ABSTRACT
The doubts and questions surrounding human misfortune and suffering raised in the "Theodicy" are typical of Babylonian literature produced in the late second and early first millennia and may be a product of the uncertainties of the time. The presence of literary-historical texts describing Nebuchadnezzar's war with Elam in the first millennium BCE has been held up as evidence for a period of heightened scholarly activity at his court. The challenge is discerning when and how the memory of Nebuchadnezzar originally came to be utilized for the purposes of such an intentional history. One must imagine that the intellectual culture supported by the kings of the Second Dynasty of Isin and situated within both the palace and the temples was sufficiently vibrant and broad to endure the instability of the early first millennium BCE. This chapter discusses that the chaos that follows divine abandonment is central to The Poem of Erra and Isum.
