2.0 Ancient Near Eastern Background to the Old Testament

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2.0 Ancient Near Eastern Background to the Old
Testament

• BOT508 Introduction to the Old Testament

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Introduction

• The nineteenth century rendered the service of
  rediscovering the long-forgotten world of ancient
  Egypt and the ancient empires of Mesopotamia. In
  consequence of these discoveries the Bible, once
  thought to be mankinds oldest book, has proved
  to be a relatively recent phenomenon.
• Keel, Othmar, The Symbolism of the Bible World
  Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of
  Psalms, 7

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Introduction

• We now see the Bible imbedded in a broad stream
  of traditions of the most diverse kind and
  provenance. Only when this rich environment has
  been systematically included in the study of the
  OT do OT conventionalities and originalities
  clearly emerge.
• Keel, Othmar, The Symbolism of the Bible World
  Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of
  Psalms, 7

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Introduction

• . . . the Oriental Renaissance. The
  transformation has been based fundamentally on
  archaeological data, but from archaeology it has
  naturally extended to literature, to religion, to
  art, and to the entire culture sphere. It has its
  beginning in April 1928, when a Syrian peasant,
  ploughing in his field, ran his share into the
  remains of an ancient tomb, and so discovered
  Ugarit . . . .
• Mascati, Sabatino, The Face of the Ancient
  Orient A Panorama of Near Eastern Civilization
  in Pre-Classical Times, (1962), 3

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Introduction

• In the Oriental Renaissance we may distinguish
  three archaeological key discoveries Ugarit,
  Mari and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In all three cases
  the discovery was made by chance . . . . In all
  three cases, the additions to our knowledge were
  revolutionary in their effect. . . .
• Mascati, Sabatino, The Face of the Ancient
  Orient A Panorama of Near Eastern Civilization
  in Pre-Classical Times, (1962), 3-4

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1. The OT the ANE

• 1. Important Collection of Texts
• 1.1 Byblos, Alalakh, Nuzi
• Nuzi Speiser, et. al.
• Two problems 1) Interpretation was Wrong! (role
  of house gods sistership contracts) 2) Nuzi
  custom not unique, but general Mesopotamian
  (childless wife and child bearing through slave)?

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1. The OT the ANE

• 1.2 Ugarit
• Ugartic Israelite Religious studies
• Ugaritic language
• Poetry

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1. The OT the ANE

• 1.3 Mari (majority 1800-1760 BCE)?
• Harran Abraham
• Prophetic text
• N.B. Malamat, Abraham, Prophecy at Mari, in The
  Place is Too Small for Us, 50-73.

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1. The OT the ANE

• 1.4 Ebla (3rd Millennium BCE, NW Syria)?
• Historical Interest
• 1.5 Amarna (Akhenaten)?
• Israelite occupation conquest ??????

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1. The OT the ANE

• 2. Areas of Research
• 2.1 Historiography
• 2.2 Religion
• 2.2.1 Hymns Prayers (Egyptian, Mesopotamian
  Canaanite)?
• 2.2.2 Myth, Ritual Magic
• Babylonian creation epics, Atrahasis epic

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1. The OT the ANE

• 2.3 Law
• 2.4 Covenant
• 2.5 Wisdom
• 2.6 Love Poetry
• N.B. Walton, John H., Ancient Israelite
  Literature in Its Cultural Context, 1989.

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1. The OT the ANE

• 3. Collections of Pictures Texts in
  Translation
• 3.1 Gressmann (1926, 1927)?
• 3.2 Pritchard (1969)?
• 3.3 D. Winston Thomas
• 3.4 SBL Writings from the Ancient World Series

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1. The OT the ANE

• 3.5 William W. Hallo, The Context of Scripture
  (1997ff.)?
• 3.6 Othmar Keels Studies
• See J. J. M. Roberts, The Ancient Near Eastern
  Environment, in Knight Tuckers The Hebrew
  Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, Chico
  Scholars Press, 1985, pp. 75-122

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2. Epigraphy the Bible

• 1. Ancient Inscriptions
• Inscriptional non inscriptional artifacts are
  the two major types of archaeological data for
  reconstructing ancient history.
• Important areas of concern include political,
  economic, social and intellectual aspects of an
  ancient culture.

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2. Epigraphy the Bible

• 2. Development of Writing
• Pictographic forms Egyptian hieroglyphics
• Syllabolgraphic forms with semantic
  determinatives Sumerian
• Development of the Consonantal Alphabet -
  Levantine
• Consonants Vowels Greek

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2. Epigraphy the Bible

• 3. Three Writing Materials
• Coloring ink on papyrus or astracon
• Gouging on wax or clay
• Carving on hard surface

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2. Epigraphy the Bible

• 4. Languages
• Semitic Eastern (Akkadian) and Western
  (specifically Northwestern Ugaritic,
  Phoenician/Hebrew, and Aramaic)?
• Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic)?
• Indo-European Anatolia (principally Hittite and
  Luwian and Greek)
• Sumerian

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2. Epigraphy the Bible

• Lingua Franca
• By Old Akkadian Period (2400 BCE) writing in
  Sumerian to expression Mesopotamian
• By 2000 BCE Akkadian dominated
• Until Aramaic takes over completely in the
  Persian Period.
• Greek Latin
• Multilingualism Bilingualism

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2. Epigraphy the Bible

• 5. Categories of Texts Found
• Administrative texts
• Epistolary texts
• Ritual texts
• Scientific texts
• Historical texts
• Belletristic works
• Pardee, Dennis, Inscriptions Ancient
  Inscriptions, The Oxford Encyclopedia of
  Archaeology in the Near East, Volume 3, pp.
  158-162

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3. Iconography the Bible

• 1. Definition of Iconography
• "The study of artistic subject matter or content
  (as opposed to artistic techniques and styles).
  Iconography therefore strives to describe the
  appearance, development, and disappearance of
  certain motifs and compositions, or the
  substitution of one artistic form by another."

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3. Iconography the Bible

• 2. Biblical Research Iconography
• 2.1 "A biblical text can explicitly describe a
  work of art, as e.g., the descriptions of
  drawings of Chaldean warriors in Ezek 2314."

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3. Iconography the Bible

• 2.2 "Descriptions can also be implicit. There are
  sound reasons for believing that Ezekiel was
  influenced by pictorial representations when
  describing the 4 living creatures supporting the
  sky (Ezekiel 1 . . . ."

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3. Iconography the Bible

• 2.3 "A text and a picture can independently deal
  with the same subject matter, as e.g., the
  appointment of an official or his being rewarded
  (Gen 313745 and several Egyptian tomb paintings
  of New Kingdom date. . . ."

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3. Iconography the Bible

• 3. Purpose of Studying Pictures
• To see what we are reading about
• Pictures tend to relate directly to the object,
  while words are symbolic . . . .
• "Thus Josephus may claim, as for the cherubim
  themselves, no one can say or imagine what they
  looked like (Ant 8.73)."
• This is especially true when dealing with
  people-made objects like the Ark.
• Lachish Room in the Nineveh Palace
• Keel, Othmar, "Iconography and the Bible," ABD
  CD-Rom edition

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4. The Comparative Method

• "To what end this toil and trouble in distant,
  inhospitable, and danger-ridden lands? Why all
  this expense in ransacking to their utmost depths
  the rubbish heaps of forgotten centuries, where
  we know neither treasures of gold nor silver
  exist? Why this zealous emulation on the part of
  the nations to secure the greatest possible
  number of mounds for excavation? And whence, too,
  that constantly increasing interest, that burning
  enthusiasm, born of generous sacrifice, now being
  bestowed on both sides of the Atlantic on the
  excavations of Babylonia and Assyria? One answer
  echoes to all these questions, - one answer,
  which, if not absolutely adequate, is yet largely
  the reason and consummation of it all the Bible."

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4. The Comparative Method

• 1. Friedrich Delitzsch, 1902ff., "Babel and
  Bible"
• Babylonian ethics superior to that in the Bible
  when dealing with Creation the Flood.
• "Sabbath" concept as coming from Babylonians
  (shapattu)?
• Babylonians knew monotheism via traveling
  Canaanites

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4. The Comparative Method

• 2. Comparison with the Bible
• "There is no doubt that the entire literature of
  the Old Testament, regardless of the age,
  character, or original function of its component
  elements, is made to conform with its overall
  theme the one God and his purposes, especially
  as they apply to man."

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4. The Comparative Method

• ". . . no comparisons between Babylonian and
  Biblical traditions can be undertaken without
  constant awareness of the polarity of the
  Babylonian and Israelite cosmic views, and of the
  profound effect this contrast had in the
  religious and cultural development within each
  civilization."
• Jacob J. Finkelstein, "Bible and Babel A
  Comparative Study of the Hebrew and Babylonian
  Religious Spirit"

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4. The Comparative Method

• 3. The Comparative Methodology
• The Comparative Method is interdependent with the
  Historical/Literary Methodologies that developed
  in the 19th Century.
• Units of Comparison should be "geographical
  neighbors and historical contemporaries"
• The problems with "patterns" and the "myth and
  ritual school."

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4. The Comparative Method

• "Comparison with extra-biblical material should
  be brought into play only when a properly
  executed inner-biblical analysis does not produce
  satisfactory results."
• ". . . when linguistic aspects provide but
  unclear and difficult hints toward the
  explanation of textual cruxes one should not
  depend on the forced testimony of assumed
  external parallels, ferreted out by the
  comparative method. Rather, the elucidation of
  difficult terms and ideas must be achieved from
  the biblical books themselves, since they are the
  only reliable first-hand evidence

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4. The Comparative Method

• which mirrors, albeit fragmentarily, the
  conceptual horizon of ancient Israel and the
  linguistic and literary modes in which it found
  its expression. For this reason, internal
  parallels are of greater help than external ones
  their identification can be achieved in a more
  systematic fashion than the pinpointing of
  similarities in extra-biblical sources."

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4. The Comparative Method

• "It demands an interdisciplinary and synoptic
  grasp, thus requiring the co-operation of experts
  in diverse areas philology, literature,
  folklore, theology, sociology, history, and the
  history of ideas."
• Shemaryahu Talmon, "The "Comparative Method" in
  Biblical Interpretation-Principles and Problems"

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4. The Comparative Method

• 4. Ten Important Principles of Comparative
  Studies Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought
  and the Old Testament, 26-7
• 1. Both similarities and differences must be
  considered.
• 2. Similarities may suggest a common cultural
  heritage or cognitive environment rather than
  borrowing.
• 3. It is not uncommon to find similarities at the
  surface but differences at the conceptual level
  and vice versa.
• 4. All elements must be understood in their own
  context as accurately as possible before
  cross-cultural comparisons are made.
• 5. Proximity in time, geography, and sheres of
  cultural contact all increase the possibility of
  interaction leading to influence.

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4. The Comparative Method

• 6. A case for literary borrowing requires
  identification of likely channels of
  transmission.
• 7. The significance of differences between two
  pieces of literature is minimized if the works
  are not the same genre.
• 8. Similar functions may be preformed by
  different genres in different cultures.
• 9. When literary or cultural elements are
  borrowed they may in turn be transformed into
  something quite different by those who borrowed
  them.
• 10. A single culture will rarely be monolithic,
  either in a contemporary cross-section or in
  consideration of a passage of time.

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5. The Problem of History

• 1. Multiple Meanings
• 1.1 "Geschichte, or the academic discipline of
  history-writing"
• 1.2 "Historie, or less formal narrative history
  and"
• 1.3 "Storie, which may contain may mythic and
  folkloric elements, but nevertheless aims at a
  connected account of the past."
• W. Dever, What did the Bible Writers Know When
  did they Know it?, 5

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5. The Problem of History

• 2. Multiple Meanings
• 2.1 Political history, the history of great
  public figures and institutions
• 2.2 Intellectual history, the history of
  formative ideas
• 2.3 Socio-economic history, the history of social
  and economic structures
• 2.4 Technological history, the history of things
  and their use
• 2.5 Art history, the history of aesthetics

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5. The Problem of History

• 2.6 Ideological history, the histor of how
  certain concepts, specifically ethnic and
  religious, have shaped culture
• 2.7 Natural history, the history of the
  environment and the natural world
• 2.8 perhaps a culture history, or total history.

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6. Problems with the History of Religions
Methodology

• Parallel Mania
• Causal Fallacies
• What kind of dependence is involved?
• Critical Scholarship and the Dating of Texts
• The Problem of Ex-eventu vaticinus