Random Justification of War

The emphasis on the role and decisions of the gods and their communication to man through omens and signs is even more prevalent in strategies of war than in everyday life. Every aspect of a battle was consulted through the omens before being carried out, and the progression and outcome of wars were believed to be preordained and approved by the gods, necessitating a need for a divinely sanctioned and justified war.

The degree to which the consultation of omens was used in military applications far exceeds that of other applications. The requests and inquiries made to the gods regarding battle plans or outcomes were ridiculously specific and included provisions that all but guaranteed that the god’s response would be untainted by any external factor (Bahrani 184-185). Furthermore, an extensive number of possible battle plans were submitted for the gods consideration such that the ritual and omen reading would need to be repeated multiple time (Bahrani 189). What is interesting to note is that this process would be easily seen as a form of corruption of the priests and a subversion of the general populace if it weren’t for the fact that it was a genuine belief that the gods were directly corresponding with man through omens. Related is the association between divinely named weapons and their believed increase in power as compared to unnamed weapons (Bahrani 192). These named weapons would have most likely been identical in design and manufacture to unnamed weapons, yet their believed strength was much greater than ordinary ones. If greater care had gone into their creation or if better quality materials were used, then perhaps the believed increase in strength could have been justified by actual physical properties.

The heavy use of omens in dealing with war strategies also shows the intense need for the wars being fought to be divinely justified. The belief was that if a battle was lost or a city destroyed, the gods had decided that to happen which provided an explanation for their defeat and the possible death of hundreds of lives (Bahrani 215). This implies that the people of ancient Mesopotamia, in fighting these wars, did so without a great personal conviction and needed some sort of reason to prove to themselves that what they were doing was not completely backwards and that they really weren’t fighting a losing battle. This heavy dependence on the “will” of the gods, which could be amounted to chance depending on the circumstances under which the omens were read, could have also led to these wars being fought almost entirely by chance with essentially random dice rolls determining the actions of an entire state.