26 Rochberg
your utterance let the star be destroyed, command again and let the star
be restored.” The deliberate disruption of order by an angry god is also
found in the Erra Epic: “When I (Marduk) left my dwelling, the regulation
of heaven and earth disintegrated; the shaking of heaven meant the posi-
tions of the heavenly bodies changed, nor did I restore them.”^31 Again, the
prayer literature provides us with a parallel, this time with specifi c refer-
ence to an omen: “You (Nabû) are able to turn an untoward physiognomic
omen into (one that is) propitious.”^32
The instrumental role of the gods manifested in phenomena refl ects a
nonmechanistic element in the Mesopotamian cosmos. Even in the con-
text of the mythological “designs of heaven and earth,” which suggest
something of a fi xed structure in the world, the designs were drawn by
gods who were never conceived of as simply setting things in motion only
to step away and leave the machinery running, but as active participants
in the world. Within such a cosmology, signs in nature produced by gods
could not be viewed as occurring out of deterministic necessity. The most
compelling evidence against determinism in Babylonian divination and
cosmology, however, was the viability of magic and ritual for dispelling
bad omens (apotropaic magic). This further dimension of Mesopotamian
divination—the human response to an omen’s meaning—is entirely what
one would expect of a system understood as fundamentally one of com-
munication between divine and human.
The Mesopotamian “natural world” was therefore conceived of as
the arena within which human beings could observe the workings of the
gods. The orderliness of the universe was viewed as a product of divine
creation, but religious texts do not hesitate to express the fear that, were
a god of a mind to change any of that order, he could certainly do so.
The basic order and regularity of phenomena was given expression in
the omen compendia, where phenomena in all their diversity were ar-
ranged in systematic fashion. Here, the contingent universe, changeable
by divine will, was amenable to divination because the ill consequences—
divine decisions associated with particular phenomena—were potentially
alterable by magic.
Given that the scribal repertoire of texts consisted in anonymous com-
pendia of words, omens, medical symptoms, and magical ritual prescrip-
tions, the only place in such works where one can obtain a glimpse of
scribal identity and how the contents of the tablet are classifi ed or concep-
tualized is in the colophon, the fi nal paragraph devoted to facts relating to
the production of the text, such as the name of the copyist, date and place
where the inscription was copied, and any comments the scribe might
have about the contents of that text. Unlike the contents of the texts,