The Blessed Saint Pazuzu, Protector of the Newborn

I’ve taken a brief break from the Mandaean Book of John to do some work on some other projects, including presenting on my research at the 41st annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics in New Haven and the 223rd meeting of the American Oriental Society in Portland.

Chief among these other projects is my contribution to a new textbook on epigraphy, which consists of a chapter on the problematic Arslan Taş amulet. This amulet, which was first published by Robert du Mesnil du Buisson in 1939, is made out of limestone (or possibly gypsum), shaped like a tablet, and perforated at the top, perhaps so that it could be hung on a doorpost. There are three figures carved upon it: a) a striding warrior wielding a double-headed ax, b) a winged sphinx, and c) a dog-like creature with what appears to be the tail of a scorpion, in the process of swallowing a human figure. The incantation inscribed upon the amulet calls upon one or more supernatural beings to protect the client from two or more maleficent beings. Presumably, these are the figures depicted on the amulet, but this is by no means certain.

The first being whose support is sought is identified as Ssm, son of Pdr. Both ssm and pdr are divine names known from other texts. Coincidentally, this same proper name (or at least its Aramaic form, ssm br pdr) also appears upon an inscription engraved upon the side of a bronze statue of Pazuzu at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, allegedly from the site of San el-Hagar (ancient Tanis) in the Nile river delta (you may remember Tanis from the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark).

Pazuzu is, of course, an Assyrian demon that represents “a ferocious wind that brings destruction to cultivated land, cattle, and humans.” Most people will be familiar with him from the 1971 William Peter Blatty novel The Exorcist and the 1973 horror film that was adapted from it. Representations of Pazuzu (in the form of amulets and figurines such as the one discovered at Tanis) were popular during the 7th and 6th c. B.C.E., because his image was used to ward off other demons, particularly the infanticidal female demon Lamaštu. Lamaštu is usually depicted as a dog-like figure, not unlike one of the two figures on the front of the Arslan Taş amulet.

Given that Pazuzu amulets and figurines generally include Pazuzu’s name, and the Ashmolean statue invokes the same figure as the Arslan Taş amulet for protection against a Lamaštu-like figure, F.A.M. Wiggermann identifies the Pazuzu with Ssm. Now here’s where things get a little bizarre.

The names “Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof” (סנוי סנסנוי וסמנגלוף) were traditionally carved upon cradles, bedposts, and amulets to protect newborn children from the infanticidal female demon Lilith. This is apparently a very ancient custom; forms of these same names appear in the Babylonian incantation bowls from Late Antiquity and even seal amulets from Parthian times. A medieval text, the Alphabet of Sirach, explains how these three angels became the protectors of newborn children (the story bears being reproduced in its entirety):

While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone’ [Genesis 2:18]. He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his Creator: ‘Sovereign of the universe!’ he said, ‘the woman you gave me has run away.’ At once, the Holy One, blessed be He, sent these three angels [Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof] to bring her back.

“Said the Holy One to Adam, ‘If she agrees to come back, what is made is good. If not, she must permit one hundred of her children to die every day.’ The angels left God and pursued Lilith, whom they overtook in the midst of the sea, in the mighty waters wherein the Egyptians were destined to drown. They told her God’s word, but she did not wish to return. The angels said, ‘We shall drown you in the sea.’

“‘Leave me!’ she said. ‘I was created only to cause sickness to infants. If the infant is male, I have dominion over him for eight days after his birth, and if female, for twenty days.’

“When the angels heard Lilith’s words, they insisted she go back. But she swore to them by the name of the living and eternal God: ‘Whenever I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that infant.’ She also agreed to have one hundred of her children die every day. Accordingly, every day one hundred demons perish, and for the same reason, we write the angels names on the amulets of young children. When Lilith sees their names, she remembers her oath, and the child recovers.

In the article I linked above, Martin Schwartz identifies ssm with a common Semitic word for “fruited branch of a date palm,” and suggests that this word also lies behind the names of the angelic triad. Furthermore, he sees this same word as the etymon of Sisinnios or Sisinius, the name of a celebrated warrior saint whose feast is celebrated either on the 23rd of November, or on the 29th of November together with St. Saturninus.

According to tradition, St. Sisinnios was born in Antioch and was martyred by the Roman emperor Maximian. The principal source for his life is another medieval legend, in which St. Sisinnios and his two brothers, Sinès and Sinodore, pursue an infanticidal female demon, and extract a promise from her not to approach any home on which their names and all of her secret names are written. For this reason, his legend was especially widespread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and as far south as Ethiopia, and he is frequently depicted as a “Holy Rider,” mounted on horseback, wielding a weapon and poised to strike a demoness, who is trampled beneath the front hooves of his mount. Beyond what is written in the legend of St. Sisinnios, nothing else is known about his life.

The legend of Sisinnios, Sinès, and Sinodore is rather obviously related to that of Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof in the Alphabet of Sirach. Less certain is Schwartz’s identification of this same figure with the Ssm of the Arslan Taş amulet, or Wiggerman’s identification of Ssm with Pazuzu, but the fact that all four (the saint, the angel, the god, and the demon) are depicted upon amulets explicitly to protect homes from infanticidal female demons should give us sufficient cause to consider the identification.

If the identification is justified, Pazuzu would not be the only unlikely figure from another religious tradition to be canonized as a saint, but certainly one of the strangest, comparable to the strange career of the Buddha, who was famously canonized as St. Josaphat.

Some Preliminary Data

As the 18th chapter of the Doctrine of John is the only one thus far that contains a clear terminus post quem (that being 691 CE, the date of the completion of the Dome of the Rock), I thought that it might make for a useful “anchor” for my relative chronology. The first step was to collect data about the language of the text; the chart below illustrates this data, and an explanation of the data follows.

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
1) gṭal	145		0.52		0.91
2) gṭil l-	14		0.05		0.09
3) nigṭul	13		0.05				0.12
ḏ-nimar		11		0.04		0.85
≠ḏ-nimar		2		0.01		0.15		0.02
4) gṭul	7		0.03
5) migṭal	5		0.02
6) (qa)gaṭil	95		0.34				0.88	0.98
Total	279		1

The rows represent different verbal stems, starting with 1) the  inherited perfect (“suffix conjugation”), 2) the innovated periphrastic perfect, 3) the inherited imperfect (“prefix conjugation”), 4) the imperative, 5) the infinitive, and 6) the innovated participial present-future tense. As I previously mentioned, 2) and 6) came to replace 1) and 3), respectively, in most Neo-Aramaic dialects; my purpose in collecting this data is to determine how far along this process Classical Mandaic was at the time that this chapter was composed.

I immediately ran into some serious problems.  For starters, although the inherited imperfect (3) appears 13 times in the text, almost all of the examples are from a formula used to introduce direct speech (ḏ-nimarlun). Formulae of this sort are much more likely to retain archaic grammatical constructions than spontaneous speech, so I felt that the data had to reflect this in some way.

Column A reports the distribution of the 279 verbal forms that appear in the text.  As you can see, the preponderant majority were the inherited perfect and the innovated participial present-future tense, suggesting a relative proximity to the contemporary reflex of Mandaic. Column B contains a breakdown of the 13 instances of the imperfect, divided between formulae and all other forms.

Column C reports the relative proportion of these verbal forms. Column D reports a breakdown of the proportion of instances of the imperfect, divided between formulae and all other forms.

Column E reflects the proportion of inherited perfects to the innovated periphrastic perfect in the text.  The overwhelming majority (91%) of examples are of the inherited perfect.

Column F reflects the proportion of formulaic instances of the inherited imperfect to non-formulaic instances.  85% of the examples were formulaic.

Column G reflects the proportion of inherited imperfects to the innovated participial present-future tense in the text. Only 12% of the examples reflected the inherited imperfect, a number which decreases even further when you remove the formulae from the proportion (Column H); then the proportion becomes 98% to 2%, a situation very much like that found in Neo-Mandaic, in which the only vestiges of the inherited imperfect are found in formulae.

It will be interesting to compare the breakdown of the data in Chapter 18 to that of the other chapters that have been parsed.

How Can You Date a Text?

The question I keep asking myself as I read selections from the Doctrine of John is how these texts relate to one another and to the rest of the Mandaic corpus. I’d like to be able to express these relationships quantitatively, but for the time being I must stick to the qualitative differences that have been identified by previous researchers. These include:

1. References to Islam or historical events that followed its advent;
2. Orthographic conventions, such as historical or phonetic spellings;
3. The presence of Arabic words, either in the form of loan words or names; and finally,
4. “Modern” (Neo-)Mandaic forms such as the indicative particle qa- or the 3rd pl. personal morpheme -iun on the perfective;

All of these are found to some degree or another in Chapter 18 of the Doctrine of John.  The problem with 1) is that it is subjective and open to interpretation, as I have hopefully demonstrated elsewhere.  In the context of Chapter 18, there is a reference to a “Dome of the Priests,” qumba ḏ-kahnia, which appears to be a synonym for the Temple, but this would place the text (or at least this version of it) squarely in the Umayyad period, as the Second Temple was most certainly not domed, and was destroyed in 70 CE in any case; no dome would appear until 691 CE, when the Dome of the Rock was completed. This confusion between the Temple of Solomon and the present occupant of its former site is by no means restricted to the Mandaeans; at times, Muslims, Christians, and even Jews have confused the two. The incipit to the Gospel of Luke in the Harley Golden Gospels, which was composed sometime during the first quarter of the 9th century, features an illustration of the Annunciation to Zechariah (the very subject of Chapter 18) against the backdrop of the Dome of the Rock:

2) is a slightly better indicator of the antiquity of a text, but still problematic, as these texts were copied and recopied constantly throughout the centuries, and with each copy came new opportunities to revise the spelling of each word (potentially to “modernize” or even “archaicize” it).  It is for this reason that the preponderant majority of the variants between the existing texts of the Doctrine of John are spelling variants.

With 3) we find ourselves on slightly better ground, but its utility as a metric for dating texts is still quite limited.  For starters, Arabic and Mandaic belong to the same Central branch of West Semitic, and share a common inherited vocabulary. Words inherited by both languages will be distinguished by their phonology; while Arabic retains the distinction between most Proto-Semitic phonemes, in Mandaic many of these same phonemes have been merged together.  Unfortunately, the Mandaic script reflects its phonology, with the result that Arabic phonemes not found in Mandaic are lumped together with their closest Mandaic equivalents, which are not infrequently reflexes of the same ancestral phonemes. Thus distinctions between Arabic and Mandaic words are occasionally invisibilized by the script. Furthermore, Arabic words are rare in this text, and the pedigree of a given word is not always unimpeachable.

4) is perhaps the best indicator of the relative antiquity of a text.  The presence of Neo-Mandaic forms, when they are absent from other classical texts, indicate that the text in question was composed more recently, relative to those texts.

To these diagnostics, I’d add another qualitative difference, and perhaps even a quantitative one:

1. The presence of the periphrastic gṭil l- perfect conjugation, which is neither Classical nor, strictly speaking, Neo-Mandaic;
2. The gradual replacement of the old Semitic imperfect or “prefix conjugation” by a participial present-future tense.

The latter requires some explanation. Between the period of Late Antiquity and the present day, the Eastern Aramaic dialects underwent a major restructuring of their verbal system. As a result of this restructuring, the ancestors of most surviving Aramaic dialects lost their inherited perfect and imperfect conjugations, which were replaced by periphrastic conjugations based upon the participles. These participial constructions were already present in earlier Aramaic dialects, in which they were used to supplement the inherited tenses. Construction 1), mentioned above, eventually came to replace the West Semitic perfect or “suffix conjugation” in most surviving dialects. It is conspicuously absent from Neo-Mandaic, but appears occasionally in the Doctrine of John.

The process by which these conjugations were replaced was gradual, and Classical Mandaic, especially insofar as it is represented by the language of the Doctrine of John, is a virtual “snapshot” of this process at work. Thus it is possible that this process could be used as a metric for a relative chronology of the texts; if the proportion of the innovated forms to the inherited forms can be observed within the corpus of texts to grow over time, then the relative age of individual texts could be potentially be gauged.

Arabic Loanword

I’ve encountered what could very well be the first genuine Arabic loanword I’ve yet seen in the text of the Doctrine of John. The word is hus, which appears at least twice, first on p. 4, ln. 15, and again on p. 76, ln. 14. Both contexts require something meaning the “source” of the Jordan, and have been translated by Lidzbarski as “reservoir.”

According to Nöldeke (Mandäische Grammatik, p. XXXIII, ln. 17), the word appears three times in the Doctrine of John, and comes from the Arabic حوض ḥawḍ- “basin, cistern.” On p. 670 of Book 1 of his Arabic-English Lexicon (London: Willams & Norgate, 1863), Lane identifies it with the root √ḥ-w-ḍ “to collect (water)” inter alia, which would seem to indicate that it is indeed a good Arabic root, and not potentially a loanword into Arabic from some other language. What is it related to?

Assuming no ad hoc sound changes, the PS root could only be *ħ-w-ɬʼ. This would give us Aramaic √ḥ-w-ʕ (or √ḤWQ), Hebrew √ḥ-w-ṣ, Akkadian √ʔ-w-ṣ, and so forth. The root √ḥ-w-ʕ is unattested in Aramaic; I likewise found nothing in Akkadian that would indicate the existence of this root (the expected G infinitive êṣum “to be(come) too little, small,” is actually derived through regular sound changes from Old Babylonian wiāṣum, according to the CDA, and the expected cognate to Arabic ḥawḍ-, ūṣum, only appears with the meaning “arrowhead,” which clearly comes from the unrelated PS root *ħ-ϑʼ-w).

Hebrew, on the other hand, has two roots that are potential candidates, חוץ I and II, the first of which is represented by the word חוץ ḥuṣ “outside” and the second by the word חיץ ḥáyiṣ “barrier, partition.” BDB relates the latter to Arabic root حوص √ḥ-w-ṣ, meaning “to sew” or “to contract,” but it seems to me that both could be related to the Akkadian root √ḫ-ṣ-ṣ (e.g. ḫaṣāṣum “I to snap off; II to erect (a reed hut)”), which would make them completely unrelated to PS *ħ-w-ɬʼ.

Quite apart from the question of the origin of the Arabic term is the question of how it came to be adopted into Mandaic.

• Why would the Mandaeans, who live in a water-rich environment and have a correspondingly rich vocabulary for water features, need to borrow such a term from Arabic, which is not generally known for its aquatic vocabulary? It would represent a total inversion of the established principles by which borrowing operates, as if the Inuit were to borrow the English word for “snow,” or if New Jerseyans were to borrow the Inuit word for “hairspray.”
• Why then, for that matter, would this stray Arabic word appear, isolated, in a text that is otherwise almost completely bare of other loans?
• Why employ a borrowed word that means “basin,” i.e. a place where water is collected, in a context that clearly requires something like “source”? They’re not the same thing, and neither Nöldeke nor any of his followers have attempted to explain the semantic shift.
• Finally, how can we explain the anomalous use of s to represent Arabic ض? Here is a spare list of words containing the same phoneme, borrowed into Mandaic:

Arabic	Transliteration	Mandaic	Gloss
أرض	ʔarḍ-	arda	earth
بياض	bayāḍ-	baiad	whiteness
ضعيف	ḍaʕīf-	daeip	weak
حوض	ḥawḍ-	hus	basin

I could find no other words in Drower and Macuch, and at least one of these is dubious in the extreme, but the pattern is clear: the Arabic phoneme ḍ-, when borrowed into Mandaic, is represented by d, except for this one word.

Granted, one could easily counter that we’re not dealing with a lot of data here, and that the word hus, if it was indeed borrowed, may have been borrowed from Arabic when the articulation of ḍ- was quite different from what it was at a later date. Even so, there’s not much evidence that this was borrowed from Arabic, despite the superficial similarity between the two words, and as Mark Rosenfelder reminds us, chance resemblances between words in two unrelated languages are not at all uncommon. In the final analysis, it’s just not a good candidate for an Arabic loan word.

So, what does it mean, and where does it come from? I can’t find any good Middle Persian candidates, unless we assume it’s somehow related to xwaš “pleasant, sweet, nice,” which somehow entered nearly all the languages of Iraq, Semitic and non-Semitic, as xōš “good” and which precedes the noun it modifies in each of these. Unfortunately, this interpretation founders upon the same issue, that of the final sibilant, which is just not a match.

Progress Report 7

Chapter 12 of the Doctrine of John, which is the second of two parts on the Good Shepherd, is now available at the project website. This chapter begins on p. 45, ln. 11, and continues to p. 49, ln. 5.

The chapter begins with an eutra exhorting someone (presumably the believer) to become a “shepherd’s helper” and aid in tending the flock. The respondent has reservations; first, he argues that the world is full of thistles and thorns, but the eutra offers a pair of everlasting radiant sandals to protect his feet from the thistles and thorns. He then lists a series of seven possible ways he could lose sheep (respectively, lions, wolves, thieves, fire, muck, water, and ‘remaining behind in the fold’), which the eutra associates with the worship of different entities, starting with the Sun, the moon, and the planet Mars.

While this was one of the easier chapters to translate (due, in no small part, to the amount of repetition within it), it was not without its challenges. I’ve already written about the phrase rahim raia, “a shepherd’s friend,” which perplexed Lidzbarski. The seven sects that claim members of the flock are also not explicitly identified, save for one (Christianity, which here represented by muck). The first three are associated with three of the visible planets (the Sun, the moon, and Mars), following the order of the week (Sunday is governed by the Sun, Monday is governed by the moon, Tuesday is governed by Mars, and so forth). I do not feel that this order is coincidental, so I collated the seven threats with the seven planets:

lion	Sun	Judaism?
wolf	Moon	?
thief	Mars	Islam?
fire	*Mercury	*Zoroastrianism?
muck	*Jupiter	*Christianity
water	Venus	?
gudibna	Saturn	?
agambia gudibna	Ruha	?

I am not certain whether the thief (the worshippers of Nirig, or Mars) represents the threat posed by Islam. Certainly, in post-Islamic texts, Mars represents Islam, but I haven’t established to my satisfaction that this section is indeed post-Islamic.

The fourth and fifth threats are fire and muck, representing the worshipers of fire and the worshipers of the Mšiha or “anointed one” (i.e. Christians), respectively, and the forth and fifth planets are Enbu or Mercury and Bil or Jupiter. Jupiter (or Ohrmazd in Pahlavi) is identified with the god of the Zoroastrians, thus suggesting that the “worshipers of fire” are to be identified with them, which is by no means an exclusively Mandaean trope. As for the Christians, Drower and Macuch (1965, 280) note that the Mšiha is explicitly identified with Mercury. The identification of the followers of the Mšiha with muck likely represents yet another Mandaean word play—the Messiah is anointed with muck, not fine oils, just as his followers are baptized in turbid waters, not the flowing, living waters of the heavenly Jordan. Strangely, though, these two planets are switched with respect to the religions that they usually represent.

I am not certain to whom the sixth and seventh threats refer, but the final two planets in this sequence should be Dilbat Venus and Kiuan Saturn. Death by drowning is the punishment for the worship of the seas, and the threat of “remaining behind in the sheep-fold” is the punishment for the worship of the Ekuria, those of the É.KUR or “mountain house,” the chief temple of Nippur. While I cannot make a case for associating the seas with Venus (apart from the obvious Greek myth about the birth of Aphrodite), the patron deity of Nippur was Enlil, whose role as chief of the divine pantheon was assumed by the god El in the West. According to the Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos, the Phoenicians identified El with the planet Saturn (in Mesopotamia, Saturn was associated with Enlil’s sun, Ninurta), thus connecting the gods of the É.KUR with Saturn (and possibly even Kevin Bacon, by extension, within six degrees).

The worshipers of Gudibna “in-the-sheep-fold,” on the other hand, is another mystery. This word doesn’t appear in Drower and Macuch, and its sole appearance seems to be within this very chapter. On the face of it, it is appears to be a compound of gu “in” and dibna “sheep-fold,” and therefore it may represent some kind of wordplay on the threat (of “remaining in the fold”). Lidzbarski suggests translating it as a “fold spirit,” so I have somewhat whimsically taken the liberty of creating a portmanteau word, foldergeist, from “fold” and “poltergeist.”

The eutra‘s response adds an eighth threat: agambia gudibna “beside in-the-sheep-fold,” who represents the Evil Spirit, Ruha ḏ-Qudša. As the Evil Spirit is the mother of the planets, I am all the more convinced that we are in an astrological context.

In his analysis, Lidzbarski identifies some sections which are extraneous to the sequence, and appear to be glosses that were later incorporated into the text (I have placed these “glosses” between {brackets}). This “corruption” might also explain why the fourth and fifth threats are switched, at least from the perspective of the planets, and together with the sing-song, repetitive nature of the composition, it leads me to suspect that this text may have been transmitted orally prior to being committed to writing.

Rahim Raia

The phrase rahim raia (which Lidzbarski translates as ein liebevoller Hirte) occurs eight times in the 12th chapter of the Doctrine of John, and it is striking (or, to use Lidzbarski’s word, auffallend), due to its strange syntax. Attributive adjectives, with very few exceptions, follow the nouns that they modify in Mandaic. The exceptions include:

• adjectival expressions of quantity (e.g. hurina (an)other, kul each, every, napša many, much)
• ordinal numbers (qadmaia, tiniana, tlitaia, etc.)
• a small class of adjectives including “clean”, “exempt”, “rare”, “wonderful”, and “extraordinary.”

Perhaps a case could be made that rahim “loving, devoted, merciful” be added to this class of words?

The word rahim can also appear as a substantive, “friend,” in which case it almost always appears in the status emphaticus as rahma. The form rahim would necessarily be either in the status constructus or a participle in the status absolutus. Could the former be an explanation for this verse? That is, should we translate the “chorus,”

ata rahim raia huilia
urilia alpa mn ruban
Come, be a shepherd’s friend to me,
and tend a thousand out of every myriad!

rather than Lidzbarski’s

Come, be a loving shepherd for me,
and tend a thousand from every myriad!

Certainly this explanation is far more parsimonious. The adherents of the Mandaean faith are often described as the “lovers of Manda ḏ-Hiia” or “lovers of Manda ḏ-Hiia‘s name,” as in the concluding formula:

zkit manda ḏhiia
uzakit kulhun rahmia šumak
uhiia zakein sa
You are victorious, Manda ḏ-Hiia,
and have vindicated all those who love Your name,
and Life is victorious. The End.

Given that our raia shepherd is likely Manda ḏ-Hiia, does it not make sense that the rahmia raia are His followers?

Progress Report 6

The eleventh chapter of the Doctrine of John, which is the first of two sections that Lidzbarski termed “The Good Shepherd,” is now up at the project website. This consists of the better part of six manuscript pages, from p. 40, ln. 6 to p. 45, ln. 10 in the 1915 edition.

I’ve been documenting my progress thus far with this chapter, so it really needs no introduction at this point. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to outline the passage briefly. “The Good Shepherd” is an extended allegory involving several elements:

• a shepherd figure (who likely represents Hibil Ziua or Manda ḏ-Hiia);
• his flock (which likely represents the Mandaeans);
• various threats such as wolves and thieves (these are explicitly identified with the seven planets and the twelve signs of the Zodiac);
• a storm of some sort (which some scholars have identified with Islam).

I dealt with the question of whether this passage addresses the Islamic conquest in an earlier post. Suffice it to say that I am not convinced. The passage usually adduced as an oblique reference to Islam (p. 45, lns. 1-2) doesn’t withstand the light of critical scrutiny. Subsequently, the passage does mention “those living at the tail end of the Age of Mars (nirig),” which might be such a reference. Mars is sometimes identified with “Abdallah the Arab,” the name by which the Prophet Muhammad is known to the Mandaeans, or as having descended alongside Muhammad, as in the Scroll of Inner Harran. Then again, Nirig is, of course, the Mandaean form of the name of Nergal (compare the Arabic name for Mars, مريخ marīḫ), the chief deity of Kutha, who was at times also associated with war, disease, and the underworld, any of which could naturally fit this reference. While this could therefore be an extremely oblique reference to Muhammad, the fact that Nirig/Nergal predates Muhammad by a considerable period of time (several thousands of years) requires us to be somewhat cautious about drawing such a conclusion.

The fact that the “Good Shepherd” makes reference to the “tail end” of this period should also give us pause; assuming that this passage was indeed composed in the early Islamic period, what would make the Mandaeans of the time think that they were living in the end of that era? The right half of the Great Treasure contains a similar claim in Book 18, suggesting that these two works might be coetaneous, if indeed the “Age of Mars” can be identified with the Islamic period. I have my doubts. The Great Treasure, for example, never employs this term, but it does appear in Code Sabéen 16, which is a manuscript of the Thousand and Twelve Questions (the so-called Pariser Diwan): hṣilnin bdinba ḏ-dara ḏ-nirig “we reached the end of the Age of Mars.” It would be interesting to investigate what this reference meant to this copyist of the Thousand and Twelve Questions. I’m not sure I want to try contacting the Bibliothèque nationale de France again for a copy, as their bureaucracy could really give Rutgers a run for its money.

The question of the presence or absence of any reference to Islam is not the only contentious aspect of this chapter; immediately preceding the reference to the Age of Mars is a reference to what appears to be female priests:

ṭubaihun el tarmidiata
ḏmn qlalia ḏruha mitparqan
mitparqan mn ṭanputa
uqlala ušišilta ḏlašalma

Happy are the tarmidiata,
who are free from the snares of Ruha,
free ‎‎from the pollution, the snare,
and the never-ending chain.

At first glance, tarmidiata appears to be the plural of tarmidita, the feminine form of tarmida, which is the first grade of the Mandaean priesthood as well as a general term for priest. As the cognates in related languages attest, it originally meant a kind of student or disciple, but in Mandaean texts it consistently refers to priests. In his translation of the Doctrine of John, Lidzbarski is silent about the identity of the tarmidiata, which he translates as Jüngerinnen (female disciples), but in his translation of the Great Treasure he argues that as female priests do not (currently) exist among the Mandaeans, this term cannot refer to female priests. Q.E.D. Drower, deferring to Lidzbarski, bent over backwards to translate this term as “women of priestly family” or “caste,” even though there is no logical basis for this interpolation. While it is certainly true that there are no female priests today, Jorunn Buckley has amassed a considerable amount of textual evidence for the existence of female priests at some point in the distant past of the faith. Obviously this question is not going away any time soon.

The “Defective Age of Bišlōm”

It is generally accepted that the Doctrine of John reached its present form sometime in the aftermath of the Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia. There are many reasons to assume that parts of it, if not all of it, are much older, but here and there within the texts are references, some oblique and some not so oblique, to Muhammad and Islam. One such reference can be found on p. 45, lns. 1-2 of the Doctrine of John, which Lidzbarski translates as follows:

ṭubẖ lman ḏbhazin dara
bṣira ḏbišlum šlim
Wohl dem, der in diesem mangelhaften
Zeitalter des Bišlom heil geblieben ist.

Blessed is he who, in this defective
era of “Bišlom,” has remained whole.

From Lidzbarski’s perspective, bišlum is a pun (or ein Calembour, as he describes it); Bišlom is an oblique reference to Islam, consisting of the Persian prefix bi- “without” and the Arabic word salām “peace,” which has been Mandaicized to šlum for some reason. I’m not convinced; bi- may be the modern Persian (“Farsi”) form, but the contemporary Middle Persian form would have been abē-, not bi-. If the joke hinges upon a Farsi preposition, either this portion of the text was composed considerably after the early Islamic period (when most scholars accept that it acquired its present form), or its author would have had to wait a long, long time for his audience to get the joke—at least two or three centuries. Talk about bad timing!

Lidzbarski’s interpretation stuck, though, and Pallis (1926, 213) went even further, suggesting that bišlum is nothing more than the word Islām influenced by the word Muslim. This strikes me as clever, but perhaps a bit too clever. For a denizen of that selfsame “defective age” to recognize Islam qua Islam as opposed to, say, the worship of the planets, “Hagarism” (as it was generally known to Syriac-speaking Christians), or “Mohammedanism” (as it was known to Europeans throughout the greater part of the last fourteen centuries), it would have required a considerably more “modern” sensibility than that which is generally attributed to the polemical tracts of Late Antiquity. As a further objection, I know of no contemporary Aramaic dialect in which the word “Islam” or any calque of this word appears, raising the question of whether pre-modern non-Muslims ever employed this term, or whether they were even familiar with it. If not, what is the point of using it in a pun?

The interpretation of the term bišlum as “Islam” (which also appears in A Mandaic Dictionary) rests wholly and squarely upon this passage. Everywhere else within the corpus of Mandaic texts, including elsewhere within this manuscript, and indeed within this very same chapter, bišlum means “peacefully” or “at peace.” As it happens, a strong case can be made that it means that here, as well. It seems to me that the only wordplay within this verse depends upon the contrast between the terms bṣir “lacking” and šlim “whole:”

Happy is the one who, in this defective / lacking
age, is the one who has come to an end peacefully / intact.

The implication being that, in the “defective age” of the author, it was more common to end in pieces than end in peace.

Of course, reading Islam out of the picture has ramifications for the dating of this portion of the text. If we accept the traditional interpretation (that of Lidzbarski, Pallis, Drower, and Macuch), then we must accept that this portion of the text is post-Islamic. If we do not accept his interpretation, then there is no reason to assume that it is post-Islamic—of course, there’s also no immediately obvious reason to assume that it isn’t post-Islamic, but there was certainly no shortage of potential candidates for the role of mangelhafte Zeitalter throughout the period of Late Antiquity.

Sailing and Animal Husbandry

One of the chief impediments to understanding the language of the Doctrine of John is not its grammar (which is, in any case, rather simple) but rather the frequent use of jargon from various fields. One would expect an extending allegory involving a shepherd and his flock to contain some jargon from the field of animal husbandry, but the sudden appearance of nautical terminology (such as the aforementioned zakaita) can be jarring at times. A stray verse near the beginning of p. 44 (lns. 2-3) reads,

qamit el ramta ḏarba
mhara qaiim alihdia kudka
I rose to the highest point of the vessel,
the mhara, standing near the kudka.

The word arba is perhaps the most common word for “boat” in the text, alongside a bewildering array of synonyms (makuta “raft,” mabarta “ferry,” markabta “vehicle,” šabaita “reed boat (?),” sahrana “crescent skiff (?),” and so forth). As the word is homonymous with a type of mixing bowl, it seems likely that the type of boat designated by the term arba is something like the modern Iraqi قفة guffa, which is indeed the most common form of boat in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia and well-attested in Assyrian reliefs. Another, less likely possibility is that the term comes from the Akkadian erbâ/arbâ “a 40 gur boat.” To reflect the homonymy between arba “bowl” and arba “boat,” I usually translate the latter as “vessel.”

The word mhara, on the other hand, gives pause. It always refers to some part of the boat in the Doctrine of John and seems to be related to the Akkadian maḫru(m) “front,” hence “prow.” The major obstacle to this interpretation, as Lidzbarski (pp. 48-49, fn. 8) notes, is that nowhere in Akkadian literature is the prow of any boat thus designated, but who knows what kind of semantic shifts might have occurred as the word was borrowed? As a latter-day parallel, Germans refer to the mobile phone as das Handy, which is a transparent English loan word, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an English speaker who uses the term “Handy” to describe his cell phone.

Lidzbarski notes that the usual word for prow in Akkadian is pān elippi, and suggests that the context requires the mhara not to be identified with the prow but rather to be “standing upright either on or inside” the boat. Citing the phrase maḫrāt elippi, which Delitzsch (1896, p. 403) defines as “forward spars,” and which apparently stand behind the sikkat elippi “spars,” he concludes that spars would best fit the context, but that mhara is used elsewhere in the context of watering and may actually refer to some kind of a sluice. In any case, I’m skeptical; spars are not necessary (and indeed not found) on most of the crafts of the marshes of southern Iraq, even if the lightworld vessels are typically depicted in Mandaean manuscripts as fully rigged. CDA complicates matters further: contra Zimmern and Delitzsch, it defines maḫrātu(m) as the entire bow of a boat, not as its prow or forward spar.

The last word in the verse presents the most problems. The term kudka is not uncommon in Mandaic literature, and where it appears it generally refers to a boundary stone, corresponding in function and possibly form to the Akkadian kudurru, but what’s one doing in the bow of a boat? Lidzbarski observes, “Here, too, the kudka will be a pole, but more information is not apparent from the context.” The passages which refer to nautical themes are among the most cryptic in the manuscript. I am in the process of collecting technical terms in the text and obviously need to track down an authority on Akkadian nautical terminology, if indeed that is what we are dealing with here.

The terms relating to the different types of sheep are only slightly less complicated. Alongside embra, aqna and the related form ana (which occasionally becomes aina “eye”), all of which mean “sheep,” the pair para and parta (“ram lamb” and “ewe lamb,” respectively) appears, as does embrusa (a diminutive form of embra, perhaps “little lamb”). Somehow I feel as if I’m only scratching the surface of a vast sheep-related vocabulary. But what’s this?

kma karialia el gablia ešnia
ḏaqamra ḏganbaihun ṭabatinun
How greatly am I distressed by the rams (?),
the wool of whose sides it [the whirlpool] has submerged.

ešnia is undoubtedly just a variant form of eušnia “males,” cognate with Syriac ܐܘܫܢܐ ˀōšnā “stallion,” allegedly an Iranian loan word related to Pahlavi gušn “male,” and ultimately from Avestan waršni- “male (animal).” But what are gablia? Lidzbarski found this word here and in one other work (British Library OR. 6592, which he calls “der Londoner Rolle A”), and with the only information at hand (given the context, it must be some kind of sheep, and it must be male) deemed it a ram. I can do no better.

Mandaic Aphorisms, II

The Doctrine of John (p. 44, ln. 10) presents us with yet another gem:

ṭubẖ lman ḏaqria bmia umia beudnẖ laiit
“Happy is the one who is swept away (?) by the water and doesn’t get any water in his ear.”

This is another great example of a phrase that is transparent at first glance but still eludes parsing. The verb aqria likely comes from the root √ʔ-q-r “to uproot” (or, to quote Drower and Macuch, “to uproot, tear loose, tear away, eradicate, detach, destroy, exterminate, break down, tear down,” which is used in several idioms such as aqar apra “dust was whirled off” or aqria ziqia “the winds break loose,” both of which are evidently intransitive despite the transitive nature of the root. Perhaps an impersonal plural is intended? “They uproot the dust” = “the dust is uprooted” or “they uproot the winds” = “the winds are uprooted.”

Clearly this form is somehow related to the others dealing with winds and dust. Could aqria be a variant spelling of aqrẖ, “he uprooted him”? That would be orthographically, morphologically, and syntactically feasible but semantically meaningless.

Could this be the C-stem perfective of a root √q-r-ʔ ? Just such a root exists, and it even means “to tear,” but it never appears in the C-stem, not in Mandaic and not in any other dialect with which I’m familiar. Plus, the expected from would be aqra, not aqria, and it would mean “he causes to tear,” which is even less meaningful in this context. What about a variant spelling for the G-stem passive participle qria? A prothetic a is not at all uncommon before initial consonant clusters, especially after a proclitic, and especially in this text. Given the similarity of forms derived from these two roots and the strong possibility of contamination between them, it’s possible that aqria has taken the form of the G-stem passive participle of √q-r-ʔ with the meaning of the root √ʔ-q-r.