Ancient Jewish Cultural Encounters and a Case Study on Ezekiel

Mladen Popović, Qumran Institute, University of Groningen

1. Introduction
Although many of us are trained to look at the ancient world from one cultural (or academic)
perspective, we are all aware that the ancient world was both culturally diverse and
interconnected. This volume, originating from the Third Qumran Institute Symposium in
December 2013, takes as its starting point the impact of encounters between cultures, groups
and individuals and focuses on ancient Jewish religion, culture, and society.
To study ancient Israel, Judea, and Palestine—from the late Iron Age until Late
Antiquity—from a perspective of cultural encounters is apt, because of the multifaceted
dynamics of people from elsewhere coming to the land and people from the land going
elsewhere. In other words, trade and travel, imperialism and diaspora, have determined
various cultural interactions between people from ancient Israel, Judea, and Palestine and
people from other parts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. Also, history
and cultural memories—available to us through literary, documentary, archaeological,
epigraphic, numismatic, and iconographic sources—offer a unique vantage point to study
such cultural interactions from a longue durée perspective.
How does our understanding of ancient Judaism change if we consider the role of
cultural encounters in shaping historical development, literary traditions as well as religious
and political systems? How can we trace and value the movements of texts, religious or
cultural practices, political institutions and ideas over the ancient world? What happened
when these were transmitted between very different cultural spaces, and how did the
encounters affect the parties involved? What were the mechanisms of these cultural
encounters, and what kinds of persons or social forces were responsible?
In this essay I briefly introduce the overall theme of the volume, the various
contributions and how they interact with the theme, and I end with a brief case study on
Ezekiel to illustrate what is at stake when using a perspective of cultural encounters to study
ancient Judaism.

2. Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World
In historical and cultural studies and social sciences the notion of “cultural encounter” is often
used for the study of the context where cultures meet and where cultural identity and cultural
resilience are at stake. There is, however, not a fixed concept of “cultural encounter.”
Theoretical positions include notions such as hybridity, métissage, frontier studies,
postcolonialism, entangled histories, or multilingualism. 1 This means that often “politics”
comes to the fore as well, especially when notions of imperialism or dominant versus
dominated culture, as in postcolonial theory, are involved.
The notion of “cultural encounters” is not the same as cultural context. Elements of
historical and cultural context, such as a particular political situation, are not equivalent to
cultural encounters or borrowings. A cultural context is wider than a cultural encounter, but a
cultural context may be determined by cultural encounters among other elements. Therefore, a
cultural context that is the result of a particular cultural-political encounter, such as
imperialism, may help to understand the impact of a particular cultural encounter in shaping
historical developments of cultural identity and literary or religious traditions.
When using the notion of cultural encounters in the study of the ancient world it is
important to reflect on the nature of the sources at our disposal. The nature of the sources used
to study a cultural encounter determines the historical investigation and also the questions
raised. Documentary sources, such as inscriptions and papyri, document a situation of real
encounters in a particular place where real social, cultural, and religious exchanges are at
stake, between individuals who can often be precisely identified. Literary sources, on the
other hand, allow for deduction of hypothetical contacts or encounters on a more general
level. The interpretation of literary sources with regard to cultural encounters often entails the
invoking of presuppositions based on contextual evidence that determines the analysis of
specific questions of a particular cultural encounter. In the case study below on Ezekiel I will
return to the problems involved in the issue of literary influences in relation to real or
perceived transfers from a given literary corpus to another.
As various contributions in this volume demonstrate, the levels of cultural encounters
vary between vast geographical areas and local sites, and in between such other ends of the
spectrum. The impact of a particular cultural encounter will have been different, and so will

1
See, e.g., Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street, eds., Cultural Encounters: Representing “Otherness” (New
York: Routledge, 2000); Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelman, and Kim M. Phillips, eds., Old Worlds, New Worlds:
European Cultural Encounters, c. 1000–c. 1750, Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 18 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2009); Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Embodiments of Cultural Encounters, Cultural
Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship 3 (Münster: Waxmann, 2011); Luca Zavagno and Özlem C̦aykent,
eds., The Islands of the Eastern Mediterranean: A History of Cross-Cultural Encounters, International Library
of Ethnicity, Identity and Culture 5 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Murat Cankara, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-
Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet,” Middle Eastern Studies 51 (2015): 1–16; Anna
Huebner, “Tourism and Cultural Encounters in ‘the Last Frontiers,’” International Journal of Heritage Studies
21 (2015): 862–68.
have the particular phenomena that occurred. In addition to examples in this volume such as
Elephantine or Elijah’s Cave, I offer the following example of impact of Rome in Galilee
around the turn of the era.
Andrea Berlin has argued that the impact of Rome in Galilee was visible specifically
in the form of shrines and temples that honoured Roman deities and through the availability
of pottery such as Terra Sigillata A. In 19 BCE Herod the Great initiated the erection of a
temple in honour of Augustus at the Paneion. Around the turn of the era his son Herod Philip
built a much larger Roman-style temple over an earlier shrine at Horbat Omrit, advertising
this new temple via imagery on the new coins that he issued from the newly established mint
in Caesarea Philippi in 1 CE, which continued until the end of his reign in 34 CE. A Judean
reaction, Berlin argues, was visible through a change in material culture at the local level of
ordinary villages in the hill land of Galilee and Gaulanitis.2
If we identify these two temples as Roman, it seems obvious that “Rome” came in the
guise of local leaders paying tribute to the global power. What we have here then are non-
Romans setting up dedications to Rome and the emperor. If we take these temples as the
manifestations at a local level of what was originally a Roman cultural trait, but now spread
and shared “globally,” we may ask whether it was shared locally outside of the local elite. In
other words, was the perceived change in material culture in Galilee and Gaulanitis a response
of some local Jews to the embracement of Roman cultural traits by some of their local rulers?
Perhaps it is possible to understand the evidence as instances of “glocalisation,” i.e. how
homogenising elements of a global culture appear in local cultures, modifying both in the
process.3 Given the absence of inscriptions and other written material from these villages that
may provide further indications as to how people there understood and presented themselves,
it is not easy to disentangle such issues of cultural identity in real life. This example may
show the different ways in which global and local levels were at play during a particular

2
Andrea M. Berlin, “Romanization and Anti-Romanization in Pre-Revolt Galilee,” in The First Jewish Revolt:
Archaeology, History, and Ideology, ed. Andrea M. Berlin and J. Andrew Overman (London: Routledge, 2002),
57–73; eadem, “Jewish Life Before the Revolt: The Archaeological Evidence,” JSJ 36 (2005): 417–70; eadem,
“Identity Politics in Early Roman Galilee,” in The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,
ed. Mladen Popović, JSJSup 154 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 69–106.
3
For “glocalisation,” see, e.g., Erik Swyngedouw, “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’? Networks, Territories and
Rescaling,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17 (2004): 25–48; Kostas Vlassopoulos, Greeks and
Barbarians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys, eds.,
Globalisation and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
cultural encounter, but also may illustrate the limitations and restrictions that the available
sources put on any analysis.4
In this volume, various aspects of the notion of “cultural encounters” are tackled
differently by individual contributors. Konrad Schmid argues that the Priestly texts in the
book of Exodus developed the notion that Egypt stands outside of God’s world order and that
P seems to reflect the peaceful world order of the Persian Empire at a point around 525 BCE
when it included the whole ancient world except for Egypt. In this case, a particular political
and cultural context, that of the early Persian Empire, may help to understand the impact it
had in shaping literary or religious traditions, that of the Priestly version of the biblical exodus
account regarding the story’s stance towards Egypt.
Bob Becking discusses two Aramaic texts from the military colony of Elephantine in
southern Egypt. They can be understood as examples of the mutual acceptance of both the
variety and the unity of the divine in Elephantine in the fifth century BCE. Being
documentary evidence, these texts illustrate a situation of real cultural encounters in a
particular place and at a particular time where real social, cultural, and religious exchanges
occurred. These texts demonstrate that it was acceptable to use the names of deities
originating in other religious traditions in order to refer to the divine realm in general and that
in the context of an oath a deity of someone else was accepted as an observing witness.
Jonathan Stökl critically examines the usefulness and applicability of James Scott’s
concepts in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts for the study of
the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature, using the example of the
mentioning of a net in Ezek 17 as a perceived hidden transcript or polemic against Marduk.
Instead of taking references to a small part of a tradition as an indication that a particular text
was known in the same form as it is available to us today, Stökl suggests to approach so-
called combat texts as intertexts and to read Ezekiel as alluding to a wider Combat Myth
tradition of which the book thereby became a part.
Caroline Waerzeggers draws on important but thus far largely ignored literary sources
in cuneiform to argue that Babylonian scholars were engaged in a lively and productive
debate about Nabonidus in the Hellenistic period. This debate took place in several
Babylonian cities, allowed for divergent appraisals of Nabonidus’ reign, and led to the
creation of a variety of literary texts. This may have provided a general cultural context,
Waerzeggers suggests, in which Babylonian-Jewish interactions that are behind such literary

4
See also Mladen Popović, From Babel to Bible: Cultural Encounters of a Third Kind, inaugural address 10
December 2013, University of Groningen, published in 2014.
texts as Daniel 4 or the Prayer of Nabonidus may well have occurred, rather in a third or
second century BCE context than three centuries earlier.
Uri Gabbay argues that the Mesopotamian method of interpreting texts, as exemplified
in cuneiform commentaries from the second half of the first millennium BCE, may have
influenced Jewish exegetical texts. Dealing with literary texts, as Stökl and Waerzeggers,
Gabbay emphasizes the element of language contact—the use of similar terminology in
exegetical texts—and argues for sociolinguistic contact, direct and probably oral, between
Judean and Babylonian scholars. Gabbay describes the type of contact reflected in the
commentaries as a self-conscious bilingual cultural encounter, but he leaves room for several
scenarios when such contacts might have occurred.
Discussing Martin Hengel’s landmark study Judentum und Hellenismus and his
subsequent work on Qumran and Hellenism, Jörg Frey deals with the history of scholarship.
The notion of cultural encounters between the Jews and the Greeks lay at the core of Hengel’s
work and has shaped to a large degree how subsequent scholarship approached the evidence
for these cultural encounters. Frey emphasizes the importance of critical reflection by scholars
on the categories utilized in research and interpretation, especially when those categories,
“Judaism” and “Hellenism,” contribute to expressions of identity or otherness.
George Brooke considers the choices being made by Jewish scribes of the late Second
Temple period when they selected papyrus for their manuscripts rather than writing on skin,
raising questions that cultural theorists have become used to discussing in terms of agency,
through which people in everyday circumstances impose aspects of their identities on their
circumstances. Brooke argues that the choice between papyrus and skin reflects an
intersection between high culture and popular culture, between the regional and the local,
where also emulation of respect for the high culture of the Egyptian priesthood might have
been at play.
Benjamin Wright adduces the particular political and cultural context of Seleucid
hegemonic rule over Palestine in order to understand its impact upon the book of Ben Sira’s
work. On the basis of Ben Sira’s use of Hebrew and his willingness to appropriate Hellenistic
literature and ideas for his own purposes, Wright characterizes Ben Sira’s interaction with
Hellenistic culture as a process of negotiation, of “using and refusing.” Using theoretical
insights from postcolonialism, Wright argues that writing in Hebrew allowed Ben Sire a space
to develop a Jewish national discourse which also allowed him to avoid the attention of the
colonial powers, as he situated himself and his students as the middle men between the
colonizer and indigenous elites, on the one hand, and the subordinated lower classes, on the
other.
Judith Newman analyses Sirach 24 as an example of a multilayered cultural encounter
when “native” Judean Hokhmah (Wisdom) crossed the border and met Sophia and Isis in
Greco-Roman Egypt. Using postcolonial theories of interculturality that assume dominant
elite and subjugated cultures co-existed in segregation but also in tension and even in conflict,
Newman argues that the hidden hybridity manifest in the hymn of Sir 24 when read in
Alexandria was an act of considered resistance, a counter-discursive move, to the political
dominance and attraction/threat represented by the ubiquitous Isis cult in the religious
competition of the diaspora world.
Focusing on the use of iconographic traditions to illustrate situations of real-life
cultural encounters between the Jewish and the Greco-Roman world, Anne Lykke analyses
the differences in the iconography of the Jewish coinages minted at the time of the
Hasmonaeans and the coinage of King Herod Agrippa I. Lykke argues that the Hasmonaean
coinage, like that of other local autonomous states rising in the wake of the increasing
disintegration of the Seleucid Empire, displayed a tendency to follow the example set by the
Seleucid coinage. She argues that Agrippa I relied heavily on Roman iconographic traditions
as a reference to the Roman sovereign and the imperial ruler cult, but also positioned himself
and his family firmly within these. Lykke shows how from Hasmonaean and Herodian
coinage—a material source and documentary evidence over against literary sources—detailed
knowledge can be drawn concerning political, cultural, and social processes.
Hindy Najman

Cornelis de Vos focuses on the literary source of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians to
discuss the cultural encounter between Paul, his opponents, and the Galatians in Anatolia. De
Vos takes both circumcision and emasculation (galli) as clearly distinguishable elements of
Jewish and Anatolian culture which can serve as a means of comparing the cultures of the
parties involved in Paul’s letter. He argues that Paul used these Jewish and Anatolian cultural
elements to oppose and substitute them.
Against recent interpretations that suggest the rabbis saw themselves as Romans, part
of the Roman order, Ishay Rosen-Zvi argues that the Mishnah, as a Tannaitic response to
Roman rule, attests to a rabbinic self-consciousness according to which they could not see
themselves as integral parts of a Roman Empire. He rethinks the comparison between
Tannaitic literature and Second Sophists from the second century CE and argues that unlike
the Sophists, but similar to Paul and his view on the ekklesia of believers, rabbinic literature
did not make do with the spaces the empire left for the provincials, but purported to create an
alternative space, which offered an entire world to inhabit. This alternative might be
understood as a form of cultural mimicry, but, Rosen-Zvi concludes, this cannot be taken as
an example of a self-conscious sense of Romanization. Dealing with a literary source to study
the encounter between Roman and Jewish cultures, he makes an important case to understand
the enterprise itself of writing and compiling the Mishnah as a textual and yet real alternative
to Rome.
Focusing on Jewish calendar and time-keeping practices, especially lunar practices, in
the Roman Empire, Sacha Stern analyses documentary and epigraphic evidence. Stern argues
that the Jewish lunar calendar did not simply function as an act of resistance to Romanization.
Jews, as were other groups in the Roman Empire, were engaged in a complex manner with
Julian and other solar calendars, participating in a wider sub-culture of the Roman Empire,
which in some cases could be regarded as subversive and culturally dissident. Following
postcolonial theory, Stern argues that hybridity in the context of the Serdica cyclical calendar or
the Catania lunar date was not the natural result of cultural osmosis or “assimilation,” but in fact
a deliberate, subversive cultural strategy.
On the basis of Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic inscriptions etched on its
walls that indicate that the site was frequented and venerated in antiquity Tal Ilan is able to
study the intricate history and use of Elijah’s Cave in Haifa as a microcosm of cultural
encounters over time between pagans, Jews, and Muslims in the area (Christians come into
play via study of literary sources). The presence and positioning of the different
inscriptions—erasing previous inscriptions or displaying new inscriptions across previous
ones—in the cave show that violence was the order of the day, rather than a peaceful co-
existence. Ilan argues that we must understand the religious character of Elijah’s Cave in
terms of an on-going struggle, among the various religions and religious dominations in the
region to possess, disinherit, and repossess the site.
Thus, the contributions in this volume show how different aspects come to the fore
when using the notion of cultural encounters to study ancient Jews’ meeting with other
cultures, with cultural identity and cultural resilience being at stake.

3. Ezekiel and Babylon

Here I wish to briefly return to my earlier work on the transmission of astronomical,
astrological, and physiognomic learning but now focus on the question whether Ezekiel had
direct access to Babylonian sources,5 as contributors such as Jonathan Stökl and Uri Gabbay
in this volume also reflect on the wider issue of Babylonian-Judean knowledge transfer as a
result of cultural encounters.
For Ezekiel as a historical character we only have the literary evidence of the
prophetic book at our disposal. All other evidence is circumstantial. According to the
prophetic book, around the year 593 BCE6 Ezekiel—having been taken to Babylon five years
before—had a vision.7 This vision stands at the beginning of the prophetic book and describes
a theophany, God appearing on his heavenly throne and accompanied by fire, thunder, and
lightning. Amid all that Ezekiel is said to have seen something that gleamed like ḥašmal. This
Hebrew word is a hapax legomenon, appearing only here in the first chapter of Ezekiel. In the
Septuagint it was rendered by the Greek word elektron. The theophany is elaborated by a
description of four wondrous creatures, with multiple faces and wings, and rotating wheels.
Above the four creatures was something like a dome, raqiʿa, just like the dome referred to in
the creation narrative in Gen 1. The dome shone like crystal and above the throne there was
what looked like a sapphire throne. Something that seemed like a human form occupied the
throne, and upward from what appeared the figure’s loins Ezekiel is said to have seen
something that gleamed like ḥašmal. This vision—which is full of linguistic and conceptual
peculiarities, has a different version in Greek, and is in its final form in the Hebrew Bible the
result of the Fortschreibung8—plays an important role throughout the prophetic book as an
expression of judgement and renewal.
The literary description of Ezekiel’s close encounter with the divine is also interesting
with regard to Ezekiel’s cultural encounter with Babylon. It seems evident that the historical
figure of Ezekiel, being in Babylon, would have been familiar with expressions of Babylonian

5
See also Popović, From Babel to Bible.
6
For this date, see, e.g. Karl-Friedrich Pohlmann, Ezechiel: Der Stand der theologischen Diskussion (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), 178–82. See also James E. Miller, “The Thirtieth Year of Ezekiel
1:1,” RB 99 (1992): 499–503.
7
For the location, see most recently Abraham Winitzer, “Assyriology and Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv: Ezekiel
among the Babylonian literati,” in Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews,
Iranians, and Babylonians, ed. Uri Gabbay and Shai Secunda, TSAJ 30 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014);
Caroline Waerzeggers, “Babylonians in Susa: The Travels of Babylonian Businessmen to Susa Reconsidered,”
in Der Achämenidenhof / The Achaemenid Court: Akten des 2. Internationalen Colloquiums zum Thema
Vorderasien im Spannungsfeld klassischer und altorientalischer Überlieferungen, Landgut Castelen bei Basel,
23.-25. May 2007, ed. Bruno Jacobs and Robert Rollinger (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 777–813. I am
grateful to Avi Winitizer for sending me his text prior to publication.
8
See, e.g. Walther Zimmerli, Ezechiel, BKAT 13 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1969); Pohlmann,
Ezechiel; Christoph Uehlinger, “Virtual Vision Vs. Actual Show: Visualizing Strategies in the Book of Ezekiel,”
paper presented during the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 2012 in Chicago; Christoph Uehlinger
and Susanne Müller Trufaut, “Ezekiel 1, Babylonian Cosmological Scholarship and Iconography: Attempts at
Further Refinement,” TZ 57 (2001): 140–71. I am grateful to Christoph Uehlinger for sending me the text his
SBL Chicago paper.
culture.9 In scholarship a general assumption seems to be that Ezekiel as a member of the
Judean elite would have had almost naturally access to Babylonian scholars who shared with
him their scientific learning.10 This assumption is often used to explain the few concrete leads
for Babylonian learning in Ezekiel. Thus, in Ezekiel’s throne vision two elements are often
put forward as examples for Babylonian-Judean interaction with regard to the exchange of
scholarly learning. First, there is the description of the dome that shone like crystal and the
figure on the throne of sapphire above that dome. Second, there is the obscure hapax
legomenon ḥašmal used in the description of the theophany.
Scholars have pointed to a Babylonian text as a presumed literary parallel for these
two elements in Ezekiel’s theophany description. In this scholarly Babylonian text (KAR
307), marked as a secret of the great gods, three heavens are mentioned, the middle one being
sapphire-like. In that middle heaven is Marduk who—seated on a raised dais—lets shine forth
elmešu-light. 11 The Hebrew word ḥašmal is from this Akkadian word elmešu. 12 The
suggestion is that the two elements in Ezekiel’s vision are there because of Ezekiel’s direct
access to Babylonian knowledge such as in the Babylonian text KAR 307.

9
Generally speaking, there are two positions in scholarship with regard to explanations of the cultural context of
Ezekiel’s work. On the one hand, scholars point to the Babylonian context Ezekiel was living in since 597 BCE
that influenced his thinking; see, e.g., Othmar Keel, Jahwe-Visionen und Siegelkunst (Stuttgart: Katholisches
Bibelwerk, 1977); W. Boyd Barrick, “The Straight-Legged Cherubim of Ezekiel’s Inaugural Vision (Ezekiel
1:7a),” CBQ 44 (1982): 543–50; Nahum M. Waldman, “A Note on Ezekiel 1:18,” JBL 103 (1984): 614–18;
Stephen Garfinkel, “Of Thistles and Thorns: A New Approach to Ezekiel ii 6,” VT 37 (1987): 421–37; idem,
“Another Model for Ezekiel’s Abnormalities,” JANES 19 (1989): 39–50; Peter Kingsley, “Ezekiel by the Grand
Canal: Between Jewish and Babylonian Tradition,” JRAS 2 (1992): 339–46; Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian
Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998); Nancy R. Bowen, “The Daughters of Your People:
Female Prophets in Ezekiel 13:17–23,” JBL 118 (1999): 417–33; Uehlinger and Müller Trufaut, “Ezekiel 1,
Babylonian Cosmological Scholarship and Iconography”; Shawn Z. Aster, The Unbeatable Light: Melammu and
Its Biblical Parallels (Münster: Ugarit, 2012); Uehlinger, “Virtual Vision Vs. Actual Show”; Abraham Winitzer,
“Gilgameš in Ezekiel’s Eden,” paper presented during the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 2012 in
Chicago; Jonathan Stökl, “Ezekiel Goes to School: A Possible Channel for the Transmission of Learning,” paper
presented during the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 2012 in Chicago; idem, “The ‫ מתנבאות‬in
Ezekiel 13 Reconsidered,” JBL 132 (2013): 61–76. I am grateful to Jonathan Stökl and Avi Winitzer for sending
me the text his SBL Chicago paper.
On the other hand, scholars point to the singularity of Ezekiel’s thinking and how that developed from a
mono-cultural tradition not influenced by Babylonian culture; see Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20: A New
Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983); Leslie C. Allen, “The
Structure and Intention of Ezekiel I,” VT 43 (1993): 145–61.
10
Garfinkel, “Of Thistles and Thorns”; Stökl, “Ezekiel Goes to School”; Uehlinger, “Virtual Vision Vs. Actual
Show”; Winitzer, “Gilgameš in Ezekiel’s Eden”; idem, “Assyriology and Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv.”
11
Other Babylonian texts also refer to elmešu-light around the gods; see Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic
Geography, 8–15; Winitzer, “Assyriology and Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv.”
12
Benno Landsberger, “Akkadisch-hebräische Wortgleichungen,” in Hebräische Wortforschung: Festschrift
zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter Baumgartner (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 176–204 (190–98); Daniel Bodi, The Book of
Ezekiel and the Poem of Erra (Freiburg Schweiz: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1991), 82–94; Simo Parpola, Assyrian Prophecies (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1997), XLVIII and nn.
248, 249; Aster, The Unbeatable Light, 304–5.
 I wish to make two brief observations regarding the issue of literary influences in
relation to real or perceived transfers from a given literary corpus to another. First, if we only
have literary evidence to go on for studying a cultural encounter any hypothesis should be
confronted with what we do know of the presumed context on the basis of other evidence.
Thus, it seems unlikely that in the sixth-century BCE, Neo-Babylonian context in which the
historical figure of Ezekiel purportedly found himself he would have had direct access to
centres of Babylonian learning. Contrary to the evidence we have for the eighth–seventh-
century, Neo-Assyrian period, we currently have no evidence for the sixth-century BCE, Neo-
Babylonian period that gives us reason to believe that non-Babylonians were given access to
the cuneiform tradition of learned knowledge. In this period the Babylonian urban elite
seemed strict in its maintenance of cultural boundaries, 13 whereas in the Persian and
Hellenistic periods they seemed to be less so, showing how attitudes toward knowledge
access and transfer are determined by the specific historical and cultural circumstances.
Second, how precise is the literary parallel between Ezek 1 and KAR 307? In Ezek 1
there is no mention of three heavens. Furthermore, in Ezek 1 the dome is not like sapphire as
in the Babylonian text KAR 307 (saggilmud-stone) but like crystal.14 In Ezek 1 it is the throne
that is like sapphire. The most specific similarity between both texts seems to be the
ḥašmal/elmešu-radiance. This terminological parallel is hardly enough to substantiate the
argument for Ezekiel having direct access to Babylonian learned culture.15
Access to and dissemination of learned knowledge and texts were determined by
specific circumstances which is why concrete manifestation of Babylonian learning differed
according to time and place. We cannot presume a literary universe alone, an immaterial
stream of tradition, available anytime and anywhere, and accessible without further ado. This
was not the case for Babylonians, let alone for non-Babylonians like the Judeans in the sixth

13
We have enough evidence that Judeans in general managed themselves well as villagers and traders in their
new Babylonian surroundings, but concrete evidence for elite exchange is lacking, except for the Judean king
Jehoiachin. See, e.g., Mladen Popović, “The Emergence of Aramaic and Hebrew Scholarly Texts: Transmission
and Translation of Alien Wisdom,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Transmission of Traditions and Production of
Texts, ed. Sarianna Metso, Hindy Najman, and Eileen Schuller, STDJ 92 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 81–114; idem,
“Networks of Scholars: The Transmission of Astronomical and Astrological Learning between Babylonians,
Greeks and Jews,” in Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature, ed.
Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 151–91.
14
Cf. Exod 24:10.
15
Other examples from the book of Ezekiel for possible Babylonian-Judean knowledge transfer are perceived
structural and conceptual parallels between Ezek 2, 3 and 13 and a learned Babylonian list of incantation
formulae, Maqlû. See Garfinkel, “Of Thistles and Thorns”; idem, “Another Model for Ezekiel’s Abnormalities”;
Bowen, “The Daughters of Your People”; Stökl, “The ‫ מתנבאות‬in Ezekiel 13 Reconsidered.” But these parallels
are very general or phenomenological, and the perceived similarities could also be explained in a different
manner.
century BCE.16 When dealing with literary sources, contextual evidence determines to a large
degree the analysis of specific questions of a cultural encounter, such as with Babylon and
Judea. It is important to be aware of such contextual presuppositions being brought forward.
This also applies to the scarce clues in Ezekiel’s throne vision.17

16
In Assyriology Leo Oppenheim coined the term stream of tradition. As a concept the stream of tradition
seems to have been taken as an omnipresence of the great literary and scholarly works in Mesopotamian cultures
for centuries. But more recently Assyriologists have argued that the many literary and scholarly cuneiform
tablets available to us now, after modern excavations and discoveries, were not available as a whole to all and
everywhere. Specific circumstances, places and people determine the availability of and the access to texts and
teachers; see, e.g., Eleanor Robson, “The Production and Dissemination of Scholarly Knowledge,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, ed. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 557–76.
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We must differentiate between different forms of cultural knowledge and different processes of access to and
dissemination of such knowledge. Narrative parallels between the Gilgameš-epic and Ezekiel (Winitzer,
“Gilgameš in Ezekiel’s Eden”) or the Poem of Erra and Ezekiel (Bodi, The Book of Ezekiel and the Poem of
Erra; see also the critical review of J. Nicholas Postgate in VT 43 [1993]: 137), the transmission of legal
formulations or astronomical and astrological knowledge should not all be lumped together and interpreted as
the result of direct access to Babylonian scholars; see also Popović, “Networks of Scholars,” 176–78.