Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East

Front Matter

Alexiana Fry — 2026-01-09

Divine Approval and Support of the King Going into War

Ada Taggar Cohen — 2026-01-09

One of the most pitiful incidents in the Hebrew Bible is the request of King Saul for divine support in his last battle against the Philistines in 1Samuel 28. The life of King Saul started with the inquiry of YHWH in chapter nine, where he was told he would become the king of Israel, and ended after his inquiry of YHWH by the woman of Ein-Dor. In both cases the mediator was Samuel the prophet. In both cases the deity sought was YHWH. The story of Saul will be read in light of the Hittite ritual texts mainly text CTH 423 which details the specific actions of the Hittite king during his pursuit of the support of his god for success in winning the war. The main issue to be discussed is the question of what indeed was the sin of Saul, for his punishment which was that he should die on the battlefield, was the most severe regarding Ancient Near Eastern rulers.

Tiny Dancers

Anne Porter — 2026-01-09

A miniscule figure is incised in the “lashes” around the left eye of a small gypsum plaque from the ancient city of Mari, known as the Stele of Ninhursag. With left leg raised, the figure, no more than six mm tall, would appear to be dancing. The plaque is already visually ambiguous in that it may be read as a human face, a female body, and, variously, a divine landscape or an owl. Is the figure a private joke hidden in a cosmic pun, self-referential, or a profound statement on the nature of existence? What did ancient viewers see and understand when viewing this plaque? And why has the figure not been recognized before now?

Temple/Herd

David Mulder — 2026-01-09

This paper reconsiders a group of Mesopotamian cylinder seals depicting ungulate animals beside a paneled facade or doorway, conventionally known as the “temple and herd” seals. Although previous scholarship has frequently emphasized these seal images’ links to the animal byre scenes of Late Uruk glyptic, and has accordingly highlighted the continuity in portrayals of domestic animal abundance that render the temple as a virtual or literal “cattlepen,” a closer examination of the temple/herd genre reveals sharp discontinuities and divergences from their Uruk precedents, both in the species and ages of animals depicted and in the relations between the animals and the human-built structure. These divergences undercut the common blanket characterization of early Mesopotamian animal imagery as a celebration of values of domesticity and enclosure. The Early Dynastic evidence for temples’ ritual and symbolic engagements with the types of animals most frequently depicted in the temple/herd seals (especially gazelles and deer) points to the roles of these animals in expanding temples’ imagined communities outside of the real sphere of human control, rather than to the expansion of such control through practices and imagery of domestication.

Birds of a Feather

Samuel Boyd — 2026-01-09

Wisdom literature is replete with the use of animals for a variety of rhetorical ends, often explained as a function of the universality of such literature in its analysis of nature and the world. In this article, I examine the role and function of bird imagery in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. I do so with the goal of demonstrating the underlying rhetorical ends to which fowl can be put to service, “thinking with” birds in a Straussian sense. Yet the ability to “think with” fauna like birds from a literary perspective is possible because of processes of domestication. I conclude with preliminary thoughts on how recent research on domestication and animal criticism can elucidate the malleability of bird imagery from a rhetorical perspective. In this sense, the incorporation of birds into wisdom imagery is not simply a reflection on the world as is, but rather on a particular type of domesticated (and, by implication, non-domesticated) world, a world that humans have cultivated to be or that exists as yet untamed.

Broad-scale Patterns in the Distribution of Ethnic Names in the Neo-Babylonian Oracc Corpus

Matthew Ong — 2026-01-09

In this paper I investigate the broad-scale distribution of ethnic terms in a large corpus of digitized Neo-Babylonian texts. I take up the same guiding questions and methodology that were used in an earlier study of Neo-Assyrian texts. I also present some points of comparison in the distribution of ethnic terms within the Neo-Assyrian versus Neo-Babylonian corpora.