The poem is inscribed onto clay in the Middle-Babylonian language,[1] which is a form of language which dates to a period (according to one source) of the years 1600 to 900 B.C.[2] The poem might also be known as An Akkadian dialogue on the unrighteousness of the world or The Babylonian Koheleth.[3]
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The poem is an example of wisdom literature, which is a form of writing which shows two people providing contrary positions on a subject, in the form of a dialogue.[4]
The poem is a dialogue between two people who are friends. One of the persons is suffering, and the poem shows him revealing the acts of evil done by people in the society around him, while the other person is shown attempting to add perspective on these acts of dubious morality, by him stating the nature of the occurrence of justice within the order of everything that exists (in the universe), an order that exists because it was made by a divinity.[5]
The first line reads:[4]
and the speaker proceeds to recount first hand experiences and his grief, referred to as lumnu libbi which means, in literal translation, evil of the heart, but which in everyday lexicon might be called anguish or heartache, which is to say, a kind of emotional and psychological suffering. Having described his state of pain, the sufferer attributes this to an occurrence in his life, which is abandonment at an early age, when he was orphaned, in addition to which, he was abandoned and also deprived of any emotional and psychological support from another. The sufferer is confused and baffled by his suffering, and ultimately, the poem shows him failing to find any clarity as to why this misfortune in life should have befallen him. The sufferer hopes to gain a cathartic release purely by the act of anothers listening to his recounting of his tale of woe, if it is his companion might be amiable and therefore might provide of a form of compassion, the sufferer states, in the last stanza [4] (the translation made by Professor W.G.Lambert [3][4]):
and the last part of the last line reads:[1]
The Babylonian Theodicy is, with regards to its dialogic nature of a sufferer and friend(s), formally very similar to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.[3][4][6]
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