Ancient Ill Will Set in Stone

Enmity can survive through the ages.

That's the message from the discoverers of an ancient Greek text filled with a curse against, not the king or any figure of authority, but a common grocer. Seems one of the people living in the city of Antioch along about 1,700 years ago had a grudge against a certain Babylas, so much that it resulted in a curse being set in stone — in this case, a tablet with cuneiform carved into it.

We don't have the carver's name (or even initials), so we can't trace the curse back to the source, but we do know — thanks to the efforts of a translator who worked for two years (because of the fragility of the tablet) — what the curse said:

"O thunder-and-lightning-hurling Iao, strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer. As you struck the chariot of Pharaoh, so strike his [Babylas'] offensiveness."

You have to love the directness of the language: straight appeal to the god-like figure (in this case, the Greek word for Yahweh, Iao) and then the reference to one of the Old Testament's signature events, the death of the Pharaoh in the un-parting of the Red Sea. This guy is not messing around.

But he's just getting warmed up.

The text goes on thus:

"O thunder—and-lightning-hurling Iao, as you cut down the firstborn of Egypt, cut down his [livestock?] as much as..."

Sadly, just as the writer was getting warmed up, his carving knife broke or his efforts were interrupted by war or a family dispute or something similar — or, the more likely occurrence, he wrote as much as he liked but what we have is what has survived down through the years.

Still, it's powerful stuff, at least in the asking. He's obviously winding up again with the second hit from above, the reference to thunder and lightning raining down on the suggested target of Iao's wrath. He's also gone back to the Exodus again and brought in the killing of the firstborn sons of all Egypt. This is the thing that eventually unhardened the Pharaoh's heart enough for him to let the Israelites go, at least for a time, before pursuing them into the path of the Red Sea.

The guy who did the translating, a staffer at the University of Washington, said he hadn't encountered a curse of a grocer before. There's a first time for everything, apparently. 

Also lost to the sands of time is the result of this ancient man's imploring. Did Babylas, whoever he was, suffer the slings and lightning bolts of outraged Iao? Who knows. It wasn't written down — or at least it hasn't been found yet.