Texts in Conversation
Exodus describes covenant curses for disobedience extending multiple generations, following ancient Near Eastern traditions such as the Surpu tablets that similarly describe oath-curses that also extend multiple generations.
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Surpu III
Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations
Ancient Near East
the oath of day and night, the oath of the gods …, any oath …. The sin of father or mother, the sin of his father’s father or his mother’s mother, the sin of brother or sister, the sin of friend or companion, the sin of family or in-laws, the sin of late offspring or sucklings, the sin of dead or living, the sin of wronged man or wronged woman, the sin he knows and the sin he does not know,
Date: 1200 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Exodus 20:5
Hebrew Bible
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children to the third and fourth generations of those who reject me, 6 and showing covenant faithfulness to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
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Notes and References
"... When all is said and done, however, textual evidence from Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, and Hittite sources attest to the existence of three different ways conditional curses could be discharged. One procedure allowed a person to curse himself or herself conditionally. This occurred when the individual declared the malediction and directed the harm in it to his or her person. The second procedure allowed a person to impose a conditional curse on an object, an underling, or even on future generations without the affected individuals’ being present. Consent is not an issue. This method could also be described as ‘distance cursing’ because the target’s formal acknowledgement of the curse was not essential for the malediction to be considered effective ..."
Kitz, Anne Marie
Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts
(p. 132) Penn State University Press, 2021
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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