Conceptualizing a Priestly World: Past, Present, and Future in Hellenistic Babylon

Abstract

In a world that grew increasingly more foreign, the Marduk priests of Hellenistic Babylon endeavored to maintain their ancient traditions and beliefs. Central to their worldview was the idea that the gods decided the fates of the land and that to ensure their benevolence, temple worship was not only necessary but the primary raison d’être of the priests themselves. However, foreign rule posed significant challenges to the traditional Babylonian temple cult. In this paper, we argue that in response, the Babylonian priests developed new discursive paradigms that sought to influence their future by reinterpreting their past in light of their present. On the one hand, this took the form of traditional models of cuneiform literacy and was developed in texts dealing with history and ritual (Late Babylonian Priestly Literature). On the other hand, the priesthood advanced a new intellectual model that expanded beyond the scope of traditional knowledge and took the form of a mathematical-astronomical paradigm. While there is an apparent tension between both paradigms, we posit that their overarching objectives remained the same: understanding the divinely determined future through the past (and present) and influencing it by ritual action directed towards the divine. Studying this Babylonian model is valuable for understanding parallel epistemological and discursive processes taking place in other ancient Near Eastern temple communities that faced similar challenges under foreign imperial rule.

1. Introduction

Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi Tancredi to the Principe di Salina, in Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)

During the second century BCE, a Babylonian astronomer named Bēl-bullissu compiled and copied a cuneiform text that provides commentary on a cultic calendar. This text, known as the Babylon Calendar Treatise, is concerned with explaining why apotropaic rituals were performed in the Esagil temple cult at certain moments of the year (Reynolds 2019). The basic premise underlying the Treatise is that ritual performance was a means to counteract negative predictions deduced from the movement and position of celestial bodies. The interpretation of these astrological signs hinges on a complex system of analogy between stars and planets, mythology, history, and traditional divination. By creating an intricate web of meaning, the Calendar Treatise reveals a marked concern for the safety and continuity of the temple cult in Babylon, explaining ritual as a mechanism to counteract predicted harm to the established worship of the gods. The following example helps illustrate this:

“In Duˀūzu (month IV), when he (a cultic functionary) performed in Babylon the ritual procedure for an enemy’s defeat, because Mars and the moon, lords of secret knowledge of the land of Elam, had height (maximum latitude), (and) Jupiter and the sun, lords of secret knowledge of the land of Akkad, had depth (minimum latitude), they revealed an omen portending the changing of Babylon’s reign. He performed an apotropaic ritual in the city. The place of secret knowledge of the moon is the Old Man constellation and the Bristle constellation, a constellation [of the land of] Elam … The place of secret knowledge of the sun is the Hired Man constellation …”

(Reynolds 2019, pp. 194–95)1

At its core, the divinatory logic underlying this passage is simple: in the context of a cultic setting thematizing ‘international’ conflict, celestial bodies referring to the traditional eastern adversary of Babylon, Elam, stand not only significantly higher in the sky than those pertaining to Babylon, both groups of bodies are in fact at their respective extreme positions of expected ‘height’ or ‘depth’. As an inversion of the expected ‘normal’ or at least desired situation (Babylon ‘standing’ above her rivals), this astrological setting is read analogistically as indicating “the changing of Babylon’s reign”. This, in turn, prompts appropriate ritual countermeasures: an apotropaic ritual (namburbû) is performed.2 Importantly, the original Babylonian text reveals a crucial nuance that the English translation does not reflect with equal clarity: the “omen portending the changing (ša nukkuri) of Babylon’s reign” is not an omen indicating that Babylon’s reign simply will change (intransitive); rather it indicates that it will be changed by someone, viz., the gods, who by sending a sign actively ‘reveal’ their intention to do so. The Calendar Treatise thus lays out a communication model of divination and ritual action: addressing an apotropaic ritual to the gods is the adequate priestly response to the initial divine message, and the gods are the addressees of the apotropaic ritual.

The Babylon Calendar Treatise is a unique and complicated cuneiform text whose density and technicality are challenging for the modern reader. Yet, the passage quoted illustrates well how this text offers a window onto the mental world of a second-century Babylonian priest. At the center of this world lies the temple cult—it is the raison d’être of the priest, and its existence and necessity go unquestioned. However, divine forces may empower outside forces up to the point where they disrupt the flow of temple worship, which ultimately leads to catastrophe and destruction. For this reason, mainly, the priest continuously reads the world that surrounds him through an analogical framework of history, myth, and divination that connects the past to the present and the future. Within this system of analogies, which is strongly rooted in cuneiform cultural tradition, a particularly powerful tool in the hands of the priest is astronomy—the ability to calculate celestial omens and thus to carry the present into the future.

The astronomer who inscribed the extant manuscripts of the Treatise was a member of the prominent Mušēzib family, which is attested as practicing the astral sciences in the milieu of the Esagil temple in the city of Babylon from the fourth to the end of the second centuries (Reynolds 2019, pp. 111–20).3 They were also involved in the prediction and daily observation of astronomical events, recorded in the so-called Astronomical Diaries (see below). It is likely that Bēl-bullissu himself participated in this project, and indeed, the Astronomical Diaries of the second century have much in common with the Babylon Calendar Treatise. Together with the celestial events recorded, these Diaries contain long sections describing contemporary events, many of which can be termed ‘ominous’ rather than ‘historical’, such as unusual births or sightings of wild animals in the city. The fact that these sections became ever longer throughout the course of the second century has been understood as a reflection of the Diarists’ growing anxiety in a context of rising tensions and uncertainties (Pirngruber 2013; see also below).

Indeed, the Hellenistic period in Babylonia (331–124) saw drastic change in the priesthood’s world.4 While the onset of Graeco-Macedonian rule had boded well for Babylonian temple institutions, tangible royal support had given way to strict control and social marginalization by the second century. Within this context of change and pressure, Babylonian priests sought ways not just to come to terms with their present situation but to move beyond it into a new future. The Calendar Treatise provides a roadmap for exploring these trends in Late Babylonian cuneiform culture.5 It also alerts us to the people behind the texts that we discuss in this paper: they were people primarily concerned with the institutional worship of the gods, and thus best defined as “priests”.6 We argue that the use of terms like “scholars” or “intellectuals”, often used in modern studies of the materials that we collect in this paper, neglects the social background of late cuneiform culture in its temple setting.7

Moreover, keeping in mind the quintessentially priestly origin of our texts opens avenues for comparison with (texts created by) other ancient Near Eastern temple communities. Indeed, not only did other traditional priesthoods have to contend with similar challenges posed by foreign imperial rule, including the absence of royal patronage, the destruction and renovation of temple architecture, and other factors that threatened to disrupt divine worship, they also responded in similar ways, as we have previously argued for some Biblical materials (Debourse and Rhyder 2024; Debourse 2022b, pp. 414–20; Jursa and Debourse 2020). Although it is not our aim in this paper to undertake any comparisons between these Late Babylonian and other Near Eastern ‘priestly’ writings that lie beyond our expertise, we sketch some pathways for comparative research.

In this paper, we start by briefly outlining the historical context within which the traditional temple community of Hellenistic Babylon existed. Then, we trace how Babylonian priests living under Hellenistic rule sought to influence their future by reinterpreting their past in light of their present. On the one hand, this took the form of traditional cuneiform models and was developed in texts dealing with history (the past) and ritual (the present) (Late Babylonian Priestly Literature). On the other hand, the priesthood advanced a new intellectual paradigm, which drew on established cultural elements like divination, cyclical time, and a text-based analogistic epistemology, but also sought to supplement the priests’ inherited epistemological framework with a mathematical-astronomical knowledge model. Throughout this all, the priests maintained their traditional objectives: understanding the divinely determined future through the past (and present) and influencing it by ritual action directed towards the divine that was thus seen as amenable to persuasion. We also address the inherent tension resulting from the intertwining of these several intellectual developments.

In the conclusion, we argue that the main objective of the several strands of intellectual endeavors explored in this paper is to establish and justify the temple cult and collective priestly ritual as the principal safeguard of communal wellbeing. In doing so, this worldview replaces the figure of the king with the priest as the central pivot of society. Finally, we propose how the Babylonian priestly community’s self-promotion in the absence of political leadership can inspire new avenues for comparative research into the writings of other traditional ancient Near Eastern temple and post-temple communities.

2. The Traditional Temple Community in Hellenistic Babylon

By the time Alexander the Great arrived in Babylon in 331, the city had been under foreign imperial rule for more than two centuries.8 The Babylon he encountered looked very different from the city that the Persian king Cyrus the Great had conquered in 539, not just architecturally, but also in the makeup of its inhabitants.9 Although we cannot always find them in our documentation, the city must have been replete with Babylonians, Persians, Jews, Arabs, Greeks, and many others. The language on the street was Aramaic, which contrasted starkly with the remnants of cuneiform inscriptions that must still have been visible everywhere.10 Within this cosmopolitan world, cuneiform culture itself was strictly confined to the space of the traditional Babylonian temple community, centered on the temple of the god Marduk, Esagil.11 Against all odds, this temple institution had survived beyond the Persian conquest and would eventually continue to exist into the first centuries of the common era (Geller 1997).

However, the temple community faced many challenges under foreign imperial rule. Traditionally, the temple had strongly relied on royal patronage in both ideological and financial ways. In the traditional Babylonian worldview, the king had been divinely appointed to take care of the worship of the gods, and rulers of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty emphasized their support of temples in their royal inscriptions.12 The arrival of foreign kings who did not wholly embrace this ideology thus posed a problem, and not only in an ideological sense. Tangible effects of imperial rule included the pressure of rising taxation and the extraction of resources from the rich Babylonian temple households. Priestly elites, who had previously been essential to the power balance in the Neo-Babylonian heartland, not only lost their economic standing but also socio-politically became more and more marginalized, as imperial centers moved away from Babylon and local pro-Persian nouveaux riches enjoyed stronger royal support. Eventually, this would all lead to a series of revolts against the Persian Crown, which retaliated so harshly that all evidence for the vitality of temple worship comes to a sudden halt in the year 484.13

By the time Alexander the Great arrived in Babylon, he was met by a local Babylonian temple community that was in the process of slowly rebuilding itself (Clancier and Monerie 2014; van der Spek 2006; Debourse 2020; Hackl 2021a). Alexander himself and the first Seleucid rulers supported the effort by engaging in building projects, donating land, and granting the temple community a say in local affairs.14 This royal support should not be overestimated, however, and was short-lived, since soon Greek-style institutions were installed in the city that took over governorship, and royal attention shifted elsewhere (Clancier and Monerie 2014; Sciandra 2012; van der Spek 2009). Aside from this ‘poliadization’, the growing ethnic variety of the city’s inhabitants, and the ever more distant king, Babylon was at the heart of ongoing wars and violent confrontations, depleting the city’s resources and manpower, and illnesses ran rampant.15 There are several indications that these developments exercised significant pressure on the traditional Babylonian temple community, not least that from the beginning of the second century, cuneiform production starts to dwindle (Clancier 2009, pp. 310–11).

To contend with these challenges posed by foreign imperial rule, members of the traditional Babylonian temple household engaged in the creation of cuneiform texts that gave expression to a new discourse in which not kings, but priests stood central (Jursa and Debourse 2020; see also: Debourse 2022b; Jursa 2020b; Debourse and Jursa 2019; Jursa and Debourse 2017; Waerzeggers 2015b; De Breucker 2015). This Late Babylonian priestly literature (LPBL) comprises compositions that deal with history and ritual legislation, and attests to a reimagination of the Babylonian past to legitimize the priests’ new roles in the temple cult in the present. The LBPL can be defined as a branch of the cuneiform stream of tradition, and although it considerably shifts away from it, it remains strongly rooted in traditional conceptions of kingship and the gods. Particularly, the ideas that the gods are the ultimate arbiters of the world’s fate and that it is humanity’s (and especially the king’s) task to keep the gods content were never abandoned.

Yet, the Marduk priests of Babylon, while reinterpreting or, as it were, recalibrating their intellectual heritage to address the pressing challenges of their kingless era, simultaneously dedicated immense intellectual energy to advancing and significantly expanding the scope of an astrological-astronomical knowledge paradigm. This paradigm, at its core, arguably stemmed from aspirations to radically reshape the intellectual horizons within which these priests operated. We will argue that although on the surface, there may be an apparent tension between these different intellectual projects, they unite in their overarching aim, which is to safeguard the worship of the gods through temple ritual and posit the priests as central to that endeavor.

3. A New Model for the Past

Traditionally, cuneiform historical memory was strongly centered on kingship and the royal persona. In this traditional view, kings were tools in the hands of the gods, divinely commanded to fight off enemies, establish justice, and consolidate territory. Divine will was what drove history, but it took the shape of royal action. Notoriously absent from this tradition are non-royal protagonists. Texts like chronicles, literary-historical epics (also called royal epics), and royal inscriptions seldom include characters that are not kings or gods, and when they do appear, they function seemingly as extensions of royal authority.16 It goes without mention that historical realities were much more complex, but it is a striking feature of cuneiform historiography of the early first millennium that it represents history as an affair in which only gods and kings played a role. By explaining royal action as aligning with divine will, it confirmed kingship as a divinely ordained institution (see also Boivin 2022).

That changed markedly during the Late Babylonian period, when Babylonian priests engaged in a drastic reimagination of their collective past. A consistency across the historiographical texts that they wrote at this time is the inclusion of non-royal—and in most cases, priestly—protagonists. In stark contrast to older traditions, Late Babylonian historiography presents priestly agency as playing a pivotal role in history. Thus, the prime concern of cuneiform historiography shifted from a focus on royal action as the central way to please the gods to priestly attempts at safeguarding the continuity and correct performance of the cult to ensure divine wellbeing. In order to achieve this, priestly characters were inserted into historical narratives that had been inherited from the stream of tradition, effectively shifting the focus from kings to priests in history.

For example, the well-known Nebuchadnezzar I and Elam cycle, expounded in texts like Seed of Kingship (Zamim Ene), traditionally told the story of the retribution visited by a hero king on Elam, which had previously raided Babylon, destroying the temple and abducting the divine image (Foster 2005, pp. 376–80; see also Mitto 2025). However, in the Late Babylonian historical epic known as Kedorlaomer B, this episode was reimagined to include a confrontation between a priest and the Elamite enemy, and completely omitted the figure of a Babylonian hero king (Jursa and Debourse 2017). Additionally, historical episodes that had previously received little attention became central to the Late Babylonian conception of Mesopotamian history, such as the rebellion of Adad-šumu-uṣur (1216–1187) against Assyrian rule (Kamil 2021; De Breucker 2015). The presence of earlier historiographical texts in the Late Babylonian Esagil libraries emphasizes the consciousness with which these priests undertook this reimagination of their past.17

Throughout the LBPL, priests are thus portrayed as the ones who drive the plot and, by extension, history (Jursa and Debourse 2020, pp. 269–77). They were the guardians of cuneiform culture, which was considered god-given, and the knowledge of which was a prerequisite for divine worship. Beyond that, many Late Babylonian historical texts involve priests playing an intermediary role between kings and gods. A particularly powerful trope is that of a priest urging a king who had not been heeding the gods to take up his divinely appointed task as patron of the cult, often putting his own safety at risk (Debourse and Jursa 2019; De Breucker 2015). Finally, the LBPL presents priests more generally as protectors of the cult, for example in the face of enemy attacks, during wartime, or in the absence of royal patronage more broadly. While kings are not entirely absent from these late texts, their role is remarkably minimal or passive. The inextricable bond between kings and gods, to which earlier cuneiform historiography subscribes, is thus strongly put into question in the LBPL.

4. A New Model for the Present

The LBPL deals emphatically with priestly concerns, exploring socio-political matters such as the question of the priesthood’s relationship with imperial powers or cultural-linguistic questions revolving around the use of cuneiform and the upkeep of the stream of tradition. Yet, the central concern in these priestly writings lies with the correct and continued performance of the temple cult, which served to keep the gods content and hence ensure stability and wellbeing. The Late Babylonian historiographical accounts explore different ways in which this could be achieved under foreign imperial rule, leaving room for both royal and priestly roles in the cult. However, another genre of late cuneiform texts lays out a program for a temple cult that removes the necessity of royal patronage.18

The temple ritual texts provide descriptions of rituals that should take place within Babylon’s temples (Da Riva 2019, 2021; Da Riva and Galetti 2018; Linssen 2004; George 2000).19 They deal largely with festivals and processions, and less so with matters of the daily cult.20 Assyriologists have long understood these texts to accurately reflect the reality of temple worship in Hellenistic Babylon. Moreover, they considered them to be copies of older compositions, and as such, they should attest to the continuity of cultic traditions (Linssen 2004). However, more recent scholarship has nuanced this view, underscoring the Late Babylonian creation of these texts and understanding them as functioning within that Late Babylonian context (Gabbay 2025; Debourse 2022b; Da Riva 2021). Additionally, it has become increasingly clear that these temple ritual texts do not offer clear windows onto rituals that took place in Hellenistic Babylon. Instead, they are characterized by idealizing and archaizing tendencies that blur our view of actual ritual practices (Debourse and Gabbay 2024; Debourse 2022b, pp. 334–36 and chap. 5, passim). The use of antiquarian or archaizing priestly titles, the mention of temples that had fallen out of use, the choice for specific language, and the use of colophons and subscripts all make the texts themselves, and their contents, seem older than they are. Despite that, both in terms of language and content, it is undeniable that these temple ritual texts were composed during the Late Babylonian period.21

Furthermore, while some of the rites described in these late compositions are attested earlier, the texts themselves are preserved in individual copies that have no textual precursors, and the known rituals are presented in entirely new ways. They are Babylon-centric and deal almost exclusively with deities from Bēl-Marduk’s circle, explicitly excluding other important deities like Anu and Enlil, the patron gods of Uruk and Nippur, respectively (Debourse 2022b, pp. 296–300). Another prominent characteristic is the minimal role that they accord to the king: many earlier temple ritual texts include the king as the central cultic agent, especially in festivals and processions, but the Late Babylonian texts do not mention the king at all (with one significant exception; see below).22 While there are earlier examples of ritual texts where the king would be expected to appear yet does not, it is the ubiquitousness of his absence that sets the Late Babylonian temple ritual texts apart from earlier ritual traditions.23

Most importantly, the Late Babylonian temple ritual texts present priests as the only actors needed to perform the temple cult. They contain a wide array of priestly titles for male and female ritualists, many of whom are not attested before (Debourse, forthcoming a, forthcoming b; Çağırgan and Lambert 1991–1993, p. 90). This not only creates the image of a vibrant and bustling temple cult with a rich cultic staff, but it also served to define the priesthood more closely and draw a distinct line around who was included, i.e., those who bore these titles—and who was excluded. Crucially, there is a tendency in these late texts to circumscribe the priesthood as a divinely privileged group; for example, by referring to them as ṣābē kidinni, “people (falling under) the banner of divine protection” (Debourse 2022b, pp. 321–27; Jursa and Debourse 2020, pp. 269–77).

Among all these ritualists, one priest in particular stands out in the Late Babylonian temple ritual texts. The Elder Brother (aḫu-rabû) or high priest appears in many Late Babylonian texts, where he assumes the role of highest ritual authority (Debourse 2022b, pp. 222–28). In the historical-literary narratives among the LBPL, he is portrayed as ensuring the continuity of the cult when wars and the absence of royal action threatened to disrupt it.24 He is omnipresent within the corpus of temple ritual texts, and he takes up a particularly prominent role in the New Year Festival texts, where he is put into confrontation with the figure of the king. Throughout these texts, the high priest’s actions entirely eclipse royal agency, culminating in the slapping of the king during the so-called ritual humiliation and negative confession of the king (Mirelman 2021; Debourse 2019). The stark contrast between priestly agency and royal passivity is further underscored by another Late Babylonian composition, known as the Eulogy of the Elder Brother, which states that no king may ever slap the high priest (George 2021; Jursa and Debourse 2017). As the chosen one of Marduk,25 the Elder Brother takes on an unprecedented supra-royal role in the context of the temple cult.

A surprisingly large number of temple ritual texts have survived from Hellenistic Babylon (George 2007, p. 155). This prominence of ritual writings seems to suggest that the priesthood was in a process not just of reformulating practices but of rethinking ritual itself (see also Debourse and Rhyder 2024). The temple ritual texts present a way forward beyond the challenges of the present and the pressures of tradition. They sketch a picture of a temple cult that could function entirely without the patronage of a king who is invested in maintaining the Babylonian gods.26 Instead, they center priestly agency and favor ritual as a rectifying mechanism. The Babylon Calendar Treatise, mentioned in the introduction, strengthens this conceptualization of ritual as a powerful mechanism in the hands of the Babylonian priests. Yet, it inextricably links it to another uniquely priestly skill: divination.

5. A New Model for the Future

A unique text from the late Persian or, more likely, from the Hellenistic period, labeled by its first editor as “an esoteric Babylonian commentary” (Biggs 1968; see also Böck 2000; De Zorzi 2014, pp. 275–76) states in its opening lines:

“The divinatory series Šumma izbu (‘If a malformation’), Sakikkû (‘Symptoms’) and Alandimmû (‘Physical Characteristics’) correspond to the constellations Aries, Taurus, and Orion; they are for taking predictions from physical appearance. When (the constellations) culminate, this refers to Physical Characteristics.27 Guard the secrets of heaven and earth”.

The point made here is that traditional Babylonian divination methods—teratomancy and physiognomy—are to be understood to be correlated to, or indeed to be nothing but an extension of, astrology, and more precisely, horoscopy, the new divinatory discipline rooted in the Mesopotamian interest in astral divination that came to the fore from the late fifth century onwards.28 In this period, astrology, the interpretation of celestial phenomena, be they observed or imagined, had become the primary vector of the Mesopotamian divinatory enterprise, replacing the earlier holder of this distinction, extispicy, in terms of its ubiquity and prestige. The point made by the ‘esoteric commentary’ quoted above goes further than this, however, in that it claims an astrological base for the other divinatory disciplines mentioned. This late period ‘astrologization’ of the disciplines of Mesopotamian erudition is not limited to divination. The so-called Kalendertexte put zodiacal and calendrical data in relation to stones, plants, and animals—entities that had a role as materia medica, and elsewhere the zodiacal signs are correlated with certain diseases: all of this is related to astrological medicine.29

However, it is important to note that while these epiphenomena of what we might choose to call the ‘astrology paradigm’ of Babylonian erudition are seen as predecessors of later Greco-Roman and indeed Medieval and Renaissance astrology and iatromagic30 and are in their way innovations of the late period, they do not represent in and of themselves a radical—epistemological or ontological—break with the earlier Mesopotamian worldview. When practicing their form of astrology or astrological medicine, Babylonian priests did not believe, as later astrologers in different European traditions of ultimately Greek inspiration did, in a ‘physical’ theory of astrology. They did not assume that it was some sort of physical stellar irradiation or the power of the ether that caused the celestial bodies’ influence on Earth. Rather, the causality underlying astrology remained ultimately attached to the supposition of the divine will—the divine will that was considered to be (literally) inscribed into the observable world by various signs that could be deciphered by following the clues of similitude and analogy (Rochberg 2010, pp. 7–8).

As Nils Heeßel correctly observes in his discussion of a Kalendertext, these texts are predicated on the assumption that “all things … have certain characteristics, qualities that attract or repel other things. Everything is permeated by a network of interdependencies, of sympathies and antipathies”; “Babylonian scholars have conceived all the things of nature as an (invisible) web woven from sympathies and antipathies and interconnected” (Heeßel (2005) quoted in Rochberg (2016, p. 154)). However, this is not so much a “starkly altered perception of nature and its mode of operation”, (Heeßel (2005) quoted in Rochberg (2016, p. 154)) as in essence the basic principle on which all Babylonian divination is based (De Zorzi 2022, pp. 376–80), a principle the famous Diviner’s Manual expresses by stating that “heaven and earth are related (lit. ‘hold each other’, itḫuzū)” (quoted in De Zorzi 2022, pp. 378–79; for the Manual, see Oppenheim 1974). Thus, neither the principle underlying astrology nor even the intrinsic connection of other means of divination to it is an innovation of the late period, but the pride of place that is given to astral divination in this time is. To understand its rise to primacy in the diviner’s toolbox and the implications of this development, it is necessary to go back to the early sixth century.

At this time, when Babylon was the center of the newly established Neo-Babylonian empire under its second and most consequential king, Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562), the long-term project of gathering what modern research calls the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries was, if not begun in absolute terms, then given decisive impetus and direction (Steele 2019; Jursa 2020a). The institutional seat of this undertaking was, in the first instance, Esagila, the temple of Marduk in Babylon, and more generally also other Babylonian temples. Its practitioners were learned priests, who in their specific functions of astronomers/astrologers were designated as mašmaššu or āšipu “incantation priest”, kalû “lamentation priest”, and in the later period more frequently ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil “scribe of the celestial omen series Enūma Anu Enlil” (e.g., Steele 2018, p. 76; Robson 2019).

An Astronomical Diary, in its most typical form, covered half a year, subdivided into monthly sections (but there are also texts for four months or even shorter periods). The monthly sections contain a standardized set of astronomical information: length of the preceding month; data for certain lunar and solar phenomena for the beginning, middle and end of the month; eclipses when present; and planetary phenomena, in the later phase from the fourth century onwards, with relation to the then newly introduced zodiac. These astronomical observations are supplemented by a standard set of quantifiable terrestrial phenomena: prices of certain standard commodities, staples, and wool, and the height of the Euphrates River at Babylon. There are also observations on the weather, and frequently, but not entirely systematically, chronicle-style entries on events of relevance for the city and particularly the temple community.31

The chronicle-style notes display a clear diachronic development. In the earlier Diaries, down to the fifth century, the ‘historical’ notes that predominate in the later record are relatively rare, and observations on events that resemble ominous signs as recorded in terrestrial or teratomantic omen compendia (“that month, a fox entered the city”) make up the bulk of the pertinent material (Pirngruber 2013). Within the more conventionally ‘historical’ notes of the later diaries, three thematic categories can be discerned (Tuplin 2019): ‘religious’ (50 percent of the Seleucid-period cases, 28 percent of those of Parthian date); ‘royal’ (37/28 percent), and ‘military’ (29/45 percent). The ‘royal’ entries mostly refer to the movements of the Seleucid or Parthian monarch and to the advent of royal messengers, messages, or officials in Babylon. ‘Military’ entries refer to local and, more rarely, to far-off fighting, and to the movement of troops and/or military officials, especially in Babylon. ‘Religious’ notes mostly refer to the life of the temple, to sacrifices by visiting officials, and to festivals and religiously charged events, sometimes of a problematic nature from the viewpoint of the priestly chroniclers, in the city of Babylon.

Specialized research has reconstructed the use to which the astronomical data collected in the Diaries were put.32 Essentially, it is possible to establish a sequence of text types that approaches a flow-chart.33 The principal point to be made regarding these compilations of lunar and planetary data, especially eclipse data, Goal-Year Texts, Almanacs, and Normal Star Almanacs is that they go from observations (in the Diaries) to compilations of observations and thence on to predictions (based on the realization that certain phenomena are cyclical). Predictions generated in this way, in turn, could be used to guide observations or indeed substitute them (in the Diaries), e.g., when bad weather rendered observation of certain phenomena impossible. This is a self-contained and very powerful system of astronomical knowledge. Still, in parallel to the Diary system, from the fourth or perhaps already from the late fifth century onwards, the same priestly astronomers developed certain procedures of mathematical astronomy: they came up with non-observation-based arithmetic procedures that allowed calculating planetary, lunar, and thus also calendrical phenomena (Ossendrijver 2018). Interestingly, even though the practitioners of these different approaches to astronomy were the same, there was no cross-over from the observation-based system centering on the Diaries and the mathematical system (Steele 2018, pp. 93–96).

As stated above, the huge effort underlying the Diaries in particular was mostly centered in Esagila, and it really got under way during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, and almost certainly at royal instigation.34 What it was supposed to generate was necessarily Herrschaftswissen, knowledge that the priests were supposed to produce on behalf of the king. Hence, they sought to understand the huge message board that was the sky through which the gods were expected to communicate those intentions that were of the highest consequence, namely those with a bearing on king and country. In other words, the underlying prime interest was divinatory. So it remained also in the later period, even though the priests, in line with the overall change in the political situation and their self-perception, came to collect these data not for a king, be he native or foreign, but in their own right as the main guarantors of the equilibrium between the gods, their demands, and the city and its temple community.35 The inclusion of events that were traditionally seen as ominous (“fox in the city”) and later of chronicle-like vignettes—that in their overwhelming majority refer to the city, its religious establishment, and its relation to political power—stems from the same motive. Given the priests’ culturally conditioned expectation to see things in the world as being “a web woven from sympathies and antipathies and interconnected” (see above), the juxtaposition of celestial phenomena, which serial observation aimed at gaining a better understanding of, with terrestrial events of immediate relevance for the priestly community would have been of considerable interest.36

Positing divination as a primary interest of the Diaries’ authors, while hardly controversial, still involves a certain degree of inference, as the texts do not state the motivations underlying them explicitly. The Calendar Treatise described above in the introduction thus provides us with an important missing link for the argument proposed here. The material collected in this compilation is concerned with the safety of Babylon, its temple (community), and its cult, which are perceived as being threatened by traditional enemies in the North (Subartu) and East (Elam), as well as by inadequate rulers over Babylonia.37 Celestial signs referring to these threats are presented in the text as grounds for priestly intervention; ritual performance was the means of choice to counteract negative predictions, and pertinent omissions lead to disaster, as one is to understand from the echo of past catastrophes that pervades the text.38 However, the text does not only present the root cause for ritual action (the ominous celestial signs) and a description of the ritual countermeasures, it also gives the rationale for it; that is, it not only presents ritual as a mechanism of central importance to safeguard Babylon and its cult, it also explains it (see also Debourse 2022a).

This explanation collects and connects both astronomical information and innovative readings of mythology and history in an analogistic frame of reference that owes much to traditional Babylonian divination. Through these elements, the Calendar Treatise constructs a highly intricate network of meaningful correspondences. In doing so, it shares its epistemological framework with the two principal bodies of original writing produced by the Babylonian priesthood in the Late Babylonian period, and in part it arguably draws on them; they are interconnected. First, the Diaries and related texts provide the specific astrological/astronomical background as well as some historical material. Second, the LBPL, owing to the specific framing of the exempla it takes from Babylonian tradition that fit the priests’ ideological needs, provides the blueprint for the schematic construction of the outside menace and for the absolute primacy of priestly agency in the form of ritual to counteract it to the benefit of Marduk and his temple.

Thus, the Calendar Treatise, all its idiosyncrasies and highly complex technicalities notwithstanding,39 encapsulates the essence of what distinguishes the worldview of the Hellenistic Babylonian priests from that of their earlier counterparts. Their astronomical and astrological competence, honed by centuries of first state-sponsored and later independent collective investigation of the analogical nexus between the heavens and the affairs of humans, jointly with their deep investment in Babylonian cultural memory as transmitted by cuneiform writing and its traditional texts, equipped them with the necessary tools to understand the future in light of the past and act on this future to the benefit of community, temple and city. Temple ritual was the crucial primary vector to achieve the necessary harmony with the divine that alone could guarantee collective wellbeing. The ultimate purpose of the Babylonian priests’ entire intellectual enterprise is therefore to guarantee the continuity of temple ritual, and all their writings in the end send the message that it is their own priestly competences that render them indispensable to society in that regard.

Thus, the resulting picture of the Babylonian priesthood’s mindset and objectives is intrinsically coherent. However, it remains to be discussed whether this coherence is not more apparent than real. As Rochberg (2016, p. 202) observes, “the Diaries introduced a new element into the landscape of cuneiform knowledge and a new idea into the practice of celestial observation that cannot be reduced to celestial divination”. The Diaries project led to the realization that serial observation proved the cyclicity of certain celestial phenomena.40 The transformative implication, given the analogistic worldview of the priestly astronomers/astrologers, necessarily was that terrestrial phenomena might be expected to behave in a similar manner, i.e., they would display cyclicity. This explains the inclusion in the Diaries of recurring terrestrial phenomena, especially of quantifiable nature, such as prices of everyday commodities or weather observations.41 The Diaries as a whole should then be seen as an attempt to gather the necessary information to establish the coordinated rhythm of heaven, earth, and the world of humans. All of this begs one question: where, one might ask, does this assumption leave the basic premise of astrology and divination in general? If the sequence of events follows recognizable mathematical principles, where is divine agency that speaks through signs? This question presents itself with even more urgency when considering mathematical astronomy. Overall, the distinctive intellectual development in Babylonia from the fourth century onwards can be read as suggesting that the Babylonian priests, while drawing on established cultural elements like divination, cyclical time (e.g., Glassner 2004, p. 8), and a text-based analogistic epistemology, advanced their thinking towards extending their mathematical-astronomical knowledge paradigm to encompass essential all that is knowable. This might then be taken to suggest a nascent mechanistic and deterministic worldview, with a concomitant curtailing of the agency attributed to the gods.

D. Brown has argued along these lines, claiming that “the predictability of phenomena, formerly believed to have been meaningfully altered by gods wishing to inform humanity of their decision, served to distance the gods from Mesopotamian-based mankind, by establishing the non-arbitrariness of some parts of nature. … Is this not a step in the so-called ‘disenchantment’ of nature? Was it not this idea that spread from Mesopotamia to the pre-Socratic Greeks that predictability was possible, for the celestial mechanism could be understood in terms of how (by what means) it runs, irrespective of why (to what end) it runs” (Brown 2003, p. 12).42 Leaving aside the possible influence of such a Babylonian mechanistic worldview on other cultures as a separate problem, there is some intuitive plausibility to Brown’s view, given the overall development of the Babylonian priestly knowledge system towards prioritizing mathematical means of prediction. It is an inference, but the absence of explicit statements in the sources that would corroborate it is not a strong counterargument, given the extreme rarity of generalizing or ‘theoretical’ statements in Babylonian erudite writings in general.

Yet, this tension cannot simply be resolved by positing two separate traditions in the engagement of Babylonian priests with celestial phenomena, that is, by positing, as it were, a ‘conventional’ divinatory tradition and a mathematical-predictive one. ‘Traditional’ divination is well represented in what remains of the cuneiform collections that also give us mathematical astronomy: it was the same group of erudite priests who copied or produced and used all these different text genres (see, e.g., Clancier 2009; Ossendrijver 2011). Still, it could be argued in favor of Brown’s position that the traditional divinatory material present in these contexts should be seen as a historical remnant and was, in any case, in the process of being re-interpreted in an astronomical key.43 The strongest argument against Brown’s reading so far was advanced by Rochberg.44 She notes that the ‘disenchantment’ idea45 is highly anachronistic, unparalleled in the history of science before the early modern age, and, importantly, “part of the ‘mythic origins’ of the scientific revolution as well” given “the persistent importance of God and theology in the history of science until relatively recent times”. However, in the end also her argument is one of silence: she positions herself against Brown’s hypothesis of necessary ‘disenchantment’ since “no stakes in resolving the relationship between the divine and nature are voiced in the cuneiform sources” (Rochberg 2016, pp. 248–49).

At this point in the discussion, we would argue that our functionalist reading of the Calendar Treatise takes us closer to a positive resolution of a conundrum that exists because of modern scholarship’s selective and narrow focus on particular literary and scholarly genres produced in Babylonian priestly circles in the Hellenistic period. As argued above, the Treatise draws together all the several strands of the Babylonian priests’ intellectual interests from history over mythology to astronomy, instrumentalizing them for their ritualistic project of appeasing Marduk. This is as close to an explicit synthesis of the priests’ worldview as we are likely to get, and this worldview undeniably attributes agency to the divine. In other words, even the demonstrable long-term predictability of celestial phenomena and the hypothesis of the predictability of terrestrial events had been integrated into the priests’ traditional theistic worldview.46

6. Conclusions

In a Hellenistic world that grew increasingly more foreign, Babylonian priests “wanted everything to remain the same, so everything had to change”.47 Moving beyond traditional models of knowledge and developing groundbreakingly new ways of approaching the universe, they nonetheless remained strongly rooted in the cuneiform traditions that they had inherited. Most importantly, they never abandoned the idea that the gods decided the fates of the land and that it was humanity’s task to placate them through divine worship. In the absence of a native king who took the divinely appointed task of maintaining the temples to heart and under continuous threat of violence that could lead to interruptions of the regular cult and even temple destruction, the Babylonian priesthood endeavored to grasp control by positing itself as the central pivot of society.

The cuneiform texts that they produced bear witness to how they reconceptualized their world and rooted their new reality in a reimagined past, present, and future in order to achieve this centering of the priesthood. In this paper, we showed how the different strands of Late Babylonian cuneiform production reveal a distinctive intellectual development in Babylonia, where priests, drawing on established cultural elements like divination, cyclical time, and a text-based analogistic epistemology, advanced their thinking towards a knowledge paradigm that integrates history and historiography, mythology, ritual, and astrology and astronomy, including mathematical predictive astronomy. The overall objective of the priests’ several strands of intellectual endeavors was to establish and justify the temple cult and collective priestly ritual as the principal safeguard of communal wellbeing.

This raises several new questions. For example, how do the texts that belong to the so-called ‘stream of tradition’, still copied in large numbers in Hellenistic Babylon, fit into this picture? Commentaries on these compositions can help elucidate priestly motivations to maintain cuneiform tradition, as can notorious absences or abundant presences of specific texts. Additionally, in this paper, we focused on the city of Babylon, but there were other centers of cuneiform culture in Hellenistic Babylonia. A comparison between Babylon and Uruk (and to a smaller degree, Nippur) would most likely uncover some significant differences in how the Marduk priesthood and the Anu priesthood, respectively, developed different discourses and methodologies during the final centuries BCE. Finally, our paper highlights the need for different studies of Babylonian theology and Babylonian conceptions of the divine that are diachronic in orientation and focus on foregrounding the propria of individual periods over prioritizing aspects pointing to (often more apparent than real) continuity over centuries.

More broadly speaking, we would also argue that the Babylonian case establishes a paradigm for understanding how a traditional ancient Near Eastern temple community responded to the challenges posed by foreign imperial rule. It showcases that the main concern of this local priesthood was an idiosyncratic preoccupation with the worship of its gods and with securing its own place in society.48 The Babylonian case is far from unique in that sense, since other traditional Near Eastern communities formed similar answers to the incongruities brought on by the arrival of foreign imperial rulers whose behavior and values were radically different from what was expected from native monarchs and who therefore threatened the stability of temple cults. This response was generally to decenter the role played by the king in a theistic world and instead advance priests or other religious actors as the ones ultimately responsible for and capable of the maintenance of religious traditions, expressed in new textual compositions that reimagined history and ritual.49

These ‘priestly literatures’ are not always contemporary (although there is strong overlap in the Persian-Hellenistic periods when the entire Near East came to be part of ‘foreign’ empires); we would claim instead that they arise as a reaction to similar types of crises rather than to the same historical situations. For example, temple destruction (and, when possible, renovation) did not occur contemporaneously in Babylonia and Judea, yet it did prompt similar reactions such as the development of ‘priestly’ discourses in cultic and historical texts.50 Yet, beyond the relevance of studying similarities between the Babylonian and Judean/Jewish responses to events that occurred under foreign imperial rule, there lies the interest of their differences. The mathematical-astronomical knowledge paradigm discussed in this paper remains unique to its Babylonian setting; in contrast, prominent intellectual-religious trends like eschatology and monotheism never developed within cuneiform culture the way they did in Judean/Jewish tradition.51 Comparative studies that take into account both similarities and differences will lead to a better understanding of the religious landscape that developed within the ancient Near East under foreign imperial rule.