Babylonian Wisdom Literature and Theodicy

Mesopotamian wisdom literature includes a distinct body of texts wrestling with the problem of unjust or inexplicable human suffering, a concern modern scholars term theodicy after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's eighteenth-century coinage, even though the ancient texts themselves predate that specific philosophical vocabulary by well over a thousand years. The most extensive and best-known example is Ludlul bel nemeqi ('I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom'), a Babylonian poem of roughly five hundred lines across four tablets, likely composed sometime in the Kassite period (roughly 14th–12th century BCE), in which a high-ranking sufferer named Shubshi-meshre-Shakkan narrates, in the first person, his catastrophic and apparently undeserved loss of health, social status, and divine favor, followed by his eventual, dramatic restoration through the mercy of the god Marduk.