A GUT FEELING?
AKKADIAN ENTRAIL DIVINATION AND ITS POLEMICAL PROHIBITION IN THE OT
Divination and superstition was a major part of life for the inhabitants of the Ancient Near East. In fact, magical practices such as reading omens through the flight patterns of birds or interpreting natural phenomena was not limited to the regions of Mesopotamia but were also a regular part of Hellenistic culture as well.[1] In Mesopotamia, the people practiced divination through “observing oil as it is dropped into water (lecanomancy), smoke as it rises from a censer (libanomancy), flour scattered on water (aleuromancy), and examination of entrails (extispicy).”[2] Of these methods, the more common means of determining or predicting the future was through extispicy: a form of divination by interpreting the entrails of animals.[3]
For the modern senses, this is a strange practice indeed. Nils Heeßel explained, “Extispicy stands out among the means to interact with the divine sphere, as it enabled humankind to obtain a direct answer of the gods to a question about the outcome of a certain event, which has already begun in the present but whose end is in doubt.”[4] Such a method of divination was veiled in the cultic ritual as an omen sacrifice. Cryer described the process:
After employing some sort of divinatory prayer, the diviner apparently whispered the words of the question to be answered into the ears of the sacrificial victim (almost always a sheep, though some few bird-extispicies are known). After being killed, the victim lay on its back, and the diviner stood at its hind end.… Thus the positions “right” and “left,” which play an important role in omen collections, refers to the organs as seen by the diviner.[5]
Recorded extispicy omens are formulated in a standard protasis/apodosis structure based on the reading of the entrails: “[I]f such-and-such a feature is present, such-and-such an event will occur.”[6] An example of an Akkadian extispicy omen would be, “If there is a Hal sign at the emplacement of ‘the well-being’ [the zone of the liver called the šulmum], the reign of Akkad is over.”[7]
As it relates to the Israelites, Anne Guinan especially noted, “The liver models found at Hazor, Megiddo, Ebla, and Ugarit and the corpus of omen texts recovered from Ugarit clearly attest to a pre-Israelite transmission of Mesopotamian practices to the Levant.”[8] Thus, as Israel was entering the land of Canaan, which was fully inculcated with Canaanite religious practices that had made their way from Mesopotamia, the reader of Scripture should expect to find interaction with Akkadian extispicy either by way of an endorsement or censure of such practices.[9] Moses provided general restrictions to divination in Deut 18:9–14, speaking of such practices as “abominations” (תּוֹעֵבָה), things such as “anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens… these nations which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners” (18:10b, 14a; ESV). Similarly, Lev 19:26b says, “You shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes.” The practice of extispicy is mentioned directly in Ezek 21:21 as an indictment against Babylon, “For the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination… he looks at the liver.”
Central to the theological rationale as to why such a prohibition existed for the Israelites was the matter of divine revelation and authority. First and foremost, it was a practice rejected by God because He did not choose to reveal Himself in such ways. And further, with the practice of extispicy, the revelatory power lies not in the animal sacrificed but the diviner interpreting and predicting.[10] Authority was relegated to the irrationality of superstition and lacked an objective basis to pattern revelation after. Even when examining the exta (Lat. for “entrails”) and looking for signs in particular zones with predetermined patterns for interpretation, Koch noted that “The right side is always positive and the left negative, but which side is ‘right’ and which is ‘left’ can change from zone to zone… the left/right-up/down orientation was not the same on all the subsections but changed in accordance with the course of the inspection.”[11]
Neither were the diviners veterinarian experts, as if they knew what they were looking at. For example, Cryer described the interpretive process saying, “[T]he ancient diviners were not concerned with descriptive anatomy. This means that, to them, the insides of an animal had no functional significance; they were instead regarded as instruments of communication.”[12] Therefore, the authority was not in the messenger (in this case the animal) as it was for the prophet who spoke directly the utterance of God, “thus says the LORD” (כֺּה אָמַר יהוה). Rather, the diviner held revelatory sway over matters of interpretation. In such a system, it is no wonder that many were suspicious of the “art” of divination. Philo, in speaking of a “counterfeit magic” said that it was “most properly called a perversion of art, pursued by charlatan mendicants and parasites and the basest of the women and slave population.”[13] It should be no surprise that the qualifications of a prophet of Israel come shortly after the prohibition of diviners (Deut 18:15–22) and are quite different from the qualifications of the entrail-readers.[14] The offices and qualifications of Israel’s prophet and Babylon’s diviner are too distinct and must be set apart.
There is also a polemical note in Israel’s prohibition of divination methods like extispicy.[15] It speaks to the central affirmation of the Jews codified in the Shema (Deut 6:4–5)—there is only one, true, living God and he alone is to be worshipped by the people of God. Invoking the methods and means of foreign pagan divination practices is tantamount to idolatry or whoring after false gods. It is a breach of covenant fidelity. Perhaps even more, the prohibition against divination was to set YHWH apart from the rest of the Mesopotamian and Canaanite gods. Should a prophet advocate any extispicy ritual or some other form of divination, he would of necessity be “speak[ing] in the name of other gods, [therefore] that same prophet shall die” (Deut 18:20b).
Lastly, there is perhaps a practical reason why methods of divination such as extispicy are to be condemned. Much of the appeal of divine foresight is based in the immediacy of the ritual. “The possibility of receiving a divine reply to urgent questions explains the popularity of extispicy to commoners and kings alike,” said Heeßel.[16] Likewise, Koch stated, “Extispicy was a very direct way of questioning the gods about particular events and their intentions or their decisions in any particular matter.”[17] This stands in direct contradistinction to the OT concept of “waiting on the LORD” (see Psalm 27:4 and Isa. 40:31). Such a demand on the divine is to force the Transcendent down to the whimsical pleasures and urgent necessities of one who could afford a goat for an omen sacrifice.
This much is certain, that research and study into the strange practices of Akkadian extispicy shed a great deal of light onto the ancient world influencing Israel’s culture and their laws prohibiting such practices. Modern forms of omen readings (psychics, horoscopes, and tea leaves) and paranoid superstitions (black cats, broken mirrors, walking under ladders, etc.) are perhaps the application of the 2nd commandment for the 21st century Christian. But Christians should be cautious too, as though feelings, happenstances, and desires are equated to God’s will. Such conclusions based on flimsy forms can be just as arbitrary as interpreting entrails of sacrificial animals. May those who live under the New Covenant of grace find the revelation from God in his Word to be a sufficient means to define and thus divine the will of God. “He who has an ear, let him hear.”
[1] Moyer V. Hubbard, “Greek Religion,” in The World of the New Testament, ed. Joel B. Green and Lee Martin McDonald (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 117–20.
[2] Anne K. Guinan, “Divination (Akkadian),” in Context of Scripture, ed. William W. Hallo, vol. 1 of (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 421–22.
[3] John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian, 3rd ed. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 224.
[4] Nils P. Heeßel, “The Hermeneutics of Mesopotamian Extispicy: Theory vs. Practice,” in Mediating Between Heaven and Earth, ed. C. L. Crouch, Jonathan Stokland, and Anna Elise Zernecke (New York: T & T Clark, 2012), 16.
[5] Frederick H. Cryer, Divination in Ancient Israel and Its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation, JSOTSup (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 174–75.
[6] Dennis Pardee, “Divination (Ugaritic),” in Context of Scripture, ed. William W. Hallo, vol. 1 of (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 291.
[7] William W. Hallo, ed., Context of Scripture, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), I:423. The bracketed portion came from footnote 22 of the same page.
[8] Guinan, “Divination (Akkadian),” I: 422. She went on to write, “While the biblical record preserves clear evidence of familiarity with Mesopotamian practices, there is no biblical corollary to the divinatory texts produced in Mesopotamia.”
[9] While this seems generally true, Dennis Pardee in examining Ugaritic divination argued, “Though one suspects that these texts had a Mesopotamian origin, there is remarkably little evidence of direct Mesopotamian influence. For example, there are very few loanwords from Akkadian in the Ugaritic of these texts, and there is no instance of a Ugaritic text having been translated directly from a known Akkadian original.” “Divination (Ugaritic),” I:287.
[10] Hendrick Bosman, “Redefined Prophecy as Deuteronomic Alternative to Divination in Deut 18:9–22,” OTE 27.2 (2014): 378.
[11] Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Babylonian Liver Omens: The Chapters Manzāzu, Padānu and Pān Tākalti of the Babylonian Extispicy Series Mainly from Aššurbanipal’s Library (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 39.
[12] Cryer, Divination in Ancient Israel and Its Near Eastern Environment, 176. See also Koch-Westenholz, Babylonian Liver Omens, 38.
[13] Philo, Spec. Laws, 3.101.
[14] W.G. Lambert, “The Qualifications of Babylonian Diviners,” in Tikip Santakki Mala Bašmu…. Festschrift Für Rykle Borger Zu Seinem 65. Geburtstag Am 24. Mai 1994, ed. S.M. Maul, Cuneiform Monographs 10 (Groningen: Styx, 1998), 141–58. Not surprising since extispicy was seen as a sacrificial omen, diviners had more in common with priests, and thus their qualifications were similar to that of the Levitical priesthood. Lambert translated an Akkadian text reading, “When a diviner… of abiding descent… begotten by a reverend of pure descent, he himself being without defect in body and limbs, may approach the presence of Šamaš and Adad where (liver) inspection and oracle (take place). The diviner of impure descent, not without defect in body and limbs, with squinting eyes, chipped teeth, a cut-off finger, a ruptured(?) testicle, suffering from leprosy, a ……, a ……, a eunuch, who does not observe the rites of Šamaš and Adad may not approach the place… for an oracle by divination” (p. 152).
[15] David Davis, “Divination in the Bible,” JBQ 30.2 (2002): 121–22.
[16] Heeßel, “The Hermeneutics of Mesopotamian Extispicy,” 17.
[17] Koch-Westenholz, Babylonian Liver Omens, 13.
Dr. Timothy Decker is one of the pastors of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Roanoke, VA, having joined them in 2018. He holds a B.A. and M.A. biblical studies from Carolina University (formerly Piedmont International University), a Th.M. in New Testament from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in biblical studies from Capital Seminary and Graduate School. In his dissertation research, he examined the style of biblical Hebrew poetry in the New Testament. He has presented various papers at academic society meetings and authored numerous articles in several different scholarly journals. He is a member of ETS and IBR. When he is not reading or researching, he enjoys spending time with his wife and four children.
Courses taught at CBTSeminary: Elementary Greek I, Elementary Greek II
