Ancient religions

encountering ancient religions 88
nated in Judah in the 8th century. The writing of the Aaronic priests, conceived
in the time of exile as a response to the Enuma Elish, similarly ends with the
construction of a holy shrine (here the tent of the encounter in the Sinai). It
does not, however, recount the story of the creation of the world and human
beings as the conclusion of a complex cosmogony and theomachy; rather it
places the creation of the world and humans, in accordance with a monotheistic
concept of God, at the very beginning. Humans, in this view, were not created
to labor in atonement for the sins of the gods, but to give shape to the
world as God’s representatives. In Mesopotamian royal ideology, the motif of
humanity made in the image of god (soeloem) was reserved for the king as
god’s representative (salum); in the Israelite version, the priesthood opposed
the negative anthropology in Mesopotamian ideology, which bound humankind
to the state legitimated by God, by applying the motif to every individual
and democratizing the royal ideology. Already, in the late preexilic era, the
writer of Deuteronomy set absolute loyalty to the Jewish god YHWH against
the Assyrian demand of absolute loyalty to the state, by subversively transferring
the oath of loyalty to King Asarhaddon to YHWH in Deut. 13 and Deut.
28. In this manner, the Deuteronomist imposed limits on demands for loyalty
to the state and also deprived the state, in the form of king, of its function as a
channel of divine grace. For the first time in the cultural history of the ancient
orient, ethical values were disengaged from loyalty to the ruler. Correspondingly,
biblical wisdom could formulate criticism of rulers that fit the kingdom
of Judah, which was connected with Assyria, by attacking it on the basis of observation
of nature: “The locusts have no king, / yet go they forth all of them
by bands” (Prov. 30.27). The emancipation of ethical thinking from the state,
which was initiated by small circles of intellectuals in Judah, prevailed when
the kingdom came to an end during the late Babylonian and Persian era in Judah
and consequently prevailed in the Hebrew Bible as well.
This emancipation also ran counter to Egyptian ideology of the state, which
still linked the possibility of overcoming the barrier of death to an individual’s
loyalty to the state, without resorting to the crass negative anthropology that
characterizes the Mesopotamian myths of human creation. In Egypt it was
held that all human beings owed their ability to breathe—their lives—to the
goddess Maat, who provided order and regularity to the cosmos as she guided
the course of the sun-god. However, her protective power was directed particularly
toward the king, the son of the sun-god and Maat’s own brother. Just as
the sun-god defeated chaos on a cosmic scale as he crossed the skies and,
guided by Maat, enabled maÚat (justice) to prevail, so the king embodied this
principle in the human sphere. State rule was, thus, the prerequisite for an individual’s
ability to lead a just life in terms of community solidarity, the sole standard
of just behavior that would permit one to pass the test on the day of judgment.
But unless the king, deified as Osiris, overcame the barrier of death, an
individual had no path into the afterlife. Part of the royal practice of maÚat
consisted of rewarding subjects for conduct that conformed to it, but it also
consisted of using the law courts to resolve conflict and eliminate conduct