2024/2025

Abraham Winitzer, Ph.D.

Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

University of Notre Dame

Born in 1970 in Haifa, Israel
B.A. and M.A. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, M.A. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University

Arbeitsvorhaben

A Philosophical Reformation? Biblical Demythologization of Mesopotamian Myth and Its Implications

My project concerns some central mythic texts and traditions from Mesopotamia – both on their own and in their reformation in the Hebrew Bible – and how these may be understood. Specifically, the question I will try to answer is whether these materials qualify as examples of philosophical expression – of philosophy. In the case of Mesopotamia, the answer to this question has been, for nearly a century, a flat no, owing to a perceived inability of this literature to “emancipate” itself from mythic language and forms taken as fundamental to the thinking underlying it. Yet great strides made of late in thinking about the possibility of philosophical and scientific thinking in Mesopotamia with respect to related literatures have challenged previous thinking. The finding of systematic expressions, formal logic, and epistemology in Mesopotamian scholarly texts has led to proposals to understand those texts as reflective of Mesopotamian philosophy and science. For reasons noted, the same has not been true for the mythic texts, though a new way of looking at things may challenge this conception as well.
Specifically, I propose to approach the question from a partly comparative perspective, informed by important new findings on a deeper knowledge of these traditions in the Hebrew Bible. These findings, moreover, shed better light on the manner by which mythic imagery, forms, and thought in these traditions are replaced by naturalistic and even abstract ways of presentation in their biblical reformations. My project aims to put these cases together so as to investigate their collective significance. I shall inquire whether the biblical adaptation of Mesopotamian mythology can be explained as a process of demythologization or the removal of mythic elements in favor of non-mythic representations and understandings of the same traditions. I will also weigh in on the question of whether such a program would mark a radical turn in human intellectual development, perhaps even the beginnings of rationalism worthy of the designation of philosophy? Finally, I will return to the Mesopotamian texts and traditions and reevaluate them in light of the preceding. As a conclusion to the project, I will strive to answer whether mythic parallels to later demythologized counterparts may simply be discounted as philosophy solely on account of the imagery, language, and forms by which they are conveyed.

Recommended Reading

Winitzer, Abraham. “Etana in Eden: New Light on the Mesopotamian and Biblical Tales in Their Semitic Context.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 133, no. 3 (2013): 441–465.
–. “World Literature as a Source for Israelite History: Gilgamesh in Ezekiel 16.” In Writing and Rewriting History in Ancient Israel and Near Eastern Cultures, edited by Isaac Kalimi, 103–120. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2020.
–. “Atrahasīs, behind the First Sin that Cried to Heaven and Related Matters.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 23, no. 1 (2023): 69–106.

Kolloquium, 13.05.2025

Searching for Science and Philosophy in Mesopotamia – in Myths, too? Don’ts and Dos

The study of Mesopotamian science and philosophy has followed a winding path in Assyriology, one that reflects considerably the manner in which the discipline itself has proceeded from its earliest days to the present. Real findings of “our” science in the cuneiform sources have been challenged by the recognition of the place of these materials in Mesopotamia, on the one hand, and by other cuneiform sources, which do not accord to our ideas about science but which were regarded as such by the Mesopotamians, on the other. And then comes Assyriology’s ugly duckling: myths, which neither for the ancients nor for us corresponded or corresponds to “real” philosophy or science, but which nonetheless offer the most detailed accounts about the origins and nature of the Mesopotamian cosmos and its human inhabitants.

This presentation will lay out the overall problem described here and then proceed to offer a possible avenue by which Mesopotamian mythic texts may be included in the overall conversation. An additional, external approach to this world’s myths will be suggested, one that admits the comparative perspective from the Hebrew Bible. Although unorthodox and long scorned in Assyriology, a consideration of this Biblical perspective, it shall be argued, provides important information on Mesopotamian mythology, with consequences for our thinking about Mesopotamian myth as a form of philosophic or scientific expression in this otherwise “dead” civilization.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Wiko Shorts 06.11.2024