Assyrian Prophets in the Local Paper: Yup, Dr. Jim is this week’s Public Professor

My good friend and fellow U. of Lethbridge faculty member Dan Johnson and I started a weekly column called the Public Professor in the Lethbridge Herald that features as many different Professors, Doctors and Assorted Professional Eggheads from the University as we can. There is no theme to the column, just stuff the author is researching teaching or otherwise professionally interested in.

It has been a great success and a lot of Herald readers like the variety. I also think that faculty in a public institution should take their work to a larger,  non-specialist audience, and this column affords that. Even if a brief newspaper column can hardly convey much “university level” information, it can pass the curiosity around, and that is the main point.

All of the articles are online at the Herald, and don’t forget to subscribe, click on the adverts, and write in to tell Dan and me that we are great.

Hey, how many other newspapers the size of the Lethbridge Herald have locally written articles on the prophets of Mari and Assyria, Serbo-Croatian (next week), why there are fewer wild flowers in Alberta’s roadsides, Arrow’s “Impossibility Theorem” and the problem of fair elections?

Anyway, here are a few exerts from this weekend’s column by yours truly. Go here to read it all

The Prophets of Assyria

Many of the Assyrian prophets were associated with the important temple to the goddess Ishtar at Arbela (modern Erbil), some 80 kilometres southeast of Nineveh. The prophets were believed to become possessed by the goddess, who would then speak through her human representative.

…

One of the Assyrian collections speak of a “covenant” or agreement that established a mutually beneficial relationship between the king and his deity. This notion also has some parallels in the Old Testament. Here is one abridged sample from that collection that speaks of the primary god of Assyria, Assur.

“Now these traitors conspired against you, expelled you and surrounded you. You, however, opened your mouth, crying: ‘Here me O Assur!’
I heard your cry and appeared as a fiery glow from the gate of heaven, to throw down fire and have it devour them . . . This is the oracle of peace placed before the statue. This covenant tablet of Assur enters the king’s presence on a cushion.”

The quote is from Martti Nissinen (with C. L. Seow and Robert K. Ritner) Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), p. 120.

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