The Neo-Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt and Yahweh's Answer to Job

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) The ancients were quite aware of the contrast between the center and the periphery, the inner versus outer territory.1 The social archaeologist Ian Hodder detects these antipodes, domus and ager, as early as neolithic European settlements.2 Agriculture is the attempt to domesticate the ager, a "culturing of the wild." Hunting and warfare, which were conceptually linked, were also an attempt to effect the domus by domesticating nature and the wild. Neolithic societies sought to create monumental walls and dirt around their long houses to exclude the wild; at the same time they sought to bring the outside under the control of the cultural by hunting.3 The contrast between the domus and forts ("outside the gate") recalls the importance of the city walls as a limen. So many Mesopotamian rituals of passage exploit the liminality of the seru, the wilderness, as a place of transition. In such varied rituals as akitu, mis pi, bit rimki, maqlu, surpu, namburbi, the seru can receive the evil that must be disposed of away from the âlu, "the city," civilization (fig. Ia).4 The classic treatment of this polarity is the story of the "civilizing" of Enkidu in the Gilgamesh Epic.5 In the Erra Epic, when Erra wishes to universalize his rule, he boasts: ina AN-e re-ma-ku ina ?ι-tim lab-ba-ku ina KUR sar-ru-ku (1:109-110) In the heavens I am a wild bull; in the land (ersetu) I am a lion; in the homeland (matu) I am king .... The gods shared their cosmogonie control of the wilderness with the Assyrian king, who was delegated "to expand his rule."6 As we shall see, however, such a divine-royal synergy, though at home with the Priestly writer in Gen 1:27 and Psalm 8, was quite at odds with the view of the author of the YHWH speeches in the book of Job. I. THE NEO-ASSYRIAN LION HUNT By his lion hunt the Neo-Assyrian king identifies himself symbiotically with his victim and thus, like Erra, becomes the lion, extending his rule beyond the city to the ersetu/seru.7 The king as identified with the lion (or with the wild bull) is then a "creature of nature" who rules over his (domesticated people), as a shepherd (Sumerian sipad; Akkadian reu).8 Because of this identification, the defeated lion is never mutilated but is treated with respect, unlike the fate of the king's human foes.9 Until the twentieth century, Panthera leo persica (the Asiatic lion) inspired both awe and fear in the inhabitants of Mesopotamia.10 Now limited to around 250 animals on a game preserve in the northwest Indian Gir Forest, the Asiatic lion is a pathetic survivor of its noble feline predecessors. From our earliest artistic and textual evidence the Asiatic lion has been linked with kingship. The famed mace head of Mesilim, the twenty-sixth-century B.C.E. king of KiS (AO 2340; see fig. 1), found at a possible Ningirsu shrine in Girsu, bears six intertwined lions on its sides and the lion-eagle Anzu (Imdugud) on its top." Its inscription clearly links it with kingship: "Mesilim king of Kis, builder of the temple of the God Ningirsu...." The Assyrian ruler gradually progressed from ruba'um ("prince") to sar kiisati ("king of the universe"); the Neo-Assyrian royal lion hunt played a role in effecting and visualizing that evolution. In this article I wish to concentrate on the function of the well-known Neo-Assyrian royal lion hunt represented in Assurnasirpal IIs Northwest Palace at Kalhu (865 B.C.E.)12 and especially in Assurbanipal's North Palace at Nineveh (645 B.C.E.). In Assurnasirpal II's Northwest Palace the lion hunt was portrayed on stone slabs in the throne room (room B) to the side of the king at the sacred tree (fig. 2); below the lion hunt was the libation scene that completed the successful hunt. As I. Winter has pointed out, the basreliefs of the lion hunt have far greater centrality than they are afforded in the corresponding royal annals. …