Reading akkadian PRayeRs & Hymns An Introduction

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READING AKKADIAN PRAYERS AND HYMNS: AN INTRODUCTION
genetic relationship between the Akkadian and Hebrew prayers? Stummer answers
this by stating that the authors of the Psalms in fact knew Mesopotamian
prayers. Due to the Akkadian material’s state of publication at the time of his
writing, Stummer mixes texts of many genres and does not differentiate between
Sumerian and Akkadian material. But the more basic problem in his work is that
the comparison is done with a theological aim: he wants to establish the high
religious level of Israel’s sacred poetry. 253 Following Gunkel’s form-critical methodology
at that time, Stummer had taken Gunkel’s statement that there was no
more pressing task for Old Testament scholarship than the systematic comparison
of the Babylonian and Hebrew religious poetry as an impetus for his work. 254
In response to Stummer’s work, however, Gunkel and Begrich wrote in their
Introduction to the Psalms (1933) 255 that the time had not yet come for a systematic
comparison of both literatures, as neither of them had been independently
and thoroughly studied. 256
Nevertheless, it was Begrich, who analyzed one aspect of Biblical and
Mesopotamian prayers in a comparative perspective in an article entitled “Die
Vertrauensäußerungen im israelitischen Klageliede des Einzelnen und in seinem
babylonischen Gegenstück” (1928). 257 Begrich’s approach is much more cautious
than Stummer’s. He first establishes the comparability of biblical and Mesopotamian
prayers, discussing the superscriptions and subscriptions, the person of
the supplicant, and their situation. After this, he analyzes the main differences
between the psalms of individual lament and prayers of the lifting of the hand.
Instead of a personal confession of trust as in the biblical texts, the Babylonian
prayers show descriptions of the magnificence of the deity. For Begrich, the underlying
relationship between god and man is different in both cultures: where
there is trusting confidence in the biblical material because of a personal relation,
in Mesopotamia, the distance between the supplicant and the deity is such
that the striving for a relationship based on trust is squelched by the consciousness
of the grandeur of the deity. 258 Many more Mesopotamian texts are published
today and the editions are much more detailed, making Begrich’s results
253
Stummer, Sumerisch-akkadische Parallelen, V.
254
Hermann Gunkel, Ausgewählte Psalmen (4th ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1917),
VII.
255
Hermann Gunkel, Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels (completed
by Joachim Begrich; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933); ET: Hermann Gunkel and
Joachim Begrich, Introduction to the Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel (trans. J.
Nogalski; Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998).
256
Gunkel and Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, 19–20, note 1.
257
Joachim Begrich, “Die Vertrauensäusserungen im Israelitischen Klagelied des Einzelnen und
in seinem babylonischen Gegenstück,” ZAW 46 (1928), 221–60; repr. Joachim Begrich, “Die
Vertrauensäußerungen im israelitischen Klageliede des Einzelnen und in seinem babylonischen
Gegenstück,” in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (ed. W. Zimmerli; TB 21; München:
Kaiser, 1964), 168–216.
258
Begrich, “Die Vertrauensäusserungen im Israelitischen Klagelied des Einzelnen,” 189.