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This book set out to demonstrate how sexuality became central to Jewish and Christian notions of holiness and holy community in the postbiblical period. In particular, this study was motivated to determine why sexuality, especially sexual restraint, became a primary demarcation of sacred community boundaries among Jews and Christians in fourth-century Persian-Mesopotamia. To accomplish this task, the book focused on the exegetical underpinnings that link holiness to sexuality in these communities’ emerging hermeneutics of holiness and sexuality. In the fourth-century Mesopotamian context, ascetic practitioners found biblical textual support as compelling as any other outside cultural norm. Sexual asceticism thus finds its rightful place in the formative periods of both religious traditions through the lens of comparative biblical exegesis, social constructs, and the study of the theological developments of the Hebrew biblical notions of holiness.

Instructions arose in Egypt, and perhaps independently in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, as a type of poetic literature. They take the form of a testamentary speech, in which an individual passes on his knowledge and experience, usually to his son, at the point when he must hand over to the next generation. Beyond that convention, instructions have no fixed form or content. Classic texts in the genre were perceived as culturally significant, and were read in schools, which may have influenced certain developments in the genre, but which does not suggest that they were ever composed expressly as pedagogical textbooks.

This chapter examines British rule in Mesopotamia/Iraq during the years 1918-1958. There were two dominant features of the British position in Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq) that were largely to influence its history until, and in fact after, the end of the mandate in 1932. First, as in the other mandates, Britain’s position there was ambiguous as the very concept of a mandate was new and undefined. The second fundamental feature of post-1918 Iraq was that it had no historical, religious, or ethnic homogeneity. In this chapter, the British experience in Iraq will be examined under four heads: first, the indigenous social structure; second, the early British response to 1932; third, Iraqi politics and society from 1920 to 1941; and finally, the revival, decline, and fall of British influence, 1941 to 1958.

As background to studying the biblical texts within their ancient contexts, this chapter surveys several extra-biblical texts of the ancient Near East. Traditions from Mesopotamian, Egypt, and Canaan are briefly discussed. The divine characters of Marduk, Tiamat, Enlil, and Ea are described in the Mesopotamian epics Enūma elish and Atrahasīs. Drawing from Ugaritic archival material, the Baal epic, though not a creation account proper, is also recounted. Both the Mesopotamian and Canaanite narratives feature the motif of divine combat with watery chaos (Chaoskampf). In contrast, the Egyptian accounts offer a more “evolutionary” perspective, particularly the cosmogony of Heliopolis, which features the deity Atum differentiating himself to form the physical world. In addition, the so-called Memphite theology features the deity Ptah bringing forth creation by word, similar to the God of Genesis 1.

This chapter contains the argument that drives the rest of the book. The rejection of hierarchy is rooted in a major theological shift. Social and political hierarchy in the ancient Near East received metaphysical legitimation, as the heavenly order was construed as paralleling the terrestrial one. The common person in this scheme emerges as a servant, the lowest rung in the hierarchy, as evidenced in Mesopotamian creation epics Atrahasis, and echoed in Egypt and Ugarit well. The theology of covenant in the Pentateuch rejects this. In light of parallels with Late Bronze Age suzerainty treaties, the covenant narratives implicitly suggest that the whole of Israel—not its king, not his retinue, not the priests—bears the status of a vassal king entered into treaty with a sovereign king, God. While much of this material has been extant in the scholarship for some fifty years, the material is examined here in new light, and from two directions. The first borrows observations from the field of anthropology concerning the role and display of honor between superiors and subordinates that offers new insight into the suzerain‐vassal paradigm for the relationship between God and Israel. The second is a revisiting of the Hittite treaties whose form and language are paralleled in the covenantal material in the Pentateuch. This study concludes that not only does Israel as a collective whole attain the status of a subordinate king, but that, indeed, hierarchy is eschewed as every man in Israel becomes endowed with this status as well. Parallels are drawn between the Israel as vassal paradigm, and Israel as spouse paradigm.

Together with material archaeology and the literary tradition of the Hebrew Bible, epigraphy is one of the main sources for the history of ancient Israel in the ninth century BCE. Although limited in number, West Semitic inscriptions throw some light on the history of this period. This chapter examines ninth-century West Semitic inscriptions and the historical information they contain regarding the history of ninth-century Israel. It starts with the Hebrew inscriptions, followed by inscriptions in the neighbouring southern Levant countries as well as Aramaic inscriptions from Upper Mesopotamia. The chapter deals first with inscriptions in ‘Canaanite’ dialects before analysing inscriptions written in Aramaic dialects. The Mesha and Tel Dan steles are the main West Semitic inscriptions that help us understand the history of Israel and Judah during the ninth century BCE.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a ten-year project to edit and analyse ancient Sumerian literature, came to an end on 31 August 2006. Like Egyptian, Sumerian is one of the world's oldest written literatures, with a classical corpus comprising some 500 compositions attested in many thousands of manuscripts from the early second millennium bc. This chapter reflects on how ETCSL has changed the practice of literary Sumerology, what it has not been able to achieve, and what could and should still be done. In particular, it argues that the collaborative working that projects like ETCSL foster has brought Sumerological practice much closer to ancient ideals of literacy — ideals that have themselves come to light through quantitative analysis of the ETCSL online corpus.

This chapter shows that the implications of the economic theory in the previous chapter are consistent with what happened to the Jewish people during the five centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple. An impressive body of evidence from both the Talmud and archaeological discoveries indicates that during the Talmudic period, Jews in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia began obeying the religious obligation to educate their sons. Indeed, a larger and larger proportion of Jewish farmers sent their sons to the primary schools located in or near synagogues. As for conversions, many Jewish farmers converted to Christianity during the Talmud era. By embracing Christianity, Jews who converted still maintained their core belief in the existence of one God and the pillar of the Written Torah but were no longer obliged to obey the religious laws and tenets of Judaism, including the costly norm requiring fathers to educate their sons.

This chapter looks at the Mongol invasion of Persia and Mesopotamia, beginning in 1219 and culminating in the razing of Baghdad in 1258. The Mongol invasion of Persia and Mesopotamia contributed to the demise of the urban and commercial economy of the Abbasid Empire and brought the economies of Mesopotamia and Persia back to an agrarian and pastoral stage for a long period. As a consequence, a certain proportion of Persian, Mesopotamian, and then Egyptian, and Syrian Jewry abandoned Judaism—whose religious norms, especially the one requiring fathers to educate their sons, had once again become a heavy burden with no economic return—and converted to Islam. This process of conversions of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as episodes of persecutions, massacres, and plagues in these regions and in western Europe, explain why world Jewry reached its lowest level by the end of the fifteenth century.

This chapter focuses on the invention and evolution of the numerical table as an information storage device. This was not a one-off event, with clearly traceable consequences across an ever-widening arena of functions, contexts, and cultures. Rather, even within the single cultural milieu of ancient Mesopotamia, there is a fitful pattern of invention, partial adoption, disappearance, and re-invention time after time over the course of some two and a half millennia. Broadly speaking, documents with tabular formatting could be found in three distinct Mesopotamian locales: in the large institutional administrative archives of Sumer and Babylonia; amongst the detritus of scribal schooling, especially in mathematics and metrology; and, later, in the scholarly libraries attached to the great temples of Assyria and Babylonia. All three are examined in turn.

This book examines compositional practices, historical developments, and passages that reveal the way the creators of the Babylonian Talmud (or Bavli) conceived themselves. It complements the continuous creative revision with a freezing of tradition and its containment in a way that produces discontinuity; it complements the fusing of horizons with a literary design that foregrounds one horizon from another. Part I of the book explores the Talmud's literary practice through a close analysis of selected passages, or sugyot. Part II focuses on the Talmud's creators‘ rhetoric of self-presentation and self-definition, arguing that they defined themselves in opposition to those who focused on the transmission of tradition, and that the opposition and hierarchy they created between scholars and transmitters allows us both to understand better the way they conceived of their project as well as to see this project as part of a debate about sacred texts within the Jewish community and more broadly in late ancient Mesopotamia.

This chapter examines three passages that associate with the “conservative,” transmission-oriented aspects of Torah study the occupation with the two bodies of knowledge that the rabbis received: the Written Torah (Scripture) and the Oral Torah (rabbinic tradition). These passages are all premised on a dichotomy between the “received” knowledge of Scripture and oral tradition, on the one hand, and the innovative, creative aspects of study on the other. Building on the work of Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, and others who showed that the Babylonian Talmud places a high value on dialectic and analysis at the expense of tradition and memorization, the chapter demonstrates the centrality of this preference to the self-perception of the Talmud's creators and situates it within a polemical conversation among Jews in late ancient Mesopotamia.

Fortifications are now recognized as a defining feature of the late antique city and in a time of insecurity they were a positive factor for the maintenance of urban life as well as making an important contribution towards imperial defence. But in place of the fora, aqueducts and curiales of the high Roman Empire, the new foundations of the fourth century display new urban typologies derived, in part at least, from patterns of military organization rather than urban organization. This chapter compares the two frontier cities of Amida in Roman Mesopotamia and Tropaeum Traiani in Scythia as examples of new urban foundations in the early fourth century. Detailed structural evidence from the walls of Amida indicates two main phases of construction, one under Valens and a second under Anastasius following the major siege of 502. On the lower Danube the city of Tropaeum Traiani reveals similar features of major defences and urban layout with a range of internal structures including granaries and churches distinct from the typical attributes of the classic Graeco-Roman city.

This chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about regime change in the ancient Near East and Egypt. It examines the dynastic change and institutional administration in southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, the social change and the transition from the Third Dynasty of Ur to the Old Babylonian kingdoms, and the role of Islamic art as a symbol of power. It explores regime change in Iraq from the Mongols to the present.

This chapter examines the evolution of seal imagery and sealing practices in southern Mesopotamia during the latter half of the third millennium BCE or the late Early Dynastic period and succeeding Dynasty of Agade and Third Dynasty of Ur. It describes changes in glyptic imagery as well as sealing practices and elucidates the timing of those changes. It concludes that seal imagery and sealing practices were not static, but evolved over the course of the late third millennium and that the introduction of new imagery and changing administrative practices were gradual and seemingly lagged decades behind dynastic change.

This chapter examines the so-called ‘rod and ring’, the identified symbol of the balance of power between the two premier institutions of ancient Mesopotamia, the palace and the temple. It proposes an identification of the ‘rod and ring’ that is rooted in the indigenous Mesopotamian conceptualization of justice. It suggests that the ‘rod and ring’ scene in royal monuments also signified righteous kingship sanctified by the gods and it communicated an aspect of the enduring relationship between the palace and the temple which served to secure the institutional continuity that endured throughout more than three millennia of regime change.