From the late third millennium BCE on, the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh were well known throughout Babylonia and Assyria, and the discovery of Akkadian-language fragments of versions of his tale at Boğazkoy, Ugarit, Emar, and Megiddo demonstrates that tales of the hero's exploits had reached the periphery of the cuneiform world already in the Late Bronze Age. A century of excavation at the Hittite capital of Hattusa (mod. Boğazkoy) has yielded more textual sources for Gilgamesh than are known from all other Late Bronze Age sites combined. The Gilgamesh tradition was imported to Hattusa for use in scribal instruction, and has been of particular importance to modern scholars in reconstructing the epic and analyzing its development, since it documents a period in the history of the narrative for which very few textual witnesses have yet been recovered from Mesopotamia itself. And it is this very Middle Babylonian period to which scholarly consensus assigns the composition of the final, "canonical" version of the epic. The Hittite Gilgamesh offers a full edition of the manuscripts from Hattusa in the Hittite, Akkadian, and Hurrian languages recounting Gilgamesh's adventures.
In his latest addition to the esteemed Anchor Bible Commentaries, scholar Gary Knoppers examines one of the most neglected books of the Old Testament and established its importance as a key to understanding the nation of Israel. Who were the Israelites? Was Israel's first king, Saul, a hero or a disaster? Was David a gifted and accomplished leader or a murderer and a cheat? Did Solomon preside over the most glorious epoch in Israelite history or did he lead the nation into a fateful decline? In I Chronicles, the distinguished scholar Gary Knoppers addresses these questions through a thoughtful and exacting reading of one of the last books of the Hebrew Bible. He shows that Chronicles, which contains a variety of viewpoints on the major events and people, provides a distinct perspective on much of Israel's past, especially the monarchy. He discusses how the chronicler's introduction to the people of Israel redefines Israel itself; explains and defends the transition from Saul to David; and shows how the Davidic-Solomonic monarchy was not only a time of incomparable achievement and glory, but also the period during which the nations most important public institutions -the Davidic dynasty, the Jerusalem Temple, the priests, and the Levites--took formative shape. I Chronicles, part of a two-volume set, is the first to employ systematically the Dead Sea Scrolls to reconstruct the biblical author's text. Knoppers reveals how Chronicles is related to and creatively drawn from many earlier biblical books, and presents a fascinating look at its connections, in both compositional style and approach, to the historical writings of ancient Mesopotamia and classical Greece. Featuring a new translation and an extensive introduction that incorporates up-to-date research, this volume replaces the Anchor Bible I Chronicles commentary written by Jacob Myers in 1965.
A book focusing on the nexus between language and literature in the Bible, with specific attention to how the former is used to create the latter; topics include wordplay, wordplay with proper names, alliteration, repetition with variation, dialect representation, intentionally confused language, marking closure, and more"--
Hittite culture of the second millennium B.C.E. was strongly influenced by Mesopotamian culture, in part through the mediation of the peripheral cuneiform civilizations of northern Syria, in part through direct contact with Babylonia and Assyria. The text edited here (CTH 718) presents an extreme example of this cultural impact, featuring incantations in the Akkadian language (Hittite babilili) embedded within a ceremony set forth in the Hittite tongue. This ritual program has therefore become known to scholars as the “babilili-ritual.” With almost 400 preserved lines, this ceremony is one of the longest religious compositions recovered from the Hittite capital, and there are indications that a significant additional portion has been lost. The divine figure to whom the rite is addressed is Pirinkir, a variety of the well-known Ishtar of Mesopotamia. Its purpose seems to be the elimination of the sins of a member of the royal family. Many of the ritual activities and offering materials employed here are characteristic of the cult practice of the Classical Cilician region known as Kizzuwatna, which was introduced into the central Hittite realm during the final two centuries of the state’s existence. Nonetheless, the Akkadian of the incantations is neither the Akkadian employed in the Hurrian-influenced area of Syria and eastern Anatolia nor that otherwise known from the Hittite royal archives; rather, it is closer to the language of the later Old Babylonian period, even if no precise Mesopotamian forerunners can yet be identified.
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