Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley – författare

This book examines popular and scholarly representations of ancient Assyria through both ancient and modern sources. The ancient sources include Babylonian, Biblical and Egyptian, while the modern sources include the well-publicized excavations of Nineveh in the 19th century, which captured the popular imagination of Christian Europe.In order to interrogate these representations, the reader is taken back to examine the scholarly and cultural allegiances of the ancient Greek and native Egyptian sources, then to Assyrian self-representation and finally to an interrogation of the cultural and scholarly allegiances of contemporary historians. Straddling Biblical studies, religious studies, classics and ancient Near Eastern studies, this book examines how popular opinion can be informed by scholarly orthodoxy, and simultaneously, how scholarly consensus often rests on cultural orthodoxy.

Recent discussion of biblical law sees it either as a response to socio-economic factors or as an intellectual tradition. In either case it is viewed as the product of elites that form an international community drawing on a common culture. This book takes that fundamental discussion a step further by proposing that 'law' is an inappropriate term for the biblical codes, and that they represent, rather, the 'moral advice' of scribes working independently of the legal framework and appealing to Yahweh as authority. Only by prolonged exegesis and through the transformation of Judaean religion does this 'advice' take the form of divine law binding on Jews.