Biblical and Judaic Studies from the University of California, San Diego – serie

The first in a series of volumes coming out of programs at the Department of Biblical and Judaic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, this book contains a number of essays originally presented at the Fourth Conversation in Biblical Studies held at UCSD, as well as pieces by each of the editors. Future volumes in the series will include both monographs and, like this one, collected essays.

From the Preface: “The alphabetic acrostic is one of the most easily identifiable poetic forms in the Hebrew Bible. Examples can be found in prophetic discourse (Nahum), the lament over the destruction of Jerusalem (Lamentations), liturgical song (Psalms), and wisdom literature (Proverbs). Yet its very obviousness has tended to deflect deeper exploration of its structure and purpose. Since Mowinckel denigrated the acrostics in the Psalms as a “disintegration of style,’ too often scholars have simply noted and then ignored the form.“There is no a priori reason that alphabetic acrostics should be less creative, expressive, or complex than other psalms. Thus the essays collected here investigate the acrostic format as a legitimate option for Israelite poets rather than as the refuge of uninspired epigones....The fruit of over twenty years’ close reading of these psalms, the following essays reveal the poets’ consummate mastery of the demanding acrostic form and deserve incorporation in future discussions of biblical poetic art.

In this comprehensive study of a common deity found in the ancient Near East as well as many other cultures, Green brings together evidence from the worlds of myth, iconography, and literature in an attempt to arrive at a new synthesis regarding the place of the Storm-god. He finds that the Storm-god was the force primarily responsible for three major areas of human concern: (1) religious power because he was the ever-dominant environmental force upon which peoples depended for their very lives; (2) centralized political power; and (3) continuously evolving sociocultural processes, which typically were projected through the Storm-god’s attendants. Green traces these motifs through the Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Syrian, and Levantine regions; with regard to the latter, he argues that Yahweh of the Bible can be identified as a storm-god, though certain unique characteristics came to be associated with him: he was the Creator of all that is created and the self-existing god who needs no other.