Oracular Law in Bīt-Baḫiāni? Rethinking Divine Representation in Three Neo-Assyrian Trial Records

Abstract

Legal documents from the Neo-Assyrian period attest to a wide range of social and administrative authorities who function as judges—from local officials to the king himself. A set of three texts from outside the Assyrian heartland (Gūzāna and Kannuʾ) are unique in that they describe judgments rendered by the god Hadad/ Adad. To explain how a deity could decide a case, some have suggested that they were resolved through oracular means—a practice otherwise unattested in the Syro-Mesopotamian legal corpus. I contend that these are not cases resolved by mantic specialists, but rather by local authorities who oversaw the local economic, administrative, and legal institutions of the city. By contextualizing these trial records in the legal-administrative archives of Bīt-Baḫiāni/land of Gūzāna, I show that the judicial agency attributed to Hadad/Adad was modeled on the representation of deities based in temples all around the empire overseeing economic exchange. Hadad/Adad was a representative figurehead for the local regime of dispute resolution that stood alongside the administrative hierarchy of the Assyrian state, whose officials also heard cases at Gūzāna.