This work presents in detail a description of archaeological data from the Iron II temple complex at Tel Dan in northern Israel. Davis analyzes the archaeological remains from the ninth and eighth centuries, paying close attention to how the temple functioned as sacred space. Correlating the archaeological data with biblical depictions of worship, especially the “textual strata” of 1 Kings 18 and the book of Amos, Davis argues that the temple was the site of “official” and family religion and that worship at the temple became increasingly centralized. Tel Dan's role in helping reconstruct ancient Israelite religion, especially distinctive religious traditions of the northern kingdom, is also considered.

This book examines temple renovation as a rhetorical topic within royal literature of the ancient Near East. Unlike newly founded temples, which were celebrated for their novelty, temple renovations were oriented toward the past. Kings took the opportunity to rehearse a selective history of the temple, evoking certain past traditions and omitting others. In this way, temple renovations were a kind of historiography. Andrew R. Davis demonstrates a pattern in the rhetoric of temple renovation texts: that kings in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria and Persia used temple renovation to correct, or at least distance themselves from, some turmoil of recent history and to associate their reigns with an earlier and more illustrious past. Davis draws on the royal literature of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE for main evidence of this rhetoric. Furthermore, he argues for reading the story of Jeroboam I's placement of calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kgs 12:25-33) as an eighth-century BCE account of temple renovation with a similar rhetoric. Concluding with further examples in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Reconstructing the Temple demonstrates that the rhetoric of temple renovation was a distinct and longstanding topic in the ancient Near East.

In this commentary on the book of Amos, Daniel Carroll combines a detailed reading of the Hebrew text with attention to its historical background and current relevance. What makes this volume unique is its special attention to Amos’s literary features and what they reveal about the book’s theology and composition. Instead of reconstructing a hypothetical redactional history, this commentary offers a close reading of the canonical form against the backdrop of the eighth century BCE.

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.

Many readers find exegeting a passage from the Old Testament to be a mysterious process. How should one begin? What methods should one use? Written in a pragmatic style, Interpreting Israel's Scriptures guides the reader by offering concrete methods for exegesis that are illustrated by numerous examples and accompanied by well-chosen references to secondary sources. This English translation of the 2012 original French version of Richelle's book has been expanded and revised and has been reorganized to have a tripartite structure: the making of the text, the various facets of the text, and "the reader in front of the text." The book is designed for use in exegesis courses or for personal study, and it is designed to be used both by students who know Hebrew and by those who do not. The book explores a variety of themes relevant for exegesis, including poetry literary genre, literary context, geographical context, historical context, structure, narrative analysis, intertextuality, and reception history. For those who know Hebrew, the book also includes chapters on translation, textual criticism, and compositional criticism. Finally, this English edition has two new chapters: one on feminist and gender studies, and one on postcolonial criticism.

This book honors the memory of Brian Hesse, a scholar of Near Eastern archaeology, a writer of alliterative and punned publication titles, and an accomplished amateur photographer. Hesse specialized in zooarchaeology, but he influenced a wider range of excavators and ancient historians with his broad interpretive reach. He spent much of his career analyzing faunal materials from different countries in the Middle East-including Iran, Yemen, and Israel, and his publications covered themes particular to animal bone studies, such as domestication, ancient market economics, as well as broader themes such as determining ethnicity in archaeology. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth of his interests. Most chapters share an Old World geographic setting, focusing either on Europe or the Middle East. The topics are diverse, with the majority discussing animal bones, as was Hesse's specialization, but some take a nonfaunal perspective related to the problems with which Hesse grappled. The volume is also broad in temporal scope, ranging from Neolithic Iran to early Medieval England, and it addresses theoretical matters as well as methodological innovations including taphonomy and the history of computers in zooarchaeology. Several of the essays are direct revisits to, inspirations from, or extensions of Hesse's own research. All the contributions reflect his intense interest in social questions about antiquity; the theme of social archaeology informed much of Brian Hesse's thinking, and it is why his work made such an impact on those working outside his own disciplinary research.

A synthetic reconstruction of women’s religious engagement and experiences in preexilic Israel “This monumental book examines a wealth of data from the Bible, archaeology, and ancient Near Eastern texts and iconography to provide a clear, comprehensive, and compelling analysis of women’s religious lives in preexilic times.”—Carol Meyers, Duke University Throughout the biblical narrative, ancient Israelite religious life is dominated by male actors. When women appear, they are often seen only on the periphery: as tangential, accidental, or passive participants. However, despite their absence from the written record, they were often deeply involved in religious practice and ritual observance. In this new volume, Susan Ackerman presents a comprehensive account of ancient Israelite women’s religious lives and experiences. She examines the various sites of their practice, including household shrines, regional sanctuaries, and national temples; the calendar of religious rituals that women observed on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis; and their special roles in religious settings. Drawing on texts, archaeology, and material culture, and documenting the distinctions between Israelite women’s experiences and those of their male counterparts, Ackerman reconstructs an essential picture of women’s lived religion in ancient Israelite culture.

Bethsaida, a fishing town on the north end of the Sea of Galilee, plays a prominent role in the Gospels, was home for several of Jesus’ disciples, and was the location of the feeding of the 5,000 and many of Jesus’ other healings. However, the Golden Age of Biblical Archaeology all but ignored this important site until 1987 when a young Israeli archaeologist, Rami Arav, undertook a probe revealing early Roman pottery, coins, and the remains of domestic buildings. This led to a thirty-two-year-long research project at Bethsaida, adding to our knowledge of the Historical Jesus and his disciples, and acting as a window into the world of common first-century men and women going about their daily lives in the realm of the family of the Emperor Augustus and the Herodians. The big surprise was that layers below the surface (and a thousand years earlier), there also appeared a major iron-age capital city of the Geshurites with a magnificent palace, impregnable city walls, a massive four-chamber gate system, and many religious symbols. This volume honors the work of Arav, who tirelessly dedicated himself to this dig, establishing the Bethsaida Excavations Project and bringing together a consortium of Universities and Colleges and a diverse team of international scholars who have joined in collaborative research to uncover the story of Bethsaida. In this volume, a representative selection of Bethsaida scholars shares their research to demonstrate the success of Arav’s venture spanning over three decades.

This volume presents the work of the international, interdisciplinary research project Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions (CSTT), whose members focused on cultural, ideological, and material changes in the period when the sacred traditions of the Hebrew Bible were created, transmitted, and transformed. Specialists in the textual study of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, archaeology, Assyriology, and history, working across their fields of expertise, trace how changes occurred in biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts and traditions. Contributors Tero Alstola, Anneli Aejmelaeus , Rick Bonnie, Francis Borchardt, George J. Brooke, Cynthia Edenburg, Sebastian Fink, Izaak J. deHulster , Patrik Jansson, Jutta Jokiranta, Tuukka Kauhanen, Gina Konstantopoulos, Lauri Laine, Michael C. Legaspi, Christoph Levin, Ville Mäkipelto, Reinhard Müller, Martti Nissinen, Jessi Orpana, Juha Pakkala, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Christian Seppänen, Jason M. Silverman, Saana Svärd, Timo Tekoniemi, Hanna Tervanotko, Joanna Töyräänvuori, and Miika Tucker demonstrate that rigorous yet respectful debate results in a nuanced and complex understanding of how ancient texts developed.

"In eleven historical, literary, and theological essays, Gary N. Knoppers elucidates the shifting character of Judean-Samarian relations in Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman times. Engaging history, law, and narrative, these essays are vital to understanding early Jewish and Samaritan religion and scriptural interpretation."--Back cover.