ASSYRIAN PROPHECIES, THE ASSYRIAN TREE, AND THE MESOPOTAMIAN ORIGINS OF JEWISH MONOTHEISM, GREEK PHILOSOPHY, CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, GNOSTICISM, AND MUCH MORE.

• Author: COOPER, JERROLD
• Position: Bibliography included - Review

Simo Parpola's Assyrian Prophecies is the latest and longest presentation of the author's theory that much of Judeo-Christian theology and Greek philosophy can already be found in first-millennium B.C. Assyrian sources. This review article, while concurring that some roots of these phenomena may indeed be found in ancient Mesopotamia, disagrees strongly with the author's methodology and conclusions.

THE APPEARANCE IN 1993 OF Simo Parpola's "The Assyrian Tree of Life," an article whose subtitle promised to trace "the origins of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy" back to the religious beliefs of ancient Assyria, generated considerable excitement in the scholarly community. In a series of articles since then, Parpola has spelled out and developed the consequences of his ideas for Assyrian governance, Mesopotamian astrology and astronomy, and Gilgamesh. [1] The hundred-plus-page introduction to Assyrian Prophecies represents a restatement of Parpola's radical interpretation of Assyrian religion in the context of a small corpus (edited, translated and annotated in less than fifty pages) of oracular prophecies from (mainly) the goddess Istar to or about the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon (680-669 B.C.) and Assurbanipal (668-627 B.C.). While still maintaining that the tree is "the central symbol of the cult" (p. xv), the new presentation focuses, naturally enough, on the role of Istar, "the Holy Spirit" (p. xx vi), and the messianic role of the Assyrian king as "God's Son and Chosen One" (p. xxxvi).

Despite the excitement and surprise generated by Parpola's original and subsequent articles, his ideas have not been directly confronted in print, although a panel was devoted to them at the 1996 American Oriental Society meeting in Philadelphia. In his rebuttal there, Parpola was unmoved by the largely critical contributions of the panelists. The present review article will recapitulate the criticisms of his theories that I made in Philadelphia, and evaluate the revised version presented in the introduction to Assyrian Prophecies.

Simo Parpola is a scholar with impeccable credentials, editor of the State Archives of Assyria series, and the foremost expert of his generation on Neo-Assyrian. If he could make the case for a Mesopotamian pedigree of the twin foundations of Western Civilization, "Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy," it would radically alter our understanding of the formative influences of our civilization, and the field of Assyriology would be moved from the margins of the humanities to a position of central importance. However, a careful reading of Parpola's articles and the introduction to Assyrian Prophecies reveals arguments that are often circular and flawed, in which, by virtue of an enthusiastic presentation, what remains to be proved is transformed into evidence for a construct that resembles doctrine more than theory.

THE ASSYRIAN TREE

Parpola's insistence that the Assyrian Tree is a symbol of central importance is undeniable, at least regarding the palace decoration of Assurnasirpal II(883-859 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (858-824 B.C.) and Assyrian seals, nor can there be any doubt that it influenced neighboring cultures. Where Parpola went wrong, at the outset of his initial article, was to assume that "the almost total lack of relevant textual evidence" concerning the Tree implies that the symbolism of the Tree was esoteric doctrine. [2] First, attempts to interpret Mesopotamian iconography are all too often stymied by lack of textual evidence, as are attempts to find in iconography items commonly mentioned in texts. Artists and intellectuals did not necessarily share the same conceptual vocabulary, and texts often neglect to mention the most obvious or most trivial, what could be assumed without being said. [3] Second, as Parpola himself noted, Mesopotamian esoteric knowledge was written down; we have it, even if we do not always underst and why certain texts were classified "secret" (nisirtu, piristu) by the ancients. [4] And we have in written form the Assyrian rituals and prayers for those moments of greatest danger to king and country; we even have the texts that unlock the mystic significance of the names of god. [5] There is absolutely no indication that the ancients were reluctant to write down anything, no matter how sacred or how secret.

The assumption that something of seeming importance unmentioned in the textual record was necessarily top secret is unjustified, and this kind of faulty reasoning is found elsewhere in "The Assyrian Tree." For example, Tablet XII of the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic is a translation of the second half of a Sumerian composition; that composition's first half tells of Inana and her huluppu-tree, out of which Gilgamesh made his ball and stick. [6] The second half, which is translated into Akkadian as Tablet XII, tells how Enkidu descends into the netherworld to retrieve Gilgamesh's ball and stick which have fallen there. According to Parpola, "the conspicuous omission of the huluppu-tree theme from Tablet XII ... is certainly also meant to direct the reader's attention to the Tree." [7] Similarly, in "The Assyrian Cabinet," Parpola insists that the complete lack of textual evidence for cabinet meetings is because they were secret, a secrecy he claims "is perpetuated in the Vatican secret consistory convened by the po pe for the appointment of new cardinals." [8] But even if we were to grant such a continuity from Assyria to the Vatican, there is a difference between meetings like the consistory, whose proceedings are kept secret but whose occurrence is public knowledge, and presumed secret meetings--like those of Parpola's Assyrian cabinet--whose existence is never mentioned.

Having established the Assyrian Tree's importance, and assuming that the lack of textual evidence for the Tree shows just how important and esoteric it was, Parpola next introduced the medieval Jewish kabbalistic Sefirotic Tree, "a form which strikingly resembles the Assyrian Tree." [9] Does it? The resemblance of the tree in fig. 1 to the trees of Assurnasirpal and Shalmaneser (e.g., fig. 2) [10] is neither "striking" nor "remarkable" to me; nor is the resemblance particularly increased by substituting any of the more schematic glyptic variants of the Assyrian Tree (fig. 3); nor do variant forms of the Sefirotic Tree set beside "similar" Assyrian trees bring the resemblance home for this viewer (fig. 4). I. J. Gelb long ago warned us against being seduced by the formal resemblance of symbols. [11] Given the strong resemblance between Mesopotamian ziggurats and Mesoamerican step pyramids, how would Parpola interpret the truly striking similarity of the Maya sacred tree from Palenque flanked by kings and surm ounted by a winged figure (fig. 5), to its similarly accoutered Assyrian counterpart?12 A reliance on authorial assertions of "striking similarity" is found elsewhere in the "The Assyrian Tree." In fig. 6 there is an almost gratuitous juxtaposition of forms and symbols from vastly different cultural contexts (and what are we supposed to make of that kabbalistic yogi in lotus position with sefirot transformed into chakras?). Stranger still is the completely invented and unlikely redrawing of the god Ashur's name (fig. 7), a figure claimed as "closely resembling" the kabbalistic Tetragrammaton Man, a resemblance that completely escapes me, except for the gross verticality of both images.'3

If we reject, or at least question, any stunning formal similarity between the Assyrian and Sefirotic Trees, we might still accept the symbolic similarity upon which Parpola built the rest of his argument. The individual sefi rot are the emanations of god; Parpola first asserted a similar function for the Assyrian Tree:

Two fundamentally important points have nevertheless been established concerning the function of the Tree in the throneroom of Ashurnasirpal's palace in Calab. Firstly, Irene Winter has convincingly demonstrated that the famous relief showing the king flanking the Tree under the winged disk corresponds to the epithet "vice-regent of Assur" in the accompanying inscription. Clearly, the Tree here represents the divine world order maintained by the king as the representative of the god Assur, embodied in the winged disk hovering above the Tree. [14]

Now reading that, you might assume that he was relying on Winter's authority that the Tree represents the "divine world order," but in fact, in her article Winter said rather that the Tree represents fertility, and that the "divine principles" are represented by Ashur in the winged disk. [15] So the symbolic or functional similarity of the Assyrian and Sefirotic Trees rests solely on Parpola's assertions.

After asserting the formal and functional similarities of the two Trees, Parpola pointed to the roots of Kabbala in the Babylonian Jewish community and the consequent likelihood that the Sefirotic Tree goes back to an ancient Mesopotamian model, that is, the Assyrian Tree. It is at this point that Parpola made a false assumption that led to more serious errors: "Given the lack of directly relevant textual evidence," he "had for years considered the identity of the Assyrian and Sefirotic Trees an attractive but probably unprovable hypothesis." [16] To get around the stumbling block of unprovability, he reasoned that "if the Sefirotic Tree really is but an adaptation of a Mesopotamian model, the adaptation process should be reversible, that is, it should be possible to reconstruct the original model without difficulty." [17] This reconstructed original, he continued, would then be proof of the derivation of the Sefirotic Tree from the Assyrian. But why this theoretical reversibility should prove the propositio n was nowhere explained.

Rather, the flawed logic was simply repeated throughout: if a Mesopotamian phenomenon can be interpreted kabbalistically, then the kabbalistic ideas used to interpret it must have been part of and...