By Jan Dietrich

 

One of the central questions about the meaning of human life is how to understand suicide. As the philosopher Albert Camus once stated: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” A definition of the human being as having the potential to commit suicide is one of the most eerie, sophisticated and inconvenient. No animal, and, according to Pliny the elder (Natural History 2.27), no god, can kill himself, only the human being.

Suicidal acts are important not only in philosophy, but also in sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, and medicine. However, in ancient Near Eastern studies, including the Hebrew Bible, studies on suicide have never been accomplished in depth or at length. Therefore, I examine suicide in my new book, Der Tod von eigener Hand. How did human beings of the ancient Near Eastern world attribute meaning to suicidal acts?

First, we must deal with the problem of semantics since there is no term for suicide in the ancient texts. In the Hebrew Bible as well as in ancient Near Eastern cultures, no abstract noun was invented to denote the action of committing suicide. Rather, whole sentences had to be constructed to denote that someone had or wished to take his/her own life. In all of these cases, the action of suicide is denoted by the sentence.

Second, understanding suicidal acts requires considering their meanings within ancient cultures. Previous interpretations of suicidal acts in the Hebrew Bible mostly questioned the cause, especially mental illness or sin. For example, Saul’s suicide on the battlefield against the Philistines was interpreted as “melancholia,” a similar “mental illness”, or the result of God’s condemnation and rejection.

In contrast, I focus on the motives and meanings behind suicidal acts. What are the aims and intentions of the actors and what are the goals of the act? From the point of view of the actor, suicidal acts are attempts to solve basic problems of life. It is also worth examining the authors of texts that describe suicidal acts. What were their intentions in describing these acts?

In his 1975 book Suicides, Jean Baechler distinguishes between four basic types of suicide: suicide as a means of escape from unbearable situations; suicide as a means of aggression to either satisfy one’s desire for revenge or to appeal to or even blackmail another person; suicide as a means of passage, to reach a particular goal, either in this world or the next; and suicide as a means of playfulness, risking one’s life for the allure of the gamble.

Not all of these types can be found in the biblical and ancient Near Eastern cultures (especially playfulness), but most are helpful when interpreting suicidal acts in these cultures. The greatest number of suicides appear to be means of escape from unbearable situations. These can be distinguished further according to contexts. For example, suicidal acts appear frequently during war and as part of “symbols” of warfare.

Assisted suicide by Babylonian soldiers when faced with capitulation. Neo-Assyrian relief from Assurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Vorderasiatisches Museum (Photo: Olaf Teßmer).

 

When suicides are committed under military circumstances, they mostly seem to be escapism, especially with the sword on the battlefield; examples from the Bible are Abimelech and Saul, from Neo-Assyrian sources are Nabûbēlšumāti, who, afraid of being delivered to the Assyrians, asks his armor-bearer to stab him, Urtak from Elam, and Ursā from Urartu, who, according to Neo-Assyrian sources, “in his great fear ended his life with his own weapon.”

Other figures chose to commit suicide by burning themselves and their goods during the siege of their city, so as not to fall into the hands of the enemy, as in the case of the biblical king Zimri (1 Kings 16:18 NRS, “When Zimri saw that the city was taken, he went into the citadel of the king’s house; he burned down the king’s house over himself with fire, and died”), and traditions regarding the death of the Lydian king Croisos, and the death of Šamaššumukīn, later called Sardanapalos, the traditional last king of Assyria.

Military suicides – with the sword on the battlefield and by burning in the besieged city – are escapist. The same is true for so-called “rational suicides” or suicides motivated by balancing of accounts. Here, the individual evaluates (or “balances”) his/her life situation and regards it as worthless and shameful. The individual then aims to flee this unbearable situation, often by hanging oneself. In the Bible, such famous cases include Ahitofel, Sara, and Judas. Examples include the Greek legend about the Mesopotamian general Onnes, the Egyptian Wise man Amenophis, and possibly the Egyptian magician Naneferkaptah, known from the Demotic Tale of Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire.

Unbearable situations, typical for a society turned upside down, provides another context for suicide. Egyptian wisdom literature from Middle Kingdom times, the Admonitions of Ipuwer and A Man Tired of Life, paint pictures of the First Intermediate Period (ca. 2150-2040 BCE) as chaotic and untenable, with people committing suicide to escape upturned worlds, aiming at the so-called “second-death” by being burnt with fire or eaten by crocodiles, a death beyond mummification and the ulterior world. In Mesopotamia, the Akkadian Pessimistic Dialogue between a master and a slave from ca. 700 BCE even seems to mock the senseless life and suggests suicide as another senseless means among many.

Another type of escapist suicide is in juridical contexts. In a world reigned by values of honor and shame, people sentenced to death may commit suicide to avoid being executed by others. This may have been the case for king Ptolemaios Macron of Cyprus, and for the suicides following the Egyptian Harem conspiracy against Ramesses III. When this conspiracy failed, several conspirators were sentenced to death, but some with high social standing were given the chance to kill themselves before being executed.

In 2012, an examination of Ramesses III’s mummy found a cut in the throat, covered by an amulet. Another mummy, according to genetic analysis, was probably Prince Pentaweret, one of the main conspirators.

Head of a mummy, probably Pentaweret, showing injuries to neck indicating hanging or strangulation. From Z. Hawass, et al., “Revisiting the harem conspiracy and death of Ramesses III: anthropological, forensic, radiological, and genetic study,” BMJ 345 (2012) figure 4, (published online December 17, 2012).

The skin of his neck was mauled and his lungs were inflated, suggesting he died by strangling or hanging. This may support the hypothesis that Ramesses III did not survive the conspiracy and that Prince Pentaweret and other conspirators of high social status killed themselves, most likely by hanging.

There are also aggressive types of suicide, aimed at either killing others with the help of suicide or at forcing others to behave in a certain way with suicidal threats. The latter may be true for the famous Egyptian tale of The Eloquent Peasant, who threatened the steward charged with judging him that he would go to Anubis (perhaps by committing suicide) to ask for help. Anubis is the god of embalming and ushering the dead in the courtroom of the netherworld.

We know from Mesopotamian and Syrian letters, Egyptian fairy tales, and from the biblical figures of Rebecca and Rachel (Genesis 30:1 NRS, “Give me children, or I shall die”) that people could threaten to commit suicide in order to force others with a higher social standing to behave in a certain way. There are even a few examples of aggressive suicides committed in order to kill others, like Samson (Judges 16:30 NRS, “Then Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ He strained with all his might; and the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life.”)

In the oblative suicide (from Latin offerre, “to serve or present,”) the suicidal person may offer his life to reach an “altruistic” goal worth dying for or to help others to survive. Jonah, for example, asks to be cast over the ship’s railing to let the ship’s crew survive the storm. Stories of the Maccabean wars tell of Jewish role models deciding to accept torture and death to uphold their own beliefs (as the goal worth dying for) instead of deciding to survive by worshipping the Hellenistic king.

Still another goal may be to follow one’s master in death and share the master’s fate out of pure fidelity and loyalty. This suicide may be glimpsed from passages about the grooms of Saul and Nabûbēlšumāti, and the fealty death of Artapates, “the most faithful of Cyrus’ dignitaries,” who killed himself over his master’s body. One Neo-Assyrian source describing the king Ashurbanipal’s fight against the Elamites describes the messenger Nabû­damiq, who tries to kill himself upon seeing the severed head of his master Te-umman. This may be historically inaccurate but serves Ashurbanipal’s interests in showing revolts as utterly hopeless.

Perhaps there is more to be said about the motivations for fealty deaths. The armor-bearer kills himself not only to follow his master in death but possibly to keep serving him in the underworld. Fealty self-killings may perhaps already have occurred in the king’s graves of Ur, from the Early Dynastic Period III (ca. 2600–2350 BCE). Here, servants, wives, wagons and other goods were found buried in sealed graves along with their masters.

Plan of Ur ‘death pit’ PG 789, containing 63 retainers. From C.L. Woolley, Ur Excavations II. The royal cemetery: a report on the Predynastic and Sargonic graves excavated between 1926 and 1931, (London and Philadelphia: 1934), plate 29.

 

Reconstruction of funerary ceremony scene in the PG 789 at Ur, depicting so-called “royal retainers” just before their death. Illustrated London News June 23, 1928 (https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/archbodyperform10/10150.html).

 

It is not clear from these and similar graves – especially those from Abydos in Egypt and Kerma in Nubia – whether such deaths were voluntary or coerced. Some skeletons from Ur and Abydos show evidence of violence, but most cannot prove that the servants did not willingly accept their deaths – only that their deaths had to be enforced for practical reasons. The excavator of Ur suggested that the followers took poison, and the excavator of Kerma suggested that the followers were buried alive. In addition, in the Sumerian text The Death of Gilgamesh, the dead king can rely on his dead family members and servants to present gifts to the gods of the underworld.

These highly controversial cases stand in contrast to later Jewish and Christian suicides, committed as acts of passage through which a person hopes to pass as a believer into a good afterworld. This is found in 2 Maccabees, which describes the suicide of Rasi. In killing himself in front of his enemies, Rasi not only aims to escape the enemy but also to express his belief in a bodily resurrection. Connecting this theme to Roman period Jewish and Christian martyrdom warrants separate investigation.

 

Jan Dietrich is Associate Professor for Old Testament at Aarhus University, Denmark.