The study of Syro-Mesopotamian civilization has greatly advanced in the past twenty-five years. In particular the renewed interest in Eastern (or 'Mesopotamian') Syria has radically altered our understanding of not only the ancient Near East, but of the Bible as well. With Syria east of the Euphrates becoming one of the most active areas of archaeological investigation in the entire Near East, the need for a synthesis of this research and its integration with the Hebrew Bible has greatly increased.This volume charts the state of our knowledge, following a general chronological flow, and will appeal not only to scholars of the ancient Near East but also to Biblical specialists interested in the historical and religious backgrounds to the Israelite and Judahite kingdoms.
Secrecy and the Gods is a comparative mythological study of the human reception and treatment of divine secret knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia and biblical Israel. The human royal council was the social model for ancient ideas about divine knowledge being secret - just as human kings had secrets so too did the gods. Diviners who received this knowledge from the gods in an on-going, ad hoc manner were an essential link between the divine assembly and the human royal council for whom such knowledge was intended. Scribes eventually adapted the ad hoc divinatory means of receiving divine communications to their culturally significant texts. By discursively asserting a historical connection between themselves and unique mediators with a close divine affiliation (the apkallus and Moses), the scribes constructed myths that legitimated their texts as divine revelation and claimed these were received in history through normal scribal channels. In this manner, scribes fixed the secret of the gods permanently among humans in textualized form that valorized their own position within society. Although the origin of divine secret knowledge was rooted in a common mythological idea of the divine assembly, its treatment was quite distinct. The Mesopotamians guarded divine secret knowledge through various scribal means, including the attachment of a Geheimwissen colophon to certain tablets (treated exhaustively), whereas biblical Israel published it openly. The contrast in treatment of divine secret knowledge was directly related to different mytho-political self-understandings: Mesopotamia's imperial aspirations versus biblical Israel's vassaldom. As vassals to Yahweh, the divine imperial king, the kings of Judah and Israel as presented in the biblical material were not to formulate secret orders; they were only to obey them.
The last fifty years have seen a dramatic increase of interest in the wisdom literature of the Bible, as scholars have come to appreciate the subtlety and originality of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes as well as of Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. Interest has likewise grown in the wisdom literatures of the neighboring cultures of Canaan, Egypt, and especially Mesopotamia. To help readers understand the place of biblical wisdom within this broader context, including its originality and distinctiveness, this volume offers a collection of essays by Assyriologists and biblicists on the social, intellectual, and literary setting of Mesopotamian wisdom; on specific wisdom texts; and on key themes common to both Mesopotamian and biblical culture. --From publisher's description.
Scholarly proposals are presented for the pre-biblical origin in Mesopotamian myths of the Garden of Eden story. Some Liberal PhD scholars (1854-2010) embracing an Anthropological viewpoint have proposed that the Hebrews have recast earlier motifs appearing in Mesopotamian myths. Eden's garden is understood to be a recast of the gods' city-gardens in the Sumerian Edin, the floodplain of Lower Mesopotamia. It is understood that the Hebrews in the book of Genesis are refuting the Mesopotamian account of why Man was created and his relationship with his Creators (the gods and goddesses). They deny that Man is a sinner and rebel because he was made in the image of gods and goddesses who were themselves sinners and rebels, who made man to be their agricultural slave to grow and harvest their food and feed it to them in temple sacrifices thereby ending the need of the gods to toil for their food in the city-gardens of Edin in ancient Sumer.
Here is a complete translation of all the published cuneiform tablets of the various Babylonian creation stories, of both the Semitic Babylonian and the Sumerian material. Each creation account is preceded by a brief introduction dealing with the age and provenance of the tablets, the aim and purpose of the story, etc. Also included is a translation and discussion of two Babylonian creation versions written in Greek. The final chapter presents a detailed examination of the Babylonian creation accounts in their relation to our Old Testament literature.
Ephrem the Syrian was one of the founding voices in Syriac literature. While he wrote in a variety of genres, the bulk of his work took the form of madrashe, a Syriac genre of musical poetry or hymns. In Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Jeffrey Wickes offers a thoroughly contextualized study of Ephrem’s magnum opus, the Hymns on Faith, delivered in response to the theological controversies that followed the First Council of Nicaea. The ensuing doctrinal divisions had tremendous impact on the course of Christianity and led in part to the development of a uniquely Syriac Church, in which Ephrem would become a central figure. Drawing on literary, ritual, and performance theories, Bible and Poetry shows how Ephrem used the Syriac Bible to construct and conceive of himself and his audience. In so doing, Wickes resituates Ephrem in a broader early Christian context and contributes to discussions of literature and religion in late antiquity.
The book sheds light on some Biblical texts and archaeological documents related to successive important events that took place in Mesopotamia (Greek interpretation of ancient Iraq), from the time of creation and until the return of the exiled Jews to their homeland after the fall of Babylonia at the hands of the Persians in 539 B.C. The idea of presenting the two accounts separately in the six chapters, might help to examine and assess whether God is really a God of love, and is able to preserve the dignity of the human race that He created in His image and likeness, and whether the world is stable, prosperous and carrying high moral human values due to the dedication and diligence of these inspired believers to fulfill God's will over the course of 6000 years. On the other hand, to evaluate the contents of archaeological documents extracted from Mesopotamia that reveal the natures, functions, and achievements of the goddess of creation, sky, air, waters, and storms, as well as the accomplishments of gods of Nations, Kings, and heroes of Epics and whether they can be adopted by generations as a constitution for life and inherited cultural civilization. The last chapter introduces some Biblical prophecies that have been literally fulfilled regarding the fall of Assyria and Babylonia, in addition to other prophecies recorded in the book of Revelation that are also supposed to be fulfilled at the end of ages, but not before the collapse of the city of Babylon which was announced by the second Angel in 14:8, nor before the action of the sixth Angel in 16:12, when he (poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East). The Author is an accredited Iraqi civil engineer, who managed and accomplished numerous building and road projects. He was appointed to complete construction projects in the heart of the archaeological site of the ancient city of Babel in the late 1980's. Being proud of the heritage and civilizations of his country that are recorded in the texts of The Holy Bible, and for those reasons, the idea began to develop into the belief that God devoted him to the diligence to produce this book. Despite the fact that the dates of some artifacts precedes the dates of any written text in The Holy Bible, acknowledging that the amount of documents extracted from the Land of Mesopotamia, which is very modest in relation to the enormous volume of information in the contents of The Holy Bible that does not decrease, increase, or change. As matter of fact, The Holy Bible remains as the main source for the success of the archaeological exploration projects, that's the reason why the title of the book begins with "The Holy Bible". The Author presents various opinions selected from some publications that show the multiplicity of assumptions regarding successive topics related to each other. In the absence of concrete evidences and to reach a single conclusion; the remaining possibility is to adhere to one hypothesis or find a suitable new one that corresponds to the sequence of events that took place in Mesopotamia. For instance: The Creation, The existence of the four rivers branching from Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:10), The reality of the flood which was confirmed by the epic of Gilgamesh, Nimrod is not a sinister but a builder, king blessed of God (Genesis 10:9-10), and Abraham crossed the Euphrates River once, not three or four times! (Joshua 24:3)
Jean Bottero, one of the world's leading figures in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, approaches the Bible as an astounding variety of documents that reveal much of their time of origin, historical events, and climates of thought.
Bringing together the research of internationally renowned scholars, Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age contributes significantly to our understanding of the epoch-making artistic and cultural exchanges that took place across the Near East and Mediterranean in the early first millennium B.C. This was the world of Odysseus, in which seafaring Phoenician merchants charted new nautical trade routes and established prosperous trading posts and colonies on the shores of three continents; of kings Midas and Croesus, legendary for their wealth; and of the Hebrew Bible, whose stories are brought vividly to life by archaeological discoveries. Objects drawn from collections in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and the United States, reproduced here in sumptuous detail, reflect the cultural encounters of diverse populations interacting through trade, travel, and migration as well as war and displacement. Together, they tell a compelling story of the origins and development of Western artistic traditions that trace their roots to the ancient Near East and across the Mediterranean world. Among the masterpieces brought together in this volume are stone reliefs that adorned the majestic palaces of ancient Assyria; expertly crafted Phonecian and Syrian bronzes and worked ivories that were stored in the treasuries of Assyria and deposited in tombs and sanctuaries in regions far to the west; and lavish personal adornments and other luxury goods, some imported and others inspired by Near Eastern craftsmanship. Accompanying texts by leading scholars position each object in cultural and historical context, weaving a narrative of crisis and conquest, worship and warfare, and epic and empire that spans both continents and millennia. Writing another chapter in the story begun in Art of the First Cities (2003) and Beyond Babylon (2008), Assyria to Iberia offers a comprehensive overview of art, diplomacy, and cultural exchange in an age of imperial and mercantile expansion in the ancient Near East and across the Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C.—the dawn of the Classical age.
In this groundbreaking work that sets apart fact and legend, authors Finkelstein and Silberman use significant archeological discoveries to provide historical information about biblical Israel and its neighbors. In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible—the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire—reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts. Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today.
