The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Religion
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1368

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The Companion to Ancient Israel offers an innovative overview of ancient Israelite culture and history, richly informed by a variety of approaches and fields. Distinguished scholars provide original contributions that explore the tradition in all its complexity, multiplicity and diversity. * A methodologically sophisticated overview of ancient Israelite culture that provides insights into political and social history, culture, and methodology * Explores what we can say about the cultures and history of the people of Israel and Judah, but also investigates how we know what we know * Presents fresh insights, richly informed by a variety of approaches and fields * Delves into 'religion as lived,' an approach that asks about the everyday lives of ordinary people and the material cultures that they construct and experience * Each essay is an original contribution to the subject

Leseprobe

Praise for The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel

I had begun to think that there were already too many handbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias of the biblical world on the market for yet another one. But reading through this new volume, superbly planned and organized by Susan Niditch, showed me how wrong I was. There is frankly nothing quite like it. In an exceptionally comprehensive way, it explores what ancient Israel was all about: the varied aspects of its culture and society, the multiple historical contexts in which it existed, and the range of perspectives, literary, archaeological, religious, social scientific, from which modern interpreters must understand it. The volume, thus, is not only a survey of the facts and features of Israel's history and culture, as is typical of many handbooks. Even more, it is a searching inquiry into how we know what we know or think we know: what are the major issues of interpretation and how to evaluate them. Editor Niditch has not been afraid to encourage differing points of view on these issues and the evidence for them from her contributors, which her cross-referencing throughout helps the reader to appreciate. And the contributors – a well-respected international group from junior to senior scholars – have not been afraid to be provocative in what they have to say. Unquestionably, this volume will become a cornerstone for all future work on the study of ancient Israel.

Peter Machinist, Harvard University

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel

Edited by Susan Niditch

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel

Edited by

Susan Niditch

This edition first published 2016 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Wiley Blackwell companion to ancient Israel / edited by Susan Niditch.    pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-65677-8 (cloth) 1. Jews–History–To 70 A.D. 2. Judaism–History–Post-exilic period, 586 B.C.-210 A.D. 3. Jews–Palestine–Civilization. 4. Palestine–Social life and customs–To 70 A.D. 5. Palestine–History–To 70 A.D. 6. Bible–Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Niditch, Susan, editor.    DS121.W65 2016    933–dc23

2015017683

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: © Kavram / Getty Images

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Editor's Introduction

Part I: Methodology: Questions, Concepts, Approaches, and Tools

A: Contextualizing Israelite Culture

Chapter 1 Archaeology: What It Can Teach Us

Introduction to Archaeological Methods of Excavation and Interpretation

“Biblical Israel” of the Text and “Ancient Israel” of the Archaeological Remains

Reconstructing Ancient and Biblical Israel from an Archaeological Perspective

Bibliography

Chapter 2 Israel in Its Neighboring Context

Amorites and the Canaanites

Philistines

Moabites and Ammonites

Edomites

Midianites

Arameans

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 3 Ancient Egypt and Israel: History, Culture, and the Biblical Text

Historical and Cultural Interaction

The Comparative Enterprise

Concluding Comments

Bibliography

Chapter 4 Text and Context in Biblical Studies: A Brief History of a Troubled Relationship

The Bible Displaced

New Historicism to the Rescue?

Down Memory Lane

Note

Bibliography

B: Hebrew Bible and Tracking Israelite History and Culture

Chapter 5 Folklore and Israelite Tradition: Appreciation and Application

The Essence of Folklore

Resistance to Folklore and Misunderstanding

Applications

Findings

Note

Bibliography

Chapter 6 The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: Sources, Compositional Layers, and Other Revisions

Forms of Ancient Revision of Texts

Examples of Scribal Revision in Genesis 1–11

Study of the Formation of the Pentateuch

The Formation of Other Parts of the Hebrew Bible

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 7 Linguistics and the Dating of Biblical Literature

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 8 Epigraphy: Writing Culture in the Iron Age Levant

Laying the Groundwork

The Focus: Iron Age Inscriptions in the Levant

Of Kings and Kingdoms: Monumental Inscriptions of the Iron Age

Monumental Inscriptions about Military Conquests: Tel Dan (Old Aramaic) and Mesha (Moabite)

Treaty Texts: Sefire (Old Aramaic)

The King's Public Works and Pious Deeds

The Tell Miqne (Ekron) Temple Inscription (Phoenician of Philistia)

The Public Works of King Mesha (Moabite)

The Public Works of King Amminadab: The Tell Siran Bronze Bottle (Ammonite)

The Siloam Tunnel Inscription of King Hezekiah of Judah (Old Hebrew) as a Public Work

King Hadd-Yithi of Gozan: The Tell Fakhariyeh Inscription (Old Aramaic) and Public Works

Royal Burial Inscriptions: The Ahiram Sarcophagus (Phoenician) and the Royal Steward (Old Hebrew)

Inscribed Cultic Objects and Inscribed Prestige Objects: Inscriptions from Mudeyineh (Moabite) and Kefar Veradim (Phoenician)

On the Bureaucracy of Kingdoms: The Samaria Ostraca and the Gibeon Jar Handles (Old Hebrew)

Old Hebrew Epistolary Texts

The Ubiquity of Religion in Ancient Writing Culture

Bibliography

Part II: Political History

A: Origins

Chapter 9 The Emergence of Israel and Theories of Ethnogenesis

Identity and Origins: A Cautionary Note

Past Research on the Emergence of Israel: A Brief Summary

Archaeology and Ethnicity: Background

Identifying Ethnicity in the Archaeological Record: Some Preliminary Observations

The Emergence of Israel in the Iron Age

The Historical Context for the Emergence of Israelite Traits: Israel and the Philistines

Merenptah's Israel

Israel's Ethnogenesis: A Chronological Summary

Notes

Bibliography

B: Monarchic Period

Chapter 10 The Early Monarchy and the Stories of Saul, David, and Solomon

The Biblical Texts and the Political History of the Israelite Early Monarchy: Changing Assessments and Current Approaches

Historical Reconstructions through the 1980s

Challenges and Reassessments

Current Interpretations

The Early Monarchy as Israelite State Formation

Other Reading Frames for the Stories of the Early Monarchy

Bibliography

Chapter 11 The Divided Monarchy

Sources

The Regnal Formulae

Preexisting Prophetic Stories

The Split and Its Aftermath (922–875 BCE)

Peace and Political Expansion (875–842 BCE)

Nationalistic Religious Retrenchment and Political Weakness (842–800 BCE)

Limited Recovery (800–775 BCE)

Renewed Expansion (775–750 (738) BCE)

Reaction to Assyria and the Fall of the North (735–715 BCE)

Hezekiah's Revival (715–686 BCE)

Vassaldom (686–640 BCE)

Josiah's Revival (640–609 BCE)

Collapse (609–586 BCE)

Bibliography

C: Postmonarchic Period: In the Land and Diaspora

Chapter 12 (Re)Defining “Israel”: The Legacy of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods

The Problem of the Exile

Textual and Archaeological Strata(gies)

Mizpah, Jerusalem and Ramat Raḥel: A Tale of Three Cities

Textual and Religious Constructs

Retrospect and Prospects

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 13 The Hellenistic Period

Hellenism and the Hellenistic Age: Demarcations and Definitions

Hellenistic Kingdoms and Hellenism in the Land of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora

Political and Social Contexts: Economic Inequity and Native Revolts

The Maccabean Crisis

Jewish Apocalypticism in Its Hellenistic Setting

Conclusion

Bibliography

Part III: Themes in Israelite Culture

A: God and Gods

Chapter 14 The Gods of Israel in Comparative Ancient Near Eastern Context

“Who Is Like Yahweh?”

The Canaanite Pantheon

Literary Portrayals of Yahweh

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 15 Monotheism and the Redefinition of Divinity in Ancient Israel

Monotheism's Modern Discontents

The Context for Monotheistic Discourse in the Seventh–Sixth Centuries

Monotheism and the Redefinition of Divinity

Bibliography

B: Mediation: Gods and Humans

Chapter 16 Priests and Ritual

The Priestly Theology of the Tetrateuch

Sinai Revelation of the Covenant

The Sacrificial Cult

Priesthood in the Tetrateuch

Historical Reconstruction: Cult and Priesthood in Israelite and Judean Religions

The Priesthood

Closing Thoughts

Bibliography

Chapter 17 Prophecy

The Perception of Divine Revelation

The Packaging of the Revelation

The Evaluation of Genuineness

Preservation of True Prophecies

Later Interpretations of Written Prophecies

Bibliography

Chapter 18 Apocalypticism

Identification of a Genre

Apocalypticism in the Prophets?

Definition of “Apocalypse”

Persian Period Prophecy

The Hope for Resurrection

A Hellenistic Phenomenon

Bibliography

C: Social Interaction

Chapter 19 Religion at Home: The Materiality of Practice

Making a Household a Home

Setting a Meal

Locating the Dead

Ritualizing the Body

Summary

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 20 Education and the Transmission of Tradition

Education in the Family Household

Literacy in Ancient Israel

Texts as Mnemonic Aids

Scribal Guilds as Vehicles of Education and Transmission

Bibliography

Chapter 21 Kinship, Community, and Society

Methodological Issues and Terminology

Kinship When There Was No King: The Social Structure of Early Israel (1200–1000 BCE)

The Social History of Iron Age II: A Changing Landscape

The Beginnings of Diaspora: Judeans in Babylon and Egypt in the Sixth–Fifth Centuries BCE

Judah in the Persian Era: Social Disruption and the Fraying of Community Ties

Hellenistic Judea: Urbanization and Sectarianism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 22 Law and Legal Literature

Biblical Sources of Law

Forms of Law

Areas of Law

Legal Institutions

The Ideologies and Historical Contexts of the Law Collections

The Literary Frame of Biblical Law

Legal Revision as a Means of Cultural Renewal

The Decalogue

Deuteronomy's Draft Constitution: The Origins of Rule of Law and Separation of Powers

Conclusions: The Legacy of Biblical Law for the Modern World

Bibliography

Chapter 23 Women's Lives

Sources

Economic Activities: Women at Work

Reproductive Activities: Women and Children

Social and Political Activities: Women and Their Communities

Women's Religious Activities: Regular and Occasional

Outside the Household: Women's Community Roles

Conclusions

Bibliography

Chapter 24 Economy and Society in Iron Age Israel and Judah: An Archaeological Perspective

Archaeological Chronology and Political Context

Sources of Evidence and Conceptual Frameworks

Households, Villages, Walled Towns and “Urbanism”

Bibliography

D: Artistic Expression

Chapter 25 Verbal Art and Literary Sensibilities in Ancient Near Eastern Context

Extrinsic Considerations of Literariness: Marking the Literary Text

Intrinsic Considerations of Literariness: Repetition

Extending the Line: Incremental Development

The Power of the Word and the Significance of the Pun

Literary Art in Writing

Bibliography

Chapter 26 The Flowering of Literature in the Persian Period: The Writings/Ketuvim

The Ketuvim in the Persian Period

The Narratives in the Writings/Ketuvim as Responses to Crisis

Poetic and Proverbial Literature

Conclusions

Note

Bibliography

Chapter 27 Hellenistic Period Literature in the Land of Israel

Category 1: The Use of Older Literature as a Framing Device or Springboard

Category 2: Implicit Use of or Allusion to Earlier Texts

Category 3: Explicit Citation and Use of Scriptural Antecedents

Category 4: Revision and Rewriting of Earlier Texts

Category 5: Texts That Relate to Earlier Texts but That Complicate the Previous Categories

Bibliography

Chapter 28 Art and Iconography: Representing Yahwistic Divinity

A Concentration on the Anthropomorphic

Symbols: Beyond the Anthropomorphic

From Sacred Stone to Sacred Emptiness

Resetting our Iconoclastic Clock: Sacred Emptiness

Theoretical Framework

Divine Fire

The Impossibility of Crafting the Essence of Fire

The Use of “Radiance” to Depict the Presence of Yahweh

Solar Divinity

Deuteronomistic Name Theology

Sacred Emptiness

Invisibility

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

EULA

List of Tables

Chapter 12

Table 12.1

Table 12.2

Table 12.3

Chapter 22

Table 22.1

List of Illustrations

Chapter 28

Figure 28.1

Male bronze figurine from Tell-Balâṭah.

Figure 28.2

The Egyptian deities denoting the concepts of sky (Nut), air (Shu) and earth (Geb) were portrayed anthropomorphically as seen here in the Book of the Dead of Nesitanebtashru

Figure 28.3

A scene from a drinking mug from Late Bronze Age Ugarit found in the so-called “house of the magician priest” in the south acropolis. The offering is presented before an enthroned bearded individual, perhaps representing the deity 'Ilu.

Figure 28.4

A giant Amun-Re dwarfing his victims at Karnak.

Figure 28.5

A procession of deities wearing horned headdresses and mounted on various animals coming before an Assyrian king. From Maltaya, located approximately 70 kilometers north of Mosul.

Figure 28.6

The god Marduk with his spade symbol and symbolic animal, the

mušḫuššu

dragon.

Figure 28.7

Marduk's symbolic animal, the

mušḫuššu

dragon.

Figure 28.8

The anthropomorphic image of a horned Shamash appears alongside the surrogate disk emblem of the sun.

Figure 28.9

A bull-headed warrior found at Bethsaida.

Figure 28.10

A stele from Zincirli whose inscription mentions that the deceased person's “soul/essence” (

nabšu

) was envisioned as continuing to dwell in the stele itself.

Figure 28.11

A depiction of the Mesopotamian storm god Aššur with radiant

melammu

and fire from the time of ninth-century BCE king Tukulti-Ninurta II.

Figure 28.12

The terracotta tenth-century BCE Taanach cult stand depicts a winged sun disc above a quadruped in register one, caprids flanking a stylized tree in register two, cherub creatures in register three, and a nude female holding lions by the ears in register four. Some scholars suggest that register three represents a type of empty-space aniconism representing divinity.

Figure 28.13

A Neo-Assyrian depiction of Aššur riding on the back of a

Mischwesen

creature.

Figure 28.14

A hybrid Neo-Assyrian human-headed, winged bull called

aladlammu.

Figure 28.15

The Iron Age Syro-Hittite temple at Ayn Dara in northern Syria has structural features that are very close to the Jerusalem Temple. A series of meter-long footprints were carved into the limestone threshold. They seem to depict a type of aniconic representation of a deity walking into the inner sanctum.

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Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth Bloch-Smith is an archaeologist who has unearthed the lived cultures of the ancient Levant, including ancient Israel. Her publications include Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead and articles on Tel Dor, the goddess Astarte, Israelite religion, the role of material culture in transmitting notions of gender, and archaeological contributions to biblical studies. She has excavated in Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Tunisia, and Connecticut.

David M. Carr is Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of Introduction to the Old Testament: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts (2010), The Formation of the Hebrew Bible (2011) and, most recently, Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins.

Charles E. Carter is Professor of Religion at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ. In addition to Hebrew Bible and New Testament, his teaching and research interests are archaeology, environmental studies, and religion and film. He was the Catholic Biblical Society Visiting Scholar at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and the École Biblique in Jerusalem in 2002–3 and a Pew Scholar in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in 1999–2000. He chaired the Department of Religion from 1999 to 2009. From 2009 to 2014, he served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Ohad Cohen is a Semitic linguist and Hebrew Bible scholar. In his book The Verbal Tense System in Late Biblical Hebrew Prose (2013), he offered a systematic structural analysis of the verb in late Biblical Hebrew prose. In his recent publications he has conceptualized new ways to deal with some classical debates on the meaning of Biblical Hebrew verbal forms.

John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale University. He has written widely on apocalyptic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. His most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (2014). He has been president of the Catholic Biblical Association (1997) and president of the Society of Biblical Literature (2002), and is currently general editor of the Anchor Bible Series for Yale University Press.

Tamara Cohn Eskenazi is The Effie Wise Ochs Professor of Biblical Literature and History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Her publications include In an Age of Prose: A Literary Approach to Ezra-Nehemiah and The JPS Bible Commentary: Ruth (National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies, 2011). She is senior editor of The Torah: A Women's Commentary, winner of the National Jewish Book of the Year Award in 2008, and recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for work on women's lives in the Persian period.

Avraham Faust is Professor of Archaeology at the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is the author of numerous books and articles covering various aspects of Israel's archaeology from the Early Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, with a special focus on Iron Age societies. He is currently directing the excavations at Tel 'Eton.

S. A. Geller is the Irma Cameron Milstein Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He has also taught at York University in Toronto, Dropsie College in Philadelphia, and Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. He has worked in the field of biblical poetry and religion, and has published books and numerous articles in these areas, among them Sacred Enigmas: Literary Religion in the Hebrew Bible (1996) and, most recently, studies on the role of nature in biblical religion and other topics. He is currently completing a commentary on the Book of Psalms.

Matthew J. Goff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. His research interests include the Dead Sea Scrolls and wisdom literature. His most recent book is 4QInstruction: A Commentary (2013).

Edward L. Greenstein is Meiser Professor of Biblical Studies and Director of the Institute for Jewish Biblical Interpretation at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He has edited the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society since 1974 and has published widely in ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies. Recipient of numerous fellowships, he completed the essay in the present volume while a visiting senior research fellow at the Herzl Institute, Jerusalem.

John R. Huddlestun is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. He has published on the relationship of ancient Israel to Egypt, especially on conceptions of the River Nile. Prior to his career in academia, Professor Huddlestun worked as a professional musician, living in southern Europe and Israel.

Brad E. Kelle, Professor of Old Testament and Director of the M.A. in Religion Program at Point Loma Nazarene University, has served as the Chair of the Society of Biblical Literature's Warfare in Ancient Israel Consultation (2004–6) and Section (2007–12). He has written or edited a variety of works on ancient Israel, including Ancient Israel at War 853–586 BC (2007) and Biblical History and Israel's Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History (co-authored with Megan Bishop Moore, 2011).

T. M. Lemos is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Huron University College at Western University, Ontario. She has published in the areas of Israelite marriage customs, social structure, impurity practices, masculinity, and violence.

Bernard M. Levinson serves as Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. His research focuses on biblical and cuneiform law, textual reinterpretation in the Second Temple period, and the relation of the Bible to Western intellectual history. The interdisciplinary significance of his work has been recognized with appointments to major national and international research institutes.

Theodore J. Lewis holds the Blum-Iwry Professorship in Near Eastern Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in Northwest Semitic languages and religions, is general editor of the book series Writings from the Ancient World and past editor of the journals Near Eastern Archaeology and Hebrew Annual Review. He is the author of Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit, and co-author of Ugaritic Narrative Poetry and is currently writing The Religion of Ancient Israel for the Yale Anchor Bible Reference Library series for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Carol Meyers, the Mary Grace Wilson Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, has lectured and published widely in biblical studies and archaeology. She co-edited Women in Scripture, a comprehensive look at all biblical women; and her latest book, Rediscovering Eve (2013), is a landmark study of women in ancient Israel. She has been a frequent consultant for media productions and has served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Susan Niditch is the Samuel Green Professor of Religion at Amherst College. Her research and teaching on the cultures of ancient Israel draw upon the fields of folklore and oral studies and reflect particular interests in war, gender, the body and lived religion. Her most recent book is The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods.

Song-Mi Suzie Park is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. Her main research interests center on the literary and theological interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, especially concerning the politics of identity. The author of Hezekiah and the Dialogue of Memory (2015) and several articles, she is currently at work on a feminist commentary on the Book of 2 Kings.

Raymond F. Person, Jr is Professor of Religion at Ohio Northern University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Deuteronomic History and the Book of Chronicles: Scribal Works in an Oral World (2010) and Deuteronomy and Environmental Amnesia (2014).

J. J. M. Roberts is Princeton Theological Seminary's W. H. Green Professor of Old Testament Literature Emeritus, retired after 25 years in that position. Prior to that he taught in the Near Eastern departments at the University of Toronto and The Johns Hopkins University, and the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. He served on the New Revised Standard Version committee, on a number of editorial boards, and has published widely.

Christopher A. Rollston is a historian of the ancient Near East, with primary focus on Northwest Semitic epigraphy of the First and Second Temple periods, scribal education, writing and literacy in antiquity, Hebrew Bible, and law and diplomacy in the ancient Near East. He works in more than a dozen ancient and modern languages. He holds the MA and PhD from The Johns Hopkins University and is currently the Associate Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages at George Washington University. He is the editor of the journal Maarav, the co-editor of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

J. David Schloen is Associate Professor of Syro-Palestinian Archaeology in the Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago, where he is also an associated faculty member of the Divinity School. He specializes in the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant (Syria and Palestine) from ca. 3000 to 300 BCE. Over the past two decades he has conducted archaeological excavations in Israel and Turkey. He is currently completing a book entitled The Bible and Archaeology: Exploring the History and Mythology of Ancient Israel, which explains how ancient artifacts, inscriptions, and other archaeological discoveries shed light on biblical narratives.

Tina M. Sherman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her dissertation investigates the nature of metaphor in prophetic oracles of judgment, situating them within their ancient Near Eastern context.

Mark S. Smith is the Skirball Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at New York University. Specializing in Israelite religion and the Hebrew Bible, as well as the literature and religion of Late Bronze Ugarit, he is the author of many books, most recently Poetic Heroes: The Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World and How Human Is God? Seven Questions about God and Humanity in the Bible (both 2014).

Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research focuses on religious and social practices in ancient Israel and Judah, and the portrayal of the past in the Hebrew Bible. Her books include King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice (2004), Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims (2010), and Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (with J. Barton, 2010).

Neal Walls is Associate Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity in North Carolina. He is the author of The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth and Desire, Discord, and Death.

Steven Weitzman serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he is also the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Religious Studies. Recent publications include Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom (2011); with John Efron and Matthias Lehmann, a second revised edition of the textbook The Jews (2014); and with co-editor Michael Morgan, Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism (2014).

Robert R. Wilson is the Hoober Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Old Testament at Yale University. He is the author of Genealogy and History in the Biblical World (1977), Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (1980), Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament (1984), and numerous articles on prophecy, historiography, and judicial practice in ancient Israel.

Benjamin G. Wright III is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. He specializes in the history and literature of Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, with particular interest in wisdom literature, the Septuagint and problems related to translation in antiquity, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He has recently completed a commentary on the Letter of Aristeas for the series Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature.

Acknowledgments

I thank the Trustees of Amherst College and Dean Greg S. Call for supporting the production of this volume with a grant from the Faculty Research Award Program. I would also like to thank Stewart Moore for his excellent work as editorial assistant during the preparation of the manuscript. My friend and colleague Peter Machinist was extremely helpful as I compiled the roster of contributors. I also wish to express my appreciation to all the colleagues who contributed essays. I thank them for the quality of their work, for their patience, and for their perseverance. For me, a particularly fruitful and enjoyable part of this project involved the lectures, based on their essays, delivered by contributors in a variety of classroom and public settings at Amherst College. My students over several years benefited greatly from these interactions that deeply enriched our courses and offered contributors an opportunity to give their essays a trial run in front of intelligent and enthusiastic listeners. The responses of these audiences in turn contributed to the final versions of the essays. The lectures were made possible by the Amherst College Willis D. Wood Fund. Finally, I would like to thank Rebecca Harkin, Georgina Coleby, Ben Thatcher, and the other editors at Wiley Blackwell who commissioned and supported our work.

Editor's Introduction

The Companion to Ancient Israel offers a multifaceted entry into ancient Israelite culture. The orientation of the Companion is rooted in several approaches: the history of religion with its interests in worldviews, symbol systems, paradigms, and the benefits of comparative, cross-cultural study; the study of religion as lived, an approach that asks about the everyday lives of ordinary people, the material culture that they shape and experience, and the relationships between individuals and tradition; and cultural studies, with its emphasis on interdisciplinary work and methodological questions about our own assumptions as scholars.

The essays of the Companion are presented in three parts, but each of the chapters relates to others in the volume to reveal a range of perspectives, emphases, and ways of reading that point both to areas of consensus and lively debate within a framework of shared questions and concerns. A first group of articles explores how we know what we know. Authors describe and apply major tools and approaches employed by scholars to contextualize ancient Israel and Judah and to explore the Hebrew Bible, the great anthology of literature integral to issues in Israelite history and culture. Throughout, readers are urged to approach the sources of our knowledge with suspicion, aware of the benefits and limitations of methodological approaches deployed in the study of ancient Israel.

In chapter 1, Elizabeth Bloch-Smith skillfully introduces readers to the modern field of ancient Near Eastern archaeology, its techniques and goals, and its implications for the study of ancient Israel. She reviews the history of the field, drawing an important distinction between “biblical” and “ancient Israel.” Bloch-Smith emphasizes the critical importance of material culture for a full appreciation of Israelite religion, literature, and society even while pointing to the limitations of this evidence and the challenges of interpretation. She judiciously describes developments and debates among scholars concerning chronology and other critical issues, providing a thoughtful counterpoint to other essays in this volume such as that of Avraham Faust.

Grappling with issues in ethnography, worldview, and literary form, Song-Mi Suzie Park discusses the peoples surrounding ancient Israel who are described in the Hebrew Bible as playing critical roles in Israelite foundation tales. Park not only reviews what is known and not known about the historical locations, ethnic identity, and cultural orientations of the Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, and others but also explores what terms such as Canaanite and Amorite variously mean in Israelite tradition. She asks how the ancient biblical authors portray neighboring peoples and what these portrayals say about Israelites' own sense of cultural self-definition contoured either in contrast with or in relation to other groups. In the process, she not only delves into the nature of ancient historiography but also provides an excellent case study in the genesis of cultural memory.

An important part of this memory relates to Egypt. John R. Huddlestun asks about the significance of biblical references to Egypt for understanding Israelite history and cultural identity. Huddlestun discusses periods and situations in which cultural contact between ancient Egypt and Israel might have been possible, pointing to historical and literary implications, but he is duly cautious about direct literary borrowings and links. Throughout, he pays excellent attention to the comparative method, offering a thoughtful review and critique of the work of previous scholarship, exploring what this work and conclusions drawn from it reveal about the field of biblical studies and the cultural orientations of its contributors. In an essay that shares some interests with those of Park, Faust, and Stavrakopoulou, Huddlestun has us consider what the biblical portrayals of Egypt and Egyptians say about biblical writers, their worldviews and contexts.

In a wide-ranging essay, Steven Weitzman also explores scholarly approaches to the contexts of biblical literature and the significance of certain recurring methodological assumptions. Weitzman is particularly sensitive to the difficulties in matching ancient texts with social, political, and intellectual history – the ambiguities and complexities, the constructions, interpretations, and receptions to which questions about text and context are subject. In particular, he assesses the contributions of ancient Near Eastern comparative studies and archaeology, discussing the New Historicism, postmodernism in various guises, minimalism, and the ways in which attention to collective memory relates to the very nature of tradition as received and worldview in context. His essay reads well in tandem with those of Bloch-Smith, Park, Faust, and Niditch.

Susan Niditch explores the ways in which categories introduced by folklorist Alan Dundes, “texture” (style and use of language), “text” (content), and “context” (social and literary), inform genres within folk groups. She points to interdisciplinary borders where folklore meets biblical form-criticism and contemporary material culture meets ancient Near Eastern archaeology. A discussion of oral and written literature is followed by a set of biblical case studies that underscore the various ways in which awareness of folklore, the field and the international corpus of material studied, deepens and enriches our understanding of ancient Israelite cultures. Her observations concerning oral tradition serve as a counterpoint to those of David M. Carr who seeks to understand how the compositions of the Hebrew Bible emerged and were preserved as written works.

In a sophisticated essay that rejects simplistic views of biblical sources, David M. Carr offers a model for the formation of the Hebrew Bible, seeking to account for doublets, contradictions, and awkwardness in the received, preserved written tradition. Drawing his examples from various ancient Near Eastern and biblical works and focusing on Genesis 1–11, Carr posits the use of specific scribal techniques, such as joining, blending, expanding, and counterwriting. His case studies lead Carr to review and assess the state of source criticism and to carefully draw some wider conclusions about the formation of the Pentateuch and its “multivoiced” quality. Carr's work is well read in tandem with that of Raymond F. Person, Jr who points to an oral-traditional dynamic in the process of written composition.

Composition also raises questions about the very words chosen by authors, the syntax and style of their language, and a host of other linguistic criteria. Ohad Cohen introduces readers to the ways in which experts in linguistics offer suggestions for the dating, authorship, and context of various biblical compositions. After describing the sort of criteria considered by scholars in the study of ancient Hebrew, Cohen provides useful case studies to explore the ways in which these criteria might be used to situate pieces and portions of biblical literature.

The culture of ancient Israel and Judah is, as emphasized throughout this volume, part of a larger Levantine world, both in regard to the content and nature of the evidence and in regard to the very writing system that has allowed for the preservation of literary evidence. Introducing readers to the variations and developments that occur in writing systems with specific reference to the ancient Near East, Christopher A. Rollston provides an array of key texts, examines the genres of literature produced or preserved in writing, and explores their political, historical, and cultural significance. Rollston discusses the methodological challenges and implications of epigraphic work, pointing to scholarly debates about the chronology and meaning of individual inscriptions. Rollston not only allows readers to think in material terms about the nature of writing in the ancient world to which Israel belonged, but also about who has access to this skill at various levels of expertise.

All of the questions about form and function, context and comparison that occupy authors in Part I of the Companion remain relevant in Part II dealing with political history. Developments in scholarly approaches will be especially striking to those who were introduced to the history of ancient Israel via works of the mid-twentieth century when venerable scholars such as John Bright could virtually visualize Abraham and his family as they traveled the steppe, donkeys in tow. Instead, Avraham Faust approaches this early period by examining the ways in which evidence of material culture reveals means of defining one's own group over against neighboring groups. In the process, he provides an overview of directions and variations in the field of archaeology as it has influenced biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies and hotly debated questions concerning Israelite origins. Faust examines critically what is meant by ethnicity and offers a chronology and a cultural map for the historical emergence of Israel as a people and a form of self-definition. His work reprises some of the themes explored by Park in her socioliterary approach. Similarly, Brad E. Kelle explores the complex intersection between legend, history, propaganda, and historiography in discussing the period of the early kings as described in the Hebrew Scriptures and as elucidated by extrabiblical evidence, archaeological, epigraphic, and literary. He points to various “reading frames” employed by modern interpreters and to the possible social contexts, worldviews, and motivations that may have informed the work of ancient composers, all of which relate to particular and often contrasting views of an early monarchy. Also employing biblical, archaeological, and extrabiblical written sources, J. J. M. Roberts points to the challenges of historical reconstruction and the inner tensions and contradictions in available material, asking how we know what we know and why the information is preserved by various sources in a particular way. His work, like that of Brad E. Kelle, thus not only provides a valuable background essay for the study of Israelite and Judean history, but also a useful model in historical methodology.

Similarly, Charles E. Carter grapples with various and contrasting reconstructions of the neo-Babylonian and Persian periods with special interest in the ways in which scholars employ and assess archaeological data. He too points to the challenges faced by historians, and offers judicious suggestions for the demography of Persian-period Judea. He points to ways in which details concerning the size and distribution of population and other information, gleaned from concrete evidence of material culture, relate to biblical authors' portrayals of exile, return, and daily life experienced under colonialist control in Israel, Judah, and the Diaspora. His essay beautifully relates conceptually to chapters by Smith, Collins, Lewis, and Eskenazi while grappling with many of the issues in archaeology and interpretation discussed by Bloch-Smith, Schloen, and Faust. Finally, Matthew J. Goff describes the political and cultural history of the Hellenistic period, exploring key events and turning points, issues relating to Israel and Diaspora, to the Maccabean revolt, and to manifestations of an apocalyptic worldview. He explores how extant literature reflects and helped to shape varieties of Jewish identity, and he allows for creativity and complexity in Jewish encounters with Hellenistic settings and ideas.

Part III of the Companion delves into critical themes in ancient Israelite cultures. Readers will notice the ways in which contributors creatively draw upon the various methodologies explored by earlier essays, often applying an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the theme they present. Essays by Neal Walls and Mark S. Smith deal with representations of God and the gods.

Neal Walls describes the rich mythological matrix to which belong representations of deities in the ancient Levant. His work in comparative religion and comparative literature underscores not only similarities in language, imagery, and narrative medium employed by Israelite and neighboring authors to express essentials of worldview but also points to important variations between the literary inventions of various contributors, revealing their unique and culturally specific orientations. The essay thus joins that of Park to explore ways in which groups define the self and the other through creative media, in this case through stories about the gods. Walls points not only to a range of views expressed by Yahwists concerning the gods and the God of Israel, but also traces developments over time. Attuned to ways in which the literary evidence reveals both shared traditions and lively diversity in critical aspects of culture and belief, this essay anticipates studies by Greenstein and Lewis dealing with verbal and visual art and beautifully transitions to issues in monotheism discussed by Mark S. Smith.

Mark S. Smith explores ideas concerning a singular god that reflect and inform both modern theological perspectives and the very definitions of monotheism that emerge from or are imposed upon ancient texts. Smith places the development of monotheism in a sociohistorical framework and within a history of ideas, drawing comparisons with developing worldviews of Israel's neighbors as they relate to divinity. Key background events include the rise of empires in the ancient Near East and the trauma of Assyrian and Babylonian conquests which focus attention on individual human responsibility and the unique role of a single national god within the larger universe.

Articles by Steven A. Geller, Robert R. Wilson, and John J. Collins deal with the mediation between the God of Israel and human beings. Steven Geller's study of priests and ritual operates on diachronic and synchronic levels, as he analyzes critical founding myths and the institutions they describe, including the priesthood itself. On the one hand, he is interested in what characterizes and holds together the priestly narrative that plays such a dominant role in the Pentateuch, for example, unifying motifs such as light and blood and narrative patterns associating holiness with danger. He is also interested in the disparate threads of tradition combined to emphasize such motifs and form these narrative patterns. Geller thus ranges from legal and ritual materials to the origin myths that serve as their framework, exploring the heroic characters who star in these myths, providing models for priestly roles as intermediaries in lived religion, real or imagined.

With a carefully articulated comparative approach, Robert R. Wilson introduces readers to prophecy as presented in Hebrew Bible, its functions, forms, and means of transmission. Drawing upon relevant ancient Near Eastern and international material, Wilson explores the roles of prophecy and prophets in ancient Israelite culture, attuned to the sociological frameworks in which prophets operated and the anthropological models that help to make sense of the phenomenon.

Sharing Wilson's interest in form and function, John J. Collins's study of apocalypticism attends to matters of genre and context. His analysis of apocalypticism deals with critical questions in the sociological study of religion concerning worldview and social movements. For Collins, the key to understanding this material is context, for example in regards to Daniel, persecutions under the colonialist rule of the Seleucid monarch Antiochus the Fourth. He engages with and assesses traits typical of apocalyptic orientations. In this way he provides insight into the particular sort of mediation between God and human and the particular relationship to history envisioned in apocalyptic works.

A second set of essays in Part III of the Companion deals with forms of social interaction. In a thoughtful piece, Francesca Stavrakopoulou questions the methodological assumptions that have informed the study of “household” religion and related terminology, for example “family religion,” “popular religion,” “women's religion.” Rejecting simple dichotomies sometimes drawn between sacred and profane, popular and elite, Stavrakopoulou complicates matters, exploring the complex nature of the ancient sources themselves and the theoretical paradigms applied to the study of “household religion.” She notes that such paradigms are too often influenced by normative attitudes and Western orientations. Concentrating on the setting of home and tomb and on practices related to these spaces and to the body, Stavrakopoulou explores the material dimensions of ancient Israelite religion and the ways in which religion is constructed and lived in social contexts.

Another aspect of social context concerns education and the transmission of knowledge in a culture that valorizes oral communication. Raymond F. Person, Jr considers the role of families and elites, scribal guilds and the state, and the educative function of liturgy, recitation, and festival contexts. He points to connections between education and gender roles, and emphasizes the ongoing importance of kinship and “family households” in ancient Israelite self-definition. Taking account of the social, economic, and ecological environments that influence the form and function of education, he points to ways in which memorization allows for multiformity and creativity in the transmission of tradition and reinforcement of cultural values.

With an approach that is both social scientific and humanistic, T. M. Lemos also explores kinship and community in ancient Israel. Like the essays by Park and Faust, this chapter evidences a deep interest in questions of cultural identity. Grappling with the terminology of kinship, Lemos explores the ways in which kinship, community, and society are understood and experienced in key periods of the social and political history of Israel and Judah and points to the ways in which the social landscape changes over time in response to changing political realities and how these changes are reflected in our sources. Like Francesca Stavrakopoulou, she makes readers aware of the methodological difficulties faced in such reconstructions of ancient history. Some particularly interesting threads in the essay deal with views of kinship and community in the Diaspora following the Babylonian conquest, attitudes to intermarriage in late biblical times, and the importance of wars in social change.

Bernard M. Levinson and Tina M. Sherman explore law and legal traditions in ancient Israel with attention to context on various levels: social, historical, narrative, and cross-cultural. Working comparatively within the biblical tradition and the wider world of the Levant, Levinson and Sherman raise questions about the relationship between extant biblical texts, as composed and framed, and actual ways of life, political institutions, and social bodies, noting that the understanding and application of law may have differed across segments of Israelite society. They explore the development of legal traditions over time, pointing to ways in which material has been reappropriated and altered, reflecting differing worldviews. Their study of law and legal traditions relates to and interweaves with many chapters of this volume including those concerned with kinship, priestly literature, economic life, and women's lives.

Focusing on the lives of women in ancient Israel, Carol Meyers examines in a sophisticated way textual, archaeological, and ethnographic sources. Taking account of the Tendenz of various biblical works, she notes that the Bible is a creation, in its current form, of male elites, even while the corpus may well reflect women's stories and concerns. Offhand references to material culture and daily life in biblical sources also reveal the possible realities of women's lives in various settings and periods. Meyers' work complements the essays on methodology and cultural reconstruction contributed to this volume by fellow archaeologists Elizabeth Bloch-Smith and Avraham Faust. Like Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Meyers points to the complex threads in women's religion in which public and private, official and unofficial overlap and interplay. Themes emphasized by Meyers include women's roles in education, the significance of female alliances, and women's economic activities and contributions.

With an explicit interest in the relevance of archaeological evidence for understanding economic realities and shifts in the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah, J. David Schloen offers a masterful overview of ancient Israelite history and historiography. Working comparatively, he introduces readers to concepts in the field of economics that have been applied to preindustrial societies. He points to modes of economic integration, for example “reciprocity,” “market exchange,” “redistribution,” and “householding,” and explores how these concepts may apply to ancient Israel and Judah. Throughout, he takes account of the tendentiousness of sources, the fragmentary nature of evidence, and scholars' tendencies to employ anachronistic models. His work relates well to many chapters in this volume concerned with archaeology, social history, and the methodological challenges posed by evidence.

A final set of essays addresses artistic expression. With literary sensitivity and deep interest in the comparative study of ancient Near Eastern literatures, Edward L. Greenstein explores the ways in which ancient authors employed “artful language,” paying special attention to the function of pieces of verbal art and pointing to their aesthetic and practical cultural roles. He also examines how composers of literature in their own cultural contexts defined various literary forms. Such forms may be distinguished not only by particulars of style, structure, content, or function but also, for example, by the presence of musical accompaniment. Greenstein underscores the importance of varieties of repetition in these literatures. Noting that “words have a mystique” in traditional cultures, he explores the worldviews behind the aesthetics, the relationship between authors and audiences, and the spectrum from oral to written styles. His essay relates well to chapters by Person, Weitzman, and Niditch in asking questions about the relationship between medium, meaning, and context and joins those of Huddlestun, Smith, Walls, and others in its attention to the interrelationships between cultures of the ancient Levant.

In her essay on Persian-period literature, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi thoughtfully analyzes the varied works in the portion of the Hebrew Bible called the Writings or Ketuvim. Attuned to matters of tradition and genre, Eskenazi points to the concerns and contexts that may explain the flowering of literature in this formative period and to ways in which these diverse writings reflect and helped to shape aspects of Jewish culture and identity. She suggests that the works provide a coping mechanism in a time of loss (e.g. Lamentations) and a source of renewal (e.g. Ezra-Nehemiah) and points to certain recurring features: the portrayal of daily life; the description of individual experience in the context of community identity; and the authors' interest in writing itself.

Benjamin G. Wright III explores the diverse corpus of Jewish Hellenistic literature, much of which was written by Greek-speaking Jews. A particularly informative set of writings in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic was preserved or composed by members of the Qumran community who took up self-imposed exile by the Dead Sea in the second century BCE. Wright describes how these various writings emerge in particular sociohistorical settings, reflecting and shaping different worldviews that all find a place under the “large tent” of Judaism. Wright pays special attention to matters of genre by setting up five categories of writings, each of which relates in a particular way to the inherited tradition and the earlier corpus of literature preserved in the Hebrew Bible.

Moving from verbal to nonverbal art, Theodore J. Lewis discusses ways in which Yahwistic divinity was imagined and represented. With a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, attention to questions of worldview, and engagement with questions concerning cultural representation and the inventiveness of human imagination, Lewis's essay relates well to many of the essays in the Companion volume. Areas explored include the links between written and visual representations of divinity, the ways in which attitudes to representation reflect the orientations of particular biblical writers, and the degree to which abstraction plays a role in representations of divinity.