Perchance to dream : dream divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East

Abstract

Throughout the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, as in so many other places and times, communication from beyond seemed at once ubiquitous and perplexing. Deities communicated with human beings in a variety of ways, from directing the movements of the stars and encoding divine messages on the livers of sacrificial animals to directly addressing selected individuals or sending lesser divine beings to speak for them. While expressions of this differed from one context to another, and the predominant modes of divination, methods of interpretation, and literary reflections were far from uniform, the underlying assumption that the gods spoke to people both directly and indirectly, and both explicitly and obliquely, is reflected in the literature of the regions represented in this volume (and beyond). Among the many forms of divine-human communication seen in these corpora, dreaming occupied the peculiar sphere of being in some ways and at some times a quite direct mode of communication, akin to prophecy, and in other ways and at other times rather opaque, more like the symbolic “writing” of the gods on the liver...