Divinized Instruments and Divine Music: A Study in Occasional Deification

Abstract

* This article was first presented virtually in a joint session of Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World and Hebrew Scriptures and Cognate Literature at the annual meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature in San Antonio in 2021, focused on music in the cult; it benefited from the discussion that followed. I would like to think the anonymous JNES reviewers for their thorough and incisive comments. 1 By “anthropomorphic,” I refer not only to human-like form, but also to human-like agency, thought, emotion, behavior, and treatment (see Hundley, “Here a God” [2013]: 82–83; Yahweh Among the Gods [2022], 31–32; Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, “Between Cognition and Culture” [2015], 37). However, as we will see, the boundary between animate and inanimate, anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic, is rather porous. While objects lack agency and animation on the surface, texts ascribe both to various objects. In addition, the form of a cult image said little about how people understood the deity it (re)presented. Regarding anthropomorphic and symbolic forms, see also Hundley, Gods in Dwellings [2013], 228–39, and Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, “Between Cognition and Culture” (2015), 23–24; regarding a cult image as a form of presentation, and not merely representation, see Gumbrecht, Production of Presence (2004), 355; Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, “Between Cognition and Culture” (2015), 10–12. Regarding the ing a static conception, texts adopted a context-specific approach to deities, even a context-specific approach to whether something was divine or not.2 This article presents a case study in the pragmatics and rhetoric of occasional deification by exploring the deification of musical instruments in Mesopotamia.3 It then turns to a preliminary investigation of the sparser data from Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible to see the relation between traditions and what light Mesopotamia may shed on its Levantine neighbors’ conceptualizations. In Mesopotamia, why were only certain instruments divine, and only in certain contexts? Some scholars argue for the deification of sacred objects by association or contagion,4 and musical instruments because