Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations

Among the many religious acts condemned in the Hebrew Bible, child sacrifice stands out as particularly horrifying. The idea that any group of people would willingly sacrifice their own children to their god(s) is so contrary to modern moral sensibilities that it is difficult to imagine that such a practice could have ever existed. Nonetheless, the existence of biblical condemnation of these rites attests to the fact that some ancient Israelites in fact did sacrifice their children. Indeed, a close reading of the evidence—biblical, archaeological, epigraphic, etc.—indicates that there are at least three different types of Israelite child sacrifice, each with its own history, purpose, and function.

In addition to examining the historical reality of Israelite child sacrifice, Dewrell’s study also explores the biblical rhetoric condemning the practice. While nearly every tradition preserved in the Hebrew Bible rejects child sacrifice as abominable to Yahweh, the rhetorical strategies employed by the biblical writers vary to a surprising degree. Thus, even in arguing against the practice of child sacrifice, the biblical writers themselves often disagreed concerning why Yahweh condemned the rites and why they came to exist in the first place.

The metaphor is a hallmark of Classical Hebrew poetry. Some metaphors, such as “Yhwh is king” or “Yhwh is warrior,” play a foundational role. The same does not hold for metaphors from the fishing industry. Because they had access to only two major freshwater sources, archaeological research demonstrates that this industry did not play a major socioeconomic role in ancient Israel. Fishing has nevertheless made a substantial contribution to prophetic and wisdom literature. All metaphors manifest reality, but given the physical circumstances of a largely agrarian, nonmarine society, what does the sustained presentation of fishing metaphors in the Hebrew Bible communicate?

Examining the use of fishing images in the Hebrew Bible is a formidable task that demands an open mind and a capacity to mine the gamut of contemporaneous evidence. In Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men, Tyler Yoder presents the first literary study devoted to the fishing images used in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as in the Mesopotamian textual records. This calls for a penetrating look into cultural contact with Israel’s neighbors to the east (Mesopotamia) and southwest (Egypt). Though nearly all fishing metaphors in the Hebrew Bible carry overt royal or divine connotations that mirror uses well-attested in Mesopotamian literature, this comparative analysis remains a largely untapped area of research. In this study of the diverse literary qualities of fishing images, Yoder offers a holistic understanding of how one integral component of ancient Near Eastern society affected the whole, bringing together the assemblage of disparate materials related to this field of study to enable scholars to integrate these data into related research and move the conversation forward.

Children were an important part of the ancient Near Eastern household. This idea seems straightforward, but it can be understood in many ways. On a basic level, children are necessary for the perpetuation of a household. On a deeper level, the definitions of child and member of the household are far from categorical. This book begins to explore the multiple definitions of child and the way the child fits within a household. It examines what membership in the household looks like for children and what factors contribute to it. A study addressing what a child is and how a child’s gender and social status affect her place in the household is vital to a proper understanding of the ancient Near Eastern household.

Despite their importance, children have long been marginalized in discussions of ancient societies. Only recently has this trend begun to change within biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholarship. A recent wave of studies, especially in relation to the Hebrew Bible, has started to address children in their own right. In light of the current state of scholarship on children, the purpose of this book is threefold. First, Garroway continues to fill out the picture of the child in the ancient Near East by compiling child-centric texts and archaeological realia. In analyzing these materials, she surveys the relationship between children and ancient Near Eastern society by examining the extent to which structuring forces in a community, such as social status and gender, contribute to the process of a child’s becoming a member of his household and society. Finally, this information provides a base for future research, for example, a cross-cultural study of children in the ancient Near East in Classical Antiquity.

In the mid-first millennium B.C., the Eanna temple at Uruk sacrificed a minimum of nine lambs every day in its basic routine of offerings to its gods; in addition to these, special occasions and festivals demanded the sacrifice of as many as 90 lambs in a single day. All told, the Eanna sacrificed about 4,300 lambs per year. There were more than 120 herdsmen connected to the Eanna at any given time, and the temple expected there to be tens of thousands of sheep and goats under their responsibility. These herdsmen delivered male lambs to the Eanna for sacrifice, and the temple had an internal infrastructure for the care, maintenance, and ritual expenditure of these lambs; they also delivered wool, which the Eanna sold mostly in bulk quantities. This book aims to analyze the economic organization of this entire system of sheep and goat maintenance and utilization, to explore the economic and social relationships between the Eanna and its herdsmen, and to integrate the study of the Eanna’s animal economy into the developing picture of the Neo-Babylonian temple economy as a whole. Kozuh’s careful examination of the bookkeeping records, the management records, and legal documents connected with this substantial enterprise sheds new light on an arcane area of first-millennium Mesopotamian life that will be sure to enlighten our understanding of the daily life, economy, and social structure of this region.

Holm’s book is an innovative approach to the biblical Book of Daniel. It places Daniel against the background of story-collections, an ancient genre that began in Egypt in the mid-second millennium B.C.E. This work focuses on Daniel 6–4 and provides detailed comparisons with specific bodies of story-collections and other related material from the Ancient Near East. In this regard, special attention is given to Egyptian court tales, a large corpus mostly neglected by previous biblical scholars. Thus, this book brings new evidence and fresh insights to the field of Daniel studies, which in recent years has generated constant interest, especially as it pertains to textual issues and literary matters.

Setting Daniel against an explicit definition of the story-collection genre redefines a vast array of questions concerning textual criticism, compositional history, and the overall nature of the book. For instance, the divergent texts of the narrative parts of Daniel (the Masoretic text and the Greek editions in Theodotion and the Septuagint) now need to be described in part as variant editions, or tellings, of a common core material, rather than as translations of older written texts with clearly traceable genealogies.

When Daniel is studied in the context of story-collections and kindred compositions from the Ancient Near Eastern and neighboring literatures, new light is shed on the literary traditions and processes from which the Daniel stories arose. There are a greater number of court tales and cycles than previously recognized, as in the case of Qumran but also the Egypt Demotic corpus. The detailed discussion of all these materials allows us to appreciate the Book of Daniel in a much wider literary milieu and it furthers our understanding of the history of its composition and early transmission.

The findings of Assyriology have been applied to biblical studies ever since the former emerged as a scholarly discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the scholarly flow from Assyriology to biblical studies continues, yet rarely are the fruits of biblical scholarship brought to bear on the study of ancient Assyria and Babylon. The present volume aims to reverse this unidirectional trend.

Considering that the literature preserved in the Hebrew Bible is the product of a people who had significant contact with both Assyria and Babylonia, then surely the study of the Hebrew Bible has something to offer Assyriology. But what? The contributors approach this question from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including intellectual history, museology, and religious and political history. The authors also offer broad methodological considerations and more focused, text-based case studies. Written by leading scholars in the fields of Assyriology and Hebrew Bible, Jehu’s Tribute presents a fresh approach to the multifaceted relationship between Assyriology and biblical studies.

In addition to the volume editors, the contributors include Céline Debourse, Jessie DeGrado, Eckart Frahm, Shalom E. Holtz, Gina Konstantopoulos, Alan Lenzi, Alice Mandell, Dustin Nash, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Seth Sanders, Anthony P. SooHoo, SJ, and Abraham Winitzer.