Results by title

A new reading strategy for the Thanksgiving Hymns

Hasselbalch asserts that current theories about the social background of Thanksgiving Hymns are unable to explain its heterogeneous character. Instead the author suggests a reading strategy that leaves presumptions about the underlying social contexts aside to instead consider the collection’s hybridity as a clue to understanding the collection as a whole.

Features:

• Systemic Functional Linguistics applied to four Hodayot
• Analysis that highlights the role of a mediator in the agency of God
• An approach that highlights the unity of the collection

All the chronicle literature of ancient Mesopotamia from the early second millennium to Seleucid times is collected in this English translation of Glassner’s Chroniques Mésopotamiennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993). In addition to revising and supplementing the French edition, this volume provides transcriptions of the cuneiform and English translations of every example of Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian chronographic literature as well as seminal essays on the genre and on Mesopotamian historiography in general.

A ground-breaking collection exploring the rich array of emotions in biblical literature

An international team of Hebrew Bible and New Testament scholars offers incisive case studies of passions displayed by divine and human figures in the biblical texts ranging from joy, happiness, and trust to grief, hate, and disgust. Essays address how biblical characters' feelings affect their relationship with God, one another, and the world and how these feelings mix together, for good or ill, for flourishing or vexation. Deeply engaged with both ancient and modern contexts, including the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of emotion in the humanities and sciences, these essays break down the artificial divide between reason and passion, cognition and emotion, thought and feeling in biblical study.

Features

• Case studies drawn from multiple genres across the Bible: narrative, prophets, poetry, wisdom, Gospels, and letters
• Helpful select bibliographies of interdisciplinary resources at the end of each essay
• Critical balance between theory and practice and between method and close textual analysis
• Distinctive ancient Hebrew and Greek uses of emotional terms and concepts compared with each other and with evolving understandings in Western culture

Experience a lifetime of adventure

This autobiography of prominent American archaeologist William G. Dever is unabashedly his story, in which he offers candid, often brutally honest, reflections on his life and sixty-five-year career. Dever places himself in the midst of a remarkable generation of giants in archaeology in Israel during a period when the fields of biblical and Israeli archaeology were evolving. With technical expertise developed over a lifetime of working alongside four generations of Israeli and foreign excavators, he recalls their exploits and shares numerous personal stories that few others would know. His memoir concludes with a postscript on the likely future of biblical archaeology and an annotated bibliography for serious readers who wish to explore some of the scholarly literature to flesh out Dever’s narrative.