From Adapa to Enoch : scribal culture and religious vision in Judea and Babylon / Seth L. Sanders

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction -- Heavenly sages and the Mesopotamian scribal ideology of continuity -- "I am Adapa!" : the divine personae of Mesopotamian scribes -- Ezekiel's hand of the Lord : Judahite scribal reinventions of heavenly vision -- Enoch's knowledge and the rise of apocalyptic science -- Aramaic scholarship and cultural transmission : from public power to secret knowledge -- "Who is like me among the angels?" : Judean reinventions of the scribal persona -- Conclusion

Seth L. Sanders offers a history of first-millennium scribes through their heavenly journeys and heroes, treating the visions of ancient Mesopotamian and Judean literature as pragmatic things made by people. He presents each scribal culture as an individual institution via detailed evidence for how visionary figures were used over time. The author also provides the first comprehensive survey of direct evidence for contact between Babylonian, Hebrew, and Aramaic scribal cultures, when and how they came to share key features. Rather than irrecoverable religious experience, he shows how ideal scribal "selves" were made available through rituals documented in texts and institutions that made these roles durable. He examines how these texts and selves worked together to create religious literature as the world came to be known differently: a historical ontology of first-millennium scribal cultures. The result is as much a history of science as a history of mysticism, providing insight into how knowledge of the universe was created in ancient times

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