NBC 7696, housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection, is a fairly well preserved one-column tablet, probably from Nippur, with a commentary on the 59th Tablet (called malsûtu) of the terrestrial omen series Šumma ālu. The commentary has been previously unpublished, but based on a transliteration provided by the present author, most of its entries are quoted in the notes of Sally Freedman’s PDF edition of Šumma ālu, Tablet 59, posted at Freedman’s Academia.edu page (accessed 11/16/2016).
Šumma ālu 59 deals with the appearance of various plants, at least some of which seem to be weeds growing abundantly in a field under cultivation. The commentary explains lemmata from about half of its 50 lines, for the most part following their sequence within the base text. Among other things, it provides Akkadian equivalents for Elamite month names (line 3), synonyms for difficult Akkadian words (e.g., lines 5, 19), and Akkadian readings of uncommon logograms used in the base text (e.g., lines 4, 18). Numerous entries, especially in the section following the horizontal ruling after line 17, provide information on the often obscure plant names mentioned in Šumma ālu 59. Line 11 explains the mythologizing apodosis “The god Ea will become obscured in the Apsû” in naturalistic terms, arguing that it means that “the waters of the river will be yellowish and disturbed.” The elaborate entry in lines 12-17 seeks to account for the link provided in one of the omens between the sudden appearance of grapevine and the nefarious actions of the god Ningišzida by quoting from the lexical series Diri (V 233-37) and an unidentified bilingual text, both adduced to demonstrate that Ningišzida was in charge of alcoholic beverages.
Both in lines 28 and 29, the commentator seems to have misunderstood the base text, reading i-šu-uṭ instead of i-kat₇(šu)-tam(ud) and i-tál(pi)tal-li instead of i-pe-te (taking the te as a la?) and, consequently, furnishing problematic explanations.
According to its colophon, the commentary was written by one “Naʾid-Enlil, son of Šamaš-aḫḫē-iddin, and descendant of mdir-dutu.” Both the theophoric element in the name Naʾid-Enlil and the fact that the commentary was acquired in 1942 as part of a group of tablets that included some Nippur texts suggest that NBC 7696 originates from Nippur. Naʾid-Enlil is known to have copied yet another commentary on Šumma ālu, BM 129092 (CCP 3.5.22.A.b), which covers the 22nd and 23rd malsûtu-portion of the series (and was copied sign by sign on a tablet found at Uruk, SpTU 5, 259 = CCP 3.5.22.A.a). BM 129092 entered the British Museum together with a tablet written in Nippur in 394 BCE, which suggests that Naʾid-Enlil was active during the Achaemenid period. It is worth noting that BM 129092, in line 44, likewise includes an entry in which the explanation draws on the theology and cult of the god Ningišzida.
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