I hate, I despise
your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye
offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them:
neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. (Amos 5:21-22)
In the Tell Fakhariyah inscription (dated
about 850 BC), we find a curse that mirrors Amos 5:21-22 and similar texts such as Hos 6:6:
Tell Fakhariyah 16-18
mn yld šmy mn m’ny’
zy bt hdd mr’y mr’y hdd lḥmh wmwh ‘l ylqḥ mn ydh
wsl mr’ty lḥmh wmwh ‘l tlqḥ mn ydh
Whoever removes my
name from the vessels of the temple of Hadad my lord, may Hadad my lord not
accept his food and water from his hand; may šāla
my lady not accept his food and water from his hand.
With Greenfield and
Schaffer, I read wsl for swl, which seems to be a scribe’s error
(J.C. Greenfield and A. Schaffer, ‘Notes on the Akkadian-Aramaic Bilingual
Statue from the Tell Fekherye’, Iraq 45 [1983], p. 115. Cf. also E.
Puech, Review of Abou-Assaf et al., La statue de Tell Fekherye, RB 90
[1983], p. 596). This emendation is followed by Gropp and Lewis: ‘The syntax
(Old Aramaic, not Akkadian) cries out for the conjunction’ (‘Notes on Some Problems’,
p. 52).
Kaufman compares the
curse here with Lev. 26.31, wl’ ‘ryḥ bryḥ nyḥḥkm, ‘and I will not savour
your pleading odours’. (‘Reflections’, p. 168) Perhaps more interesting is Amos
5.21-22: ‘I hate, I reject your feasts and I will not take delight (l’ ‘ryḥ)
in your assembles. Even if you offer me burnt offerings and your gift
offerings, I will not accept them (l’ ‘rṣh); and I will not look upon (l’
‘byṭ) your offerings of fatted cattle.’ Hebrew rṣh has a cognate in
Aramaic rqy, which occurs with the same meaning in Hadad (zenjirli) 22,
. . . zbḥh w’l yrqy bh, ‘ . . . his sacrifice may he not look favourable
upon it’ (Gibson, Textbook…Aramaic Inscriptions, pp. 68-69). (Kevin J.
Cathcart, "The Curses in Old Aramaic Inscriptions," in Kevin J.
Cathcart and Michael Maher, eds., Targumic and Cognate Studies: Essays in
Honour of Martin McNamara [Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Supplement Series 230; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996], 140-52,
here, pp. 142-43)
What I found interesting is that this
curse, mirroring the Amos text, is not merely a rejection of sacrifice offered by priests in a state of sin or hypocrisy to the deity, but a very strong non-sacrificial understanding
thereof.
