Advances in Ancient, Biblical, and Near Eastern Research

We (And) the Philistines

Raz Kletter — 2024-04-08

In 1998, Neil Silberman showed how early scholarly portrayals of the Philistines reflected the values of the Victorians. The Philistines were presented by the Victorians either as good colonialists who brought an enlightened Indo-European civilization to the East, or as barbaric destroyers who ruined the supposedly decadent Canaanite culture. The time has come to reflect on more recent images of the Philistines. In the 1970–1980s, they went through a great transformation from a Bible-centered model or image of cruel invaders and enemies to that of an advanced, cultural people. Several other images have appeared since, competing for hegemony. I review them here, focusing especially on the most recent image of them as “merry pirates,” which has not yet been studied critically. My aim here is not to support any particular “image” of the Philistines but to study these scholarly constructions and their relations to our time. Based on the results, it seems that the future of the Philistines may be as unpredictable as their past.

Textualization across Media

Raymond F. Person, Jr. — 2024-07-03

Although there may be some significant differences between oral discourse and written discourse, this chapter explores the similarities of how textualization can occur across media, from everyday conversation to literature with special reference to the cognitive-linguistic practices associated with person reference. This exploration begins with observations taken from Conversation Analysis to understand the basic practices of person reference in talk-in-interaction, including the preference for achieving recognition and the preference for minimalization. The paper then provides two examples of person reference in written material culture: (1) bulla A and B from excavations at Lachish, which contains two Hebrew names translated as “Eliakim, (son of) Yehozarah” and (2) a discussion of text-critical variants concerning person reference in 2 Sam 3:23-25 and in 2 Kgs 24:18//Jer 52:1. This analysis leads to the following conclusion: for successful communication to occur, textualization requires some level of co-cultural knowledge between speakers/writers and hearers/readers in ways that requires the speakers/writers to make certain assumptions about the co-cultural knowledge of the hearers/readers and design their speech/writing accordingly; therefore, any particular example of textualization should not be understood as explicitly containing all of the information shared between speakers/writers and hearers/readers. This chapter ends with reflections on the implications of this conclusion on understanding both individual manuscripts of ancient literature and the text-critical “variants” between manuscripts of the “same” literary text as examples of textualization within textual plurality, a characteristic of ancient literature.

The Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur between Mesopotamian and Biblical Wisdom

Giorgio Paolo Campi — 2024-09-26

This article provides a tentative new overall reading of the literary composition in Akkadian language known as (The Tale of) The Poor Man of Nippur implying a partial reassessment of former scholarly understandings and grounded in a comparative approach with selected examples of both Mesopotamian and biblical wisdom literature.
At first, a brief philological overview of the extant manuscripts and an outline of the plot (with notes accompanying its most debated and/or obscure passages) are provided, along with some remarks about the information they offer. Afterwards, a review of past scholarly understandings of the tale highlights the hermeneutical impasse interpreters face when dealing with it. The identification of a shared background of tropes and motifs between The Poor Man of Nippur and both Mesopotamian and biblical wisdom literature of the ‘pious sufferer’ lays the foundation for a new reading that circumvents the impasse and allows The Poor Man to be refrained in a new context and envisioned as a ‘hypertext’ conversing with wisdom literary tradition. Ultimately, The Poor Man can be read as a sample of ‘skeptical literature’, in line with other cognate examples stemming from the wisdom tradition.

Judeans and Samarians at Tahpanhes

Marshall Cunningham — 2024-11-09

In this short article, I offer a speculative identification for the unnamed king who receives a caravan of Judeans and Samarians in Papyrus Amherst 63 col. xvii and the location where the royal site where the meeting might have occurred. Through a close reading of this passage and a comparison with a similar account of Judean and Samarian migration in Jer 40–44, I argue that the caravan arrives at Tahpanhes, modern day Tell Dafana, an important royal outpost in the Nile’s eastern delta. The king was most likely a member of the Saite dynasty, perhaps Apries, who is said to have come to Judah’s aid in the early 6th century ʙᴄᴇ and whose military exploits are recorded in two stelae that have recently been discovered at Tell Dafana.