Category Archives: Biblical Studies

ἔστιν πανουργία καὶ αὕτη βδέλυγμα
καὶ ἔστιν ἄφρων ἐλαττούμενος σοφίᾳ

There is cleverness that is also an abomination,
and there is a fool lacking in wisdom.

Wisdom of Sirach 19.23, Rahlfs-Hanhart and NETS

If you have a copy of the New English Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford, 2007), then you’ll likely want to correct the following:

1.) Iezekiel 37.23: “recue” should read “rescue”

2.) Sirach 28.24-25: The second “25b” should read “25a” so that the verses progress thusly: 24a, 25b, 24b, 25a

3.) 3 Reigns 4.9: “Mackemas” should read “Machemas”

4.) Proverbs 24.23: “judgement” should read “judgment”

5.) Iezekiel 30.17: “Bubastus” should read “Bubastis”

6.) 1 Makkabees 2.32; 5.5; 10.77: “marshaled” should read “marshalled”

7.) Numbers 1.33: “(34)” should read “(35)”

8.) 3 Reigns 16.28c: “(22.46)” should read “(22.45)”

9.) Esa 38.14: “(5)” should read “(15)”

I discovered these in the course of working on the text for a concordance to the NETS, which I’ve mentioned before. There are also some of what I would call “mismatches,” that is, cases in which the spelling is inconsistent in view of other usage in the NETS. These are too numerous to list here (because I’m lazy!). One is “David” in 2 Reigns 4.8, 9, 12; 3 Reigns 11.27, rather than “Dauid” as elsewhere, passim. Another pair is “Dositheos” (Est OG 10.3; 2Mak 12.19, 24, 35) and “Dositheus” (3Mak 1.3). I’m forwarding the complete list to the editors, and hopefully there will be a corrected reprinting, eventually. The above, however, are the only real mistakes that I’ve found.

And as for his concubine, whose name was Reema, she too bore Gaam and Tabech and Tochos and Mocha.

Genesis 22.24 NETS

With all those babies I’d bear a mocha too, with a triple-shot of espresso.

This has got to be some kind of joke.

One of the guys more responsible than not for the uninformed public’s impression of the Bible—namely that it is a completely invented late artifact of little historical value for the periods it ostensibly covers—now notices one of the side effects of this is a complete and utter lack of interest in being told this, and so the field is shrinking. What sane person would study or fund such a self-cannibalizing field of study? Meanwhile, Bible programs in religious institutions are thriving, or, I should say, religiously-motivated Bible programs in such institutions are thriving. Those programs in religious institutions which ape critical scholarship of the moment are likewise shrinking, judging from anecdotal evidence. People are simply not interested in that approach.

Now that the results of such an approach become more obvious, the suggestion is made of cooperation with religiously motivated study. The two are antagonistic and will remain so. The faith-contingent programs of study will continue to cherry-pick critical biblical studies, and critical biblical studies will continue to fade away, as fewer students can find appealing the necessary philological expertise, if such is even available to them anymore in their institutions, with so many programs having been cut. It’s the time of a kind of twilight for biblical studies.

I’ll dispense with two memes in this single post.

First, Nick Norelli tagged me for Five Influential Primary Sources, “sources that have most affected your scholarship, thoughts about antiquity, and/or understanding of the NT/OT.”

I list these in no particular order.

1.) The Law Code of Hammurapi: In my first year of Akkadian, we translated all the laws, but only part of the prologue, as I recall. The whole thing together gave me a great handle on the language of law. Of course, at that time I was in my second year of Biblical Hebrew, too, so the overlap when we touched on Pentateuchal legal material was enlightening. And in this I want to emphasize that it’s not the superficial parallels of similar subject matter that is so interesting. There’s very little, if any, of that kind of equation between the two corpora. But the ways the laws are constructed are similar, whether simple bipartite laws of mere protasis and apodosis, or those extended, case-like provisos, they follow particular patterns of language and syntax within each corpus that are quite similar to one another. There is also a similar method between the two of linking laws in groups by vocabulary chains, though this is not extensively used, if memory serves, coming rather in little groups. The differences between the two are equally striking. It seems fair to say, in light of the prologue and epilogue of CH that it is not a “law code” at all, but an idealized picture of the reign of Hammurapi, intended as a memorial perhaps to Shamash, god of justice. I’ve heard this said about the various other Mesopotamian “law codes” as well, that they are not law codes per se, but something else. Since th “laws” don’t appear in legal documentation, it seems a pretty safe bet that they weren’t laws per se. Anyhow, it’s interesting stuff. We either learn from CH of an ancient conception of the ideal society, or of the workaday world being “legislated” against in the “laws.” Fascinating.

2.) The Mishnah: Early on in my post-Biblical Hebrew training, we were introduced to excerpts from the Mishnah. For whatever reason, the logic of the Mishnah’s organization and the argumentation preserved in its terse style immediately made sense to me. It was also immediately clear that this was not “a bunch of made up Jewish stuff” as I’ve heard some Christian ignoramuses call it. In fact, the reliance of the Mishnah on the Bible is obvious throughout, from reliance on the Bible for proof for a particular point in argumentation to a general influence on subject matter and the deeper similarity in what I would call now foundational patterns. These are the underlying patterns of logic and ethics that are induced from the Biblical narrative, patterns which are used to generate new applications. In reading the Mishnah, it became clear to me that in the New Testament, most strongly in Matthew, there were halakhic discussions, with Jesus arguing with Pharisees, et alia, just as the Rabbis argued amongst themselves in the Mishnah. The argumentation, so-called, in Luke and Mark, on the other hand, would have gotten Him laughed out of town or ignored, and would certainly not have led to Him being popular enough to be considered a threat. (John, on the other hand, displays striking similarities in Jesus’ discourses to the Essene writings found at Qumran, particularly the ubiquitous language of light and darkness.)

3.) The Epic of Gilgamesh: Back around the time of my introduction to the Code of Hammurapi, I also was delighted to be presented with the Epic of Gilgamesh in all its confusing, incomplete, riotous glory. The presentation of the various fragments in Pritchard’s big ANET was a real delight, as was the cleaned-up presentation in Stephanie Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1989; there’s now a 2009 edition with more stuff in it). EG affected my approach to the Bible on several levels. Firstly, it was obvious that there were here a number of versions of one story that dated to numerous centuries (indeed, nearly two millennia!), and that these could be used to investigate the development of such writings through the ages, with a specific view toward comparison and contrast with the classic Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP and all that rot). Jeffrey Tigay has presented the development of the EG very well in his The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic, but he’s more amenable in his conclusions to the classic Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis than I think the evidence warrants. So, while I applaud his work without hesitation, I disagree with his conclusions that EG actually supports the Documentary Hypothesis to any meaningful degree at all. In no instance are the particular mechanisms or framework of the DH itself actually supported by the EG’s evolution. Something happened, but the DH is definitely not it. Tigay allows room for as much in his Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). First, from the Introduction (pp 19-20):

The greatest amount of space [in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism] is devoted to analogues that have a bearing on the documentary hypothesis (Chapters 2-5 and Appendix). This is because of the seminal role played by this subject in modern biblical studies and because Pentateuchal criticism has been the focus of most controversy. It will be clear from my own chapters that I find the documentary hypothesis persuasive, but the reader is urged not to read this volume as essentially a defense of that hypothesis. The processes illustrated here do not exhaust the possibilities for explaining the development of biblical literature; they only scratch the surface. Even where a chapter lends support to a particular theory about a biblical composition, some other comparative model might lend equal plausibility to a competing theory or even suggest a new theory. Indeed, Alexander Rofé suggests in Chapter 4 that the supplementary hypothesis, rather than the documentary hypothesis, best explains the development of Joshua 20, and in Chapter 6 Yair Zakovitch offers a theory of assimilation to replace the documentary analysis of Genesis 34. But in addition to lending plausibility to particular theories, new or old, the volume is designed to give the reader experience with concrete models of literary development and to illustrate the kind of research that must go into interpreting the evidence that is available about these models. It is hoped that readers will be encouraged to seek more such models, especially for genres of biblical literature not covered in this volume. Experience with such models offers the biblical scholar what wide exposure to literature gives any student of that subject: a feeling for what happens in literature, and the sophistication to formulate literary theories and evaluate those of others in an informed and critical way.

More briefly, he reiterates the same possibilities in the Summary and Conclusions (p. 240):

Certainly the possibility exists that in other cases, too, analogues may suggest explanations better than those currently preferred by critics. The aim of the present volume is not to foreclose any options but to encourage those who study the evolution of biblical literature to approach this necessarily hypothetical task with the perspective and experience offered by empirical case histories.

In view of Tigay’s own statements above, those who point to either of these books of his as demonstrative proof of the objective, conclusive, and exclusionary verification of the DH have quite obviously not read them. But back to me! Secondly, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a cracking good story, and I loved reading it just for that.

4.) A particular midrash that I can’t find now. There was a particular excerpt from one of the earlier Rabbinic Midrashim that we read in the first weeks of my first semester of post-Biblical Hebrew. It included one of those great “There was a king…” parables in it. (There are far too many of those for me to recognize which it was.) Again, in reading this parable, it was a case of Jesus’ parables (the king parables are found only in Matthew) coming into full 3-D Technicolor life as part of first century Judean culture and (proto-)Rabbinic intellectual life rather than being the washed-out, incomprehensible, weird, but supposedly wise quotes that most people treated them as, as if He made up the whole genre. With this and the Mishnah and the few of the Dead Sea Scrolls we read (I remember 4QPHab and 4QFlorilegium, but there were also a few others; this was just before the DSS were generally released, so not many were available at all; actually my teacher then went down to Claremont to get copies of the microfilms for Berkeley), I was hooked. The Jewish background of the New Testament was plain to anyone familiar at all with the Hebrew writings, which the vast majority of NT people certainly were and are not. That’s a serious drawback. Since then, I ignore anyone who places more focus on works of Gentile literature as sources for the Gospels, etc, because they’re obviously idiots.

5.) Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles. This brought the world of the explosive growth of the early Church alive for me. This was a strange world, but a very religious one, and one in some ways quieter and more thoughtful than our own, as the discussions in this work shows, particularly the really fun story about the death of the god Pan (you may read it here, an early entry on this here blog). Plutarch lived about 80 years, from around 45-125 AD, and was writing in the very early second century, and so gives an excellent picture of the intellectual currents of the time, when Christianity was spreading like wildfire even among the upper classes.

Rick Bannon tagged me for The Five Biblical Studies Books I’m Stupider for Having Read. That’s kind of a tough one, since I usually get rid of such books, both physically and mentally, so it’s hard to remember them all. A few do come to mind. Again, I list them in no particular order. I will rein in my habitual rhetorical exuberance, keeping the comments very short, both because it would be so easy to go on at length in regards to the shortcomings (or noncomings) of the following, and so as not to leave the reader metaphorically spittle-flecked.

1.) Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. The combination of disordered writing and Hippyscopalian religion should be banned. And no, it’s not because she’s a girl. (The same evaluation covers her The Origin of Satan, and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. I honestly gave her a shot.)

2.) Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth. This was a tour de force of tendentious hyper-Bauristic Jesus Seminaristic line-toeing. Ultimately boring: it was perfectly nineties.

3.) Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Everyone’s favorite book by Uncle Jew-hater! Yay!

4.) The Archaeological Study Bible. Comment dites-vous “trainwreck”? Nice printing, though.

5.) Anchor Bible 38: Revelation by J. Massyngberde Ford. Seriously. Was that a joke?

On a piece of scrap paper:

More on Semler’s particularity:

Removing the tie to Israel, little, hated, poor, removes the necessary asceticism from Christianity. It also removes the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, so that, presumably, there is no judgment, a standard in the “Christianity” of “thinking people”, exemplified by an attitude of “I’m okay, you’re okay (unless you disagree with that).”

That’s not Christianity, but a quasi-religious social construct of the bourgeoisie.

I make these kinds of notes for myself, and then they are often lost. I’m glad this one was not.

As I posted briefly on Semler earlier, and this note is related to that, providing an additional critique of Semler. I will expand upon this note.

More on Semler’s particularity. Semler accuses the Jews of “particularity”, of adamantly sticking to their own ways in the face of liberal German blandishments to convert to some kind of flippy-floppy ethical universalism which Semler calls Christianity, but which is far from any known species of the Christian faith. Yet, importantly, Semler is blind to his own particularity. Semler’s own requirements are quite exclusive, and the attitude he exudes and which is maintained by later modernists following him generally, is one of complete particularity: only liberal German theology is valid. Even more conservative German theology is rejected. So, Semler’s ideal is not only enthnocentric (German), but further restricted by being his own particular liberal stream of theology and scholarship. Only those who would accept his ideal would be acceptable. That’s quite a rigid particularism! That explains my “More on Semler’s particularity.”

Removing the tie to Israel, little, hated, poor, removes the necessary asceticism from Christianity. The “tie to Israel” refers to the continuity between the Church of the Old Testament and the Church of the New Testament. Semler, of course, posited a complete break between the two, because he (and so many other “enlightened” Germans) couldn’t stomach the idea that Christianity owed anything to Jews. But the continuity between Israel and the Church is there, as all modern scholarship recognizes. One would have to be insane to posit otherwise. And, as part of that continuity, we find the Church assimilating, as Israel, the asceticism involved in being lesser than those around. The humble national status of Israel in the ancient world, hated for its peculiar customs, is something embraced by the Church in its asceticism. There is, too, the wholly iconic reflection of this relationship, which inheres in this scrawled note, of Israel and Church. There is both continuity and image between the two, Israel and Church, Church and Israel, forward and backward. The iconic worldview does not move in only one direction, after all. One becomes the image of the other at various times. Semler, in denying the continuity between Israel and the Church, removes the heritage of asceticism from his “Christianity.” Like some iconoclast of old, he plasters over the image of both Israel and the Church, so neither can be seen for what they are: reflections one of the other.

It also removes the distinction between oppressor and oppressed…. When there is no more image of the one wronged, then there is no way to recognize the one doing wrong. Semler restricts one’s analogical view to a Christianity that is sui generis, one that is the “ultimate emanation of the world spirit” or some such. Stripped of its very historicity, the Church no longer exists as an historical entity at all, but rather as an emotion, a longing, a purely Romantic ideal. (This Romanticism is found most strongly in Semler, but it is also present in de Wette and others of the period.) There is no longer any sin, nor any sinner, for these are legalistic, Jewish categories of thought, passé, and, I daresay, verboten in Semler’s new construct. With no sin, then, there can be no fault and no guilt in oppressing others. How convenient! The primary point here is, again, iconic: without the icon of Israel, wronged and hated by the world, the Church cannot recognize itself. To continue:

It also removes the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, so that, presumably, there is no judgment, a standard in the “Christianity” of “thinking people”, exemplified by an attitude of “I’m okay, you’re okay (unless you disagree with that).” When a concept of penalty is absent, there can be no judgment. Only a simple mind would depict this as “mercy.” This is instead anomianism: there can be no Judge and no Judgment, for there are no laws. This mentality denies God His sovereignty to do otherwise than His subjects determine should be done. For Semler, God is dead, executed by nice. And this perspective lives on in many liberal quasi-religious-themed social groups (a.k.a. “churches”). The historic Christian perspective is that not only will there be sheep and goats, at right hand and left, Abraham’s bosom and Gehenna, the Banquet or Wedding Chamber and outer darkness, but there are also those fearsome words: “Truly, I tell you, I do not know you.”

That’s not Christianity, but a quasi-religious social construct of the bourgeoisie. In Semler’s day and afterward it was precisely the burgeoning middle class, or bourgeoisie, newly prosperous and wishing to continue to increase in prosperity, that were the greatest source of support for such liberal ideas as Semler’s. The royalty, nobility, and the lower classes were almost universally conservative in religious, social, and political outlook. But the middle classes saw greater opportunity in loosened restrictions socially and economically, and they desired to advance such agendas for the firmer establishment of their own selves, primarily through their wallets. The ethics, such as they are, of such desires, come to be debated not in relation to traditional mores (Church or custom), but in relation to the newly constructed and very, very conveniently permissive ideas promulgated by supporters of their movement. And while the situation is nowadays different, some still parrot the liberal anomianism of two hundred years ago (or forty), as though this were some refreshing new breeze of the intellect. It’s not. SSDD: same stuff, different day. In any number of “mainline churches”, in any number of “megachurches”, in any number of “emergent churches”, whether any of these would call themselves by these or any other names that might remotely imply ownership by His Lordship (for to be Κυριακου is Not A Good Thing), we see and hear of a comfortably bourgeois existence extolled as Christian, the Gospel of Mammon instead of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. Woe. Woe. Woe.

From Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Jason Aronson/Rown & Littlefield, 1996), xiv:

No living culture can survive on the basis of history alone. History is essential because we need to know what our forebears thought. But after we discover what they thought, we need to decide what we think. And we need to determine what we think about some issues our forebears never thought about. WIth the passage of time, issues that at one time seemed very important recede in importance and other issues take their place. Such new issues cannot be ignored simply because they were not raised in the past. In the study of dead cultures (ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Rome, etc.) this problem does not arise. They belong to the historians because these cultures belong to the past and have nothing but a history. But it is different with a living culture such as Judaism which not only has a past but a present and a future. If such a culture ignores its present and future, and concentrates exclusively on the past, it declares itself dead. Once it does this, it will soon be dead. This must be avoided at all cost.

I want to expand Wyschogrod’s point here and apply it to specifically historical-critical approach to the Bible. The above paragraph brings to mind several things. Firstly, what is the result of finding the primary and only valid meaning of a text in the distant past, through whatever means? Does it not render all other readings “invalid” or “inaccurate”? Does this not also immediately render the text itself dead, and no longer to speak with a living voice to any community? Secondly, doesn’t such an approach itself also come to be deadened by this methodology? Finding no living voice in opposition to its theoretical constructions of meaning, it is unimpeded in its approach to the text, and finds only deadness reflected back upon it, because it will find nothing else. There is no living interaction. The results of the experiment are predetermined by the experiment. In this case, the approach, partaking as it does of a number of presuppositions, is limited in its conclusions. As it is, necessarily for the method, dismissive of the immanent and of all claims of living attachment to the texts, it has separated itself from all possible life to be found the text. It brings only death, seeking only death, for that it all that it can comprehend. Is it not dead itself? In its self-enforced separation from life, yes, it is. This is only one of the reasons that it will never be a valuable method for the use of a community of faith with a regard for the Bible as a living document.

From Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Writings from the Ancient World 19 [SBL, 2004]), 21:

The interest the Mesopotamians felt in their own past undeniably arose from a historical way of thinking. One is struck by the remarkable effort they devoted to the copying of official texts, to the study of royal correspondence from the past, and to the compilation of chronological lists and collections of omens. We can appreciate the attempts to explain the application of the principle of causation to human events. Some historians, indeed, were not satisfied with merely narrating the facts but tried to establish connections, looking for causes and consequences. Some saw in the fall of the empire of Akkade the consequence of a foreign intervention, the invasion of the Gutians or of the Umman-manda, two names that evoked rebellious mountain tribes or remote savage hordes, or of an indeterminate but always foreign adversary. Other commentators, on the contrary, sought a different explanation for the collapse of Akkade and believed that they had detected the beginning of its fall in palace revolutions and popular uprisings culminating in the outbreak of civil war, in which ever-bolder successors sought to make themselves heirs of the kings Narām-Sîn or Śar-kali-śarri.

However, we should not be misled by these premises. The Mesopotamians had no profession of historian as we understand it today, nor its methods of perspective. As they saw it, the problem was not critical assessment of sources, nor was the question, fundamentally, knowing how and in what causal sequences event considered unique had occurred. The primary task was to choose, according to a definite focus of interest, among the carefully collected data from the past, certain facts that, from that point of view, had acquired universal relevance and significance.

Even as it located the historical genre in the domain of literature, historical method consisted of separating the past from the present and making the past an object of study for the edification of that same present. The past having become a source of examples and precedents, history found a special purpose: it became an educational tool for elites and governments. Consequently, the lesson of history concealed a further one, of an ethical or political kind.

Elsewhere, Glassner describes a specifically religious component of all this literature as well, particularly the tie between earthly actions and those in the divine realm, in whichever direction of influence. The above quotation, coming at the end of a general description of the kinds of writings included in the book, describes Mesopotamian writing from the Old Babylonian period onward. That is, the “historical way of thinking” is something present long, long before Herodotus. And his statement that “the lesson of history concealed a further one, of an ethical or political kind” brings to mind an old definition of history from my junior college days: “History is the humanistic, interpretive study of past human society, the purpose of which is to gain insight into the present with the fervent hope of perhaps influencing a more favorable future” (Donald Gawronski, History: Meaning and Method, Third edition [Scott, Foresman and Company, 1967], p. 8). Glassner, Gawronski, the Mesopotamian scribes, Mr. Dewes (my history instructor back then) and I all agree upon the humanistic aspect of history. It is not just a bare account of what happened, but an account that is invested with meaning, particularly meaning for others to learn from. In such an understanding of history, there is no question of petty squabbling over objectivity’s impossibility, for such is irrelevant. It is necessary rather to illumine events in a multi-subjective light, bringing to the fore the aspects that would have been important in the past, are important in the present, and that can lead to a better future. And this is common to the historical writings in the Bible. They are couched in such a way as to be of value from multiple subjective viewpoints. [As I will cover in more detail in the future, the viewpoint that is most strongly represented and which indicates a majority authorship position for the Old Testament is that of the Prophets. The “Primary History”, “Hexateuch”, “Octateuch”, “Deuteronomistic History”—call it what you will—was clearly written by Prophets, as only their concerns, those of the only true and steadfast worshippers of God, are consistently presented, and only they are presented in a positive light. All the great characters are presented as Prophets, the priests are generally presented poorly (even Aaron was an idolatrous syncretist!), and the evaluation of the kings was of course varied, which one would not expect from a royalist scribe. The characteristics of the Deuteronomist are those of a Prophet: concern for the fulfillment of prophecy, the centrality of the cult, blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, etc. But this is all for another time.] In addition, there are the living viewpoints found amongst those of the contnuously living traditions that have found value in the writings of the Bible. Following the Gawronski definition above, it is precisely within these living traditions, those who find life in the texts (in contrast to those who seek and find only death), that we find the Bible “influencing a more favorable future.” The precisely realized ideal of a modern historian is unnecessary for writings arising “from a historical way of thinking” to have this effect. What is necessary is the human factor, thus the “humanistic” in Gawronski’s definition, which one learns in reading the rest of the book is intended to connote precisely a focus on personal edification and improvement. By not denying the living value of the text to either the ancient or modern reader, and all in between, we recognize as valuable multiple subjectivities, multiple viewpoints or snapshots of reactions to the texts. This is necessarily a part of being within a living tradition finding value in a particular set of texts. And we can see in these extended histories of interactions with texts various similarities. The Mesopotamian scribes selected various subsets of various corpora to be transmitted as exemplary or valuable, for example, the letters from the Sumerian royal archives dealing with Amorites. Similarly, we find such selectivity in practice in the formation of the Biblical canon, with the loss of the Book of Yashar, the Book of the Wars of the Lord, and the many accounts mentioned in Luke 1.1, among others. Works which were transmitted were obviously considered of particular value. And within this very act of transmission is a hope for extending the effectiveness and value of the texts into the future, in addition to assuring the derivation of benefit in the present. The text becomes an object of value not just intrinsically for the amount of work put into its copying, but for the effect it is intended to have. This “influencing a more favorable future” can thus itself be understood on several levels, for it is not only the ethical and political realms that Glassner mentions that benefit from history’s lesson, but the spiritual as well, in those traditions which value such. Thus a reading of the Bible for many is not simply a guide to solely ethical norms or to political solutions, but is a book charged with a spiritual power, one which effects the readers. The lessons of the past become alive in such a reading, even more vividly so when the reader places himself within the text, as is often the case in such spiritual reading. For example, in such a reading, the Psalmist becomes the reader, and vice versa, with the Psalmist’s words expressing the fears, joys, and exaltation of the reader. Again, the benefit is there only in finding living value in the text, in being open to the possibility for it to have an effect on life here and now and in the future, in not requiring it to be locked into the past as a dead vessel of dry leaves.

Perspective 1:

During my second campaign, bent on conquest, I marched rapidly against Babylon. I advanced swiftly, like a violent storm, and enveloped the city like a fog. I laid siege to it and took possession of it by means of mines and ladders. I delivered over to pillage its powerful […]. Great and small, I spared no one. I filled the squares of the city with their corpses. I led away to my country, still alive, Mušēzib-Marduk, the king of Babylon, with his entire family and his nobility. I distributed to my troops, who took possession of them, the riches of that city, the silver, the gold, the precious stones, the furniture and the property. My troops took away and smashed the gods who dwelt there, carrying off their wealth and their riches. After 418 years I took out of Babylon and returned to their sanctuaries Adad and Šala, the gods of Ekallāte, whom Marduk-nādin-aḫḫē, king of Babylon, had seized and carried off to Babylon in the time of Tukultī-Ninurta, king of Assyria. I destroyed, laid waste and burned the city and its houses, from the foundations to the tops of the walls. I tore from the ground and threw into the waters of the Araḫtu the interior and the exterior fortifications, the temples of the gods, the ziggurat of bricks and earth, as much as it contained. I dug canals in the middle of that city, flooded its terrain and caused even its foundations to disappear. I carried this out so that my destruction surpassed that left by the Flood. To make it impossible, in any future time, for the location of that city or the temples of its gods to be identifiable, I dissolved it in the waters and wiped it out, leaving the place like flooded ground.

Sennacherib of Assyria, on his destruction of Babylon after a fifteen month siege, having taking the city 1 Kislev 689. Adapted from Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles. Writings from the Ancient World 19. (SBL, 2004), p 23.

Perspective 2:

I will rise up against them, says the Lord of hosts, and will cut off from Babylon name and remnant, offspring and posterity, says the Lord. And I will make it a possession of the hedgehog, and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction, says the Lord of hosts.

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the images of her gods lie shattered on the ground.”

Come down and sit in the dust, virgin daughter Babylon!
Sit on the ground without a throne, daughter Chaldea!
For you shall no more be called tender and delicate.
Take the millstones and grind meal, remove your veil,
strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers.
Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your shame shall be seen.
I will take vengeance, and I will spare no one.

Isaiah 14.22-23; 21.9; 47.1-3

Something that doesn’t get enough attention in discussion of the destruction of Babylon as depicted in the Hebrew Prophets, especially Isaiah, is the very real destrcution wrought by Sennacherib in 689 and after. The city was completely depopulated and destroyed as well as the Assyrians could manage, which, considering that nearly everything was built of unfired mudbrick and the Assyrians were quite well-motivated, was probably quite effective.

A further aspect of this situation is that of exile. I do not mean those from the ersatz kingdom of Judah who were taken captive by the Chaldeans to Babylon in the sixth century, but those who were exiled by the Assyrians from the territories and former territories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the eighth and early seventh centuries.

The troubles of the last third of the eighth century between the small kindoms of the southern Levant are complicated, and we find these reflected in the Major and Minor Prophets. First, Damascus had a tempestuous relationship with Israel and even, to a lesser degree, Judah. Judah was more involved with Edom and Philistia. It may be that the Transjordanian territories were somehow allied with Damascus, if not annexed. This explains the close relationship between Pekah of Gilead/Samaria and Rezin of Damascus. Their agression against Judah led directly to the annexation of the dependencies of Damascus and Samaria’s territories along the coast at Dor, and all of Gilead and upper and lower Galilee by Tiglath-Pileser in 733, with exiles of numerous inhabitants. Samaria was left essentially a city-state, with a few villages. Damascus, completely isolated, with its fields and orchards destroyed, was taken by Tiglath-Pileser in 732, and Rezin was killed. Pekah in Samaria was generously assisted off the throne and into his tomb, being replaced by Hoshea, who was pro-Assyrian, at least for a year or so. In the meantime, Judah under Ahaz had lost territories to Philistia, headed by Gaza at this time. Likewise, Rezin had aided the Edomites in taking the port of Elath, cutting off Judah’s lucrative trade with Arabia by sea and by caravan. Judah apparently also lost some or all of the Negeb at this point to Edom, though not permanently (yet). Hoshea’s intrigues brought the wrath of Assyria down on Samaria, with its siege begun under Shalmaneser V, and then the city taken under Sargon II. The rump kingdom was annexed, and Samaria’s remaining population exiled. At this point, Judah recovered extraordinarily under Hezekiah, regaining the lands lost to Edom and Philistia, and even coming to dominate Philistia. Unfortunately, Hezekiah’s intrigues with the Chaldean Merodach-Baladan led to a revolt at the death of Sargon II. Judah then faced the full onslaught of the Assyrian army, itself becoming a rump state, and all Hezekiah’s gains lost. The Israelite and Judahite exiles were sent into various places, including Babylon, which at that time was under Assyrian rule. Sargon II himself was also King of Babylon: Isaiah 13.1-14.27 describes Sargon and his death in battle; his body was never recovered. We see in Isaiah various reflections of the traumatic effect that the exile of so many kinfolk had on the remaining, beleaguered Judahites after about 700, when most Judahites, if Sennacherib’s numbers can be trusted, were either dead or exiled. And would not a Prophet of God care about the exiled Israelites, too? It is tendentious to posit that every reference to Israel in Isaiah is merely a reference to Judah, to require every mention of Babylon to refer only to the later Judahite exile of the sixth century, to suggest that only Judahites deserve comfort, to require every mention of Chaldeans to be of the sixth century, and to posit that Israelites were of no concern to Judahite Prophets. All of these things are flatly untrue. It is understandable that some might think such things, for the inscriptions and tablets describing this earlier time of exiles and its complicated context were unknown to foundational mid- to late-nineteenth century theorizers on the Biblical texts, and we are often at the mercy such outdated views of history due to the inertia of scholarship. Such is abundantly clear.

With all the above, we can find the Prophet Isaiah’s oracles and Sennacherib’s text, in the context of what history is known, to be situated in a real world of complexity and drama. Israelites and Judahites ended up in Babylon, an Assyrian-ruled city, and were harshly treated by the Assyrians and Chaldeans. Southern, formerly Elamite cities that had been annexed by Assyria and settled with Israelites were taken back by Elam and the Assyrian settlers, including those Israelites, driven out. In Babylon itself, there was a revolution by the Chaldeans aided by the Elamites, and Sennacherib’s own son Ashur-nadin-shumi, whom he’d set as king over Babylonia, was overthrown and killed. Sennacherib’s fury against Babylon is more understandable in knowing this. Those Israelites there, in light of a coming storm, should certainly have fled. Likewise, the Elamites, after this initial assistance to the Chaldeans, betrayed their former loyalties to Babylon in not offering further assistance, undoubtedly hoping to avoid Assyrian vengeance. The surviving Chaldeans of Babylon get a ggod taste of exile and mistreatment themselves. And for a time, the whole world was stunned: Babylon was gone! Yet here the seed of revolution is planted, too, and watered by the hatred of Babylonians for the Assyrians, to grow and bear such evil fruit in the future.

Some helpful reading on the subject may be found in the following:
The Cambridge Ancient History Volume III Part 2: The Assyrian and Babylonian Empires and Other States of the Near East, from the Eighth to the Sixth Centuries B.C.
The Carta Bible Atlas
The Sacred Bridge

Several years ago I compiled an index (really more of a concordance) which lined up the texts common to William Hallo and K. Lawson Younger’s Context of Scripture, and James Pritchard’s classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. I had intended to do some more work on it, but this simply slipped my mind until the other day when Charles Halton commented on how useful he found this index (as well as my Anchor Bible Dictionary Index, which I’m working on upgrading as well to include a comprehensive bibliography of all the titles listed in the individual articles).

So, last night and this evening I spent, as St Jerome might say, a small lamp’s oil on the project, correcting some items in the index itself, and adding two lists of the texts which are found only in the COS volumes, or only in the ANET volume.

I’ve also redone the pdf file of the index. It is completely searchable, and is better formatted for printing than the web page itself is.

One interesting thing is the number of texts that are peculiar to each work. In ANET there are 221 titles that are not found in COS. In COS there are 525 titles that are not found in ANET. Some of those titles include multiple texts in either work. For instance, COS includes only Tablet XI of Gilgamesh, while ANET includes all the various texts known at time of publication. There are numerous historical writings found in ANET which are not found in COS. So, while the number of titles peculiar to COS is larger, it’s not precisely explicative of the quality of texts peculiar to either work. Both have their strengths. But I am still much more impressed by the wealth of material selected for ANET, even if the translations are older.

If anyone finds errors or has suggestions for improvements, please let me know. I hope the index continues to be found useful.