Divine Ambition From Marduk to Yahweh Exploring Beliefs about Divine Ambition Through Mesopotamian Incantation-Prayers

Abstract

This article explores the incantation-prayer tradition of Mesopotamia in order to understand how gods were expected to acquire power and how the movement of gods within a pantheon could be explained from within the cuneiform culture of ancient Mesopotamia. The situation assumed in many incantation-prayers has strong parallels to the situation of Marduk in Enūma eliš. Incantation-prayers fold an individual’s problem into a mythological moment, or type-scene, similar to Enūma eliš, where a god is invited to rescue an individual and thereby gain further power by gaining the allegiance of both gods and mortals. Deities were allowed to rise and fall in the pantheon because it was assumed that a great god’s power made them hard to recognize; truly transcendent gods were assumed to be manifested by other gods. These beliefs about divine ambition also help contextualize Yahweh’s own Cinderella story, where two small nations dreamed that their previously unrecognized god could one day rule the world.