prophets” (yeter han-nĕbî’îm), as if Noadiah was leading a prophetic group that opposed Nehemiah’s reforms in Jerusalem (Neh. 6:14). Otherwise, prophecy seems to turn into a literary phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible. The book of Malachi is hardly even thought to be based on oral prophetic performances, and even though texts like Second Isaiah may have been performed orally, the question must be asked how exactly “prophetic” the performance was thought to have been, and in what sense. Second temple texts such as Deuteronomy 13 and 18; Zechariah 13; and even Hosea 9:7–9 tend to present actual prophesying in a dubious light, if not condemning the prophetic performances altogether.

What happened? Did the prophetic practice come to an end in the Near East, and if so, why? Did the rabbis get it right anyway with their theory of the cessation of prophecy in Israel after the last “writing” prophets?⁵⁸ The sources presented above, however few and far between, speak against the total absence of oral prophetic performances in the Near East in Persian and Hellenistic periods.

I would like to return to the sources of prophecy as secondary evidence, as written reception of prophecy. Since oral performances do not leave traces in written records unless there is an interest among the audience to create such records, the amount of evidence correlates with the literate circles’ appreciation of such performances. This interest seems to have decreased dramatically after the Neo-Assyrian period in Mesopotamia as well as in Judah/Yehud. The prophets did not disappear, but their socio-religious status was changed. Once a significant part of the divinatory apparatus of the king, the prophetic divination seems to have lost its viability as a relevant source of divine knowledge. Interestingly in Greece, the Delphic oracle only started flourishing at the time prophetic records disappear from the Near East. I am not suggesting any kind of causal connection between these phenomena, but I would like to pay attention to the different socio-political position of prophets in Greece and in the Near East. It seems evident that in the Near East, the change of the status of prophetic divination has to do with changes in political structures that did not take place in Greece.

To understand the change of prophecy requires the perception of prophecy as one method of divination: the change of prophecy is due to changes in divinatory agency and the use and appreciation of different divinatory methods. Prophets were not the only diviners whose status was reduced in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian period. While astrology and exorcism were well alive in the Babylonian culture, the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian empire seems to have left most haruspices unemployed. Interpretation of omens did not cease, but the set of accredited divinatory specialists changed. Seth Sanders has recently pointed out that the collapse of native kingship, whether in Babylon or in Jerusalem, had effects on the scribal culture: the art of magic (āšipūtu) replaced the art of extispicy (bārūtu), and this development can be traced down all the way to early Judaism, that is, to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Enoch. Scribes assumed a new kind of intellectual leadership not dependent on the institution of kingship and less dependent of the royal court.⁵⁹

Sanders does not discuss prophecy here, but I would contend that the loss of native kingship, together with the divinatory reorientation, had effects on prophetic divination, too. One of the foremost societal roles of prophecy was to provide the king with the Herrschaftswissen he needed to know his rights and responsibilities as a ruler. As I have argued in this book, prophecy was not a royal institution par excellence, because the primary context of prophets and prophecy is usually to be found in the temple context; however, kings appear as the foremost addressees of prophetic speech, whether we read texts from Mari, Assyria, or the Hebrew Bible. The strong emphasis on kings is partly due to the fact that the best Near Eastern source materials come from royal archives, but this fact does not explain everything. Even in the Hebrew Bible, the golden age of prophecy is the monarchical period, and only few (though important) prophets are mentioned outside this time frame. Therefore, one can expect that the disappearance of native monarchy caused drastic changes in prophetic agency.

Prophecy did not die out altogether but it lost much, if not most of its socio-religious significance. When there was no longer a king using prophetic or other divinatory services, the prophets were deprived of an important part of the function of their activity. The political function of prophecy was lost, while its cultic functions were still ongoing, as we can see from the ritual text from Hellenistic Uruk as well as from 1 Chronicles 25, where the ones who prophesy (han-nibbĕ’îm) are temple musicians. Whatever role the prophets played in temples, whether in Mesopotamia or in Jerusalem, is difficult to discern on the basis of the very few sources at our disposal.

What is abundantly clear from the sources is that the scribes took over the role of leading diviners. The scribes perceived themselves as belonging to a prophetic succession beginning with Moses.⁶⁰ In Deuteronomy in particular, “Moses becomes the mediator, who is alone granted access to the divine presence, and who conveys the word of God to Israel.”⁶¹ The “scribal turn” can be seen in the increasing focus on the written text as a sign and a carrier of revelation, together with the rise of appreciation of ancient sages with whom the prophets of old (including Moses!) were likened. That the scribes’ takeover—perhaps somewhat paradoxically—happened by way of the scribal production of prophetic texts has been noted long ago by scholars who have observed the marginalization of the traditional type of oral prophecy in favor of the scholarly type of divination and the scribalization of prophecy, actually a scribal prolongation of the prophetic process of communication. When prophecy became literature, literature became prophecy; the oral proclamation was no longer appreciated by the scribal circles who claimed the agency of transmission of divine knowledge for themselves. Prophetic literature started flourishing, but the prophets were best appreciated as dead.

Before its biblical scribalization, ancient Near Eastern prophecy was not a scribal enterprise at all. Even in the Hebrew Bible prophets do not write, with the notable exception of the books of Chronicles. It is, therefore, quite understandable that when the continuation of tradition—whether in Mesopotamia or in Judea—was more than ever before in the hands of the scribes, they adopted ancient scribes as their role models, such as Adapa, and also Moses who appears as a semi-divinized figure with his “radiance,” even if only reflecting the light of God. Only the scribes were in the position of transforming the tradition at the same time as they kept it up, only they could produce ominous knowledge by interpreting the signs given to them, now in written form. The prophetic phenomenon could hardly compete with this new culture of writing and rewriting revelations; it was destined to marginalization.⁶²

This does not mean that prophecy was not appreciated as an idea and a concept—quite the contrary. Transmission of divine knowledge was as important as ever, and the prophets of old became highly respected figures. Prophetic texts were interpreted over and over again, becoming signs for the scholars to interpret, as is evidently the case with the Qumran Pesharim.⁶³ However, while prophetic words were transmitted and recontextualized by textual means, the textual sources are remarkably silent about the transmission of the tradition of oral prophetic performance. The question is rather what counted as divine knowledge and who were the flesh-and-blood persons accredited to receive and interpret it, and this—like most important questions—is an issue of power and authority.

The ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and biblical texts make available a manifold, if fragmentary, documentation of prophetic intermediation. The image of the prophetic phenomenon varies according to the function and purpose of each source, probably reflecting different historical circumstances. Perhaps the most useful aspect of differences for the comparison can be seen in the questions arising from their manipulation. The frequency of consultations of individual persons in Greek sources makes one ask why such consultations are so much rarer in Near Eastern sources. The critical stance on kingship in biblical texts raises the question of its sparseness in Mesopotamian sources. The meager number of female prophets in biblical and West Semitic texts compared with the strong contribution of women in Greek and Mesopotamian prophecy requires explanation, and so on. One source usually cannot be used for a historical explanation of the other, but the sources can illuminate each other by highlighting the presence or absence of features that would be difficult to see without the comparative perspective.

Of course, there is also the question of influence and cultural transmission I promised not to delve into in this book. Let me just by way of conclusion present some preliminary thoughts on this important issue. The nature of the source material discussed in this book, as I believe, prevents any definitive conclusions regarding interdependencies between Near Eastern, Greek, and biblical texts; the evidence, in the words of Erik van Dongen, “is too fragmentary on both the Greek and the Near Eastern side and neither now nor in the foreseeable future will the available source material allow us to be as detailed as we would like to be.”⁶⁴ At best we can pay attention to features that may point towards a common stream of tradition, which can indeed be found behind biblical and Near Eastern texts, sometimes even including Greek sources.⁶⁵

The Mesopotamian tradition of prophetic divination persisted from Old Babylonian through Neo-Assyrian times without undergoing dramatic changes that, however, were to come after the collapse of the Assyrian rule. What can be known about prophetic divination in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah on the basis of the Hebrew Bible can be mirrored not only against the Assyrian evidence but also against the few contemporary documents from neighboring countries, that is, the inscriptions from Hamat, Deir Alla, and Amman (**136–138). Direct influence of Assyrian prophetic divination on either Aramaic or Israelite/Judahite prophecy is impossible to demonstrate, but there are enough structural and literary elements to indicate a common stream of tradition. An interesting case is Second Isaiah (Isa. 40–55), which has more affinities with Neo-Assyrian prophecy than any other part of the Hebrew Bible, even though it cannot possibly be directly dependent on Assyrian texts. The explanation can only be looked for in a common tradition of royal prophecy with which the scribes responsible for Second Isaiah were familiar.⁶⁶

While there is, thus, every reason to assume a historical continuity between prophetic phenomena in different parts of the ancient Near East, the question arises whether even Greek prophecy belongs to the same stream of tradition. Greek sources, to be sure, do not trace the traditions of the primary Greek oracle site to the East; if any “foreign” influences are admitted to have taken place, they are rather derived from Egypt, as in the case of the oracle at Dodona. This, of course, tells primarily about the identity construction of the authors of Greek literature rather than historical circumstances. Given the long-term political tensions between the Greek city states and the East, Persia in particular, it is natural that the origins of important religious institutions are not derived from that direction.⁶⁷ It is indeed probable that the foremost oracle sites grew from different local traditions such as the Molossian ones at Dodona and the early oracle of Gaia at Delphi, without any influence from the Near East. However, the sanctuaries did not live in isolation, and especially the “big three” sanctuaries of Apollo were seen as designed after the Delphic model—at least in retrospect.

When it comes to the stream of tradition of divination flowing from the east, it is fairly certain that the distribution of the practice of extispicy around the Mediterranean has its origin in Mesopotamia.⁶⁸ Prophecy is a much more problematic case, because the dissemination of the tradition of prophetic divination is largely invisible. Moreover, the Near Eastern documentation of prophecy starts disappearing at the same time as the star of Delphi begins rising. The virtual lack of contemporary source materials makes the identification of the routes and carriers of possible transmission of the prophetic tradition very difficult; the sources produced by potential intermediaries in Anatolia or Phoenicia do not help us any further. This is not to say that such transmission never took place—it just cannot be demonstrated with extant sources. Prophetic tradition was not a matter of transcultural textual transmission, hence the stream of tradition may be longer and deeper than the sources at our disposal are able to reveal, and the cultural connection between Greek and Near Eastern divinatory traditions may be found flowing in its deep undercurrents.

There is no need to look for an “authentic” source of prophecy asking “who was first?” or “first from where?” The local and the general should not be pitted against each other. Our sources come from an area geographically restricted enough to increase the probability of historical connection and cultural interaction, which demonstrably took place in the Eastern Mediterranean sphere. Even though it is impossible to reconstruct any direct dependencies between the source materials, there is no reason to consider Greek, Mesopotamian, and biblical prophecy as three distinct and disconnected, and as such incomparable socio-religious phenomena. Instead, the study can focus on family resemblances, whereby the “family” metaphor should not be understood in a generic rather than genetic sense.

Regardless of the existence and direction of textual and cultural influence, enough resemblances can be found between Greek, Near Eastern, and biblical texts to warrant the use of the scholarly category of ancient Eastern Mediterranean prophetic phenomenon. The recognition of the common category is first and foremost a tool for interpretation, and it does not imply any more historical connectivity than can be distracted from the sources. The search for the common category has revealed large-scale resemblances including the social function of prophecy as a distinct type of divination; the socio-religious context of the prophets in temples and sanctuaries; the political significance of prophetic divination for the institution of kingship; the altered state of consciousness as the typical precondition of prophesying; and the gender matrix allowing the prophetic agency of both male and non-male persons. All these aspects appear both in terms of similarity and difference, demonstrating how the structures and ideologies of prophetic divination have been adapted to different socio-religious and political circumstances—whether the prophets are appreciated by each society as preachers, healers, martyrs, shamans, or tricksters.