THE GOD OF ISRAEL AND THE BABYLONIAN GODS

Isaiah 40-55 (AB 19A; New York 2000) 105-110.

The author of the core of Isa 40-55 defies historical plausibility by concentrating on the theme
of the God of Israel as victor, creator, and king. This argument inevitably unfolded against the
background of overwhelming political [106] power represented by the Babylonian Empire. The
ideology sustaining this power was expressed through the cult of the imperial deity Marduk, and its
principal literary expression was the creation myth Enuma elish, recited in the course of the
New Year akitu festival. This high point of the liturgical year was held in the
god's esagila temple complex in Babylon, including the Etemenanki ziggurat,
and in the akitu house outside the city limits.
During the Neo-Babylonian period, the festival took place during the first
twelve days of the month of Nisannu (Nisan) in the spring. In the course of the
first three days prayers were offered to Marduk by the sheshgallu priest, and
the god s triumphs were celebrated in hymns of praise. The creation myth was
recited on the fourth day, perhaps accompanied by a kind of ritual drama. On
the fifth day a purification ceremony was performed, a canopy was erected in
anticipation of the arrival of the god Nabu, Marduks son, and the reigning king
was ritually humiliated, stripped of his royal regalia, and received back the
emblems of kingship from Marduk for the coming year. Nabu, son of Marduk,
arrived from Borsippa, his city, on the following day, and subsequently the
statues of the two deities were led in procession along the main thorough-fare
of the city, passing through the Ishtar gate on their way to the extramural akitu
house (bit akiti).
The events of the last days of the festival are not well known, but it is
probable that a banquet took place in the akitu house followed by a ritualized
sacred marriage (hieros gamos) of the god and his consort, the fixing of
destinies for the following year, all culminating in the triumphant reentry of the
gods into Babylon, Marduk s city.
The supremacy of Marduk as imperial patron and embodiment of supreme
political power comes to expression in the seven columns of the poem Enuma
Elish, which may be briefly summarized as follows (for a more complete
summary, see Alexander Heidel 1963, 3-10). In the beginning there was
nothing but the divine pair Apsu and Tiamat. From these primordial deities
several generations of gods were begotten, but the repose of Apsu was
disturbed by the secondary gods, whom he therefore decided to destroy, a
proposal rejected by his consort, Tiamat. The wise god Ea then discovers the
plan and takes preemptive action by killing Apsu with the help of magic. The
birth of Marduk follows, and his many attributes are described. Meanwhile,
Tiamat prepares for battle to avenge the death of her consort and appoints
Kingu as head of the divine assembly, leader of her army, and keeper of the
tablets of destiny. Since the gods are afraid to take on Tiamat, Marduk, also
known as Bel, agrees to do so with the condition that he is appointed supreme
god in the divine assembly. The gods accept with the acclamation "Marduk is
king!" (Enuma Elish IV 28) and equip him with scepter, royal robe, throne, and
magical weapons.
In the contest that follows, Tiamat is defeated and killed, and out of her
body are created the sky, the stars, constellations, sun and moon, the earth
and the circumfluent waters. The human being, a lowly creature (lullu) is

created by the god Ea out of the blood of the slaughtered Kingu, mixed with
slime. To humanity is assigned the task of relieving the secondary gods of the
duty of [107] serving the high gods. In gratitude, the gods erect the esagila
sanctuary for Marduk, Enlil, and Ea. A banquet follows, and the destinies are
fixed. The poem ends with the recital of a litany of the fifty names of Marduk
and the praise of his incomparable greatness: "none among the gods can equal
him" (Enuma Elish VII 14).
It seems that the central message of Isa 40-55 can be construed as a kind
of mirror-image of the ideology expressed in the akitu liturgy and the Enuma
Elish myth. The fact that the only foreign deities named in these chapters are
Bel and Nebo that is, Marduk and his son Nabu (46:1-2), the divine
protagonists in the akitu festival supports this reading of the text. The Isaian
passage in question can be construed as a satirical rendering of the most
visible act of the akitu ceremony and therefore the one most likely to be
familiar to non-Babylonians namely, the procession of the statues of the two
gods drawn on ceremonial chariots through the city. The idea might then be
that, rather than return in triumph into Babylon from the akitu house, they
would continue on into exile after the fall of the city.
In accord with the Babylonian imperial myth, Isa 51:9-10 revives the old
mythic topos of the deity's conflict with the monster of chaos, which at once
brings into play the association between conflict and creation:
Was it not you that hacked Rahab in pieces,
that ran the Dragon through?
Was it not you that dried up the Sea,
the waters of the Great Deep?
In Enuma Elish Tiamat, defeated and killed by Marduk (IV 71-104),
represents the chaotic salt waters of the ocean. The omens and incantations
involved in the struggle (IV 91) are naturally rejected by the biblical author (Isa
44:25).
The presentation of Yahveh as cosmic creator is one of the most salient
features of chs. 40-48 (40:12, 26, 28; 42:5; 43:1, 15; 44:24; 45:7-8, 12, 18;
48:12- 13), though present only tangentially in 49-55 (51:13,16). Titles
reflecting the same attribute also appear: "the eternal God" (40:28), "the God
of all the earth" (54:5), and "the Sovereign Lord" (51:22). In the first place, the
author rejects the theogony which, in Enuma Elish (I 9-20) and often in other
creation recitals, is the first stage in the creative process:
Before me no god was formed,
and there will be none after me. (43:10b)
This may also be the point of the repeated insistence that Yahveh is the first
and the last (41:4; 44:6; 48:12). That is, he was not generated within a family
of deities.
Among other indications, the absence of any need for a counselor (yoes =
Akkadian tamlaku) is strongly reminiscent of the role of Ea, "the all-wise one" (I
60), in the creation of humanity (VI 11-16 cf. Isa 40:13-14; 41:28; see [108]
Norman Whybray (1971, 73-74). For both Babylonians and Israelites the
creation of the heavenly bodies and the control of their movements was a
matter of quite extraordinary religious significance on account of the religious
calendar. Yahveh's control of the rising and setting of constellations and stars

could well be directed polemically against the similar claims made on behalf of
Marduk as creator god (IV 141-V 22):
Lift up your eyes to the sky,
consider who has created these;
he leads out their host one by one, summoning each by name. (40:26)
My hands stretched out the sky and marshaled all its host. (45:12)
In Enuma Elish the acclamation of Marduk's universal and supreme kingship
("Marduk is king!" Marduk-ma sarru IV 28) is closely associated with his
creative role but occurs before the conflict with Tiamat and therefore before the
creation of the world and humanity. While the acclamation YHVH malak in the
so-called kingship psalms (93:1; 96:10; 97:1; 99:1) carries associations of
cosmogonic conflict and of other mythical representations, the Isaian author
places his similar exclamation squarely in a historical and political context, that
of his aspirations for the future of Jerusalem:
How welcome on the mountains are the footsteps of the herald announcing
well-being,
bringing good tidings, announcing victory, declaring to Zion: "Your God
reigns as king!" (52:7)
Closely connected with the idea of universal kingship is that of the
incomparability of the deity. The claim pronounced by Babylon in the guise of a
queen, "I am, and there is none other" (47:8, 10), reproduces the praise of
Marduk in Enuma Elish as being without equal among the gods (VII 14, 88). If
Second Isaiah is generally given credit for the first clear statement of
monotheistic faith, it may be on account of formulations generated by polemic
of the kind we are discussing. At any rate, the incomparability of the God of
Israel is one of the great leitmotifs of chapters 40-48 (40:18, 25; 43:11; 44:6-8;
45:5-6, 14, 18, 21-22; 46:9), and the formula "I am Yahveh/God, and there is no
other" (45:5, 6, 18b, 22; 46:9) is practically identical with the praise of Marduk
in the creation poem.
This reading of Isa 40-55 allows us to place it among the various attempts in
the extant post-destruction biblical texts to account for the recent disasters.
The author is not much concerned with the aspect of the problem dealing with
worship how sacrificial cult or indeed cult of any kind could continue to be
offered to Yahveh in the absence of a temple and for devotees living
out[109]side of Yahveh's land. The prospect of rebuilding the Jerusalem temple
is mentioned only once (44:28b), and tribute is brought to Jerusalem but not to
the temple (45:14), in contrast to the emphasis on the temple in the last part of
the book (e.g. 60:5-7). The one complaint about failure to sacrifice (43:22-24)
seems curiously out of place since animal sacrifice is otherwise unattested in
that period. If we are not willing to fall back on the time-honored recourse of an
insertion, it could refer to the time when the Jerusalem temple still existed. The
occasional echoes of psalms of lament and the hymn stanzas interspersed
among the discourses (42:10-13; 44:23; 45:8; 49:13) do not affect this
conclusion, nor do they provide adequate support for the hypothesis that the
author was associated with the temple musicians or their surviving
descendants (Claus Westermann 1969, 8; Rainer Albertz 1994, 415).
In this respect, Isa 40-55 contrasts with the concern for worship in Ezekiel.
The deportations confronted the deportees with the question whether worship
was possible outside of the territorial jurisdiction of the deity. They were

therefore challenged to abandon the idea of Yahveh as a purely locative deity,

if they were to continue as Yahveh-worshipers at all. We recall David, who
cursed those who had driven him out of Judah to serve other gods (1 Sam
26:19), Naaman the Syrian general who took a load of Israelite earth back to
Damascus in order to be able to venerate Yahveh (2 Kgs 5:17), and the
question asked in Ps 137, "how can we sing hymns to Yahveh in a foreign
land?" At the symbolic level, the solution is presented in Ezekiel's vision of the
mobile throne (Ezek 1:1-28; 10:1-17) and the migration of the divine radiance
(kabod) by stages from Jerusalem to Babylon where the vision could therefore
take place (Ezek 10:18-19; 11:23). The implications of severing the links
between deity and territory, one of the subplots in the book of Jonah, were farreaching but, to repeat, this is one aspect of the crisis that is not a major
concern in Isa 40-55.
Rather more surprising is the relative lack of interest in the issue of
theodicy, painfully debated in Job and explored in the dialogue of Abraham with
God about the destruction of Sodom (Gen 18:22-33). We hear a complaint that
the people's just cause goes unnoticed by their God (40:27), to which the
answer is that God knows what he is doing, he is all-powerful, you must be
patient and wait (vv. 28-31); not so different an answer, therefore, from the
display of divine power in nature with which Job's complaint is answered. The
issue is raised later in a more explicitly disputatious context:
Call me to judgment, let us argue the case together.
Set out your case that you may be proved right.
Your first ancestor sinned;
your spokesmen transgressed against me,
so I profaned the princes of the sanctuary;
I delivered Jacob up to ruin,
Israel to reviling. (43:26-28)
[110]
The disaster is therefore explained along classical Deuteronomic lines as the
outcome of collective guilt and the failure to heed prophetic admonitions:
Who delivered Jacob to the despoiler,
Israel to the plunderers?
Was it not Yahveh, against whom they have sinned,
unwilling as they were to follow his guidance
and heed his teaching? (42:24)
If we assume that the guidance referred to comes through prophetic
admonition, this is pure Deuteronomic doctrine. A later text (Isa 48:5-5) will
add the typically Deuteronomic accusation of adopting non-Yahvistic cults, the
principal reason for the disaster according to the History.
The argument advanced in Isa 40-55 required emphasis on the deity's
power and effective action in the political arena rather than on justice. To some
extent this appeal to divine power sounds disturbingly close to the Rabshakeh's
attempt to get Hezekiah to capitulate by asking whether the Judean deity could
hope to succeed where the gods of other lands had failed (2 Kgs 18:33-35); we
recall that Assyrian campaigns were sponsored by and carried out in the name
of the imperial deity, Ashur. The dangers inherent in this approach are obvious.
Political failure can leave such claims sounding hollow but, even when the
course of events appears to justify the claims, there is the risk of projecting

chauvinistic and xenophobic group interests, aspirations, or resentments onto

the deity at the expense of outsiders, the others.
As it happened, the worst of such consequences were avoided by the failure
of Cyrus to live up to the expectations placed on him in the name of Israel's
God. On the other side of the balance, the introduction and development within
these chapters of the linked ideas of servanthood and mission, including a
mission to other peoples, the outsiders, a mission that could encompass defeat
and suffering, is one of the great innovations in religious thinking in antiquity.