"This volume explores how economic agents in and around Ugarit operated in different exchange networks and how elite actors could gain power by operating across more than one network. By applying a Network-based model to both the textual and the archaeological data from the site of Ugarit, economic activities at the site are reconstructed in this volume"--
With the growing proliferation of literature concerning the social world of the Hebrew Bible, scholars continue to face the challenge of a proper understanding of ancient Israel’s economies. Portrayals of Economic Exchange in the Book of Kings is the first monographic study to use an anthropological approach to examine the nature of the economic life behind the biblical text. Through Karl Polanyi’s paradigm of exchange as a methodological control, this book synthesizes Semitic philology with related fields of Levantine archaeology and modern ethnography. With this interdisciplinary frame, Nam articulates a social analysis of economic exchange, and stimulates new understandings of the biblical world.
This volume challenges patrimonialism as a political model for the ancient Near East by engaging with letters and legal texts concerning royal women at Late Bronze Age Ugarit, demonstrating women’s pivotal roles in the exercise of power, and then bringing these insights to bear on the Hebrew Bible. The book offers a new vision of how women figure in ancient political systems. Through an analysis of royal letters, legal verdicts, and regional records, it examines overt claims and implicit anxieties concerning the pivotal roles of royal women. Three case studies from Late Bronze Age Ugarit reveal that a single woman functioning in a range of modalities—mother, daughter, sister, and wife—brokered a network of relationships among a range of men. Patrimonialism depended on the political polyvalence of women. Texts from Ugarit attest to this reality, and the biblical royal women of the House of David amplify its significance. This analysis of women’s activity within and among royal households is productive not only for the study of the Late Bronze Age Levant, but also as a model for analogous inquiries into ancient societies and other systems in which data are thin and patrimonialism widely in evidence. Royal Women at Ugarit is suitable for students and scholars working on women and gender in the ancient Near East, as well as those interested in the political realm of the Late Bronze Age and the intersections of biblical literature with other ancient texts.
As any dictionary of a dead language the present aims to indicate the stage reached by the Ugaritic consonantal lexicography and to serve as a reference work. This edition includes the whole of the new discovered materials.
In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.
Warfare exerts a magnetic power, even a terrible attraction, in its emphasis on glory, honor, and duty. In order to face the terror of war, it is necessary to face how our biblical traditions have made it attractive -- even alluring. In this book Mark Smith undertakes an extensive exploration of "poetic heroes" across a number of ancient cultures in order to understand the attitudes of those cultures toward war and warriors. Smith examines the Iliad and the Gilgamesh; Ugaritic poems commemorating Baal, Aqhat, and the Rephaim; and early biblical poetry, including the battle hymn of Judges 5 and the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1. Smith's Poetic Heroes analyzes the importance of heroic poetry in early Israel and its disappearance after the time of David, building on several strands of scholarship in archaeological research, poetic analysis, and cultural reconstruction.
In July, 2008, the International Association for Assyriology met in Würzburg, Germany, for 5 days to deliver and listen to papers on the theme “Organization, Representation, and Symbols of Power in the Ancient Near East.” This volume, the proceedings of the conference, contains 70 of the papers read at the 54th annual Rencontre, including most of the papers from two workshop sessions, one on “collective governance” and the other on “the public and the state.” As the photo of the participants on the back cover demonstrates, the surroundings and ambience of the host city and university provided a wonderful backdrop for the meetings.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms urban and city has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleations origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.
The purpose of this book is to help postmodern Westerners understand what the Bible has to say about wealth and possessions, basing itself on the presumption that (a) nobody can understand themselves apart from some recognition of their spiritual roots, and (b) that these roots sink deeper into the pages of the Bible than most Westerners realize. Focusing upon that part of the Bible most widely recognized to be its ideological core--that which is called Torah by some, Pentateuch by others--it interprets this "great text" against other "great texts" in its literary-historical environment, including (a) some epic poems from Mesopotamia, (b) some Jewish texts from Syria-Palestine, and (c) some Nazarene parables from the Greek New Testament.