Prayer from the Past: Ritual Practice and Scribal Imagination in BM 40474 and the Psalms

Abstract In a Neo-Babylonian prayer to Marduk ( BM 40474), there is a curious inclusion of two colophons indicating competing identities of the speaker. The first colophon identifies the speaker as a non-specific “weary and bound man,” while the second introduces the speaker as Nabû-šuma-ukīn, an unattested “son of Nebuchadnezzar.” Much like David in the Psalms, nothing in the body of the prayer can serve to support the historicity of the claimed speaker. The general application of the prayer to a “weary and bound man” appears to be an earlier framework for the prayer, with Nabû-šuma-ukīn’s colophon added later. I will argue that the addition of the second colophon reflects scholarly uses of the Babylonian past which portray royalty as exemplary religious figures. In the Psalms and in BM 40474, writing prayer was both an act of recording religious practice, and a means of scholarly reflection on the past.