Our contribution attempts to reinterpret an unconventional use of cuneiform characters in the Middle Assyrian letter MARV (I) 71 (Assur Fd. no. 11018 t; VAT 16375; photo: CDLI P281848). We are not assuming that these are the inadequacies of a scribe, as J. Llop (2003)1 recently put it. Rather, we would like to put the text up for discussion under the premise that the unusual use of cuneiform characters served to encode a message. At the same time, we would like suggest that everyday, subtle forms of resistance against prevailing violence can also be demonstated for the cultures of the Ancient Near East.
A lot has been said about how Persian ideas allegedly influenced certain parts of the Hebrew Bible. Second Isaiah (Isa 40-55), where the Persian king Cyrus (II) is mentioned by name in Isa 44:28; 45:1, is a case in point. On the other hand, imprints of Babylonian influence have also been posited for the very same texts. Against this backdrop the present article seeks to refine the comparison. We will examine how the phraseology and pragmatics of the royal inscriptions changes between Neo-Babylonian rulers and the succeeding Persians. More precisely, we will see similarities which Isa 45 shares only with the Achaemenid royal inscriptions after the Bisitun Inscription. Having identified distinct commonalities of the biblical sample text and a selection of royal Achaemenid inscriptions, we will delineate why it is likely that the author(s) of Isa 45 drew on the language of the Achaemenid inscriptions, both on textual and historical grounds.
The book of Isaiah refers to Cyrus the Great as Yhwh's "shepherd". The book presents him as a divinely "anointed" king, chosen to subdue nations and to elevate the Judean deity. How would Judeans of the Persian period (and later) imagine this king and his special relationship with their deity? Would Judeans think that their deity was present in the mind of a Persian king? In other words, would they imagine that Cyrus knew Yhwh? This article argues that Judeans probably did think this way. The ancient Judean discourse on kingship suggests as much. However, for Judeans who read and considered texts like Isaiah, the details of Cyrus's personal knowledge of Yhwh would be less important than the general knowledge that Yhwh was and remains the true king of the world-a truly universal deity-and that Cyrus was employed to that end.
The article offers new information on twenty-two Akkadian lexemes. Out of them three are totally new words: disutu "growth", a plant name marrutu and a stone name dur & ucirc;. Other cases are new interpretations of existing lexemes, such as identification of das & ucirc;tu with the textile teh & ucirc;tu or re-normalisation of issillatu "shell" as issillatu. The majority of cases are new attestations ofAkkadian words. Some of these add a new phonetic variant: desu of disu "grass", dusumu of dusm & ucirc; "slave", dardarru of daddaru "thistle", and kusimtu of the plant akusimu; others broaden the chronological period of attestation of a word, for example by providing second millennium attestations of abarakkutu "stewardship" or post-Old Assyrian attestations for the plant duglu.
