Péntek Dániel Gábor. Próféták Mezopotámiában

The aim of this paper is to introduce sources related to prophetic activity in Mesopotamia. Prophecy was known outside Israel in the ancient Mediterranean, too, but it did not gain similar significance in other civilizations in the ancient Near East. The phenomenon of prophecy did not appear at all in Egypt, or at
most only very rarely. The prophetic sources written in Akkadian from Mesopotamia and northern Syria date primarily from the reigns of four rulers from two periods that were distant from each other in space and time. The earlier of these two periods was the reign of Yasmah-Addu (c. 1782–1776 BC) and Zimri-Lim (c. 1775–1761 BC) in the city-state of Mari, which immediately followed the destruction of the city by the Babylonian king Hammurapi. The other group of sources dates from the reign of two kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Assurah-iddina (681–669 BC) and Assur-ban-apli (668–627 BC). Given the long-time span, we could conclude that prophetism may have been more widespread, but we have no evidence which support this. These two periods are relatively short, and the sources also indicate that other forms of divination played a much more significant role in Mesopotamian society than prophetism. In the Mari texts, there are relatively few references to prophecy compared to the size of the corpus, but based on the relative geographical proximity and parallel religious phenomena, we can legitimately compare them to the image of prophecy in the Old Testament. The significance of the Neo-Assyrian sources for Old Testament studies lies in the fact that they were written at about the same time in the powerful empire of the period, of which Judah was a vassal, when several important Judaean prophets were active. The latter corpus can also be compared to the corpus of Old Testament prophetic texts in terms of the editorial techniques used, since a large part
of the texts of both source groups are found in collections of prophetic oracles. Beyond this, the Mesopotamian sources can also serve as an important contribution to the understanding of the societal role of the Israelite and Judean prophets.

Keywords: Ancient Near Eastern prophecy, Mari, Neo-Assyrian Empire, prophetesses, Mesopotamia