Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death.

AuthorFoster, Benjamin R.
PositionBook Review

By SHLOMO IZRE'EL. Mesopotamian Civilizations, vol. 10. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2001. Pp. xii + 172, plates. $36.50.

Despite its small compass, the Adapa story has accumulated an imposing array of treatments and interpretations. No new textual material has appeared since the last, comprehensive edition by S. Picchioni, Il poemetto di Adapa (Budapest: Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegetem, 1981). Picchioni's book remains important to the student of this text and, moreover, includes material not treated by Izre'el, so should not be considered fully replaced by this study, its merits notwithstanding. Izre'el's Adapa and the South Wind offers a new edition of the Adapa poem to the highest epigraphic standard. Every manuscript is painstakingly collated and reproduced in good copies, some by the author, as well as in photographs. The commentary is expert, honest, and sensible, moving with mastery and competence across the numerous proposed readings and interpretations of this short but thought-provoking piece of Mesopotamian literature.

The author's arguments are carefully worked out and well documented. Even so, I am not able to join him in some of his many original and interesting proposals. For example, in Fragment A (p. 9), 17', he asks the reader to believe in a logographically written verb in a problematic passage, without parallel elsewhere in the manuscript, so his reading must be rejected on methodological grounds alone. Besides, what would *nadi ... ina sadadi really mean? The author's "lingering" for sadadi (lying in bed while lingering?) is ingenious, but it is still hard to see how the two alleged activities hang together grammatically. In Fragment B 5' (commentary, p. 26) Izre'el makes a valiant effort over ta-am-ta i-na me-se-li in-si-il-ma, understanding "He (Ea) cut the sea in half," but for all of his discussion of the alleged mythological background of the text, he does not explain why Ea would cut the sea in half at this point or what that would have to do with the story. Izre'el properly draws attention to the grammatical problem of the apparent accusative of ta-am-ta, but then asks the reader to allow him to convert an intransitive verb to a transitive one and give it an aberrant stem vowel, surely a more substantial grammatical problem than the one that disturbed him. His alternative proposal, "constipate," seems odd said of the sea.

The author goes on to make up a new Akkadian verb in 53', insisting that [i-n]a is not...

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