Getting the “Permission” from God

Chapter 7 of Rituals of Wars goes on to talk about the relationship between religious rituals and war. Since religion was such an important part of the ancient Near Eastern culture and gods were highly respected, it is no surprise that people looked for ways to consult the gods before making any decisions.

But what’s interesting is that it almost seems like people were only asking the gods to have results in their favor. All the questions were asked in a yes or no format, which made it really easy to get a “yes.” Instead of asking “what should the king do with the tribe on the east,” they would ask “should the king send army to the tribe on the east?” This is obviously a leading question with a clearly expected reason. But I guess there are justifications for that. After all, it would be really hard to get any detailed instructions from gods by reading signs from animals’ livers and human body parts.

This system seems to make adulteration possible for the diviners. In order to please the king, the diviners might interpret the signs according to his will. I wouldn’t imagine the diviner to have enough guts to come up with some predictions against the king’s favor. So it looks like it’s not so much about the decision of gods, but of the king himself. This then leads to this ironic situation where the king is asking for permission to do something, but he is actually the permission giver himself.

As Bahrani also mentioned in the introduction of the book, the Mesopotamians were the first to develop the use of semiotics or observation of signs. Since there were precedents, the interpretations of the diviners must not have received that many challenges and questions. At least the Mesopotamians had enough intelligence to view virtually everything in the world as a sign and come up with an explanation for it based on the way it acts. Furthermore, since such explanations were used as guidelines of wars sometimes, the system of semiotics allowed everything embedded in nature to be a part of the mechanism of wars.