Mursili II came to the Hittite throne as a young man after the deaths in rapid succession of his father, Suppiluliuma I, and his elder brother Arnuwanda II, both of whom died within a short span during a plague that had begun ravaging the Hittite kingdom, an inheritance of crisis rather than stability. The plague continued intermittently for roughly twenty years into his own reign, and Mursili, working within a religious framework in which such disasters were understood as divine punishment for some specific unaddressed offense, undertook what modern scholars read as a sustained, almost investigative effort to identify what that offense had been, consulting oracles repeatedly over years rather than settling on an explanation immediately.
The prayers that survive from this process, translated and studied in detail by Itamar Singer among other scholars of Hittite religion, show Mursili working through several possible causes in sequence, including neglected offerings and unfulfilled ritual obligations, before arriving at the explanation he presents as most likely, a serious offense from his father's own reign against oaths that were regarded as bound under divine witness. The prayers combine formal religious petition with what is, in effect, careful historical and legal argument, making them unusually valuable evidence for how Hittite kings understood the relationship between political conduct and divine favor.