Papers

At St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, July 21st-23rd.

A Joint Meeting with the Oudtestamentisch Werkgezelschap, and in coordination with the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting, under the joint presidency of Professors Robert Gordon and Arie van der Kooij

Theme: The Hebrew Bible against its Ancient Near Eastern Background

Professor Kenneth Kitchen (Liverpool), ‘The Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of the Neo-Hittite States (1200-700 BC): A Fresh Source of Background to the Hebrew Bible’

Dr Jan Wagenaar (Utrecht), ‘The Ancient Israelite Festival Calendar in its Ancient Near Eastern Context’

Dr Jan-Wim Wesselius (Kampen), ‘Language Play in the Old Testament and in Ancient North-West Semitic Inscriptions’

Dr Nathan MacDonald (St Andrews), ‘Whose Monotheism? Whose Rationality?’

Dr Marjo Korpel (Utrecht), ‘Disillusion among Jews in the Persian Empire’

Ms Ora Lipschitz (Jerusalem), ‘Camels, Philistines and Writing’

Professor Peter Machinist (Harvard), ‘The Old Testament in Comparative Perspective: The Case of Julius Wellhausen and Assyriology’ (in the Concert Hall)

Dr Meindert Dijkstra (Utrecht), ‘Annals and Chronicles’

Dr Philip Johnston (Oxford), ‘Death in Israel and Egypt: A Theological Reflection’

Dr Pierre Van Hecke (Brabant), ‘Pastoral Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible and its Ancient Near Eastern Context’

Abstracts

Professor Kenneth Kitchen (Liverpool): ‘The Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of the Neo-Hittite States (c. 1200-700 BC): A Fresh Source of Background to the Hebrew Bible’

Indigenous written sources from the North Levant in the 1st millennium BC are very limited in scope and quantity as compared with Mesopotamia and Egypt. Most familiar is the modest collection of West-Semitic texts (mainly Old Aramaic and Phoenician). A larger group of inscriptions from Syria and south-east Anatolia is the so-called ‘Hittite Hieroglyphic’ inscriptions (strictly, hieroglyphic Luvian) left to us by the kings and ruling elites of the Neo-Hittite states such as Carchemish, Malatya, Gurgum, Hamath, Que, and Tabal (among others), close neighbours of Aram and Phoenicia. Full decipherment of these texts followed from the discovery in 1946 of the bilingual inscriptions (‘Hittite Hieroglyphic’ and Phoenician) at Karatepe, and intensively worked out in recent decades, culminating (to date) in the recent publication of a full and accurate Corpus of these texts by J.D. Hawkins (plus H. Cambel for Karatepe), with translations and commentary. The language is Indo-European, deriving from the cuneiform Luvian of the Hittite Empire of the later 2nd millennium, and precursor to the Lycian of classical times. Their potential input for Old Testament studies is varied. Politically, there was a brief age of ‘mini-empires’ within c. 1190-950 BC, headed by Carchemish and Tabal, with which those of Aram-Zobah/Damascus and the Hebrew United Monarchy have affinities. We can now ‘personalize’ the ‘kings of the Hittites’ of 2 Kings 7:6. In the social/religious sphere, these texts illustrate the roles of royalty in the areas of cult and rituals, and of deity in royal activities in war and peace; with one ‘Hittite Hieroglyphic’ text, we may end (as was said of Jezebel) by ‘going to the dogs’!

Dr Jan Wagenaar (Utrecht): ‘The Priestly Festival Calendar in its Ancient Near Eastern Context’

The festival calendar recorded in Leviticus 23 and Numbers 28­29 seems to combine the features of two mutually exclusive festival calendars. On the one hand they share the tripartite lay-out of the pre-exilic festival calendar preserved in Exodus 23:14-19; 34:18-26; Deuteronomy 16:1-17, while on the other they agree with the biannual scheme adopted in Ezekiel 45:18-25 and the priestly festival calendar (Exodus 12:1-13; Leviticus 23:5-8, 23-27, 33-37). The data suggest that the celebration of three harvest festivals a year in agreement with the course of the agricultural year may in the late exilic or early post-exilic period have been abandoned in favour of the custom of observing two major festivals a year after the example of the vernal and autumnal new year festivals of the Babylonian festival calendar. The present text of the festival calendar recorded in Leviticus 23 and Numbers 28­29 may be explained as a late post-exilic scribal compromise between the pre-priestly and priestly festival calendars.

Dr Jan-Wim Wesselius (Kampen): ‘Language Play in the Old Testament and in Ancient North-West Semitic Inscriptions’

It is well known that we find an entire array of instruments of what we could call language play in the Old Testament: ambiguity, double entendre, and intra-textual repetition being only a few of them. Numerous scholars have pointed out that there are parallels to this in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hittite and Ugaritic texts. It has, however, been noticed only to a limited degree that certain North-West Semitic (especially Phoenician and Aramaic) inscriptions also contain some of these elements. This remarkable agreement serves to further the interpretation of some of these inscriptions, of which the Phoenician Kilamuwa inscription and the Old Aramaic Tel Dan inscription were discussed in some detail in this paper, and of the literary traditions of the Old Testament in their ancient North-West Semitic context.

Dr Nathan MacDonald (St Andrews): ‘Whose Monotheism? What Rationality?’

The axis ‘monotheism’­‘polytheism’ is frequently used to locate religious expressions from ancient Israel and her Near Eastern neighbours. Though pervasive in biblical scholarship, the use of this axis is not self-evident and depends on a particular construal of the nature of God, the world and religious belief. It is well known that ‘polytheism’ does not belong to any religious self-description. But what of ‘monotheism’? Whose monotheism is it, and what kind of rationality does it presuppose? And what difference might it make to our understanding of Old Testament articulations of Yahweh’s oneness?

Dr Marjo Korpel (Utrecht): ‘Disillusion among Jews in the Persian Empire’

For many Jewish exiles in the Neo-Babylonian empire, disillusion with their own religion was so deep that neither the high hopes of Second Isaiah nor the Edict of Cyrus allowing them to return to their homeland and start rebuilding the temple was sufficient incitement to repatriate. Often they allowed themselves to be integrated into the culture of the country they lived in. Throughout the Persian empire the mixture of religions that resulted from the liberal religious policy of the new masters resulted in a slackening observance of traditional religious duties. Some Jews adopted religious practices from other peoples they lived in contact with, intermarriage with non-Israelites became quite normal, and some of them abandoned religion altogether, trying to organise their lives autonomously.

Ms Ora Lipschitz (Jerusalem): ‘Camels, Philistines and Writing’

It was noted that the Bactrian and the Dromedary were domesticated in different regions at different times. The issue as far as the Old Testament is concerned is the domestication of the Dromedary which, William Albright rightly claimed, could not be prior to the 12th century BCE. Camels are absent from early records, e.g. at Mari and Ugarit, and there is not even a word for ‘camel’ in Egypt. Various representations of camels from earlier periods were discussed. 25 of the 54 references to camels in the Old Testament occur in Genesis, most of them in ch. 24 (18 times). Some references locate camels in their correct Arabian cultural context (Ishmaelites/Midianites); in other cases camels have been added routinely to already existing lists of animals. Genesis 24 is to be regarded as a late exemplum (at least post-Deuteronomic) in which the proper treatment of camels is a key element. It was noted that the Philistines never appear in the many lists of the pre-Israelite inhabitants of the land. These lists consist of six peoples in two fixed groups, each containing three elements (only the later Deuteronomist adding the Girgashites). Since this recurrent 3 + 3 form probably indicates fixed oral tradition, the absence of the Philistines from these lists may reflect awareness of their late arrival in the region. Finally, although the Pentateuch is free in its association of writing with Moses, it does not associate this skill with the patriarchs. The explanation may be that there was a clear conception of what could be attributed to whom, and writing was not thought appropriate for the patriarchs. The discussion concluded with reflections on the occasional value of the ‘argument from silence’ as potential evidence of accurate historical reminiscence, and sometimes as good as (other) facts and artefacts which tend to be regarded by some as evidentially more reliable.

Professor Peter Machinist (Harvard): ‘The Old Testament in Comparative Perspective: The Case of Julius Wellhausen and Assyriology’

As great a biblical scholar as Julius Wellhausen was, it has often been stated that he had a major weakness, namely his failure to apply to the understanding of the Old Testament the burgeoning evidence of the broader ancient Near Eastern world that was fast becoming available during his lifetime. Indeed, the charge has been made that he cared little or nothing for this evidence and remained largely ignorant of it, because for him the only real analogy to biblical Israel was the culture of the pre-Islamic Arabs. The paper revisited this view of Wellhausen by focusing on his relationship to one of the then developing ancient Near Eastern fields, Assyriology. His relationship, it was argued, was in fact a complex one, and if he failed to utlilize Assyriology fully in his Old Testament work, it was not out of ignorance or disdain. The explanation appears to lie, rather, in a combination of Wellhausen’s personal circumstances and his sense of what the priorities should be for a field like Old Testament. Wellhausen’s views here take us straight into the larger arena of philology and how it was conceived in the nineteenth century, even as they remain a provocative challenge to contemporary studies of the Old Testament and the larger ancient Near East.

Dr Meindert Dijkstra (Utrecht): ‘Annals and Chronicles in the Bible and the Ancient Near East’

In his seminal studies on the historical traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia, Hans Güterbock formulated the basic distinction between ‘historical documents’ in which royalty prescribed how to be remembered by posterity (in general: annals) and literature (usually called: chronicles) in which posterity selected and wrote what it wanted to be remembered from the past. The latter form was the beginning of real ancient Near Eastern historiography. This distinction has often been neglected in comparative studies. From this perspective the paper discussed some of the problems of ancient Israelite historiography in the context of ancient Near Eastern historiography.

Dr Philip Johnston (Oxford): ‘Death in Egypt and Israel: A Theological Reflection’

The Egyptians invested more in preparation for death than any other human group. Their positive view of the afterlife and its gradual extension from pharaohs to officials to commoners is well documented in primary sources and secondary literature. But the ideal of respect for the dead was widely flouted in practice, with early abandonment of funerary offerings, later reuse of mortuary material, and endemic robbery of tomb contents. Negative views always co-existed, in the early period regarding the non-elite, and from the New Kingdom onwards in various carpe diem expressions. By contrast, Israel invested relatively little in death and had a largely negative attitude towards it. The underworld was an unwelcome fate, but is only an infrequent theme in the canonical text. Contact with and veneration of the dead occurred and were condemned, but they were not major concerns of the biblical writers. Positive views only developed later, mainly from within Yahwism and without noticeable assimilation of Egyptian concepts. So in contrast to Egypt, Israel’s approach to death was cheaper, more egalitarian, less socially conservative and less delusionary. Where Egyptians sought divinisation in death, Israelites were to seek God in life.

Dr Pierre Van Hecke (Tilburg): ‘Pastoral Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible and in its Ancient Near Eastern Context’

The metaphor of God as shepherd has received quite some attention in scholarly literature (e.g. De Robert 1968, Willmes 1984, Hunziker 2001). All these treatments have concentrated, however, on the biblical texts in which the shepherd image is affirmed and elaborated, leaving out of consideration the texts in which the metaphor is either questioned, rejected or reversed (e.g. Jeremiah 49:19-20; 50:44-45; Hosea 4:16; 13:4-9; Amos 3:12; Lamentations 3:1-6). This paper argued that the inclusion of the latter texts is necessary for a correct understanding of the use and development of pastoral metaphors in the Hebrew Bible. It was shown that biblical authors treated their religious images and traditions in a dynamic and sometimes iconoclastic way. Like many other religious metaphors, the metaphor of God as shepherd was not limited to the Hebrew Bible, however; its use in different ancient Near Eastern cultures is well attested and has received extensive scholarly discussion (Müller 1961, Seibert 1969, De Moor 1982, Bosetti 1984). The paper addressed the question to what extent the dynamic and, at times, iconoclastic way in which the biblical authors treated their metaphors has parallels in the literature of these surrounding cultures. Finally, the question of a possible (negative or positive) influence of the ancient Near Eastern pastoral images on the biblical metaphor was dealt with.

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