This small and badly broken tablet preserves the beginning and end of a commentary. According to its rubric it is a commentary on the "29th" tablet of Šumma Ālu, however the incipit it gives for this alleged "29th" tablet corresponds with that called the "31st tablet" in other traditions.
The colophon states that the tablet was copied by Marduk-zēru-ibni, son of Nabû-balāssu-iqbi, from the Egibatila family, for his father, probably as some sort of pedagogical exercise. It is not dated but probably comes from the end of the second or the beginning of the first century BC, like the dated tablets from Nabû-balāssu-iqbi's collection.
The most remarkable feature of the colophon is its statement that the continuation (arkīšu) of the present tablet (Šumma Ālu 32) was written on a leather roll (magallatu). The same statement can be found in another commentary owned by Nabû-balāssu-iqbi, CCP 3.5.25.
A collation of the tablet has improved our understanding of the relationship of the present commentary with its base text. The commentary is mostly concerned with philological matters: e.g. the hardly ever syllabically written ordinal number "eleventh" (ištēnšerû) is said in r 2' to mean "11," and to correspond with Šabāṭu, the eleventh month of the Babylonian calendar.
As is usually the case with commentaries on divination texts, another concern of this tablet is to prove the internal consistency of its base text. It does so by correlating a word from the protasis with a word from the apodosis. For instance, l. 3-4 explain an apodosis that attributes a certain outcome to the "hand of Ištar" by correlating "Ištar" with a word from the protasis.
In the same manner, the commentary tries to justify certain apotropaic measures prescribed in the base text by relating them to the words of the omen. For instance, l. 4 explains the abbreviated writing of the expression "to tie a knot" (ṭurra tarakkas) with a full syllabic writing of the phrase, and then proceeds to explain it with an aššu gloss that probably refers to one of the terms in the protasis.
The commentary has some points common with K.1 (CCP 3.5.30), a commentary on Šumma Ālu 30-32, which perhaps suggests that both of them belong to the same tradition.
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