The Babylonian Theodicy
A twenty-seven-stanza acrostic dialogue argues, through a sufferer and a more conventionally pious friend who never fully persuades each other, that the gods deliberately built injustice into human nature rather than that suffering is always earned.
- acrostic authorship signature
- formal debate structure rather than lament
- injustice as a deliberate feature of human creation
- closest Mesopotamian parallel to biblical wisdom dialogue
Structured as an alternating dialogue between a suffering man and his friend, each of the poem's twenty-seven stanzas beginning with a sign that spells out an acrostic naming its author as a priest called Saggil-kinam-ubbib, the Babylonian Theodicy stages a formal debate on why the wicked prosper and the pious suffer. The friend defends conventional piety and patience; the sufferer presses harder, until the friend concedes a startling admission, that the gods themselves gave humanity 'a lying and false character' at creation, deliberately, so that injustice was never fully avoidable to begin with.
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