Dreaming as a form of divine
communication was so significant that examples of regular, everyday-type
dreams, “in all their fantastic variety,” were collected and catalogued into
what we now call “dream books.” Evidence for this practice exists from ancient
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ugarit, and the Hittite empire. As was the case in other
forms of divination (attempts to know the future), ancient Near Eastern
scholars produced lists of these dream elements and their expected outcomes
with a standard protasis-apodosis structure (if ... then ...). These dream
precedents along with their previously observed outcomes were viewed as a means
to discern the fate of someone who received a similar divine communication in a
similar dream. For example, a few lines from the so-called Chester Beatty
“Dream Book,” an Egyptian text dating to the reign of Ramses II (1297–1213 BC),
read:
If a man see himself in a dream: ...
Eating the flesh of a donkey. Good. It
means his promotion....
Looking through a window. Good. The
hearing of his cry by his god....
Seeing a large cat. Good. It means a
large harvest will occur for him....
Drinking warm beer. BAD. It means
suppurating illness infects him....
Eating a filleted catfish. BAD. His
seizure by a crocodile....
Bitten by a snake. BAD. It means the
occurrence of a quarrel against him.
Although the operative principles
behind such interpretations are not always evident to us (why was dreaming
about eating donkey flesh a good omen?), these lists of dreams and their
outcomes (as well as other divinatory lists of observed phenomena) exhibit an
underlying effort to organize the world and its competing forces, and thus to
better know the future and to counteract demonic influences.
Apart from dream catalogues, actual
reports of individuals’ dreams in the ancient Near East occur in royal
inscriptions, literary texts, and letters, as well as in myths and epics. These
dream reports were produced using the standard literary conventions of their
time and culture to express in writing the content of the dream. Although the
available textual evidence of dream accounts from the Semitic peoples living in
Syria and Canaan is much sparser, these reports and interpretations show
evidence of early Mesopotamian influences.
For some time now, scholars have
classified these written ancient Near Eastern dream reports as representing
either message or symbolic dreams. According to this typology, a message dream
is one in which a divine being visits a person and delivers a spoken message.
One well-known example is preserved in the Ugaritic tablets, in the poetic
narration of a presumably epic king, Keret. Through disease, accidents, and
other tragedies, Keret’s family was all destroyed. Lamenting the loss of his
progeny one night, he fell asleep and the great West Semitic god, El, appeared
to him in a dream (notice the parallelism in this text).
As he [Keret] wept he fell asleep;
as he cried slumber (came).
Sleep overpowered him and he lay down;
slumber, and he curled up.
And in his dream El came down,
in his vision the Father of Man,
and he drew near, asking Keret:
“What ails Keret that he weeps,
the gracious one, heir of El, that he
groans?” ...
[“It is s]ons I would beget,
descendants I would multiply!”
And Bull, his father, El re[plied]:
“[Desist] from weeping, Keret,
from crying, gracious one, heir of El.
Wash yourself and rouge yourself;
Wash your [han]ds to the elbow,
[your] finge[rs] up to the shoulder.”
...
At this point El further instructs
Keret to offer sacrifices and then to attack another kingdom, demanding the
king’s daughter for his wife. She will bear him a son to rule after him.
Keret awoke, and (it was) a dream,
the servant of El [awoke] and (it was)
a vision.
He washed himself and rouged himself,
he washed his hands to the elbow,
his fingers to the shoulder.
The epic tells that after waking Keret
did all that he had been instructed to do in El’s message to him and everything
came to pass just as Keret had dreamed. (Dana M. Pike, “Lehi
Dreamed a Dream: The Report of Lehi’s Dream in Its Biblical Context,” in The
Things Which My Father Saw: Approaches to Lehi’s Dream and Nephi’s Vision,
ed. Daniel L. Belnap, Gaye Strathearn, and Stanley A. Johnson [Provo, Utah: Religious
Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011], 96-98)
