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Ancient Israel was a nation in the Near East, but it conceived of itself as a unique people. This chapter investigates the ways that Israel constructed its cultural identity in relation to its neighbors, and how its cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries were contested and reinterpreted in various biblical texts.

Serving as the volume introduction, Chapter 1 lays out the scope of the ancient Near Eastern canon as it has been understood since its inception. Situating the canon within Art History, Archaeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, this chapter raises an inquiry about the fluidity and staying power of its content. Through a case study of the ancient Near Eastern canon as it appears in college art history textbooks, we detect patterns in the canon, which remains a flexible but essentially conservative phenomenon. Nevertheless, the individual contributions in the volume’s four sections are shown here through chapter synopses to be historically grounded, theoretically provocative, and full of potential avenues for research and revision of the seemingly outmoded phenomenon of the canon. The chapter proposes that celebrating the longevity and future of the canon, rather than dismissing it, can allow today’s researchers to take the study of the ancient Near East to new levels and share it with expanded audiences.

The distinctive features of the biblical sense of history may be illuminated by comparison with classical Greek and ancient Near Eastern concepts. The biblical view includes features of what we call myth, epic, and history. A useful category is “genealogical time,” in which the past provides a foundation, a model, and continuous connection to the present and future.

This chapter lays out the peculiarities of the Ugaritic language and hence of its peculiar contributions to our knowledge of the history of culture. It discusses the nature of the language and its place within the languages of the ancient Near East, the nature of the writing system, and the nature of the Ugaritic texts that have been preserved.

This chapter looks at the issues occupying the interpretation of Genesis at the time of Darwin and notes that the impact of the discovery of ancient Near Eastern creation accounts came at more or less the same time as the impact of Darwin's writing. As a result, the interpretation of Genesis could operate within two completely different hermeneutical frameworks, neither of which was directly linked to the plain-sense concerns of the Genesis text. A variety of examples of interpreting Genesis in the light of ancient Near Eastern texts is explored, seeking to demonstrate that there is a variety of ways in which hermeneutical benefit may be derived from reading a text in the light of other concerns, and a similar case is then made with respect to the hermeneutics of reading Genesis after Darwin.

This chapter examines how an historian of the ancient Near East sets about reconstructing a picture of the past using material of great diversity in terms of type and historical value. It demonstrates this approach by considering the figure of the Achaemenid king, Cyrus II ‘the Great’ of Persia. The discussion begins by creating a conventional image of the king and consolidating it. It then analyses the evidence that has been used to strengthen the picture and presents some historical realities. The basis for the standard picture of Cyrus the Great is provided by material in classical writers and the Old Testament. Cyrus introduced a new policy of religious toleration together with active support for local cults, exemplified by the permission he granted to the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, with generous funding from central government. The chapter also considers the date for Cyrus' defeat of the Median king Astyages (550), as well as his conquest of Babylon itself.

This chapter provides an island history of Bronze Age and early Iron Age Cyprus, discussing at length all published documentary evidence related to Alashiya, Ku‐pi‐ri‐jo, and Iadnana (Neo‐Assyrian cuneiform texts). Whilst specific focus falls on issues of identity, the more general intention is to situate Cyprus in its eastern Mediterranean context. Each section — on economy, society, and polity — provides commentary on the material dimensions of the textual evidence; a general historical overview concludes the chapter. Given converging streams of evidence, it is argued that Late Bronze Age Cyprus was centrally organized — politically and economically — under a ruling class that had adopted a coherent ideological and symbolic repertoire of material paraphernalia to signal their identity, within and beyond the island. The documentary evidence related to Alashiya demonstrates a role so pervasive and influential in the international world of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East at this time that it is difficult to see how its king would not have controlled the entire island.

Focusing on the circulation of knowledge about religion and religions, this chapter shifts focus from Europe to the history of the study of religion in the United States, highlighting the importance of Morris Jastrow Jr. in the emergence of an academic discipline in America. Like imperial comparative religion, this study of religion was structured by the divide between savagery and civilization, with Native Americans and African Americans cast as proximate savages. This chapter also reviews research in American folklore, anthropology, and religious studies that contrasted the visionary quality of Native American religion with the emotional character of African American religion. In the study of the religions of ancient civilizations, the British interest in India was superseded by the American interest in the Ancient Near East. Between 1914 and 1920, Jastrow dedicated his scholarship to analyzing conflicts and identifying conditions for peace in the Middle East. The chapter concludes with observations about the persistence of imperial comparative religion.

The chapter believes that Job is the most death-oriented book in the Bible making Job one of the most basic resources, with regard to death in the Ancient Near East. The poet of Job was able to use the theme of death conventionally but with a further purpose or serving parodistic ends. Joban depicts death as a place where all mortals eventually go (Sheol, “There”) or, simply put, the ultimate ending to mortals. In Job’s lament, the poet’s use of the death-motif showed a slight variation from the norm when not only Job wishes that he is at death’s door but that he might as well be already dead. In this point, Job is seen parallel to Jeremiah’s desires which proves that a sufferer so driven in despair feels moved to repudiate his very existence. The poet wants readers to see how things are not meshing together conventionally as Job wants to affirm his innocence and demand justice by asking to be dead. On the other hand, Job requests God for protection from the wrathful Deity who is the same God. Being popular endeavor for rulers in Ancient Near East, Job also wanted to make a stone inscription, leaving a memorial of how his Redeemer saved him through his resurrection. Nowadays, the resurrection in Job can be considered as his words of hope that endures all men who follow his path towards oblivion.

Chapter 2 reads the description of David’s purchase of Araunah’s land in 2 Samuel 24 in light of ancient Near Eastern texts depicting royal power over land, especially land sales and land grants. Kings enjoyed administrative rights in all land within their territory, but could not legally seize land from landowners without just cause. Furthermore, kings could dedicate land to their gods. There were two types of land dedication in the ancient Near East: the transfer of administrative rights and of productive rights in land to the god. Literary motifs associated with depictions of both types are found in 2 Samuel 24. The account in 2 Samuel 24 vindicates David as an ancient Near Eastern king who is scrupulous in his dealings with his god.

The “Poem of Job” like Bontsye Shvayg maintains a sharply critical line against pietistic worldview that a poet like Perets wished to address. The chapter mentions that to understand fully the “Poem of Job,” one must see what the poet wished to turn inside out for purposes of parody, both in broad and small scale terms. Perets wanted the same thing on a whole array of Yiddish themes though it is not as easy as it is in Bontsye since it has a relative wealth of contemporaneous information while Job does not. The two reasons for such is Job, as a literary work, clearly stands within the “Wisdom” tradition and literature within the Ancient Near East is remarkably conservative. The basic structure of the “Poem of Job” is said to be parallel to the “Theodicity” or “Babylonian Theodicity” with the dialogue between Job and his friends as actually an appeal to his God. There is also similarity of Ludlul to the “Poem of Job” which is sometimes called the “Babylonian Job.” The Dialogue/Appeal was an excellent way to show the transition of Job into Anti-Job keeping in mind that the innocent victim must always keep his complains within the bounds of propriety, thus being a “Righteous Sufferer.” At the same time, issues of justice and righteousness do play a role in the standard Dialogue/Appeal though in the end things do turn around right for God acts decisively and dramatically to restore the victim.

This is the last of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament, and discusses Hebrew poetry in the context of the Hebrew (Old Testament) Bible. The introductory section looks at recent work on the discovery of the verse traditions of the ancient Near East, and discusses the difficulty of reading Hebrew poetry, the Hebrew poet's resources (tradition versus innovation) and the poet's voice and the lyrical first person singular (the lyrical ‘I’). The second section discusses the issue of differentiating between prose and poetry, the third discusses metre and rhythm, and the fourth discusses parallelism. Further sections discuss building blocks (line, half‐line, and couplet), the segmentation of poems, repetition, the exploitation of sound, figurative language, and poetic diction. The last section of the chapter looks at the matter of holding the reader's attention.

This chapter presents the archive as a critical feature of the ancient Near Eastern political landscape. The need to collect and preserve documents is endemic to many first millennium empires, not only for pragmatic purposes of organizing information, but in order to emblemize cultural power. This ancient symbolism of power through the archive is comparable, though not identical, to contemporary notions of archive, especially within literary and postcolonial discourses. The point is not that the communities that produced Ezra-Nehemiah replicated such power on an imperial scale but rather that archives—on a variety of scales and in a range of forms—preserve, and indeed produce, institutional memory and signal cultural vitality.

With the emphasis of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East firmly placed on the political, social, and cultural histories of the states and communities shaping Egypt and Western Asia (including the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran), this introduction to the five-volume series seeks to place the region in its environmental context. It discusses the lay of the land between the North African coast and the Hindu Kush, including the role of tectonics and geomorphology. It also considers some key issues regarding climatic conditions, focusing in particular on the significance of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and the potential impact of megadroughts and pandemics.

Ancient Egypt and Western Asia had a library tradition many centuries before the advent of the Greek script and the building of the Library of Alexandria. The chapter provides an overview of this tradition from the third millennium BCE onwards. It presents a rich archaeological record of many thousands of texts; the scripts, languages, and different types of manuscripts and writing equipment; the scholarship, acquisition, and curation that went into their creation; the various types of collections and assemblages of texts; literacy, reading, and access; and the architecture, storage, and maintenance of these early collections.

The lack of a systematic account of marriage and divorce in biblical law means drawing on a wide range of legal materials in order to reconstruct what the typical practice might have been in biblical Israel. This includes evidence of local custom, shared ancient Near Eastern conventions, formal rules, and rabbinic traditions. Nevertheless, the typical marriage seems to have followed a conventional procedure and problems arose when this was subverted (e.g., such cases as the “rape” of Dinah, and Tamar). This chapter argues that, in some cases, what we call “sexual offences” are really deviations from what the biblical texts regard as the normal sequence of marital relations. Biblical law regulates the practice of divorce and sets limits to its operation. It also shows concern for issues of consent, equality, protection, gender, and heterosexual ideology, although these are expressed differently from similar interests in modern law.