The Book of Job and the Babylonian Song of the Suffering Righteous One1 (part 1)

By Archpriest Alexander Petrovsky

The study of Assyrian Babylonian writing, which began with the decipherment of cuneiform, has led to the discovery of a number of documents whose content shares similarities with Old Testament literature. As such, they provide, along with monuments from Egypt, ancient Canaan, and other countries of the Near East, extensive material for the comparative study of nearly all aspects of biblical Israel. Its history, religion, forms of life, laws, and even works of subjective religious and moral creativity are currently being compared with extra-biblical data. Thus, Babylonian hymns of repentance are placed in parallel with biblical psalms, and the Book of Job is compared with the Babylonian Song of the Suffering Righteous One. And while some extra-biblical parallels prove unsuccessful, the same cannot be said of the latter monument. The similarities observed between it and the Book of Job are real, not imaginary, and, correctly understood by those who evoked them, provide an indisputable answer to some of the questions raised by this book. Their resolution is transferred from the realm of conjecture, in which it has hitherto remained, to the realm of precise, positive data. In view of this significance, the Babylonian Song of the Suffering Righteous Man deserves full attention.

Preserved to this day in two manuscripts—one Assyrian and one Babylonian—the song became known in 1875. In that year, Rawlinson published a small fragment of its Assyrian text, found in the library of Assurbanipal (668–626). In 1888, Ewetts published two new fragments of the song, which, together with Rawlinson’s fragment, constitute its second part. In 1894, Sheil discovered a Babylonian text of the song in the archives of the temple of Samas in Sippar. It is somewhat more extensive than the Assyrian, providing five new lines for its second part, but, like the latter, it also does not reproduce the entire composition of our text. A reconstruction of the latter, although not in its entirety, was made possible by a commentary on the song by Assurbanipal found in the same library. 5 and a new fragment published by Thompson in 1910. 6 The text of the first and fourth parts of the song is established on the basis of the commentary, and the third part is established on the basis of Thompson’s fragment. Significant omissions in both texts, however, make it impossible to reconstruct the song’s content in its entirety. According to Jastrow’s calculations, based on a study of its individual redactions, it contained at least 480 lines; currently, no more than 2,007 are known.

The content of the song is as follows. Beginning with a glorification of the god Bel, it transitions into a depiction of the calamities that befell the sufferer. As far as can be judged from the surviving text of the first part, these are the loss of sight, hearing, and the loss of his former position as king, which altered the attitude of his friends toward him. “I was,” says the sufferer, “a king and became a slave. My friends began to insult me ​​as a fool, and they cursed me in the midst of the assembly.” Misfortunes, blow after blow, strike the sufferer: his lot is “sighs by day, tears by night, wailing for months, sorrow for a year.” He has reached the end of his life and, looking around, sees nothing but disaster. In this state, the sufferer is deprived of hope for change. His righteousness is not recognized by anyone, and his prayers to the god and goddess for help remain in vain: the god hid his face from him, the goddess did not raise hers. The seer of the future could not reveal the future to him, the questioner of the dead gave no answer, and the priest-meditator did not loosen his bonds through sorcery. “It is terrible,” the sufferer remarks, “I have never seen anything like it on earth.” No one can explain to him the cause of the misfortunes that have befallen him; and he himself sees no basis for them in his previous life. “I look back—disaster follows me, as if I had not brought a sacrificial libation to my god and had not thought of the goddess at the sacrificial meal, had not bowed my face and had not proven my humility, had been careless of the gods, had not heeded their sayings and had frivolously sworn by the name of my venerable god.” The sufferer has suffered the fate of a sinner, and yet his previous attitude toward God was one of complete submission. “I thought,” he remarks, “only of prayer and supplication; prayer was my rule, sacrifice my law; the day of honoring the god—a day of joy for my heart; I taught my country to revere the name of the god, I instructed my people to glorify the name of the goddess. I believed that all this was pleasing to God; but what seemed good to me proved to be an abomination to Him, and what was despicable in itself deserved His favor.”

Something inexplicable from a human point of view happened to the sufferer. “Who can,” he says, “decipher the will of the celestial gods? Who is capable of understanding the mysterious counsel of God? How can mortals comprehend the ways of God? The living in the evening are the dead in the morning; they quickly descend into darkness, instantly stricken.” His neck and the back of his head are shattered; like a willow, he is bent to the ground, torn out like a tree by the roots, and thrown on his back. Previously healthy, He is now unable to take food; it has become like stinking grass; he is tormented by hunger, and pallor covers his face. Stricken by a long illness, he is tied to his bed and cannot move; his own home has become a prison; his body has become a burden: his hands are like chains; his shackled legs stretch out helplessly.

The fall was painful and the wound grievous: the persecutor pierced him with an arrow, inflicting a terrible wound. “He pursues him all day and gives him no breath at night.” The sufferer’s knees are maimed and broken, his limbs disintegrate; like an ox, he spends his nights on a bed, like a ram, covered in filth. Struck by a grave illness and abandoned by all, the sufferer surrenders himself to thoughts of his inevitable death. “The coffin,” he says, “is open; my burial is already being prepared. Before I die, they sing a funeral hymn over me; the land proclaims: ‘Alas!’ And the triumphant enemy spreads the good news to others.” “His hand has become heavy upon me, and I can no longer bear it”—with these words the description of his suffering in the second part of the song concludes.

The sufferer’s patience is exhausted; but at this moment he is healed of his illness by the god Marduk. The latter casts a dream upon Tabi-utul-Bel, who lives in Nippur, during which the spirit of the deceased Ur-Bau appears to him and, in the name of Marduk, orders him to convey news of the healing to the suffering Sub-si-mersi-Nergal. At dawn the news was delivered, and it was followed by the cessation of the illness, which became known to all the people. My sins, says Sub-si-mersi-Nergal, he carried away with the wind; like a plant, he tore out the root of the illness, put an end to the unhealthy, painful sleep that disturbed my peace; he opened my eyes, which he himself had covered with the darkness of night, and enlightened their sight; opened my previously closed ears, restoring their hearing; healed the cavities of my nose, so that I regained the ability to breathe; stopped the trembling of my lips, cleansed my mouth and lips, strengthened my teeth and gave to my swollen tongue, which I had previously been unable to move, the ability to speak clearly. He brought food and drink to the rich man dying of starvation. Like a cedar, he straightened my neck, bowed to the ground, and gave me the appearance of a man full of strength. He quenched his anger at me, ceased his rage. On the banks of the sacred river, where judgment is held over men, slavery was erased, the chains of slavery broken.

As can be seen from the above essay, the content of the Babylonian Song coincides with the Book of Job. The main character of both works is a rich, righteous man, stricken by illness, abandoned by both men and God, but later healed by Him. The similarity is even clearer in the details of the content, which coincide almost to the point of complete identity. Thus, if Job, according to the book of his name, is a contemporary of the patriarchs, then the life of the sufferer in the Babylonian Song falls in the same period. His contemporary, Tabi-utul-Bel, is included in the list of Babylonian kings among the rulers of Nippur after the flood.81 Besides him, the song also mentions the deceased Ur-Bau, by which name one of the patesi of Shirpurla, or Lagash, is known. The names of Nippur and Shirpurla, two religious and political centers of southern Babylonia from the so-called Sumerian era, would justify dating the event described in the Babylonian song to this time.92 However, such a conclusion is weakened by the fact that these cities also existed in a later period. For example, Nippur is mentioned in an inscription by Abraham’s contemporary, the Elamite king Eriaku,103 as well as in a document from the Gamurabi dynasty. In the last monument, Nippur is described as having its own shepherd,111 a name which, judging by its use in an inscription of the king of the First Dynasty of Ur, Hamilnibib, means the same thing as “ruler.”122 While these data do not necessarily require the event described in the Babylonian Song to be dated to the Sumerian period, other facts argue against such an attribution and force us to date it to the era of the First Babylonian Dynasty. These include the martyr’s belief in Marduk as the supreme god and the mention of the temple of Esagila dedicated to him. Both features place him contemporary with the First Babylonian Dynasty, since only now does Marduk become the supreme deity, taking the place of Enlil-Bel,133 and Zamum III of the Gammurabi dynasty builds him the temple of Esagila.144 A contemporary of the Sumerian period could not have spoken of Esagila, which did not exist in his time, and in his prayers he would have addressed not Marduk, but Bel-Enlil. True, Bel’s name appears in the first line of the first part of the song. And this circumstance apparently confirms Jastrow’s opinion that the contemporary of ancient Nippur, the sufferer, believed in Bel; the authors of the song—the Babylonian priests—replaced him with Marduk. 155 In fact, the joint mention of Marduk and Bel-Enlil is one of the distinctive features of literary works from the time of the Gammurabi dynasty. It appears, for example, in the introduction and conclusion to his code of laws,166 and therefore the Babylonian song, which reproduces this feature, is a document of this era. The same conclusion is supported by the presence in it of some expressions, for example, ib-bir-ru (4th part, p. 12), which are technical terms in the laws of Gammurabi177, as well as ancient Babylonian forms, garsun, instead of garsu, found in the texts of the first dynasty18. The event described in the Babylonian song falls on the time of the dynasty of Gammurabi19, or what is the same – on the biblical patriarchal period, to which the story of Job unfolds.

The sixth line of the first part of the song calls the sufferer a prince. Job was not legally a prince, but he was in fact the head of his fellow tribesmen: “He appointed their paths, sat at their head, and lived like a king among warriors” (29:25). The piety of Job and the sufferer in the song is also outlined in similar terms.

According to the Hebrew “tam”—whole, undamaged—Job’s righteousness was the devotion of his entire being to God, as opposed to halfheartedness and hypocrisy. Subsi-mersi-Nergal was also sincerely devoted to his god, driven by pure love: the day of his god’s honor was the day of his heart’s joy; under the protection of the good genius, he and his entire family served their god with a feeling of love (Part 2, pp. 83–84). God was the highest good for Job, as evidenced by his words: “Have I put my confidence in gold? Or have I said to my treasure, ‘You are my hope?’” (31:24). The same thought, and in almost the same form, is expressed by the sufferer in the Babylonian song, who remarks that the days of worshiping the goddess constituted his wealth and best possession (Part 2, pp. 26). Like Job, he kept the commandments of his god and yet, like him, was afflicted with a grave illness. Job’s illness, according to the book bearing his name, was leprosy, elephantiasis, as Origen and John Chrysostom already called it. Subsi-mersi-Nergal also suffered from a skin disease, as is clearly indicated by the words: from yellowish, the disease became white (Part 2, p. 49). Its manifestations, such as putrefaction, as evidenced by the expression gar-su20, disintegration of the limbs and loss of the ability to speak: “to my swollen tongue, which I could not move, Marduk gave the ability to speak clearly” (Part 3, 60 – p. 1), give every right to consider it leprosy, for the latter was accompanied by the aforementioned phenomena. The same is indicated by the designation of Subsi-mersi-Nergal’s disease by the term “gar-bu”: in Arabic and Syriac it means leprosy21. But physical pain constituted only a part of the suffering endured by Job and Subsi-mersi-Nergal. Both were tormented by the knowledge that God had treated them, a righteous man, as if they were villains. This led to complaints about the undeservedness of their misfortunes, accusing God of injustice and of trampling on truth. Job expresses this in the words: “If I am innocent, then he will find me guilty” (9:20); Subsi-mersi-Nergal agrees with him: “I believed that all this, that is, my previous piety, was pleasing to God, but what seemed to me good for God turned out to be an abomination” (Part 2, pp. 33-4). The idea of ​​God’s inscrutable wisdom, which arose in the minds of both sufferers, did not help them maintain their faith in divine justice. For Job, divine wisdom not only fails to guarantee the deservedness of the calamities that befell him, but rather suggests the opposite, since, in his view, it manifests itself only in elemental world catastrophes (12:13–25). Likewise, divine wisdom fails to explain the mysterious fate of Subsi-mersi-Nergal and people like him, who, in his words, “one moment are joyful and playing, the next moment they weep like mourners” (Part 2, 41–2 p.). Identical in its beginning and continuation, the story of Job and the sufferer of the Babylonian Song also ends with the same ending: both are healed by God.

Identical in their main content and its details, the book of Job and the Babylonian Song are also similar as literary works. In both, the sufferings of the righteous are the material and at the same time the occasion for posing and resolving the problem of evil; In both, the same method of characterizing the piety of the righteous is observed, which boils down to indicating its positive and negative manifestations; in both, there are similar transitions from complaints about suffering to the question of its cause and the same method of highlighting the severity of misfortunes by contrasting them with previous, former happiness. In this regard, the words of Job: “Oh that I were as in former months, as in the days when God preserved me, and I walked in His light in the midst of darkness, when the Almighty was with me, and my children around me” (29:2-5), find their echo in the following phrase of the Babylonian sufferer: “And I remembered the time when all my family, being under the protection of the good genius, served their god in a feeling of love” (Part 2, pp. 83-4).

Notes:

1. Speech at the annual meeting of the Imperial Petrograd Theological Academy, February 17, 1916.

2. Rawlinson. Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. Vol. IV. Pl. 67

3. Ewetts. Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archacology. X. p. 478.

Both excerpts were published by Rawlinson in Vol. IV of “Cuneiform Inscriptions.” Pl. 60. Ed. 2, 1891.

4. Scheil. A Season of Fouls at Sippar. Pg. 105. Caire. 1900.

5. Rawlinson. Op. cit. Vol. V. pl. 47. 1884.

6. Thompson. Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archacology. Vol. XXXII. I. pp. 18–24. 1910.

7. Journal of Biblical Literature. XXV. p. 145. Almost simultaneously with the publication of the texts of the Babylonian song, its translations began. The oldest of these, translations of just half of the song, belonged to Halèvy – “Documents religieux de I`Assyrie et de la Babilonie”. Pg. 125. Paris 1882; Sayc`y – “Hibbert. Lectures on the Religion of Babylonia and Assyria. 1887”; Zimmern`y-Schrader – “Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament”. P. 385. A translation of the song based on fragments by Rawlinson, Scheil, and the Commentary, i.e., in three parts, was given by Jastrow – “Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens”. Bd. II, Lieferung 9. S. 124–132. 1906. Thompson’s fragment was used by Martin – “Le just souffrant Babylonien”. Journal Asiatique. Juillet. Août. 1910. Pg. 86–106, and by Landersdorfer – “Eine Babylonische Quelle für das Buch Job?” S. 21–8. 1911. The song was translated by them in all four parts. In Russian, in the translation of Professor B. A. Turaev, there is only the second part of the song – “History of the Ancient East”. Part I. Page 150. Petrograd. 1913. For more detailed information on the translations of the song, see Landersdorfer. Ibid. S. 10–14.

8. Rawinson. Op. cit. T. V. pl. 44. kol. II. 17. Cp. Hommel. Grundriss der Geographie und Geschichte des alten Orients. S. 251. Anm. 3; S. 351.

9. Landersdorfer expresses a similar view. According to him, the original of our song was composed in Eridu and from there, with the rise of Babylon, was transferred to the archives of the temple of Marduk. Eine Babylonische Quelle fürdas Buch Job? S. 78–9.

10. Hommel. The Altissue of Ancient History in Inschriftlichen Beleuchtung. S. 167–8. Munich. 1897.

11. B. A. Turaev. History of the Ancient East. Part I. Pp. 118–119.

12. Schrader. Key words and literature. Sammlung von Assyrischen und Babylonischen Texten. Band III. H. I. S. 81. Cf. and Hommel. Op. cit. ibid.

13. Jastrow. The Religion of Babylonians and Assyrians. B. I. Kap. VIII. S. 110–112. Cf. B. A. Turaev. Op. cit. Part I. Pp. 127.

14. B. A. Turaev. Op. cit. Part I. Page 103.

15. Jastrow. Op. cit. B. II. Chapter XVIII. Page 132.

16. Gressman. Altorientalische Texte und Bilder zum alten Testament. B. I. Page 141. 168. 1909.

17. Landersdorfer. Op. cit. Page 53. Martin. Op. cit. Page 141.

18. Martin. Op. cit. 139–140; 84.

19. Martin considers the song a monument of this era. Op. cit. Page 85.

20. Martin. Op. cit. Page 140.

21. Martin. Op. cit. Page 138.

Source in Russian: Petrovsky A.V. The Book of Job and the Babylonian Song of the Suffering Righteous // Christian reading. 1916. No. 4. P. 377-393.