דת ומוסר בספרות הפתגמים השומרית

This paper examines the extent and role of religious themes and ideas within the corpus of Sumerian proverb and instruction literature. Formerly, scholars tended to describe this literature as secular; this tendency has recently been criticized, but a systematic examination of this issue has not been conducted thus far. Two bodies of literature are discussed in this paper: The Instructions of Šuruppak, an Early Dynastic didactic wisdom text, which reappeared in the Old Babylonian period in an expanded form; and the Proverb Collections dating from the Old Babylonian period. The examination of the Instructions of Šuruppak shows that the instructions included in it are indeed 'secular' in nature, i.e., they do not involve divine order or retribution. However, the prologue and epilogue of each text-division contain religious ideas, tacitly ascribing the instructions to the gods. We tentatively suggest that this difference between the instructions themselves and their literary framework may reflect the work of an Old Babylonian redactor. The religious aspects of the Old Babylonian proverb collections are explored by collecting and analyzing proverbs from four thematic categories: proverbs containing divine names; proverbs referring to the personal god; proverbs connected to the concept of abomination; and proverbs containing the terms 'good' and 'evil'. The investigation of the above four categories in the Sumerian proverbs reveals that the proverbs reflect a popular religion which does not distinguish between social ethics and divine morals. Far from being a 'secular' genre, the Sumerian proverb collections assume that the gods are fully involved in all spheres of life, especially in the realm of justice and ethics.