Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations – serie

The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations investigates the origins, manifestations, and meanings of a myth that plays a major role in the Hebrew Bible and a substantial role in the New Testament: the dragon-slaying myth.The dragon-slaying myth has a hoary ancestry, extending back long before its appearance in the Hebrew Bible, and a vast range, spanning as far as India and perhaps even Japan. This book is a chronicle of its trajectories and permutations. The target of this study is the biblical myth. This target, however, is itself a fluid tradition, responding to and reworking extrabiblical myths and reworking its own myths. In this study, Robert Miller examines the dragon and dragon-slaying myth throughout India, the proto-Indo-European cultures, and Iran, and among the Hittites as well as other ancient Near Eastern and Mesopotamian traditions, and then throughout the Bible, including Genesis, the Psalms, Daniel, and ultimately the New Testament and the book of Revelation. He shows how the myth pervades many cultures and many civilizations and that the dragon is always conquered, despite its many manifestations. In his conclusion, Miller points out the importance of the myth as a hermeneutic for understanding key parts of biblical literature.

While topics such as death, funerary cult, and the netherworld have received considerable scholarly attention in the context of the Ugaritic textual corpus, the related concept of life has been relatively neglected. Life and Mortality in Ugaritic takes as its premise that one cannot grasp the significance of mwt (“to die”) without first having wrestled with the concept of ḥyy (“to live”). In this book, Matthew McAffee takes a lexical approach to the study of life and death in the Ugaritic textual corpus. He identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics, and he concludes by synthesizing the results of this lexical study into a broader literary discussion that considers, among other things, the implications for our understanding of the first-millennium Katumuwa stele from Zincirli.McAffee’s study complements previous scholarly work in this area, which has tended to rely on conceptual and theoretical treatment of mortality, and advances the discussion by providing a more focused lexical analysis of the Ugaritic terms in question. It will be of interest to Semitic scholars and those who study Ugaritic in particular, in addition to students of the culture of the ancient Levant.

Akkadian, a Semitic language attested in writing from 2600 BCE until the first century CE, was the language of Mesopotamia for nearly three millennia. This volume examines the language from a comparative and historical linguistic perspective. Inspired by the work of renowned linguist John Huehnergard and featuring contributions from top scholars in the field, Bēl Lišāni showcases the latest research on Akkadian linguistics. Chapters focus on a wide range of topics, including lexicon, morphology, word order, syntax, verbal semantics, and subgrouping. Building upon Huehnergard’s pioneering studies focused on the identification of Proto-Akkadian features, the contributors explore linguistic innovations in the language from historical and comparative perspectives. In doing so, they open the way for further etymological, dialectical, and lexical research into Akkadian. An important update on and synthesis of the research in Akkadian linguistics, this volume will be welcomed by Semitists, Akkadian language specialists, and scholars and students interested in historical linguistics. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Øyvind Bjøru, Maksim Kalinin, N. J. C. Kouwenberg, Sergey Loesov, Jacob J. de Ridder, Ambjörn Sjörs, Michael P. Streck, and Juan-Pablo Vita.

The findings of Assyriology have been applied to biblical studies ever since the former emerged as a scholarly discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the scholarly flow from Assyriology to biblical studies continues, yet rarely are the fruits of biblical scholarship brought to bear on the study of ancient Assyria and Babylon. The present volume aims to reverse this unidirectional trend.Considering that the literature preserved in the Hebrew Bible is the product of a people who had significant contact with both Assyria and Babylonia, then surely the study of the Hebrew Bible has something to offer Assyriology. But what? The contributors approach this question from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including intellectual history, museology, and religious and political history. The authors also offer broad methodological considerations and more focused, text-based case studies. Written by leading scholars in the fields of Assyriology and Hebrew Bible, Jehu’s Tribute presents a fresh approach to the multifaceted relationship between Assyriology and biblical studies.In addition to the volume editors, the contributors include Céline Debourse, Jessie DeGrado, Eckart Frahm, Shalom E. Holtz, Gina Konstantopoulos, Alan Lenzi, Alice Mandell, Dustin Nash, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Seth Sanders, Anthony P. SooHoo, SJ, and Abraham Winitzer.