Divine Presence in Ancient Near East Temples

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Religion Compass 9/7 (2015): 203–215, 10.1111/rec3.12154

Divine Presence in Ancient Near Eastern Temples Michael B. Hundley* University of Scranton

Abstract

This article addresses ancient Near Eastern conceptions of divine presence in the realm of the temple, considering evidence from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hittite Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine. It analyzes the perceived religious function of ancient Near Eastern temples, cult images, the installation and maintenance of divine presence, as well as the complicated relationship between the deity and its cult image and between a deity’s various cult images.

The present contribution presents a distilled version of my most recent book (Hundley 2013a), which examines conceptions of divine presence in the temple in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hittite Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine. Since it covers so much ground, the following synopsis is by necessity general, focusing on shared features across the different contexts. As such, there is little space for the divergences both across and within regions and for the exceptions to the general trends. While this article is synthetic, there nonetheless remains a remarkable consistency across cultures, such that we can meaningfully speak of ancient Near Eastern conceptions of the divine presence in the temple. Since biblical and ancient Israelite materials are indeed ancient Near Eastern material, they will be included under the purview of Syria-Palestine. While the Bible and Israelite religion are in many ways distinct (just as the other cultures are distinct from each other), this article will focus on their areas of commonality with the other ancient Near Eastern data. The reader should look elsewhere for the distinctives ( for my understanding of the biblical Deuteronom[ist]ic and Priestly conceptions of presence, see respectively Hundley 2009 and 2011; for a consideration of the political aspect of biblical and ancient Near Eastern treatment of images, esp. those of foreigners, see Levtow 2008). The Necessity of Divine–Human Contact Life in the ancient Near East was precarious. People had no recourse to modern health care, maternity care, or supermarkets. In turn, illness, childbirth, and the absence of rain could prove fatal. Rather than submit to the whims of fate, people sought some measure of control over the otherwise uncontrollable. Their primary solution was an appeal to the gods, whom they believed governed the necessary, dangerous, and humanly uncontrollable elements of the world. In order to inf luence the gods, people required contact with them. However, consonant with normal human experience, (living) humans generally had little to no access to the divine realm. The gods described in mythology commonly dwelt in realms outside of the human experience. For example, in Egyptian mythology, human and divine originally dwelt together, yet evil in creation (attributed to human rebellion or Seth) precipitated the gods’ withdrawal from the human sphere (see, e.g., the Book of the Heavenly Cow (Guilhou 2010)). The Bible likewise envisions a short-lived original intimacy in the garden of Eden (Genesis 2 and 3). In Mesopotamia, separation was built into the fabric of creation (see, e.g., Atrahasis (Lambert and Millard 1999) and the Enuma Elish (Lambert 2013: 45–133); see also Wiggermann © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


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