An essential resource exploring orality and literacy in the pre-Hellenistic southern Levant and the Hebrew Bible Situated historically between the invention of the alphabet, on the one hand, and the creation of ancient Israel's sacred writings, on the other, is the emergence of literary production in the ancient Levant. In this timely collection of essays by an international cadre of scholars, the dialectic between the oral and the written, the intersection of orality with literacy, and the advent of literary composition are each explored as a prelude to the emergence of biblical writing in ancient Israel. Contributors also examine a range of relevant topics including scripturalization, the compositional dimensions of orality and textuality as they engage biblical poetry, prophecy, and narrative along with their antecedents, and the ultimate autonomy of the written in early Israel. The contributors are James M. Bos, David M. Carr, André Lemaire, Robert D. Miller II, Nadav Na'aman, Raymond F. Person Jr., Frank H. Polak, Christopher A. Rollston, Seth L. Sanders, Joachim Schaper, Brian B. Schmidt, William M. Schniedewind, Elsie Stern, and Jessica Whisenant. Features Addresses questions of literacy and scribal activity in the Levant and Negev Articles examine memory, oral tradition, and text criticism Discussion of the processes of scripturalization

For too long, critical biblical studies have applied modern textual assumptions to ancient oral cultures. Exegeting Orality challenges many of these modern approaches, distilling decades of studies in oral traditions to redirect pastors and scholars toward a more accurate narrative of biblical origins, identity, and meaning. Many works in the area of orality, textuality, performance criticism, and media studies focus on critical issues. Exegeting Orality guides pastors and scholars through a brief introduction to these fields, emphasizing biblical inspiration, interpretation, and proclamation. This work honors the rich oral traditional foundations of the inspired canon, urging a transformative shift in how we interpret the Bible. The stories we believe define us. The Bible is not just a text to be studied but a record of voices from the past who performed our definitive stories. The Bible is a tradition to be reproclaimed and reenacted in the community of faith. Let us not recast these ancient voices into modern epistemological molds without letting them speak from within their own cultural realities. Their voices still call out to us through the abiding Holy Spirit who connects us all to the story of Jesus. May we live out that ancient story today together.

This book tells the fascinating, millennia-long story of peoples around the world who have claimed an Israelite identity and history.

This volume presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of the archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, the 47 chapters in The Ancient Israelite World provide foundational, accessible, and detailed studies in their respective topics. The volume considers the history of interpretation of ancient Israel, studies on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society and history, and avenues for present and future approaches to the ancient Israelite world. Accompanied by over 150 maps and figures, it allows the reader to gain an understanding of key issues that archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars have faced and are currently facing as they attempt to better understand ancient Israelite society. The Ancient Israelite World is an essential reference work for students and scholars of ancient Israel and its history, culture, and society, whether they are historians, archaeologists or biblical scholars.

Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? Daniel D. Pioske attempts to answer this question by studying the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. This book is comprised of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175-830 BCE) with a wide range of archaeological and historical evidence from the era in which these stories are set. Pioske examines the relationship between the past disclosed through these historical traces and the past represented within the biblical narrative. He discovers that the knowledge available to the biblical scribes about this period derived predominantly from memory and word of mouth, rather than from a corpus of older narrative documents. For those Hebrew scribes who first set down these stories in prose writing, the means for knowing a past and the significance attached to it were, in short, wed foremost to the faculty of remembrance. Memory in a Time of Prose reveals how the past was preserved, transformed, or forgotten in the ancient world of oral, living speech that informed biblical storytelling.

The Babylonian attack on Jerusalem in 587 BCE forced upon the Israelite survivors the realization that Yahweh, one of the gods they had venerated, was an overwhelming presence in their affairs. The attack on their city had been devastating, overturning virtually the only world they knew. Such a disaster had been prophesied by several prophets of Yahweh who had warned them against worshipping other gods than Yahweh and ignoring his commandments. These prophets reminded them that in the ancient past Yahweh had established a special relationship with their people, binding them to himself through a covenant in which Yahweh promised to protect and lead their people while they were to honor him as their only god and keep his commandments. The community of survivors living as exiles in Babylon, and their heirs who would return to Judah after 539 BCE, believed that Yahweh had caused the destruction of their society because of the refusal of their people to abide by the terms of the ancient covenant. Indeed, they saw it as an act of Yahweh’s love, an appeal for them to honor him as their only god so that he could show them his favor. Anthropologist Robert Canfield examines the process by which this transformation in religious understanding took place, describing it as an example of how human beings imaginatively imbue their affairs with moral significance.

The uncertain position of the Persian Period in Jewish memory is nothing new -- in fact, it can be traced back to nearly two thousand years. Yet it can lead contemporary scholars to exercise too much caution when dating, analyzing, and discussing ancient scribal texts. Utilizing recent tools to examine scribal methods, Mark Leuchter takes a definitive approach. An Empire Far and Wide focuses on a careful selection of literary test cases to better understand how Jewish scribes in Persian Yehud interacted with a feature of Persian imperialism that has not received adequate attention: the dynastic mythology of the Achaemenid rulers and the way it shaped emerging Jewish identity in the Persian period.

The Old Testament was written for us, but not to us. Inviting us to leave our modern Christian preconceptions behind, John Walton contends that we will only grasp the Old Testament’s theology when we are immersed in its Ancient Near Eastern context, being guided by what the ancient authors intended as they wrote within their cognitive environment.

The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography provides an overview of Jewish history from the biblical to the contemporary period, while simultaneously placing Jewish history into conversation with the most central historiographical methods and issues and some of the core source materials used by scholars within the field. The field of Jewish history is profitably interdisciplinary. Drawing from the historical methods and themes employed in the study of various periods and geographical regions as well as from academic fields outside of history, it utilizes a broad range of source materials produced by Jews and non-Jews. It grapples with many issues that were core to Jewish life, culture, community, and identity in the past, while reflecting and addressing contemporary concerns and perspectives. Divided into four parts, this volume examines how Jewish history has engaged with and developed more general historiographical methods and considerations. Part I provides a general overview of Jewish history, while Parts II and III respectively address the rich sources and methodologies used to study Jewish history. Concluding in Part IV with a timeline, glossary, and index to help frame and connect the history, sources, and methodologies presented throughout, The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography is the perfect volume for anyone interested in Jewish history.

Many studies of the prophetic books assume that a text's addressee and audience are one and the same. Sometimes this is the case, but some prophetic texts feature multiple addressees who cannot be collapsed into a single setting. In this book Andrew R. Davis examines examples of multiple addressees within the book of Amos and argues that they force us to expand our understanding of prophetic audiences. Drawing insight from studies of poetic address in other disciplines, Davis distinguishes between the addressee within the text and the actual audience outside the text. He combines in-depth poetic analysis with historical inquiry and shows the ways that the prophetic discourse of the book of Amos is triangulated among multiple audiences.