Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 74:1 (NA 2023)
Article: Dissertation Summary The Uses Of ‘Bēlu’ And ‘Marduk’ In Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions And Other Sources From The First Millennium BC
Author: George Heath-Whyte

TynBull 74:1 (2023) p. 187

Dissertation Summary
The Uses Of ‘Bēlu’ And ‘Marduk’ In Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions And Other Sources From The First Millennium BC1

George Heath-Whyte

Research Associate in Old Testament and Ancient Near East
Tyndale House, Cambridge
[email protected]

In Assyrian and Babylonian sources of the first millennium BC, the god Marduk is often referred to not as ‘Marduk’, but as ‘Bēl’, or ‘Bēlu’. While ‘Bēlu’ just means ‘lord’, by the end of the second millennium it had come to function as a name of this god, being written with the ‘divine determinative’, a cuneiform sign that typically preceded divine names. Why, though, was Marduk so often referred to as ‘Bēlu’?

The Babylonians (but not the Assyrians) saw Marduk as the king of the gods, and so an assumption proliferates that, as ‘Bēlu’ means ‘lord’, it is a natural byname for a chief god. However, this assumption has never been tested. Marduk was a god thought to play many roles. As well as being thought of as the king of the gods by the Babylonians, to different groups at different times, he was a god of wisdom, magic, and healing, a warrior god, a creator god, a storm god, and the patron deity of the city of Babylon. Some of these roles had specific names associated with them. When being addressed in his role as a god of magic and healing, he was referred to as Asalluḫi. In his role as the king of the gods, he could be referred to as Lugaldimmerankia. As Beate Pongratz-Leisten has written, divine names in ancient Mesopotamia, ‘rather

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than evoking a divinity as a personality, summon the divinity in a particular form of agency.’2

By focusing not on the translatable meaning of ‘Bēlu’, but on the contexts of its use in comparison to the use of ‘Marduk’, I suggest in this dissertation that, in the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and in several other corpora from both Assyria and Babylonia, ‘Bēlu’ did not reference this god’s divine supremacy, but referred to the god in his specific role as the patron deity of the city of Babylon, and to the primary cult image of the god in that role in Babylon’s Esagil temple.

The inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian kings (tenth to seventh centuries BC) make up the main corpus of the study. These inscriptions provide us with almost 300 years of discourse surrounding this god, spread through hundreds of compositions, allowing any patterns in the use of ‘Marduk’ and ‘Bēlu’ to emerge, and any change in their use over time to be explo...