Prophecy, Gastronomic Ghosts, and Oracular Flatulence: On the Substance of Spirit in Ancient Israel and Mesopotamia

In this contribution, I contend that the divine “spirit, wind” was conceived as moist, wet, and vaporous in nature in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. I adduce support for this view from biological reality and from a number of biblical and cuneiform texts that associate the spirit with water or depict it behaving like a liquid. I submit further that since the ancients believed that a divine spirit animated living bodies, they conceived it as capable of conveying divine missives by way of wind emanating from the body, either from the mouth as prophecy (in Israel and Mesopotamia) or as flatus (Mesopotamia). The inclusion of the latter reveals that the process was understood as gastric in nature, a view that finds parallels in the Septuagint and other Greek texts. Thus, this study offers new perspectives on the materiality of spirit and the phenomenology of prophecy and divination in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia.