Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel.

• Author: Pearce, Laurie
• Position: Book review

Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel. By ALAN LENZI. State Archives of Assyria Studies, vol. 19. Helsinki: THE NEO-ASSYRIAN TEXT CORPUS PROJECT, 2008. Pp. xvii + 456. $69 (paper).

In this ambitious study, Alan Lenzi undertakes to define, within the pages of a single volume, the components, character, and cultural setting of secret knowledge in both Mesopotamia and Israel. His approach considers secret knowledge to be a textual phenomenon that is a component of the mechanisms of political and social mythmaking. The volume, a revision of its author's 2005 Brandeis University Ph.D. thesis, is characterized by careful philology and comprehensive analysis. The occasional "dissertationese" that remains--primarily in the form of superfluous dictionary citations, justification of translations (e.g., of idiomatic Akkadian expressions), and the providing of English translation of German sources cited in the body of the text (e.g., of AHw lemmata definitions and of phrases in Borger's R1A article "Geheimwissen")--does not detract from the overall work. The flow and content of the present work shows that Lenzi gave due consideration to transforming the manuscript from dissertation to published work. He comments that revision resulted in "the incorporation of a wider perspective on secrecy and human activity, especially with regard to religion" (p. vii), a process that represents the author's early engagement with theoretical constructs that continue to inform his subsequent and ongoing work.

The six chapters of the volume are evenly divided into two nearly equal sections dedicated to a survey and analysis of the evidence from Mesopotamia and Israel. Lenzi situates secret knowledge in the socio-political arenas of their respective cultures and demonstrates that between them significant differences exist in the origins, content, and manifestations of secret knowledge. The core of the volume is framed by an introduction and by a conclusion that clearly lay out and summarize the research agenda(s) of the work. He wisely avoids imposing a symmetrical framework of topics on the presentation of the two data sets; this serves well the outcome of his analysis, which might better be termed contrastive than comparative. In the Comparative Synthesis section of his conclusion (see especially p. 384), Lenzi summarizes his work in four broad points: 1) the conception of the divine realm as a divine council forms "the...