When the Personal God Withdraws

The belief's sharpest expression appears in Babylonian wisdom literature that wrestles with the problem of unjust suffering, a body of poetry W. G. Lambert gathered and translated as Babylonian Wisdom Literature. In these compositions a righteous, pious sufferer, stricken with illness, poverty and social disgrace despite a lifetime of proper devotion, does not primarily blame Marduk or any of the great state gods for the disaster. Instead the crisis is framed as personal abandonment, the sufferer's own ili and ishtaritu having turned away or fallen silent, leaving them without the private intercessor who would ordinarily carry their case to the higher gods and shield them from demonic attack and misfortune.

This framing mattered practically as well as theologically, because it shaped what remedy the ritual and medical texts of the period actually prescribed. Rather than appealing directly to Marduk or Ishtar for restoration, healing and reconciliation rites regularly worked to identify which personal deity had been offended and by what specific failure, and to repair that one relationship first, on the understanding that health and fortune flowed through the personal god as intermediary rather than arriving from the great gods unmediated.