Prophets and Temples in Ancient Greek and Near Eastern Religious Contexts

**Ruins from a temple ancient Nippur, said to be the site for the meeting of Sumerian gods, as well as the place that man was created. / Photo by Jasmine N. Walthall, Wikimedia Commons**

Prophecy was another characteristic representative of the ancient art of divination.

By Dr. Martti Nissinen
Professor of Old Testament Studies
University of Helsinki

Introduction

Prophecy, by any definition, is a religious institution; hence an investigation into prophets connected with other religious institutions, such as temples, is most necessary. In the tradition of biblical studies, however, juxtaposing prophets and temples easily evokes antagonisms characteristic of biblical stud-ies throughout the twentieth century, such as prophets versus cult, prophets versus priests, cultic versus independent prophets, true versus false prophets,and so on. The sharp distinction between the pro-establishment professional prophets dependent on religious institutions on the one hand, and anti-cultic,independent, and oppositional prophets on the other hand, belongs firmly to the construct of prophecy developed in the late nineteenth century and has ever since been daily bread for anyone involved in biblical studies.¹

The contraposition between cultic and anti-cultic prophets has seldom, if ever, been value-free: the sympathies of scholars have usually been with the latter group that has been held in higher estimation with regard to religious and social innovation, spirituality, and morals. While recognizing the affiliation of prophets with sanctuaries as a common state of affairs in ancient Israel, as in the ancient Near East in general, a special group often coined as “classical” prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea, has traditionally been granted an elevated position. In the words of J. Philip Hyatt written in 1963:

Some [prophets] were ecstatics, and hardly more than dervishes or shamans; others were men of great stature, probably not subject to ecstatic possession. Some were members of organized societies or attached to sanctuaries, while others were solitary individuals. Some were closely associated with the royal court, while others engaged in revolutionary activities that led to the change of dynasties. The very small group of men whose books have been preserved as the Prophets in the Bible represent only a tiny minority. They were free, independent-minded, charismatic individuals.²

This common attitude was criticized in the very same year by Peter L. Berger who saw “the notion of the prophets as brave individualists defying the religious authorities of their time” growing from the nineteenth-century German Protestant atmosphere: “In this way, the prophets are made to appear as proto-Protestants of an earlier dispensation.”³ Reviewing biblical studies of his time as a sociologist, and modifying Max Weber’s theory of charisma⁴ which had contributed much to the distinction at issue, he would suggest that the social location of all Israelite prophets should be sought in cultic institutions, not isolating the charismatic innovation from established religion. Building on earlier studies to the same effect, especially those of Sigmund Mowinckel and Aubrey Johnson,⁵ Berger also referred to the study of prophecy and related phenomena in the ancient Near East, initiated by Gustav Hölscher’s Die Profeten (1914):⁶

For it is precisely the turning point marked by Hoelscher’s work—the re-interpretation of Israelite prophecy in the light of the increasingly rich material available to scholars concerning the culture and religion of the societies surrounding Palestine. And it is the steady and impressive expansion of this general knowledge of the ancient Near East, aided by massive new data unearthed by the archaeologists, that furnishes the background of the re-interpretation.⁷

**Gustav Hölscher’s *Die Profeten* (1914). / Public Domain**

When Berger wrote the above-quoted words, the extrabiblical evidence of prophecy was not really very large; today, however, the corpus of some 175 individual texts documenting ancient Near Eastern prophecy makes the “re-interpretation of Israelite prophecy” a whole lot easier. Complementing the Near Eastern and biblical sources with Greek material enables a new overview of prophetic divination in an ancient Eastern Mediterranean religious context.

To avoid the shortcomings of the word “cult,” often burdened with negative and sometimes misleading connotations, I prefer to talk about prophets and temples, thus referring to institutions of religious worship. For the sake of convenience, the word “temple” is used in this essay in a very broad sense as an environment for worship, as an alleged dwelling-place of the divine presence whether it was thought to be permanent or temporary, and as the domicile of religious institutions and their employees, be it a huge temple complex or a small outdoor sanctuary. It goes without saying that the function and significance of temples and cult places varied according to their size, location, wealth, and status. Not all kinds of sanctuaries can be called temples in strictly archaeological terms;⁸ for the needs of the present article, however, this one term will suffice as shorthand.

To form a meaningful and integral part of a society, any institutional order must have legitimacy; to quote Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann: “Legitimation ‘explains’ the institutional order by ascribing cognitive validity to its objectivated meanings. Legitimation justifies the institutional order by giving a normative dignity to its practical imperatives.”⁹ According to Berger and Luckmann, the highest level of legitimation is constituted by symbolic universes that “integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality.”¹⁰ Temples are prime examples of such an institutional order. In the ancient Near East, temples were centers of the mythological universe,¹¹ sacred environments where the objective and subjective aspects of reality come face to face, and the community of worshipers is expected to experience the presence of and encounter the divine.¹² The worshipers went to temples to participate in the divine presence and to approach the divine by various means such as offerings, prayers, and other ritual celebrations, performed on the occasion of public festivities as well as during individual visits. One can easily imagine that, whenever these approaches were expected to inspire the experience of receiving a response from a deity, the response was received within the same sacred environment.

The more prominent status the temple had in the mental map of the members of the community, the more important symbolic significance it had for the identity of the community in the maintenance of their symbolic universe¹³ as the dwelling place of their patron deities. A divine response received in the temple could, therefore, have social and political dimensions transcending the very time, place, and addressee(s) of its reception. This is especially true with regard to different institutions of rulership: the closer the ties between temples and rulers, typically kings, whose rule was divinely sanctioned everywhere in the ancient Near East, the weightier the divine resolutions proclaimed to them in the temples. The royal inscriptions and other sources from all over the ancient Near East testify to the importance of the meticulous care of temples and their worship as one of the principal duties of the king. Building and restoring temples were pious works to which the kings were exhorted by prophets and other diviners. On the other hand, they could also be reproached for disregarding the temples and their worship.

Not all divine responses were received in temples, however. Divinatory acts, that is, different ways of receiving allegedly divine responses and becoming conversant with divine knowledge, were not confined to the temple environment. Practitioners of technical divination did not typically belong to the personnel of the temples; at Mari and Assyria, for instance, they were rather employed by the royal court.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the very act of divination was a ritual in itself, requiring certain qualifications of the diviner like a sufficient degree of ritual purity, appropriate divinatory skills, and an acknowledged social role. The ritual aspect of the divinatory act was related to temple activities; extispicy, for instance, was preceded by the sacrifice of animals whose intestines were then interpreted by the diviners (bārû). The livers of sacrificed sheep were certainly not regarded as leftovers recycled for secondary purposes; on the contrary, the properly performed sacrifice was considered a prerequisite of successful divination.¹⁵

Prophecy was another characteristic representative of the ancient art of divination. Unlike in sacrificial divination, the Near Eastern prophetic performance did not presuppose a ritual; prophetic messages could be uttered in a variety of environments, whether in a ritual setting in the temple or outside the temple context. Notwithstanding this, the sacred space of the temple was an ideal venue for communication with the divine by means of prophecy.¹⁶ The prophetic appearances, again, had to be performed by persons acknowledged as prophets and controlled by appropriate authorities. It is my purpose to demonstrate with the help of ample evidence discernible from ancient Near Eastern written documentation that this indeed was the case.

Ancient Near Eastern Sources: Second Millennium BCE

Temples as Venues of Prophetic Performances

Goddess Ištar on an Akkadian Empire seal, 2350–2150 BCE. She is equipped with weapons on her back, has a horned helmet, is trampling a lion held on a leash and is accompanied by the star of Shamash. / Photo by Sailko, Wikimedia Commons

Temples appear as typical venues for prophetic appearances in the texts from Mari. I have discussed the two texts pertaining to the ritual of Ištar at Mari, in which prophets, if able to reach the altered state of consciousness, prophesy in the presence of the king in interplay with lamentation song performed by musicians. The two tablets are written by different scribes and may describe two separate ritual occasions;¹⁷ at any event, they provide conclusive evidence of prophetic performances in a most prominent ritual context in the kingdom of Mari. The texts are not at all specific about what the prophets were expected to prophesy, but the ritual context suggests a message from the goddess related to the lamentations that the musicians are supposed to perform. The musical performance would make sense only if the prophet is able to act as the mouthpiece of the goddess, who is also the subject of the lamentation the musicians are supposed to perform.¹⁸ The presence of the prophets in the temple is concretized by the instructions written on the side of one of the tablets, according to which “water in a container and four meḫsû-jars are installed; they are always at the disposal of the prophets.”¹⁹

In the correspondence of Mari deriving from the Old Babylonian period, the authors of the letters repeatedly report how prophets “arise” (tebû) in temples to deliver a divine message, the essential contents of which are then summarized in the letter; for example:

Another matter: a female prophet arose in the temple of Annunitum and spoke:“Zimri-Lim, do not go on campaign! Stay in Mari, and I shall continue to answer.”²⁰

In this and two other cases²¹ it is explicitly mentioned that the “arising” had happened in a temple, while in others, this is indicated by other expressions, such as “arising before Dagan”:

Also, a prophet arose before Dagan and spoke: “How much longer will I not drinkpure water? Write to your lord that he may provide me with pure water!”²²

Since this is mentioned by the letter-writer immediately after his report on offerings for Dagan and a subsequent sacrificial meal, there can be no doubt that even the oracle is presented as taking place in the same venue. Indeed, this evidence points to the conclusion that the use of the verb tebû²³ in itself suggests that the prophetic appearance took place in the temple context,²⁴ whereas different expressions are used to indicate that the prophet spoke elsewhere. The letters very commonly report that a prophet had “come and spoken” to the writer; the verbs used here are alāku and iqbû.25 The place of the encounter is disclosed only once,²⁶ but even in other cases, the temple environment seldom plays a role, and the verb alāku itself implies the movement of the prophet to the letter-writer rather than vice versa. Hence, it seems like the choice of the verb indicates whether the prophet was performing in the temple or delivered her/his words elsewhere.²⁷

Devotional scene to Inanna, Warka Vase, c. 3200–3000 BC, Uruk. This is one of the earliest surviving works of narrative relief sculpture. / Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), The Iraq Museum, Wikimedia Commons

Yet another expression used for a prophetic performance is the verb maḫû, “to be crazy, to go into frenzy,” which implies that prophecies were delivered in an altered state of mind. This is said to have happened in the temple of Annunitum, a local Ištar goddess,²⁸ on two occasions, involving two different prophets:

In the temple of Annunitum, three days ago, Šelebum went into trance and said: “Thus says Annunitum: ( . . . ).”²⁹

In the temple of Annunitum in the city, Aḫatum, a servant girl of Dagan-Malik, went into trance and spoke: “Zimri-Lim ( . . . ).”³⁰

In some cases, prophetic messages are transmitted by the Aḫum, the priest of the temple of Annunitum, presumably reporting what had happened in this temple,³¹ and thus fulfilling the responsibility of keeping the king informed of oracles delivered in the temples of Mari, especially during his absence:

When my lord decided to undertake the campaign, he gave me the following instructions: “You reside in the city of God. Write to me whatever oracle isde[live]red in the temple of God and which you hear.”³²

The demand to report every oracle that is delivered in “the house of God,” implied by another writer as well,³³ suggests that in the world of the Mari letters, temples were places where the prophetic oracle was expected to take place and where full attention was paid to it—at least in the time of King Zimri-Lim. The letters mention nothing about the audience of the prophecies, but rather give the impression that not many people except for the temple personnel were witnessing the performance. This makes the role of the priest crucial in transmitting the prophecy to its royal addressee.³⁴

One of the rare prophetic texts from second-millennium Babylonia presents itself as a first-person narrative of an anonymous prophet. The text describes a dialogue between the prophet and the goddess Nanaya, whose words a redirected to an anonymous king, who apparently has just been established:

The legitimate shepherd, whose name is good, whose protective spirit is everlasting, has entered the temple Eanna. From now on, he is surrounded by health and well-being, from the day when Nanaya entered and had me sit down in the gate of Sin, her father. She said: “Until I establish a legitimate shepherd and revive dead Uruk, you shall grind the sūtu of Uruk.³⁵ Great Uruk will look to me, (and) I will exempt the city and the temple (from it).”³⁶

The continuation of the dialogue is difficult to translate; what is clear, however, is that the concluding lines of the tablet present the words (awātum) of the goddess as prophecy: “(These are) the words the goddess³⁷ spoke to me. Let my lord listen to what I say, let him retain my words, that he may attain the god’s desire.” Whether the text is a transcript of an actually spoken oracle is doubtful because of the narrative frame, but it is nevertheless presented as a divine word transmitted by the prophet, to be taken seriously by the king. The dialogue takes place at the gate of the temple of Sin, the Moon-god, where the goddess had made the prophet sit, thus localizing the prophecy in a temple context.

Prophets among the Temple Personnel

**Tablet of Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, concerning the foundation of an ice-house in Terqa. / Photo by Jastrow, Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons**

The texts discussed above leave little doubt of the temples as being prominent venues for prophetic performances at Mari; however, they are not at all informative about the role of the prophets in the actual functioning of the temples where the prophets are said to have spoken. The above-mentioned texts pertaining to the prophets’ performances in the ritual of Ištar provide striking evidence of prophesying in a prominent ritual setting; however, if a prophet participates in a ritual, we still “do not know that he lived in the temple or took even a majority of his income from service there.”³⁸

Some indirect evidence can be quoted, such as the letter of Nur-Sin to Zimri-Lim quoting a prophecy, which may be explained as originally belonging to his enthronement ceremony and secondarily quoted in the letter.³⁹ This is well in line with the roughly contemporaneous oracles of Kititum to KingIbalpiel II of Ešnunna, also interpreted as connected to his coronation.⁴⁰ Thanks to a food rations list from the temple of Kititum at Nerebtum we know that there were indeed prophets (muḫḫû) provided for by this temple. According to this document, the allowance of the temple of Kititum consists of a huge amount of barley and beer to be delivered, among others, to female musicians, prophets, hired workers, and harvesters, that is, both to cultic and maintenance personnel of the temple.⁴¹ Again, the juxtaposition of musicians and prophets strikes the eye.

Further references to prophets in the context of temples can be found in a number of Old Babylonian administrative texts from different cities. A decree of expenditures records the outlays for rites performed during ten days from the fifteenth until the twenty-fourth of the month of Shebat (XI) at the capital city of Larsa in the time of Rim-Sin in the late nineteenth century BCE.⁴² In the section of the text relating to the ceremony of the evening of the eighteenth day, the recipients of one liter of oil include the singers, the lamentation priests, the groom, the prophet, the brewer, the messenger of the en-priestess, the builder, and the purification priest⁴³ with his assistant; the list makes the prophet appear in a company rather similar to that inlexical texts. Another decree of disbursement of oil from Sippar (Tell ed-Der) mentions a prophet together with a temple administrator, an overseer of the temple women, a miller, a groom, a steward, and a potter, suggesting a temple context for the recipients.⁴⁴ The same may be said of the document from the Syrian city of Tuttul, in which a prophet is mentioned as recipient of sesame immediately after mentioning the temple of Dagan.⁴⁵ Taken together, these four⁴⁶ texts leave no doubt that prophets were part of the infrastructure of Old Babylonian temples. Even though the texts are not very numerous, they come from different cities, suggesting that Mari with its numerous prophets was no exception in Near Eastern cities of that period; what makes Mari a special case is rather the discovery of its substantial archive, thanks to which we are better informed of many things in that city, including prophetic divination.⁴⁷

Prophets as Advocates of Worship

**Mesopotamia in 2nd millennium BCE. / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons**

Further evidence of the close affiliation of prophets with temples at Mari can be found in letters reporting prophetic words that give orders to the king concerning ritual performances. The following two examples are quoted from letters written by Kibri-Dagan, the governor of the city of Terqa that housed the temple of Dagan, which was one of the principal sites of prophetic divination in the kingdom of Mari:

Send to your lord the following message: The new month has now begun, and on the fourteenth day, thepagrā’umofferings should be executed. Not a single offering may be neglected.⁴⁸

Another matter: When I sent this tablet to my lord, a [p]rophet of [D]agan ca[m]eand [s]poke to [me]: “The god has sent me, saying: ‘Hurry up and deliver a message to the king that akispum offering be performed for the spirit of Yaḫdun-Lim.’”⁴⁹

Both offerings, pagrā’um and kispum, belong to mortuary rituals, as is made plain in the second example referring to the spirit (eṭemmu) of the deceased king.⁵⁰ The prophets, apparently in tandem with the temple of Dagan at Terqa,⁵¹ remind the king about communal events significant for the social memory of the community, the royal house in particular.

An important ritual activity at Mari was the erection of sacred stelae and commemorative monuments.⁵² In one of the Mari letters, Zimri-Lim is urged to erect such a monument:

[…the god DN spo]ke [as follows: “Let Zimri-Lim erect] a commemorative monument (ḫumūsum) in [ . . . ], and I will es[tablish] his name for e[ver].” However, the sacrifice for this commemorative monument has not been offered, and my lord has said to me as follows: “In Mari I shall deliver to you a casting net.⁵³ Place it in this commemorative monument.” [No]w my lord has ar[rived]in Mari, but has not deliv[ered] the casting net.⁵⁴

Because of the damage to the text, we do not know the sender of this letter, and even a prophet is not mentioned in the preserved text. However, what is left of the first eight lines of the tablet is clearly a quotation of a divine demand and promise. The ḫumūsum, perhaps a cairn rather than a stele, seems to have been assembled to commemorate the site of an event, usually of a political nature.⁵⁵ In the case of this letter it seems that the monument is already there; however, the paraphernalia necessary for performing a ritual (a casting net symbolizing the defeat of an enemy?⁵⁶) have still not been delivered. Because their delivery seems to be dependent on the king himself, nothing less than a divine word is enough to have the ritual performed appropriately.

Another prophetic demand to erect a commemorative monument is worth mentioning in this connection, even though it is an early first millennium text.The late tenth/early ninth-century BCE stele discovered in the vicinity of TellAhmar (Til Barsib) in Northern Syria was erected by Hamiyata, king of Masuwari, for the Storm-god Tarhunza to commemorate Hamiyata’s and his royal father’s victories over their enemies. The Luwian text of the stele specifically mentions that its erection was prompted by a prophecy:

The one belonging to a god said to me: “Erect the Storm-god of the Army!” And in the year in which I went to . . . with the support of the Storm-god with five hundred . . . vehicles and with the . . . army,—when I came away—in that year I erected this Storm-god of the Army.⁵⁷

**Luwian storm god Tarḫunz. / Photo by Verity Cridland, National Museum of Aleppo, Wikimedia Commons**

The “one who belongs to the god” is clearly a prophetic figure,⁵⁸ transmitting the divine command concerning the monument. The Luwian king demonstrates his piety by presenting the establishment of the monument as something that did not happen at his own initiative. As a by-product, he also provides important information on his use of prophetic divination.

The correspondence of the king of Mari includes several letters suggesting that the welfare of the temples and the people dependent on them was an important concern for the prophets in the kingdom of Mari. The king is not only reminded of his cultic duties but also reprimanded for his negligence in cultic matters; the temple authorities remind the king of his nonchalant attitude towards the worship of particular deities or neglected or insufficient offerings to them, authorizing their demands with divine words uttered by prophets. In some of prophecies reported in the letters from Mari, the king is reprimanded for his insufficient attention to temples and negligence towards gods:

On the day of the sacri[fice i]n the temple of [N]inḫur[sag], a prophet o[f Nin-]ḫursag ar[ose] and spo[ke] as follows: “Once, twice, even three [times] haveI ex[pr]essed my request before Zim[ri-Lim], but he did not give[meany]th[ing…]”

(break)

This is what the pr[ophet] said. I have now s[ent] the h[air and a fringe of a garment] of the prophet to my lord. My lord may do what he deems best.⁵⁹

The rebuke is tough and outspoken, and the damaged part of the tablet seems to have included further criticism. Nevertheless, the attitude of the unknown author of the letter strikes the eye. He or she follows the usual practice of sending the hair and the garment fringe of the prophet, but does not add any comments on the prophet’s message but, rather, distances him- or herself from it, letting the king draw whatever consequences he considers appropriate. Presumably, the author is neither personally responsible for the concerns ofthe temple of Ninḫursag, nor able to keep silent about the threefold demand of the goddess.

Sometimes the blame is interwoven with an assurance which makes the criticism sound like a promise:

Speak to my lord: Thus Šibtu, your servant:

In the temple of Annunitum in the city,⁶⁰ Aḫatum, a servant girl of Dagan-Malik went into trance and spoke: “Zimri-Lim: Even though you are neglectful about me, I will massacre on your behalf.⁶¹ Your enemy I will deliver up into your hand. The people that steal from me I will catch, and I will gather them into the camp of Belet-ekallim. ”On the day following, Aḫum the priest delivered to me thismessage together with the hair and the fringe of the garment. I have now written to my lord. I have sealed the hair and the fringe of the garment and sent them to my lord.⁶²

Queen Šibtu, Zimri-Lim’s spouse, is heaping coals of fire on the king’s head by quoting the prophetic words of the servant girl. She proclaims an oracle of salvation concerning the king’s victory over his enemies, but at the same times he makes it plain that something has been “stolen” from the temple of Annunitum, and this reminds the king of a failure in looking after the interests of that temple. Some prophecies include even direct demands:

Speak to my lord: Thus Lanasûm, your servant:

My lord has written to me: “I have just consigned an offering for Dagan. [Bri]ngone bull and six sheep!” Now, the offering of my lord has arrived safely into the city and was performed before Dagan. The land ate the sacrificial meal and the whole city was very pleased by the offering of my lord.

Also, a muḫḫûm arose before Dagan and spoke: “How much longer will I not drink pure water? Write to your lord that he would provide me with pure water!”⁶³

Here the writer begins with good news about the sacrificial meal with which the whole city was “very pleased.” Why was that so? Probably because the offering of the king was abundant enough for the large amount of people involved. This hints at the social importance of the offerings: they were not just meant for gods and priests but also for the worshippers who on this occasion all had enough to eat.

**A Ugaritic stele detailing a sacrifice for Dagan, c. 13th century BCE. / Photo by Zunkir, Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons**

Noteworthy also is the demand for pure water. It is spoken by a prophet, but it is a word of god, not of the prophet: the prophet’s “rising before Dagan”means that the prophet stood before the statue of Dagan, acting as the god’s mouthpiece.⁶⁴ Thus, the prophet does not claim the water for himself but for the god, which in concrete terms would mean the community of the temple of Dagan which, obviously, suffers from a shortage of pure water. The role of the author of the letter should be recognized. Even though he mitigates the criticism of the king’s deficient offerings with a more pleasant account of the successful sacrificial meal, he makes it clear that the king had not quite done his duty for the temple of Dagan in Tuttul. Lanasûm not only sends the usual verification equipment but also makes a demand of his own that a purification offering be performed.⁶⁵ On this occasion, pure water was certainly needed.

Prophecies like these are usually transmitted by temple authorities whose concern for the gods is highly motivated: they were responsible for the prosperity of their temples—not just the well-being of gods but also of the people who were dependent on the temples’ income. This refers even to those prophets who belonged to the personnel of temples, and there is reason to believe that defective offerings could have nasty consequences for their daily life; I quote some evidence to this effect from a letter from Mari:⁶⁶

Šelebu[m came to me] and said: “Idatum-beer [has been taken] from Annu-[nitum]. When [I desired flo]ur to be thrown to the fire,⁶⁷ [they] gave [me] por-[ridge](?) in a jar in lieu of flour. [Thus,] I had to depend on myself.⁶⁸ Twice afterI got into the (territory of) the ene[my], and now the thir[d time], she dwells in a temple, whereas I live amidst an abundance of shit and piss, eating reed of timinum.”69

In spite of some difficulties in understanding and translating this letter it becomes clear that Šelebum, the assinnu who is well-known among the prophets of Mari, has got off the hook. Obviously he obtains his livelihood from the income of the temple of Annunitum, and suffers very concretely the consequences of the cut in offerings to the goddess. And not only that, but he has been sent away from the temple to somewhere where he has met with an unendurable situation.

This plea for a prophet illustrates that royal provisions for the temples were not just meant for the deities but also for the people who lived under the aegis of these deities in the temple communities. Therefore, the maintenance of the temples was not exclusively a matter of ritual practices. The temple was an economic factor and a symbol of social identity. Some temples provided shelter for underprivileged people whose social role was liminal.⁷⁰ For instance,theassinnuslikeŠelebum belonged to people whose social and sexual role was acceptable only as devotees of the goddess, and whose living for this reason was entirely dependent on the temples. This letter shows that the so-called cultic criticism may have social dimensions that are seldom spoken of but are perhaps more important that we realize, belonging to the“larger hinterland of ethical concern in Mesopotamian literature.”⁷¹

Ancient Near Eastern Sources: First Millennium BCE

Temples as Venues of Prophetic Performances

**Remains of the ancient synagogue at Arbela. / Photo by Avrahim Graicer, Wikimedia Commons**

The first-millennium documentation provided by the Neo-Assyrian archives yields essentially a similar picture as the cuneiform sources from the second millennium, although explicit mentions of prophets performing intemples are fewer and expressed more indirectly. This is partly due to the textual genre: instead of being embedded in letters, the Neo-Assyrian oracles are recorded as they were written down, without much information on their proclamation situations; the colophons following each oracle would only give the name and domicile of the prophet in question. Even this is informative,though, since the domicile of the prophet—which more often than not is Arbela, a prominent center of the worship of Ištar—is also indicative of the temple the prophet is affiliated with. The remarkable concentration of prophets from Arbela strongly suggests their affiliation with Egašankalamma, the famous temple of Ištar in Arbela. When the colophon says, “Tašmetu-ereš, the p[rophet], prop[hesied this i]n Arbela,”⁷² or when Ištar exhorts King Esarhaddon to “take to heart these words of mine from Arbela,”⁷³ this most likely refers to prophetic oracles uttered in that particular temple.⁷⁴ Compare this to the following:

Peace to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria! Ištar of Arbela has left for the steppe. She has sent an oracle of peace to her calf in the city.⁷⁵

In this case, we know that the “steppe” refers to Ištar’s “Palace of the Steppe,”⁷⁶ that is, a shrine in Milqia, an otherwise unknown locality outside the city of Arbela, where the goddess dwelled during the absence of Esarhaddon during the civil war preceding his rise to the throne.⁷⁷ The oracle only makes sense as being spoken in this sanctuary.

Some Neo-Assyrian oracles read like responses to prayers of their addressees, presuming that these have been pronounced in temples. The prayer–response model is clearly to be found in the prophecy where Ištar responds to the appeal of the queen mother Naqia for her son:

I am the Lady of Arbela! To the king’s mother, since you implored me, saying: “The one on the right and the one on the left⁷⁸ you have placed in your lap. My own offspring you expelled to roam the steppe!”⁷⁹

Now, king, fear not! Yours is the kingdom, yours is the power!⁸⁰

A similar situation can be found in other Neo-Assyrian texts as well: both Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal relate in their inscriptions about how they implore the gods and the prophetic or otherwise divinatory responses to their prayers that they receive.⁸¹ These cases are strongly reminiscent of the somewhat earlier inscription of Zakkur, the king of the Syrian city Hamath,who receives an encouraging oracle “through seers and through visionaries” from Baalshamayn, his god.⁸² The ritual setting of these prayers is evident even without a mention of specific temples as their venues.

The indirect evidence of the Neo-Assyrian oracles of prophetic appearances in temples is supplemented by a few letters that give more exact accounts. The temple official Adad-aḫu-iddina in his letter to Esarhaddon mentions explicitly a female prophet who prophesied “[in] the temple” about matters related to a substitute king ritual.⁸³ Another temple official called Nabû-reši-išši quotes the critical words spoken by a female prophet, concerning some property that had been given away, probably uttered on occasion of the king’s sacrifices mentioned earlier in the letter.⁸⁴ An indirect allusion to a prophecy spoken in a sanctuary may be hidden in the letter of Nabû-reḫtu-uṣur, who reports the word of Nusku uttered by a slave girl against Esarhaddon “on the outskirts of Harran.”⁸⁵ This calls to mind the temple of cedar that was erected “on the outskirts of Harran”when Esarhaddon was on his way to conquer Egypt. In his letter to Assurbanipal, Marduk-šumu-uṣur reminds him how Esarhaddon was symbolically crowned in the presence of the gods Sinand Nusku, and a prophetic word was pronounced to him: “You will go and conquer the countries with it!” It seems plausible that the prophecy of Nusku pronounced by the slave girl to the opposite effect took place at the same site.⁸⁶

The scattered first millennium BCE cuneiform sources from locations other than Assyria do not contain too much information about prophetic performances in temples. One Neo-Babylonian ritual text pertaining to a major cultic event, the ritual of the Lady of Uruk, mentions a prophet performing in rituals on the third and fourth day of the month of Adar:

In the month of Adar, on the first, second, sixth, [ . . . ], fourteenth and fifteenth day: duties of the ch[anter and the musician]; the edūtu is (ful)filled.

On the second day, on offering [ . . . ] kettledrum is played [ . . . ] the purify.

On the third day, the Lady of Uruk proceeds and takes a seat between the curtains [ . . . ] The prophet goes around it three times, carries the water basin and proceeds [ . . . ] [On the fourth day], the prophet goes around it three times, carries the water basin and proce[eds . . . ] the copper [kettledrum] is played, sacrificial me[als] are offered, the offering [ . . . ] kettledrum is played and danc[e . . . ] the censer. The musician takes a seat and shou[ts . . . ].⁸⁷

Here, a harpist leads a group of female musicians. To the right is a lute player, who is naked except for her jewelry. She is dancing, and her tilted head indicates that she is possibly singing as well. Behind her, a young girl also wearing only jewelry is dancing and might be singing. The fourth female figure plays a double pipe and turns her head toward a lyre player. According to an inscription, this detail of a larger banquet was probably part of the Beautiful Festival of the Valley. / Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

Interestingly, the prophet acts in interplay with musicians, as was the case in the ritual of Ištar at Mari discussed above; in fact, the prophet’s performance is listed under the “duties of the ch[anter and the musician],” which, once again,shows that the often-made associations between prophets and cultic functionaries in lexical lists and omen texts actually reflect real circumstances in Mesopotamian temples. What strikes the eye in this particular text is the job description of the prophet. He circumambulates something—probably the cubiculum surrounded by curtains where the goddess is seated⁸⁸—carrying a water basin used for the ritual washing of hands,⁸⁹ but nothing is mentioned ofthe usual functions of a maḫḫû, such as going into a frenzy and prophesying. This is quite exceptional, since the intermediary function of the maḫḫû is virtually always referred to in texts where they are mentioned. This is not enough to deprive the maḫḫû of their primarily prophetic function,⁹⁰ but the text shows that the prophets’ cultic performance was not restricted to raving and prophesying.

A most baffling text connecting a prophet with cult places is the very latest cuneiform document of prophecy. The Late Babylonian chronographic texts reporting events of the year 133 BCE⁹¹ include an account of a certain “man belonging to the Boatman family” (iltēn mār mallāḫi) who appeared in the sanctuaries of Babylon and Borsippa and spoke something that won the favor of the citizens but was condemned as a heretic by the temple authorities:

That Boatman [ . . . ] in Babylon and Borsippa and [ . . . he ap]peared, on the streets and squares they listened to his proclamation [ . . . ] “[I am] a mes[senger]of Nanaya! I have been sent on behalf of the strong, hitting god, your God.” The council of that temple responded to [that] Boatman [and to the people with him], saying: “Retreat back, return to your cities! Do not deliver up the city to loot and plunder! Do not let the gods like the city be carried off as spoils! [ . . . ].”

[Boatman] responded to them, saying: “I am a [mes]senger of Nanaya; I will not deliver up the city to loot and plunder! As the hand of the strong, hitting God[…s] to Ezida[…].” The council of that temple responded to the people who were wi[th] that [Boatman]: “Do not listen to the words of that fanatic! [Save] your lives, [protect] yourselves! [ . . . ]” The other people did not take up their words but said:“[…”].

The texts inform that this prophetic figure chose prominent cult places in the two major Babylonian cities to proclaim his controversial message as “a messenger of Nanaya,” that is, a prophet of the most important goddess of Hellenistic Babylonia. What exactly was so scandalous about his message is not quite clear for the reader of the present day, but it seems like the “the strong, hitting god, your God”—in fact, your gods in plural (ilīkunu), indicating a totality of gods in one divine person—was something the temple authorities could not digest. The text indicates that this message brought about a riot in Babylonia where some people may even have been killed.⁹²

Prophets among the Temple Personnel

**Alabaster work relief of an Assyrian royal attendant, from the northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal II. / Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, The Burrell Collection (Glasgow), World History Encyclopedia**

The affiliation of the Assyrian prophets with the temples of Ištar becomes all the more evident when we take a look at some texts that actually present the prophets as belonging to the temple personnel. This is already suggested by Neo-Assyrian lexical lists that itemize prophets (maḫḫû) among of cultic functionaries,⁹³ but there is evidence showing that the association between prophets and temple activities is not merely lexical.

The outlay of copper from Tušḫan from the year 611BCE may indicate that the prophet and the augur receiving rewards for their services were affiliated with the temple that is also given its share in the document (*118c).⁹⁴ A Middle-Assyrian provisions list from Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta (*123; c. eleventh century BCE) lists male and female prophets together with the assinnus of the Ištar temple as recipients of a ration of barley. A similar text, dating from the year 809 BCE(*110), is a decree of expenditures for ceremonies in Ešarra, the temple of the god Aššur in the city of Assur, which enjoyed the highest status among Assyrian temples in the Neo-Assyrian period. The paragraph concerning the expenditure for the divine council mentions female prophets as recipients of barley. In yet another document of similar kind, a Neo-Babylonian list of temple offerings, the prophet is listed among the temple servants as a recipient of different parts of the sacrificial animals, the prophet’s share being the hearts (*130). These administrative documents, comparable with the caseofŠelebum, who had been left without his food rations at Mari (see “Prophets as Advocates of Worship” above), provide the most direct evidence we can get of prophets as members of temple communities.

Some seventh-century Neo-Assyrian texts from the state archives of Nineveh testify to the role of members of temple communities as prophets.One of the prophecies is spoken by Issar-beli-da’’ini who is said to be a votaress (šēlūtu) of the king, that is, a person who had been donated by the king to the temple (*74). A poorly preserved fragment of a text sent by another votaress to the king may also be a remnant of a prophetic oracle (*114). Female votaries of Ištar of Arbela, some of them of Egyptian origin, are known from Neo-Assyrian sources.⁹⁵ They could be married or divorced and have children,which indicates that they were not secluded, but they nevertheless lived under the aegis of the temple of Ištar of Arbela, a context which probably endorsed the prophetic activity of some of them.

There is not much evidence to reveal how the prophets actually functioned in the worship of the temples; nevertheless, we are a little better equipped with the Neo-Assyrian texts than was the case at Mari. The above-mentioned text associating the female prophets with the divine council (*110) is a strong indication of their presence in the ritual celebration of the assembly of gods, which makes perfect sense with regard to the prophets’ position as the mediators of divine words. Another hint can be found in the so-called Marduk Ordeal text, which is a ritual commentary probably associated with the return of the statue of Marduk to Babylon at the beginning of the reign of King Assurbanipal (early 660s BCE). A prophet (maḫḫû) features once in this dramatic scenario (*103):

The prophet who goes before the Lady of Babylon is a bringer of news; weeping he goes toward her: “They are taking him [i.e. Marduk] to the ḫursān!”⁹⁶ She sends (the prophet) away, saying:“My brother, my brother!”

The role of the prophet in the ritual is indeed a prophetic one, since he is functioning as an intermediary of gods, bringing the sad news to the Lady of Babylon that her husband Marduk had been sent to captivity; this refers to the destruction of Babylon and the expatriation of the statue of Mardukto Assyria.

The most impressive document of the prophets’ ritual role is provided by the collection of five prophecies, all deriving from the enthronement ceremony of Esarhaddon in the Ešarra temple and reflecting different phases of the ritual (SAA 93). The structure of this oracle collection differs from other collections in that the text includes not only the actual oracles but also cultic commentaries indicating the ritual setting of each prophecy. The ritual begins with a procession (*84), that proceeds to the temple gate (*85) and finally to the inner sanctum, arriving at the statue of Aššur (*86). The next phase is a meal served to the vassal kings on the temple terrace on occasion of their covenant with Esarhaddon (*87), and the last oracle is to be located in the temple of Ištar (*88). The written prophetic oracles follow this cultic procedure from station to station, and there is little reason to doubt that they are based on on-site oral proclamation, whether or not they repeat the exact wording of the spoken oracles.

Prophets as Advocates of Worship

**Colossal statue of the god Nabu, 8th century BCE, from Nimrud. / Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), Iraq Museum, Wikimedia Commons**

Building and restoration of temples was one of the principal duties of an ancient Near Eastern king. Since the prophets were there to remind the king of his duties as mouthpieces of deities who were believed to dwell in the temples, it can be expected that the welfare of the temples was among the foremost issues the prophetic oracles dealt with, all the more because it seems that the prophets’ personal welfare was at least partly dependent on it.

We have already seen officials reporting prophetic words concerning the care of gods and their offerings at Mari, and the king could even be reprimanded by prophets for neglecting his duties. It appears that their Assyrian colleagues a millennium later had similar concerns. The letters of two Assyrian temple officials Adad-aḫu-iddina and Nabû-reši-išši, deal with temple property. Nabû-reši-išši gives an account of a prophetic performance in the temple:

[ . . . ] she prophesied:“Why have you given the [ . . . ]-tree, the grove and . . .⁹⁷ to the Egyptians? Say to the king that they be returned to me, and I will give total abundance [to] his [ . . . ].”⁹⁸

The deity speaking here is probably Ištar of Arbela, who claims ownership of her property. The proclamation situation may have been indicated in the broken part of the text; in any case, one gets the impression that the prophecy was spoken in the presence of Nabû-reši-išši. The oracle may even have been proclaimed on his own inquiry. His role as the author of the letter should not be overlooked: the letter is about the property of the temple, for which he is responsible. The prophecy gives him the opportunity to place the demand of returning the property in the mouth of the goddess, disguising his own critical attitude to the real estate policy of the king.

The case of Adad-aḫu-iddina is different, since he does not want to act according to the prophecy, according to which he should send the royal throne of the temple to Akkad, probably to be used in a substitute king ritual:

Mullissu-abu-uṣri, the female prophet who conveyed the king’s clothes to the land of Akkad, prophesied [in] the temple: “[The] throne from the te[mpl]e […]
(break)
Let the throne go! I will catch the enemies of my king with it!” Now, without the authorization of the king, my lord, I shall not give the throne. We shall act according to what the king, my lord, orders.⁹⁹

In this case, the prophet and the temple administrator have different ideas about the appropriate ritual procedure: the former advocates the royal ritual in Akkad while the latter is more concerned about the proper use of the temple’s most precious assets he is responsible for. Interestingly, as it seems, the temple official prefers to rely on the royal command rather than on the divine word.

Unlike the documents from Mari, the Neo-Assyrian records do not include ritual demands spoken by the prophets, except for one case, where Ištar requires offerings from the newly enthroned Esarhaddon.¹⁰⁰ Considering the general importance of the temples to the identity of the community and to the royal ideology, one would expect to find more prophecies of this kind; if there were more, they have not been preserved. In any case, it is important that Assurbanipal in his inscription mentions dreams and prophetic oracles as the source of divine orders to renovate the temple of the Lady of Kidmuri, that is, Ištar of Calah. These prophecies, corroborated by the “firm positive answer” from Šamašand Adad (this refers to extispicy), are presented as the initial impetus the king needed to re-establish the rites of this particular temple.¹⁰¹

**Neo-Assyrian clay tablet: containing a letter to the king, written in 24 lines of cuneiform inscription. / Courtesy The British Museum, Creative Commons**

The fifth and last oracle of the Neo-Assyrian tablet SAA 93, which is a collection of prophecies on the occasion of Esarhaddon’s coronation, presents an angry goddess.¹⁰² The tone of this prophecy is very different from the preceding oracles of salvation (šulmu), in which Esarhaddon is given the “four regions” of the world (*85), a covenant is made between him and the Assyrian supreme god Aššur (*86), and a meal of covenant is served by Ištar to his vassals and their gods (*87). Now, however, Esarhaddon is given a severe reprimand for neglecting the worship of Ištar:

Word of Ištar of Arbela to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria.

As if I had not done or given to you anything! Did I not bend and give to you the four doorjambs of Assyria? Did I not vanquish your enemy? Did I not gather your foes and adversaries [like but]terflies?

What have [yo]u, in turn, given to me? The [fo]od of the banquet is no[t there], asif there were no temple at all! My food is wi[thhe]ld from me, my drink is wi[th-he]ld from me! I am longing for them, I have fixed my eyes upon them.

Verily, see to it that there is a bowl of one seah of food and a pitcher of one seah of best beer! Then I will take and put vegetables and soup in my mouth,fill the cup and drink from it. I want to restore my charms!¹⁰³

The goddess is being quite blunt with the new king about whom he should thank and praise for his ascending to the throne. It was she who gave him the “four doorjambs of Assyria,” that is, the cities of Assur, Nineveh, Calah, and Arbela, symbolizing the land of Assyria as a whole.¹⁰⁴ She had vanquished his enemies and captured the rebels (*88, lines iv 22–30), and in the previous oracle (*87), she is the hostess of the meal of covenant. Now, after all this, she wants to restore her charms that have been ravaged because of Esarhaddon, but she has been left alone, without food and drink.

The “charms” of the goddess have a parallel in a later prophecy to Assurbanipal, in which Ištar tells how she was disfigured by droughts and showers while roaming the steppe and mountains because of him.¹⁰⁵ This allusion to the Epic of Gilgameš¹⁰⁶ has a concrete point of reference in Esarhaddon’s expatriation and his speedy march through the desert towards his rebelling brothers. According to the Nin A inscription of Esarhaddon, Ištar stood at his side and led him to victory.¹⁰⁷ Her participation in Esarhaddon’s struggle was symbolized by her sojourning in an akītu chapel in Milqia, outside of Arbela, during Esarhaddon’s absence, and by her triumphal return from there after his victory.¹⁰⁸ Now, recovering from all this trouble, she is expecting something from Esarhaddon in return.

If this oracle was really pronounced on the occasion of Esarhaddon’s coronation (and its connection with the rest of the oracles is not purely redactional), Esarhaddon receives a tough rebuke for shirking his duties right on the first day of his rule. One is tempted to ask whether this can refer to anything that he could really have done or failed to do. Rather, to be on the safe side, the newly enthroned king is reproached for flaws he cannot yet possibly be guilty of, that he may never forget his duties as the king to the goddess who“loves his priesthood.”

The prophecy from the angry goddess illustrates how deeply interwoven the two primary contexts of the prophetic activity, temple and kingship, were. At least in Assyria, the ritual duties of the king belonged to his role as a priest, or the high priest (šangû),109 which he assumed when ascending the throne, taking supreme responsibility for the worship of gods in his kingdom. Therefore, the so-called “cultic criticism” cannot always be separated from political and societal criticism.

Taken together, the cuneiform sources yield a surprisingly uniform picture of the relationship of the prophets with temples. In particular, the huge time-span covering the Old-Babylonian, Middle-Assyrian, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Seleucid periods speaks volumes about the persistence of the presence of the prophets in Mesopotamian temples. Most of the evidence necessarily derives from the two main sources of information, Mari and Assyria; however, there are enough texts from other periods to warrant the conviction, not only that there were prophets, but also that they were involved in temples and their worship. According to the picture discernible from the documents at hand, the prophets proclaim their oracles in temples; they belong to temple communities; they advocate ritual practices and sometimes take part in them; temple officials inform the kings about their sayings. This does not mean that the activity of the prophets was confined to the temples, since prophecies are demonstrably delivered elsewhere, and “prophets also took to the streets if their addressees were located there.”¹¹⁰

To this should be added that,first, there is a significant number of women among the prophets, and second, the prophets are never presented as occupying the highest ladders of social or religious hierarchy, but seem rather to be supervised and controlled by priests and temple administrators. This does not mean, however, that the prophets were a peripheral and socially marginalized group; on the contrary, they were employed by central temples, they communicated with temple authorities who took their prophecies seriously, and their sayings were not indifferent to the politics of the royal court.

Finally, the question must be asked to what extent this picture concurs with historical factuality. This must be judged with regard to the nature of the sources, their purposes, and their eventual biases. The purpose of food rations lists is primarily administrative, for example, to keep a record of how much barley had been delivered to whom. If misleading records were given, they would probably have been detected before filing them in the archives. Again,when a temple official gives an account of a prophecy he has either witnessed or otherwise become aware of, he can, of course, manipulate the contents of the prophecy to correspond with his own purposes of citing it, but he would have little reason to make the prophetic performance happen elsewhere than it did (if he made a prophecy take place in a temple when, in reality, it occurred in another place, this would only contribute to the general picture that prophecies were expected to occur in temples). The problem is rather that the fragmentary condition and uneven distribution of the sources prevents us from seeing the whole picture.

While we can be rather confident that the above-sketched general picture of prophets and temples in Mesopotamia is not very far from historical reality, it is also possible that the picture is disproportional and local variations are not visible at all. Details that we happen to know may not be the most important details we should know.¹¹¹

In comparison with the biblical texts, it is important to note that the cuneiform sources do not inform us about major conflicts or rivalries between prophets and temples, or prophets and priests; the constructs of prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria rather present the prophets as sharing the symbolic worlds of both the temple communities and the (implied) authors of the texts. Especially in Assyria, the collections of prophetic oracles can be seen as a part of the social organization for maintenance of the symbolic universe¹¹² constituted by royal ideology and worship of Ištar.¹¹³ This, ofcourse, does not mean a total and fundamental absence of dissonance between prophets and the institutional order; a few individual discordant voices, such as the telling case reported by Nabû-rehtu-uṣur (*115), testify to the contrary. Evidently, we are dependent on a textual transmission that does not give the dissident voices a hearing but make the prophets appear in roles representing, rather than opposing, the institutional order.

Prophets and Temples: Greek Sources

Temples as Venues of Prophetic Performances

**General view of Delos. / Photo by Vijinn, Wikimedia Commons**

The cuneiform evidence, as we have seen, leaves little room for doubt that temples indeed were places where prophetic performances were expected to take place, and where they were actively sought after. This picture gets even sharper when we move westwards, to the ancient Greek world, encountering broad evidence of sanctuaries where all kinds of divinatory oracles, including those of prophetic type, were delivered.¹¹⁴ These included local shrines,serving the needs of the citizens of individual cities, as well as temples which boasted a centuries-long tradition and were visited by kings and citizens from the Eastern Mediterranean area from Syria and Asia Minor to Etruria. The most important oracular sites were the temples of Apollo, the Greek oracular deity par excellence. His oracles were uttered in his sanctuaries all over mainland Greece, the island of Delos (Apollo’s mythical birthplace), Peloponnesus, and Asia Minor.¹¹⁵ The most important and best documented temples of Apollo with an established oracular tradition are those at Delphi, Didyma, and Claros—the “big three” of Apollonian prophecy. Another important oracular deity was Zeus, Apollo’s father, whose sanctuary in Dodona counts among the major Greek oracular sites.

The Greek sources are somewhat more rewarding than the Mesopotamian ones when it comes to the question of what actually happened in the temples when oracles were taken. While the Mesopotamian texts are nearly mute as a grave about the procedure of prophetic performances, apart from references to prophets going into a frenzy (maḫû), the Greek sources sometimes give an inkling of the ritual practices related to the oracles. Archaeology has brought to light what is left of the above-mentioned temples together with items that can be associated with oracular practices,¹¹⁶ but the main source of information on the oracles remains the huge body of written sources from different times. Evenhere it must not be forgotten that the sources are not eyewitness reports but appear in secondary sources partly dependent on each other—for instance, lamblichus’ accounts of the oracle of Didyma are dependent on Porphyry.¹¹⁷ Plutarch, on the other hand, himself a priest of the temple at Delphi,¹¹⁸ probably knows what he is talking about when he relates the goings-on in the temple of Apollo in his own time, but when referring to ancient practices even he must have drawn on written sources.

The temple of Apollo at Delphi was, according to Plutarch,“the most ancient in time and the most famous in repute”;¹¹⁹ indeed, Delphi is doubtless the most acknowledged oracular site in Greek literature and, even historically, the first-ranking among the Greek oracular sanctuaries and the longest enduring in the whole ancient Eastern Mediterranean.¹²⁰ According to the myth, it was originally the sanctuary of Gaia, the earth goddess, who was guarded by the snake monster Python, and only became the oracle of Apollo when he killed the snake with his arrow.¹²¹

The Delphic oracle was consulted by clients coming from all around the Mediterranean including, of course, the citizens of Delphi and other Greek cities.¹²² Attested archaeologically at the end of the ninth century BCE and mentioned twice by Homer,¹²³ it gained Panhellenic status especially in the seventh century BCE, and probably did not decline even after the Persian wars in the fifth century BCE, as has often been thought.¹²⁴ The oracle flourished in the Hellenistic period; however, the fame of Delphi began to decline along with the extension of Roman power, giving reason to Plutarch to write his treatises on the Delphic oracle’s magnificent past compared to its less-than-glorious state in his own time. The oracular institution at Delphi was eventually closed down by Theodosius I in 390/1CE.¹²⁵

The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi was a magnificent wall-bounded complex with the temple at its heart.¹²⁶ The temple, again, was built around what was called the omphalos,“navel of the earth,”¹²⁷ located at a spot where there was believed to be a chasm producing vapors emerging from the ground. While the existence of the chasm and the toxic vapors remains a matter of dispute,¹²⁸ this tradition was the basis for the placement of the inner sanctum (adyton), furnished with a tripod exactly above the spot where the chasm was believed to be situated. During the oracular session the female prophet, who was called the Pythia, sat on the tripod and uttered the oracles of Apollo.

The information on fifth-century Delphi in this period derives mostly from Herodotus who regularly refers to consultations of the Delphic oracle and the responses given by the Pythia. Together with other sources, the number of oracle responses from Delphi in Greek texts from different times amounts to several hundreds.¹²⁹ Herodotus does not, however, describe the oracular process at Delphi. It can only be reconstructed from the information given by Plutarch who wrote half a millennium later,¹³⁰ in addition to some passages in Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles) that may reflect the Delphic practices at the time when they were written. Thus, when reconstructing what actually happened at Delphi, it is important to keep in mind that it is drawn from sources from different periods, fulfilling different literary purposes depending on the writer, and leaving many details unmentioned.

The second-ranking oracular site in the Greek world was Didyma, the temple of Apollo close to the city of Miletos.¹³¹ It is first mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and several inscriptions from the sixth century BCE, but Pausanias says the sanctuary was founded before the Ionian settlement (eleventh century BCE),¹³² and the foundation myth traces its origin back to Branchos, the forefather of the Branchidae priests serving at the temple; there is no archaeological record, however, predating the late eighth century BCE.¹³³ Herodotus, according to whom “there was an Oracle long since established, which all the Ionians and Aeolians were wont to consult,” makes recurrent references to the oracle at Didyma in connection with the Persian wars,¹³⁴ in the wake of which the temple was destroyed in 494 BCE and the Branchidae family left the site. The oracle was silent for 160 years and re-established in 334/331 BCE, after which it, again, enjoyed a considerable prestige until the fourth century CE. The restoration of the temple is connected with Alexander the Great, and the oracle was consulted also by Seleukos Nikator; even Diocletian received an anti-Christian oracle from the Apollo of Didymain 303 CE.¹³⁵ First and foremost, however, it served as the civic oracle of Miletus, the patron city of the temple of Apollo, and its population.¹³⁶

**The ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Didyma. / Photo by AlexanderVanLoon, Wikimedia Commons**

The temple at Didyma was the third largest in the Greek world after Ephesus and Samos, reflecting the wealth and mutual rivalry of the Ionian cities.¹³⁷ At the heart of it was a large adyton, the inner sanctum, within which there was the sacred spring, probably a natural water source around which the sanctuary was constructed. The water of the spring had an important function in the oracular session which, therefore, took place in the adyton.¹³⁸ The oracles may have been spoken by male members of the Branchidae family until the destruction of the temple; in the re-established Hellenistic temple, perhaps following the Delphic model, the oracle-speaker seems always to have been a woman.

The third member of the “Big Three” of Apollonian prophecy is the temple of Claros near the ancient city of Colophon.¹³⁹ According to the myth, the foundation of the sanctuary goes back to the legend of the divinatory contest between two seers, Calchas and Mopsus, probably “intended to supply heroic credentials for the founder of the oracle at Clarus.”¹⁴⁰ Calchas had received an oracle that he would have to die when meeting a seer greater than himself. This greater seer turned out to be Mopsus who was the son of the female seer Manto and grandson of the blind seer Tiresias, and hence, having such a familial background, was an ideal person to establish the oracle at Claros.

Historically, there is no evidence of the Clarian oracle before the Hellenistic age, the earliest response being connected with Alexander the Great.¹⁴¹ The archaeological record at the site begins already in the eighth century BCE, butthe monumental architecture, less influenced by Delphi,¹⁴² dates likewise to Hellenistic times.¹⁴³ A multitude of contemporary sources testify to the prosperity and significance of the sanctuary and its oracle through the Hellenistic times and again, after a period of decline, in the late imperial age.¹⁴⁴ The catchment area of the Clarian oracle covered, in addition to Asia Minor, Anatolia, Syria, mainland Greece, Macedonia, and Thracia, giving it a truly international character.¹⁴⁵

In addition to the three major temples of Apollo, the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona in northwestern Greece is another example of an outstanding oracular center in the ancient Greek world.¹⁴⁶ The lead tablets from Dodona, dating to c.550–167 BCE, constitute the biggest body of primary oracular sources, comprising some 1,300 examples.¹⁴⁷ The literary evidence suggests that the temple had a Panhellenic standing comparable to that of Delphi,¹⁴⁸ although the geographical area represented by the tablets rather suggests the status of a regional cult center with consultations from other parts of the Greek mainland, especially from Sparta and Athens.¹⁴⁹

It is impossible to determine when the oracle at Dodona was established. The oldest archaeological remains located in the plain of Molossia in Epirus date back to the eighth century BCE, and the first literary reference is to be found in Homer.¹⁵⁰ The oracle is, in any case, older than the temple of Zeus constructed in the late fifth century BCE, and it functioned throughout the Hellenistic period until the turn of Common Era, when Strabo reports it to be “virtually extinct.”¹⁵¹ The significant elements of the sanctuary at Dodona were the oracular oak, attested already in Homer, the dove with which the prophetesses of the sanctuary were identified, and the bronze tripods dedicated to Zeus.

Prophets among the Temple Personnel

In the Greek world, the oracles of the intuitive type were typically spoken by women often called prophētis or promantis, who had a permanent, perhaps life-long affiliation with a specific temple. The most famous of them is and was the Pythia of Delphi, but the female prophets of Apollo at Didyma, as well as those at the temple of Zeus at Dodona, have also left traces in Classical literature. At the temple of Apollo at Claros, the prophets were not women but men.

The Delphic oracle worked for centuries; hence its practices were based on a time-honored tradition. It also must have had a well-established organization, the structure of which, however, remains somewhat obscure. The office of the female prophet, the Pythia, is, in any case, attested incontestably—without her the oracle could not function; in fact, shewasthe oracle, the mouthpiece of Apollo, placed exactly where the center of the earth was believed to be found, sitting on her tripod and uttering the oracles of Apollo. Plutarch’s writings give the impression that, at least at his time, there was one Pythia at the time,¹⁵² who was an unmarried woman over fifty years old who lived a cloistered and chaste life, “inexperienced, unlearned about almost everything and truly virginal with respect to her soul.”¹⁵³ However idealized this image of Pythia may be, it indicates that the female person, serving for life as the mouthpiece of Apollo in the divinatory ritual, had to be “virginal” in the sense that she was as free as possible from bodily pollution. Therefore, she had to be unmarried while serving as Apollo’s bride, but not necessarily beforethat.¹⁵⁴ Plutarch also takes it for granted that the (ideal) Pythia,“because she grew up in the home of poor farmers, she carries with her nothing in the way of skill or expertise or ability when she goes down into the oracular shrine”;¹⁵⁵ to whatever extent this corresponds to historical fact, this characterization probably reflects the idea of the correct enactment of the divinatory ritual at Delphi, at least in Plutarch’s time.

The oracular process at Delphi¹⁵⁶ has been reconstructed mainly from Plutarch’s writings, supplemented by several passages in Greek tragedy¹⁵⁷ that usually do not essentially contradict Plutarch’s information. One should be cautious, however, in extrapolating information from one source to another. The rites of Delphi may have had a considerably longue durée, but even conservative institutions change over time, modifying their structures and procedures.¹⁵⁸ Therefore, we have to admit that our reconstructions, inevitably based on the uneven set of sources from different ages, reflecting traditions that may or may not be based on historical facticity, remain what they are: reconstructions.

The Delphic oracle was not available all the time—according to Plutarch, it functioned only nine days a year, on the seventh day of each month, except the three winter months.¹⁵⁹ There was a strict precedence for consultation. The first right to consult the oracle was given to the citizens of Delphi, followed by consultants from other cities with the privilege of promanteia, such as Athens and Sparta. After that came delegations from other cities and, if there was still time left for them, individuals other than Delphians.

Consulting the oracle at Delphi was as such a ritual act, and the sources suggest that both the enquirers and the Pythia herself had to undergo ritual preparations before the actual inquiry could take place. After dawn, the Pythia first took a ceremonial bath in the Castalian spring and purified herself.¹⁶⁰ Meanwhile the inquirers, too, who at least in Athens were carefully selected from among the citizens,¹⁶¹ first had to be ritually purified before entering the sanctuary, while the priests ensured that the day was auspicious for the consultation by presenting a goat to Apollo, sprinkling it with water, and if the goat nodded its head which indicated that the sign was positive, sacrificing the goat. Only after these preparations would the Pythia enter the sanctuary, mount the tripod, and wait for the enquirer to be brought before her.¹⁶²

Different theories have been presented as to how the inquiry was presented and how the Pythia replied; whether she spoke clearly or uttered incomprehensible mutterings; whether she spoke poetry or prose; whether the help of a prophētēs (who was a cultic functionary, not an inspired speaker) was needed to clarify her utterings; and what the Pythia’s behavior and mental disposition were during the consultation. She probably prophesied in an altered state of consciousness, which need not have resulted in unintelligible gibberish or excessively wild behavior, both unsupported by the sources. Most probably the procedure was quite as simple as Hugh Bowden reconstructs it: “the petitioner would ask his question, and the Pythia would reply directly to him, speaking clearly and straightforwardly.”¹⁶³ Interpreting the responses is another matter,even if they were quite clear-cut and not intentionally obscure, as sometimes seems to have been the case. Making sense of the oracle was neither the Pythia’s nor the priests’ but ultimately the responsibility of the enquirers—or, rather, their communities whose purposes were served by the inquiries.

**The Athena temple complex, including the Delphic Tholos. The background is the Pleistos River Valley. / Photo by tamara semina, Wikimedia Commons**

Apart from the oral prophecies uttered by the Pythia, several late sources refer to lot divination at Delphi, that is, a method of answering a binary question of the form “yes or no?” using beans, pebbles, tin tablets, or the like.¹⁶⁴ Even older texts sometimes refer to inquiries to Apollo formulated in a binary manner. In spite of the fact that archaeological evidence of lot-drawing at Delphi (unlike Claros and Dodona, discussed below) is missing, the practice is rather well supported by written sources and usually taken for granted by scholars. There is scholarly disagreement, however, about whether the lot-drawing was a divinatory act distinct from the prophetic session or, rather,formed part of it.¹⁶⁵ What speaks for the first-mentioned alternative is the infrequency of the prophetic sessions, if it indeed took place only nine times a year. The lot oracle would have made it possible to consult the oracle whenever there was a need for it—and when the temple was less crowded and the fees were lower.¹⁶⁶

The presence of the oracle at Didyma is attested in the pre-Persian era, but little is known of the oracular process. The actual speaker of the oracles of Apollo at Didyma was the female prophet (prophētis/promantis/gynēchrēsmōdos) of whose presence at the sanctuary there is inscriptional evidence; one prophetess, Tryphosa, is even known by her name.¹⁶⁷ The best, even though historically not unproblematic, source of information of the functioning of the oracle at Didyma is Iamblichus, who discusses it at some length in his De mysteriis, drawing essentially from Porphyry.¹⁶⁸ According to Iamblichus’ account, the prophetess prepared herself for the oracular session by fasting and bathing in the sacred precinct, thus making herself ready for the reception of the god. The preparations also included holding a staff, sitting on an axle, wetting her feet in the water (that is, of the sacred spring rising within the adyton), and inhaling its vapors. It is not clear whether all these actions belonged to every oracular session,¹⁶⁹ but the function of these actions, in Iamblichus’ terms, was to “partake”(metalambanei) of the god, that is, to become possessed by him and become his instrument.¹⁷⁰ How the actual oracles were uttered and memorized is not described anywhere.

We know that the personnel of the sanctuary, in Hellenistic and Roman times, included a prophētēs who, in fact, was the highest official of the sanctuary rather than an oracle-speaker, presiding over all rites performed in the sanctuary and chosen by lot every year. The existence of this office is confirmed by inscriptions written by its very holders; these inscriptions do not include prophecies of any kind but accounts of their careers.¹⁷¹ The role of the prophētēs in the oracular process remains unknown; filling the gaps in the existing sources and, partly, by analogy to Delphi, it is commonly surmised that he was present at the session, and may have delivered the response in written form to the consultant who was not witnessing the prophetic performance, eventually preserving a copy in the chrēsmographion, the oracle-writing house of the temple.¹⁷²

Interestingly, the Didyma inscriptions include references even to prophets who, by all appearances, did not serve as functionaries at the temple of Apollo. In two inscriptions, the enquirer is himself a prophet (prophētēs),¹⁷³ which does not necessarily indicate an oracle-speaker at Didyma; however, one third-century CE inscription, if reconstructed correctly, indicates that a “prophet self-called, pious Titus Flavius Ulpianus […] to whom the god also bore witness often in divine pronouncements, speaking to him in vision and now in an oracle, ”had himself reported his vision to the temple of Apollo.¹⁷⁴

At Claros, there was also a sacred spring at the site where the oracles were taken. Iamblichus who, as in the case of Didyma, is our main source of information, writes:

The oracle at Colophon is agreed by all to function by means of water. For there is a spring in an underground building, and it is from that the prophet drinks. On certain appointed nights, when many religious rites have previously been performed, he drinks and utters the oracle, while he is no longer seen by the ambassadors who are present.¹⁷⁵

Pliny also knows that in the cave of Apollo at Claros“there is a pool a draught from which causes marvelous oracular utterances to be produced, though the life of the drinkers is shortened.”¹⁷⁶ Tacitus, in his Annales, points out that the oracle-speaker is not female, as at Delphi, but male, describing him as ignorant of writing and meter but still, having descended into a cavern, uttering oracular responses in set verses without knowing the actual questions.¹⁷⁷

Taken together, these sources make it probable not only that the oracle-speaker was of male gender, but also that water played a role in the Clarian oracle; for Iamblichus, the water allowed the prophet to receive divine inspiration, even though the primary source of the divinatory power was Apollo himself.¹⁷⁸ In addition, the structures of the underground adyton have been preserved, consisting of two rooms, one for the oracle and the other for the consultants, connected by a narrow corridor.¹⁷⁹

The main functionaries of the temple of Apollo are always mentioned in the inscriptions from the second and third centuries CE¹⁸⁰ reporting visits to the site and naming the functionaries active at the sanctuary during the visit: the prytanis (administrator), the hiereus (priest), the thespiōdos (singer of oracles), the prophētēs and the grammateus (secretary/scribe). The role division of these persons is usually understood the following way:“the priest was responsible for the performance of sacrifices and probably presided over all the ceremonies. The prophet drank the water and uttered the oracle. The thespiodos reproduced it in verse which he sang, while the secretaries kept a written record.”¹⁸¹ A certain degree of speculation notwithstanding, this distribution of functions makes good sense, although some scholars have reversed the roles of the prophētēs and the thespiōdos, doubting the ability of the annually selected prophētēs to be able to achieve the required inspiration.¹⁸² The written sources do not mention any form of technical divination; however, excavations have revealed bronze astragals which indicate that even in Claros, intuitive and technical divination (lot-casting with astragals) were practiced side by side.¹⁸³

**Sacrificial hammer from Dodona. Bronze, 7th century BCE. / Photo by Jastrow, Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons**

The priestesses of Dodona, also called prophetesses (prophētis),¹⁸⁴ are mentioned together with the Pythia of Delphi and the Sibyl by Plato¹⁸⁵ and were widely acknowledged as intermediators of the oracles of Zeus, the patron deity of Dodona, and his spouse called Dione. Herodotus even names three of them as Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra.¹⁸⁶ Since they are conceived of by ancient writers as having communicated with the divine by non-inductive means in the state of divine possession,¹⁸⁷ they well deserve to be characterized as women prophets.

It is far from evident how the oracle actually worked.¹⁸⁸ The binary structure of the enquiries in the Dodona tablets suggests an answer in the form of a decision between two alternatives—possibly by means of lot-casting as was reported by the historian Callisthenes in the fourth century BCE. According to him, an oracle was given to the ambassadors of the Spartans by collecting lots in a pot and letting the prophetess make the choice with the help of a petmonkey.¹⁸⁹ The use of lots at Dodona is now confirmed by a few newly published lead tablets bearing the formula “pick this one” (tautan anele/toutonan eletōn); however, the small number of such tablets may indicate that lot-casting was not the standard procedure at Dodona.¹⁹⁰

The explanation is often derived from the well-known symbols of the Dodona oracle, the sacred oak and the dove.¹⁹¹ The “sign in the oak” is mentioned in one of the oracle tablets.¹⁹² Homer relates how Odysseus travels to Dodona to hear from “the god’s divine, high-leafed oak tree”the will of Zeus,¹⁹³ as if the tree itself was thought to communicate; Hesiod seems to think that the oracular deity was somehow present in the tree.¹⁹⁴ How exactly the oak functioned in the oracular process is not known. According to some ancient authors, the rustling of the tree’s branches and leaves were interpreted by priests called selloi¹⁹⁵ who, according to Homer,¹⁹⁶ had unwashed feet and who slept on the ground. In late sources, it is rather the spring flowing from under the roots of the oak, the“murmuring”of which inspired the priestesses to prophesy.¹⁹⁷

As to the dove, Herodotus tells about two kidnapped Egyptian female priests to whom doves speak the divine command to establish an oracle, one in Libya and the other in Dodona.¹⁹⁸ The female prophets of Dodona were identified with doves, and the word peleiai is used for both doves and the prophets in late sources. According to Herodotus, the association of the female prophets with doves was because“they were foreigners and when they spoke they sounded like birds.”¹⁹⁹ Yet another (late) explanation involves the sounds of Dodona’s famous bronze objects, the bronze statue²⁰⁰ and the cauldrons associated with the prophets’ activity by Clement of Alexandria and by Lucan.²⁰¹ All this provides a picture completely different from that of Callisthenes’ lot-casting, not involving the sacred oak, the dove, or any other emblem of Dodona.

The variety of explanations suggests that the ancient writers were no less puzzled than their modern readers about the source of Dodona’s prophetesses’ method of communicating with the divine. “Talking doves and rustling oaks, erratic springs and men with dirty feet, women who may or may not twitter like birds, echoing vessels and croeing demons, and finally tokens picked from a jar, possibly guided by dreams: in the end, (…) all that we know for certain is that consultants wrote their question down on lead tablets, which they then rolled up.”²⁰² There is, however, a common denominator of ancient theories concerning the source of divine revelation: with the exception Callisthenes, the ancient authors seem to agree that it was based on some kind of a sound, which triggered the required state of the prophetesses’ consciousness.²⁰³

Prophets as Advocates of Worship

**Coin of Alyattes. Circa 620/10-564/53 BCE. / Courtesy Classical Numismatic Group, Wikimedia Commons**

Building and restoring temples and sacrificing to gods were pious works which could be done only with the consent and encouragement of the gods, and to which kings and other rulers were exhorted by prophets and other diviners. Rulers could also be reproached for disregarding or destroying temples and their worship. For example, Alyattes, king of Lydia and the father of Croesus, sent messages to inquire of the Delphic oracle concerning his sickness. When his envoys arrived at Delphi, however,

the Pythian prophetess said that she would give them no answer, until they should restore the temple of Athene which they had burnt at Assessos in the land of Miletos.²⁰⁴

Alyattes, as related by Herodotus, had continued the war against Miletos begun by his father for eleven years until in the twelfth year, when the Lydian army were burning standing grain, the fire was driven by a heavy wind, setting fire to the temple of Athene. Soon after this incident, Alyattes fell sick, and even though the burning of the temple was due to an accident, this was the reason why he was denied an answer from Delphi, as if the inquiry itself was found impious. In fact, the denial implied an answer in itself: when the war was finally over, Alyattes would build two temples of Athene at Assessos in place of one, recovering from his illness;²⁰⁵ he is also said to have dedicated a votive-offering at Delphi, “a great mixing-bowl of silver with a welded iron stand, a sight worth seeing above all the offerings at Delphi.”²⁰⁶ In the context of Herodotus’ Histories, this passage highlights the authority of the Delphic (that is, Greek) oracle above foreign kings and the supreme moral judgment it represented in his pattern of the rise and fall of earthly powers.

The example taken from literary sources highlights how important it was for the rulers and citizens to maintain good relationships with temples. In Greece, too, taking care of temples and public sacrifice served the purposes of maintaining a symbolic universe and binding the community together.²⁰⁷ For those who were wealthy enough to pay a visit to major Greek oracle sites it was important to be seen there and to donate money for the sanctuaries. In the Roman imperial period, the functions of prestigious oracle sites such as Claros and Didyma were even used to integrate local elites into the imperial political context.²⁰⁸

Greek oracular sites share a feature poorly attested in ancient Near Eastern sources: dedications to the gods in response to oracles as a gesture to express gratitude to the deities, and as demonstrations of the wealth and divine favor enjoyed by the donor.²⁰⁹ Oracular shrines, Delphi in particular, “were bursting at the seams with votive offerings of all kinds,”²¹⁰ such as statues and vessels with inscriptions indicating the donor’s name, mostly visible to every visitor. The dedications reflect the Greek oracular process based on the sequence of question and response, demonstrating that (1) the prophetic process of communication did not end with the divine response, but (2) continued in the subsequent interpretation and eventual fulfillment of the oracle. This (3) prompted the consultant to address a votive offering to the oracular deity which, then, (4) served as a monument to the piety and wealth of the donor as well as of the prestige of the temple and its oracle.

The dedications demonstrate the central role of the temples in the functioning of the oracular process. Essentially, however, they were visible carriers of the significance of the prophetic institution as such; as Plutarch wrote: “Those dedications have movement and significance in sympathy with the god’s foreknowledge, and no part of them is void or insensible, but all are filled with the divine significance.”²¹¹ The actual subject of the dedications ,in fact, was not the donor but the deity; they were not spontaneous expressions of the donor’s emotions but were based on the instructions pronounced by the oracle itself; for instance, an inscription of Didyma states simply: “Hermias to Zeus Hypsistos, a thank-offering in accordance with an oracle (kata chrēsmon eucharistērion).”²¹²

In addition to the dedications, the significance of the temple context of Greek prophecy is reflected in the contents of the oracular responses, which very often deal with cultic matters. According to the revealing statistics of Joseph Fontenrose concerning the Delphic oracle, nearly three-fourths (73 percent) of what he calls “historical responses” fall in the category of res divinae, whereas only less than one third of the so-called “legendary responses” can be so classified.²¹³ In other words, the responses which are recorded in primary sources, mainly inscriptions, or which otherwise, according to his criteria, derive from historically reliable informants, are overwhelmingly of a religious nature. On the other hand, about half (55 percent) of the “legendary responses” in secondary sources deal with private matters, which, again, are much rarer (8 percent) in the historical group of responses. Whether or not we agree with Fontenrose about the “historicity” of each individual case, these statistics nevertheless suggest that the closer the source is to the actual performance of the oracle, the more probably its topic is related to cult and religion. This ratio also correlates with the type of transmission: the inscriptional evidence is much more focused on religious matters than the literary sources. The inscriptional responses tend to be addressed to public bodies rather than individuals, and this may distort the result somewhat, assuming that the responses to individuals would be more focused on private matters; but as Fontenrose says: “all we can rely on is what we have, responses attested to contemporaries, and most of these are inscriptional.”²¹⁴

The picture remains very similar when we look at the responses from Didyma: according to my own calculations, some twenty out of the thirty-five responses defined by Fontenrose as “historical” have a religious focus,²¹⁵ while only a few of those labeled by him as “not genuine” deal with culticmatters. In a similar vein, many of the preserved Clarian oracles give cultic instructions, often related to setting up divine images or altars.²¹⁶

A different picture is given by the lead tablets from Dodona, the great majority of which do not have a ritual emphasis.²¹⁷ This may reflect the nature of the sources: the Dodona tablets typically carry enquiries of private persons on their own behalf, mostly relating to matters like traveling, marriage, health, and property. However, questions asked by communities may concern the deity to which it would be best to sacrifice.²¹⁸

The cult-related oracular responses typically give the enquirer instructions concerning sacrifices to gods; for example, the Cycizenes are told to sacrifice to Poseidon, Gaia, and some other gods whose names have not been preserved.²¹⁹ The enquirer may also ask who would be the appropriate god to receive his sacrifices; for example, the delegation of the Parians from Pharos want to know to what god or goddess they should sacrifice to in order to keep the city and the country from harm.²²⁰ The cities of Hierapolis and Callipolis, both afflicted by pestilence, received thorough instructions from Apollo on the sacrifices necessary to remove the plague.²²¹ Even one of the very few Dodona tablets with ritual content contains the simple question: hē trithytikon “Whether to make the triple sacrifice?”²²²

**The Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian Xenophon of Athens. / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons**

Sometimes the seemingly cult-related question may have political intentions. Xenophon wanted to accompany his friend Proxenus in order to make the acquaintance of Cyrus the Younger and to participate in his military expedition against Artaxerxes II. Socrates advised him to consult the Delphic oracle on the matter, so Xenophon asked the Delphic oracle to what god he should sacrifice and pray to make his intended journey successful, receiving the response that he should sacrifice to Zeus Basileus. When Socrates heard about this, he said Xenophon should instead have asked whether it was better to go or to stay, but told him nevertheless to act according to the oracle. Xenophon took part in Cyrus’expedition, the real purpose of which became clear to him only later.²²³

While these oracles are primarily related to the concerns of the enquirer and only indirectly about advocating the worship of certain temples, there are plenty of oracular responses urging the enquirers to erect statues of gods or to furnish the sanctuaries with altars or other cultic paraphernalia. Several inscriptions report on statues in different cities erected according to the oracle of Apollo at Claros or at Didyma,²²⁴ and many responses relate to the establishment of altars. The Acharnians and Athenians, for example, are advised by the Delphic oracle to construct altars for Ares and Athena Areia;²²⁵ Damianos, the prophētēs of Didyma, is given permission to establish an altar for Soteira Kore in the temenos of Apollo at Didyma;²²⁶ Symmachos the Phrygian is told by Apollo of Claros to build an altar for Apollo Helios;²²⁷ and the four tribes of the city of Anchialos in Trache had set up statues of gods according to oracles of “the Lord Apollo of Colophon,” that is, Claros.²²⁸ Sometimes the enquirers ask Apollo’s permission to construct new temples; for example, that of Timotheos of Anaphe concerning the temple of Aphrodite in the sanctuary of Apollo in Anaphe.²²⁹ An inscription indicates that the Didymean priests had consulted the oracle in order to speed up the completion of the construction works of their temple.²³⁰

Two individual cases from Didyma deserve to be mentioned as examples of the oracle serving the special interests of a temple and a city, whether economic or political. The dēmos of the Milesians consulted Apollo probably several times by the turn of the second century BCE in order to“make the games of the Didymeia crowned games and invite Hellenes to these, the benefactions made by the god being common to all of them,”that is, to convert the Didymean festival into an athletic contest. The Milesians received firm support from the god for their plans to establish a Panhellenic event, doubtless designed to increase the wealth and international fame of the temple of Apollo and the city of Miletus in competition with well-known festivals in other cities such as Delphi and Magnesia.²³¹

Another interesting oracle is the one concerning the appointment of Satorneila as the priestess of Athena Polias, quoted in a monument erected in her honor by her sons sometime in the third century CE.²³² The long, hexametric oracle of Apollo of Didyma highlights the position of Athena as the patroness of Miletus, giving the impression that her cult had become obsolete until Satorneila, a member of a prominent Milesian family who,although a married woman, was appointed the high priestess (archiereia) for the rest of her life. The oracle not only endorses the cult of Athena Polias but also underscores the personal achievement of Satorneila in its maintenance—and, indirectly, the high social standing of her family within the Milesian community.²³³ Both cases from different times highlight the function of prophecy in underpinning the institutions and the social hierarchy of the city of Miletus.

Taken together, the Greek sources leave no doubt that throughout the period of several centuries that they cover, inspired prophecy was practiced in sanctuaries. The three major oracles of Apollo at Delphi, Didyma, and Claros shared a considerable number of common characteristics, probably because Delphi as the oldest and most venerable Greek oracle site, served as a model to the others. Features common to the three oracles of Apollo include a special chamber (adyton) in which the prophetic performance took place and which was not accessible to the consultants, purification of the prophet and/or the consultants with water, and the use of mediating personnel in the transmission of the divine message to the consultants. The procedures and role-castings were not identical, however. At Didyma and Claros, the oracles were also written down, whereas at Delphi this is doubtful. The inspired prophet was always a woman at Delphi and Didyma, while in Claros, the hypophētēs—whether he was identical to the prophētēs or the thespiōdos—was of male gender. Lot-casting as a divinatory method appears in sources concerning Delphi and Claros, but it is not known from Didyma.

**Panorama of the theatre of Dodona, the modern village Dodoni and the snow-capped Mount Tomaros are visible in the background. / Photo by Onno Zweers, Wikimedia Commons**

What the sources tell us about Dodona is indicative of the independent roots of the oracle. The Molossians inhabiting the area, considered barbarians by Thucydides,²³⁴ lived on the fringes of the Greek world and had traditions different from the Athenians; on the other hand, they derived their own genealogy from Greek heroes, avowing themselves Panhellenic identity.²³⁵ The few things that can be reconstructed of the oracular process at Dodona suggest that its functioning did not follow the model of the oracles of Apollo. However, there are common features as well. The divine message was mediated by women at Dodona probably quite as consistently as in Delphi and Didyma, and some evidence suggests lot-casting as a method of divination at Dodona as at Delphi and at Claros. Technical divination such as lot-casting may also have been practiced because the inspired prophet was available only at designated times.²³⁶

All four oracles were consulted by communities and private people alike, even though, from the available sources, private consultations form the clear majority of cases at Dodona, while at Claros, delegations coming from different cities dominate the written evidence. In general,“oracles were not really in the business of foretelling the future. They were there to give advice, and to ratify decisions.”²³⁷ The function of giving advice addresses uncertainty, the basic need of divination, while the function of ratifying decisions rather serves the purpose of bestowing authority to the consultant. Hugh Bowden has recently demonstrated a change of focus in Greek oracle: while the earlier oracles in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE are motivated by true uncertainty, those delivered in the Roman period were more concerned with the individual status of the enquirer.²³⁸

Much of what is said above is basically true for ancient Near Eastern prophecy as well. However, the sources available to us suggest a marked difference between Greek and Near Eastern types of prophecy, since the Near Eastern sources almost nowhere describe private people consulting prophets, while in Greece, this is taken for granted everywhere. While this may partly derive from the accident of preservation of sources, the Near Eastern ones coming primarily from royal archives, it may also relate to a different distribution of divinatory functions in Greece and the Near East. We have seen that in Greece, there was no such clear-cut boundary between prophecy and technical divination as in Mesopotamia, and the oracle sites could employ simultaneously different methods of divination. As a rule, however, the venue of inspired divination was the sanctuary, and it was clearly the preferred method at least in the three major oracles of Apollo. Technical divination was considerably less dependent on the temple context, as the existence of itinerant diviners demonstrates.²³⁹

Prophets and Temples: Hebrew Bible

Overview

Does the general picture of prophets and temples drawn from Mesopotamian and Greek sources change when we move to the Hebrew Bible?

Yes, and no. As I attempt to show in the following survey of biblical texts related to the subject, prophets are frequently enough associated with temples and worship in the Hebrew Bible to suggest that there was more than a merely occasional connection between these religious institutions, and that the biblical texts supplement the general picture constructed so far from Mesopotamian sources instead of replacing it with a totally different picture. On the other hand, the perspective taken on prophetic activities and their method of presentation changes drastically. This, as indicated above, is largely due to the nature of the Bible as a source material. In the Bible, we have nothing to compare with the Mesopotamian or Greek primary sources bearing an (almost) first-hand witness of prophets and temples.

In what follows, I will classify the biblical material according to the same scheme I used with the Mesopotamian and Greek texts; this, I hope, will help to identify the family resemblances—both commonalities and differences—between these textual corpora.

Temples as Venues of Prophetic Performances

**Complete set of scrolls, constituting the Tanakh. / Photo by Pete unseth, Wikimedia Commons**

Biblical texts, in general, are not very informative about the details concerning the realia of prophetic performances, at least in proportion to the immense importance of the prophetic word for the overall ideology of the Hebrew canon. The narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible, notably the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, include many descriptions of the prophet’s appearances, but even these cases are often lacking details that would satisfy a historian, mostly because the narrative frame of the prophetic appearances serves compositional rather than historical purposes. In the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, mostly being compilations of prophetic words without any specific scenery, such narratives are fewer still. In both cases, it was essential from the point of view of the authors and editors of these texts to write what the prophets said rather than give details about when, where, and how their messages were thought to have been delivered.

Fortunately, when it comes to the prophets’ appearances in the context of worship, the texts are not entirely mute. In fact, the books of Samuel and Kings include quite a number of narratives in which a place of worship is presented as the venue of the prophetic performances. The encounter of the“man of God”with Eli (1 Sam. 2:27–36) only makes sense within the context the temple of Shiloh, all the more because the explicit concern of the prophecy is the proper execution of the priestly office. This is also the temple where the future prophet Samuel was given as a little boy to be dedicated to God (1 Sam. 1:24–8)—which reminds one of the female votaries (šēlūtu) uttering prophecies in Assyrian temples. Later on, the legacy of this temple is carried forward by the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite (1 Kgs 11:29–39), who continually lived in Shiloh and was consulted there by King Jeroboam as if the ancient temple were still standing (1 Kgs 14:1–18). The same king is also found in dispute with another “man of God” at Bethel, the place where he had erected the notorious “golden calves” (1 Kgs 13:1–5). These texts illustrate how the prophetic appearances serve the ends of the narrative context and the editors’ preferences. While the prophecy of the “man of God” to Eli reads much like an addition to the stories on Samuel legitimizing the Zadokite priesthood,²⁴⁰ the prophecies to Jeroboam appear in decisive turning points of the Deuteronomistic narrative on the disintegration of the Solomonic kingdom, first legitimating the kingship of Jeroboam but later condemning the cultic innovations of this Unheilsherrscher.²⁴¹

Especially noteworthy is the company of ecstatic prophets related to the cult place in Gebah, who come down from the high place with harps, tambourines, flutes, and lyres, prophesying so powerfully that even the freshly anointed king Saul becomes enraptured by the spirit of God and is “changed into another man”(1 Sam. 10:5–6). These prophets have often been seen as the biblical counterparts of the Near Eastern ecstatic prophets,²⁴² and not without reason.When read as a part of its present context, it is interesting that the editors of the Deuteronomistic History do not hesitate to incorporate an account of such prophets in their composition. Similar performances are met with little understanding in the Second Temple period (Hos. 9:7; Zech. 13:2–6). It may be that, while taking the cultic context of prophetic activity for granted, the text, at the same time, distances itself from it.

The prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible do not often indicate whether or not the words of the prophets are imagined to be spoken within a temple context. This is consistent with the idea of a prophetic book as a collection of divine words that transcends the bounds of time and space, which leads to a dehistorizing strategy that makes the search of the historical context of the texts an extremely difficult task.²⁴³ Nevertheless, there are a few narrative sections in the prophetic books that repeatedly make the prophets appear in temples.

In the book of Isaiah (that hardly mentions prophets at all) the most important text in this respect is the so-called calling vision of the prophet that initiates his prophetic career in Isaiah 6. This text is often, and with good reason, understood to take place in the temple of Jerusalem.²⁴⁴ What is particularly interesting about it in comparison with the Mesopotamian texts is the element of the divine council that has been found in God’s words: “Whom will I send? Who will go on our behalf?”(Isa. 6:8). If this passage actually derives from the eighth century BCE, as most commentators believe,²⁴⁵ it suggests a similar affiliation of the prophet Isaiah with the temple of Jerusalem as is known to us from all over the Near East. Other than that, the book, even in its narrative sections, does not tell anything about Isaiah’s relationship to the temple of Jerusalem, save the possible indirect hint in the narrative on King Hezekiah consulting Isaiah when facing the threat from Assyria (Isa. 37:1–7; 2 Kgs 19:1–7): the king goes to the temple wearing sackcloth and sends his representatives, also clothed in sackcloth, to Isaiah,as if the prophet was to be found there.²⁴⁶

The book of Jeremiah is the most explicit of the prophetic books in locating prophetic activity in the temple of Jerusalem; this is because of the lengthy narrative sections that read like passages of the prophet’s biography. Here, if anywhere, we encounter a construct of prophet and prophecy, which turns Jeremiah into a multi-layered legend reflecting different, not always entirely compatible, ideologies of the Second Temple period.²⁴⁷

**Reconstruction of the Second Temple. / Photo by FOTLbill, Wikimedia Commons**

In fact, Jeremiah is connected with the temple in the very first verse of the book where he is given a priestly lineage (Jer. 1:1). The narratives of the book are careful not to present him as belonging to the actual temple personnel; but the mannered juxtaposition of priests and prophets all over the book suggests that this is the place where prophets should normally be looked for.²⁴⁸ Even Jeremiah is brought to the temple over and over again. This is the place where he gives two sermons to priests, prophets, and the people of Judah predicting its destruction (Jer. 7:1–15; 26:1–19); where he is arrested by Pashhur, the temple overseer, because of his performance in the temple (Jer. 19:14–20:6) that causes the temple authorities to consider him a lunatic (Jer. 29:26–7); where he meets prophet Hananiah, his rival, in front of the priests and people (Jer. 28); and where King Zedekiah asks him to prophesy and has a private conversation with him (Jer. 38:14). When Jeremiah himself is no longer allowed to enter the temple, he sends Baruch the scribe to read out loud what was written on the scroll containing his prophecies (Jer. 36:1–10).

Not all, if anything, of this can be taken as accurate historical information on the whereabouts of Jeremiah the prophet; for example, the Deuteronomistic, if not post-Deuteronomistic, nature of the temple sermons is generally recognized.²⁴⁹ What matters is that the book of Jeremiah as such shows that the temple—which in the minds of the book’s readership would have been virtually identified with the second rather than the first temple of Jerusalem—remained a most natural venue of prophetic performances to take place. While the contents of Jeremiah’s prophecies of doom are often difficult to compare with any Near Eastern counterpart known to us (this seems not to have been the kind of prophecy that ended up in Near Eastern archives), the scenery showing prophets proclaiming in temples, officials supervising them, and kings utilizing their services, is something to be found all over the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. The multi-layered construct of prophecy in the book of Jeremiah, then, is based on a well-known model suggesting institutional support of the prophets in the temple of Jerusalem.²⁵⁰

When moving to other prophetic books, the prophets frequenting temples become few. The most telling case is doubtless Amos confronting the priest Amaziah in the royal temple of Bethel (Amos 7:10–17). While vehemently denying that he is a“prophet or a prophet’s son, ”this is what Amos is in every respect regarding the venue and contents of his proclamation. The scenery is in many ways comparable to Jeremiah’s performances in the temple of Jerusalem, including the later-than-Amos origin of the text²⁵¹ and role of the priest as an overseer—again, a model well known from the Near Eastern cultural milieu.²⁵²

That Ezekiel, the exiled priest and prophet, never appears in the temple of Jerusalem is self-evident and does not diminish the overall concern of the book of Ezekiel for the temple; the same can be said of Haggai. Unless we take it for granted that some part of the texts in the books of, say, Joel, Nahum, or Habakkuk, originate from the temple context, scanning the text of the Twelve Prophets results in very few passages where the prophets and their words are actually located in temples. Among such passages are one in Hosea (Hos. 9:7–9) indicating that the prophet, considered a madman, is persecuted “in the temple of his God” (which I understand to refer to the temple of Jerusalem rather than some eighth-century shrine in the Northern Kingdom²⁵³), and another in the book of Zechariah (Zech. 8:9) referring to the words of the prophets who were there at the founding of the temple (the first or the second?). Both of these strayfinds are remarkable as such, the first as a possible glimpse at the marginal status of traditional prophecy in the Second Temple period, and the second as reflecting the Near Eastern understanding that temple-building had to be based on divine initiative.

Prophets among the Temple Personnel

**Russian icon of Haggai, 18th century (Iconostasis of Kizhi monastery, Karelia, Russia). / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons**

Looking for explicit evidence of prophets as belonging to the permanent staff of the temple of Jerusalem or some other cult place in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible leaves one at first virtually empty-handed, especially if we do not accept the criticism of “false” prophets, such as those rebuked in Micah 3:5–7, to be evidence of their status as “cult prophets.” However, it would be all too hasty to conclude from this that no prophets in Israel, Judah, and Yehud were ever employed by the temple. To be sure, several biblical prophets are presented as descendants of priestly families: Jeremiah (Jer. 1:1), Ezekiel (Ezek. 1:3), and Zechariah (Zech. 1:1; cf. Neh. 12:16);²⁵⁴ and a figure like Haggai, even though not presented as a priest, cannot be located far from the priestly circles either.²⁵⁵ Moreover, Joel, Obadiah, Nahum, and Habakkuk, even Amos and Jeremiah, have been labeled as “cult prophets”;²⁵⁶ whether or not the existence of such a class of prophets can be proved, the implication that the temple was the principal framework of their activity is derived from the biblical texts. Moreover, the psalms that bear a conspicuous resemblance to prophecies—biblical as well as extrabiblical—are quite plausibly taken as evidence of the presence of such prophets in the temple.²⁵⁷

In the historiographic books of the Hebrew Bible, only a few interesting but enigmatic cases can be listed. As already indicated, the young Samuel is presented as a votary of the temple of Shiloh (1 Sam. 1–3), which immediately brings to mind the Assyrian votaresses delivering prophecies in the temples ofIštar.²⁵⁸ Of the multiple roles of Samuel, that of the prophet may be due to a secondary textual development,²⁵⁹ but the overlap of his priestly and prophetic roles is nevertheless noteworthy. We can only speculate whether the readers are supposed to think that the ecstatic prophets of Gebah belong to the permanent staff of that cult place, or whether, for instance, the prophetic band around Elisha should be understood to have an affiliation with the sanctuary of Bethel or Gilgal (cf. 2 Kgs 2:2–3).²⁶⁰ The role of Huldah the prophetess as the wife of a temple functionary begs interesting questions regarding her relationship with the temple and its worship (2 Kgs 22:14),²⁶¹ as does the institutional position of the prophetess Noadiah and the “rest of the prophets” who stood against Nehemiah in fifth-century BCE Jerusalem.²⁶²

A most intriguing combination of prophecy and ritual performance is to be found in Chronicles, where David appoints the sons of Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun to “prophesy with lyres, harps, and cymbals” (1 Chr. 25:1). These men were “trained in singing to the Lord,” and they numbered no less than 288 (1 Chr. 25:7). The association of prophecy and music calls to mind the ritual of Ištar at Mari (**51, 52) where, however, prophets and musicians were different groups of performers, and the Neo-Babylonian ritual text (*135o), where prophets are mentioned in the section concerning the duties of musicians.²⁶³ Whether the Levitical singers should be called prophets in the usual sense of the word is debatable, but it should be noted that the Chronicler does call Heman the “seer of the king” (1 Chr. 25:5), hence associating the temple musicians’ task with prophetic activity.²⁶⁴ Rather than turning musicians into prophets, the Chronicles highlight the divinely inspired origin of their music, thus creating a positive association between ritual and prophetic inspiration. It can be observed that in Chronicles, the roles of the priests (Levites in particular) and prophets are blurred in a way that makes also the priests transmitters of the divinely inspired word.²⁶⁵

All in all, while the temples in general are presented as natural environments of prophetic activity, and the close Near Eastern analogy suggests this tobe probable in historical terms as well, the status and position of biblical prophets within religious institutions remains surprisingly obscure—perhaps because it was unclear even to the editors of the texts, or, preferably, because the scribes in charge of prophetic literature wanted to present the “true” prophets as independent of the temples. This, however, does not turn temple and worship into marginal issues in the Hebrew Bible—quite the contrary.

Prophets as Advocates of Worship

Modern-day reconstruction of Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon (10th century BCE) from Jerusalem Walls National Park. The temple stands on the original Mount Moriah, as it looked prior to its expansion by King Herod in the 1st century BCE. / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The abundance of biblical texts surveyed above demonstrates that, whatever the prophets’ affiliation to the cultic institutions might have been in socio-historical terms, the temples are not presented as alien or indifferent to the prophets. On the contrary, the prophets’ concern for worship is a recurrent topic; in fact, it is one of the most urgent issues of the biblical prophetic discourse altogether. Again, we are talking primarily about texts, not the historical prophets.

The prophetic advocacy of the temple of Jerusalem begins already with the prophet Nathan who, as a part of his promise to David of his eternal dynasty also pronounces the foundational oracle of Solomon’s temple: “He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13; cf. 1 Chr. 17:12). There is, however, an interesting tension between this oracle and the beginning of the chapter where God makes it clear that he does not need to dwell in a temple.266

Josiah’s cultic reform is said to have been prompted by the newly found book of the law and by the oracle of Huldah that obliges the king to enforce it (2 Kgs 22:3–20).²⁶⁷ Likewise, the earlier reform by King Asa of Judah, as narrated in Chronicles, was inspired by the prophecy of Azariah son of Oded (2 Chr. 15). In Second Isaiah, the role of the royal temple-builder is given to the King Cyrus of Persia, the“good shepherd”who, upon the word of the God of Israel, presides over the re-establishment of the temple of Jerusalem(Isa. 44:28).²⁶⁸ It is noteworthy that all these texts recapitulate the common ancient Near Eastern triangle of kings, prophets, and temples, representing the building of temples and cultic reforms as a royal achievement initiated by divine word proclaimed by a prophet.²⁶⁹

Apart from Noadiah in Nehemiah 6:14, the only prophets mentioned in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are Haggai and Zechariah who prophesied “in the name of the God of Israel, ”encouraging the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem (Ezra 5:1; 6:14). This is roughly in accord with what is written in the books bearing the names of these prophets.²⁷⁰ The two chapters of the book of Haggai focus entirely on the rebuilding of the temple, and the visions written in the book of Zechariah predict, not only the building of the temple (Zech.1:16), but also the coronation of Joshua the high priest (Zech. 6:9–15).

In the book of Ezekiel, the temple of Jerusalem is an indispensable element of the prophet’s visionary world. Living in physical separation from the temple, the prophet is shown in visions how the Glory of the Lord leaves the temple (Ezek. 10), defiled with idolatry and desecrated by foreigners (Ezek. 8),and how the Glory of the Lord eventually returns to the renewed temple (Ezek. 43:1–5), described in detail in the prophet’s vision (Ezek. 40–8). This structure of the book of Ezekiel can be seen as the biblical version of the divine alienation—a divine reconciliation pattern that can be found in several Mesopotamian texts: the destruction of temples is caused by the anger of the gods who abandon their temples, whereas their reconstruction is asign of reconciliation between gods and their worshippers.²⁷¹ Similarly in Ezekiel, the temple is the symbol of the eternal covenant of peace between Israel and God, who dwells in the midst of his people (Ezek. 37:26–8).

The idealized vision of the temple of Jerusalem as the dwelling of God and the focal point of the identity of Israel and even other nations can be found in other prophetic books as well. The temple is the condition sine qua non of the eschatological vision of the book of Isaiah: “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. . . For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”(Isa. 2:2–4; cf. Mic. 4:1–4). In the visions of Third Isaiah, the temple is a house of prayer for all peoples (Isa. 56:3–8), and offerings are brought to the temple by nations from afar (Isa. 60:4–16; 66:18–21; cf. Zech. 8:18–22). In these texts, the temple of Jerusalem is the navel of the universe, fully corresponding to the mythological location of Near Eastern temples, the monotheistic ideology notwithstanding. The central position of Jerusalem “rests fully on its association with the (ideologically) sole legitimate temple for the one and only existing deity in the universe. In other words, Jerusalem is important and unique because of the temple, rather than vice versa.”²⁷²

While these idealistic and eschatological visions hardly reflect any actual practices of the temple of Jerusalem, prophetic concern for the temple can also be expressed in more tangible terms. This is most clearly the case in texts that reprimand the community for ritual negligence and improper offerings. Especially in the book of Malachi, the priests are given a severe scolding for faulty offerings (Mal. 1:6–14), and the people for “robbing” God by not bringing the full tithe to the temple (Mal. 3:6–9).²⁷³ In the book of Malachi, the prophetic advocacy of the temple becomes its clearest formulation within the Hebrew Bible, including the interplay between ritual observance and the constraints of everyday life.²⁷⁴ Malachi’s concern for proper worship is probably rooted in the temple itself; it has been plausibly suggested that the text derives from Levitical circles.²⁷⁵ Malachi’s message is akin to prophetic advocacy of worship in Mari letters; what sets Malachi apart from them is its nature as an extremely learned literary product relying on earlier written traditions.²⁷⁶

If Malachi can be seen as an advocate of the temple, demanding that thepeople worship their God in an adequate way, what should we say about thoseprophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible that, at least seemingly, invalidate thepeople’s offerings altogether and accuse them of downright idolatry? Are suchtexts to be interpreted as another way of advocating appropriate worship or,rather, as reflecting a complete alienation from a ritualistic religion?

Cultic Criticism in Biblical Prophecy

Israeli West Bank barrier with quotation from Malachi 2:10: “Do we not have one father? Has not one God created us? Why does each of us act deceitfully, each man against his own brother, to profane the covenant of our ancestors?” / Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

We have seen that the ancient Near Eastern documents of prophecy are not void of critical voices concerning the fulfilling of ritual duties. On the contrary, as we have seen, “cultic criticism” in the sense of Malachi can be found in Mari letters as well as in Neo-Assyrian oracles, and that critical prophetic words are quoted in the letters from Mari to address important socio-political issues.However, no counterpart can be found to those biblical texts that despise the worship of the Israelites or Judahites altogether. In particular, the biblical discourse of idolatry presupposes a distinction between the in-group and the out-group, that is, Israel and the nations, or God of Israel and other gods, that is not viable in any other Near Eastern socio-religious environment. More than any other feature, this distinction, fundamental to all parts of the Hebrew Bible where the prophets feature, sets the biblical texts ideologically apart from all other Near Eastern texts.

Much of the polemical speech of the biblical prophets against ritual practices is a corollary to this distinction, whether it should be attributed to the ancient prophets or the editors of the biblical texts. In the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Israel and Judah are compared to unfaithful women and their religious behavior is described with more or less explicit sexual metaphors (Jer. 2–3; Ezek. 16; 22).²⁷⁷ In Jeremiah, the worship of the Queen of Heaven is explicitly mentioned as being practiced by the women of Jerusalem (Jer. 7:18;44:15–19); there is no unanimity so far as to which goddess this title is given.²⁷⁸ In the overarching design of the book of Ezekiel described above, the divine alienation from the temple is caused by its defilement with what is vaguely referred to as “detestable things” and “abominations” (Ezek. 5:11), “all kinds of creeping things, and loathsome animals, and all the idols of the house of Israel” (Ezek. 8:10),²⁷⁹ or more specifically as worship of Tammuz or thesun (Ezek. 8:14, 16). Similarly, in the book of Hosea, the people of Israel are accused of sacrificing to Baal or Baalim (Hos. 2:10; 11:2; 13:1) and worshipping statues (Hos. 8:4–6; 10:1–2, 5; 12:12; 13:2; 14:4); this is why God does not accept their sacrifices (Hos. 5:6; 8:13).²⁸⁰ The book of Zephaniah is somewhat more specific in itemizing Baal and the host of the heavens as the idols of the people of Jerusalem (Zeph. 1:4–5).²⁸¹

While all these passages refer to worship of deities other than Yahweh, or a worship of Yahweh considered idolatrous by the authors of the texts, there are very few specific features to indicate what kind of rituals are being attacked. The alleged “Canaanite” practices often constructed as the target of the polemics of Hosea and Jeremiah in particular are scholarly constructs that can no longer be substantiated by conclusive evidence.²⁸² This alone distances the texts from whatever can be surmised to be their historical environment. At any rate, these texts cannot to be taken as general criticism of ritual activity, but are outspokenly directed against religious practices that the texts denounce as idolatry.

Even the book of Amos, clearly the most polemical among the prophetic books in terms of worship, is somewhat unspecific about the targets of its attacks. Apart from Sikkuth and Kiyyun, names denoting astral deities (Amos 5:26), the book only mentions cult places: Bethel (3:14; 7:13), Bethel and Gilgal (4:4), Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba (5:5), Samaria, Dan, and Beersheba (8:14), “high places of Isaac” and “sanctuaries of Israel” (7:9).This raises the question whether the book targets worship in general or only as performed in these places. It is true that the book does not give an explicit alternative where the appropriate worship should take place; but in view of the divine word, “The end has come upon my people Israel” (Amos 8:2), this would be superfluous anyway.²⁸³ “Fallen, no more to rise, is maiden Israel” (Amos 5:2), and there is nothing that can change God’s mind—or may be there is, after all: “Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said”(Amos 5:14).

This verse of Amos serves as a reminder that not all critical voices against ritual practices are explicitly concerned with idolatry. There are a few texts in which rituals, and the sacrifices in particular, are disvalued as compared to justice—not only the locus classicus, Amos 5:21–4 (“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . .”),²⁸⁴ but also, for instance, Isaiah 1:11–17:

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts . . .

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them . . .

Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Related sayings can be found in the books of Hosea (Hos. 6:4–6), Micah (Mic. 6:6–8), and Zechariah (Zech. 7:5–10), and a similar idea may be echoed in Jeremiah 7:22, where God tells the people to eat up the meat meant to be sacrificed and claims—contrary to the testimony of the Pentateuch!—not to have commanded their fathers concerning sacrifices when bringing them out of the land of Egypt.²⁸⁵ Importantly, further passages with a similar message include Isaiah 58, ridiculing the people who, while fasting, serve their own interests and oppress their workers, and Isaiah 66, where God prefers the humble and contrite in spirit for the temple and sacrifices.

These passages are the ones that lend the strongest support to the idea of the anti-ritualism of the “classical” prophets and give rise to the idea of a cult-critical current in the prophetic tradition extending from Hosea to Third Isaiah.²⁸⁶ The problem remains, whether these few expressions against the sacrificial rituals really constitute a cantus firmus that gives the deepest level of meaning to the prophetic literature, sustaining the image of the “classical” prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos as sworn anti-ritualists, and whether such an image is historically sound.

My own answer would be rather to the negative for several reasons. First, the evidence is based on only a small selection of biblical passages representing a tiny proportion of the text of the prophetic books, which raises the question of whether the strong emphasis on them corresponds to the ideological preferences of the scholars rather than their prominence within the biblical text. Secondly, the significant dating problems make the reconstruction of a pre-exilic prophetic criticism of the cult extremely difficult; each dating must be argued for, and indeed, a later origin has been suggested for every one of the above-mentioned texts. Thirdly, the image of the anti-ritualist prophets tends to form a hermeneutical circle with the traditional idea of irreconcilable antagonism between (“true”) prophets and cult, or (“true”) prophets and priests. In fact, some prophetic books may turn out to be much more positively disposed towards cult and ritual than the traditional image of the“anti-cultic” prophet allows us to imagine.²⁸⁷

**Hebrew bible (Tanakh) in the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland, printed in Israel in 1962. / Photo by LGLou, Wikimedia Commons**

This said, there is no need to invalidate the condemnatory message of the texts, whatever their dating and religio-historical background. Their aggravated tone is difficult to miss, whereupon it has been suggested that these passages actually give voice to the prophets’ antagonistic attitude towards sacrificial cult or to an anti-ritualistic faction in the community.²⁸⁸ Many would argue that even these passages do not propagate the rejection of sacrificial rituals altogether but present it as of lesser importance than social justice; or that the targets of criticism are to be found in the wrong beliefs and practices of the worshipers rather than the rituals per se;²⁸⁹ or that condemnation of the cult is a necessary part of the proclamation of the end of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.²⁹⁰ Furthermore, it may also be that this rhetoric“ is intended to shock and dismay, not to lobby for a world without cultic practice,”²⁹¹ which would be difficult to imagine anyway.

Whatever historical and socio-religious explanation can be given in each individual case (one universal explanation is probably not enough), what the texts have in common is the troubled relationship between the symbolic universes of their implied authors and audiences. In these texts, the position of the temple as the center of the mythological universe is seriously at issue. The prophets are given a role, not representing the institutional order but questioning the legitimacy of the order represented by those responsible for the temple. Rather than an ideological anti-ritualism, the texts reflect a severe disruption in the symbolic universe of the implied authors (i.e. the “prophets”) with regard to the central position of the temple and the legitimacy of its management. These texts express a deep mistrust in the capability of the religious order to provide people with trust and security—either because the temple is no longer there or because it is wrongly maintained; hence its position is challenged and, consequently, the symbolic universe reinterpreted.²⁹²

Instead of expressions of a universally anti-ritualistic ideology, the texts can be read as reflecting a post-traumatic stress. They cope with the trauma caused by social and cultural upheavals, whether the end of the Northern Kingdom, the destruction of Jerusalem, or the troublesome restoration of the post-monarchical temple community. Normally, the institutions legitimized by the shared symbolic world of the members of a given society should be able to furnish them with a trust and identity necessary for overcoming the uncertain times following such catastrophes and to supply a shared vision of the future;²⁹³ for example, the communal laments reflected by the prophetic books (cf. Hos. 10:5–8; Zech. 7:1–10; 8:16–22) and Lamentations have doubt-less served as a cultural organization of grief. The“cult-critical” passages, as the biblical prophecy of doom in general, present the contemporary institutional order as failing to provide the identity, security, and protection required of it, deny its role as the identity giver, and proclaim an alternative vision of the future.²⁹⁴

The biblical prophetic books certainly reflect conflicts in monarchic and post-monarchic communities—between whom and because of what remains to be explained from case to case. Identifying the historical proponents of the conflicts reflected by the texts has become increasingly complicated, because the texts can be placed against a variety of historical backdrops. The traditional appreciation of the eighth to seventh century BCE as the normative period of Israelite prophecy easily leads to reconstructions of social settings for the “classical prophets”; however, when looking for the societal background of the texts advocating or criticizing temples or rituals within a prophetic discourse, it may turn out that they rather reflect the circumstances of Second Temple communities.²⁹⁵ Problems regarding the possibility of reaching the sociological reality behind the texts calls for caution against knowing all too much about it;²⁹⁶ suffice it to say that the texts unquestionably reflect clashes and rivalries “between some prophets and some priests.”²⁹⁷

We can now return to the question of the contraposition between “cultic” and “anti-cultic” prophets, or between prophets and priests. While this antagonism still has its proponents, at least in some form, it is also clear that it has given way to other kinds of understanding of the relationship between prophets and worship.²⁹⁸ The above analysis concurs with the results of current research as summarized by Lester Grabbe in his introduction to a collection of essays related to the topic (presented here in an abridged form):²⁹⁹

There was no natural opposition between prophets and priests.
The temple was seen as an essential part of society.
This acceptance did not prevent clashes between different groups affiliated with the temple.
While there is little conclusive evidence for a class of “cult prophets,” many prophetic activities took place in the temple.
The roles of prophets and priests may have overlapped.

These points can be reached by reading the biblical text without too much historical speculation, and the same points can be made of the ancient Near Eastern and Greek material surveyed above (perhaps with the exception of point 5, not much endorsed by Mesopotamian and Greek records). This makes the prophets appearing in Greek and Near Eastern texts not just a heuristic analogy to biblical prophets, but fragments of a patterned cultural background, against which the biblical texts can be placed in spite of their different history of textual transmission. As Dominique Charpin puts it: “the essential difference between Mari prophecies and biblical prophecies lies in their reception.”³⁰⁰

See endnotes and bibliography at source.

Chapter 6 (201-256) from Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives, by Martti Nissinen (Oxford University Press, 11.28.2017), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.