The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Collected Essays

449 Pages·2019·1.8 MB·English

by  J. J. M. Roberts

Copyright 2002. Eisenbrauns. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
THE BIBLE
AND
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The Bible
and the
Ancient Near East
Collected Essays
by
J. J. M. Roberts
EISENBRAUNS
WINONA LAKE, INDIANA
2002
ç Copyright 2002 by Eisenbrauns.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, J. J. M. (Jimmy Jack McBee), 1939–
The Bible and the ancient Near East : collected essays / by J. J. M.
Roberts.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 1-57506-066-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Bible. O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Middle East—
Religion. I. Title.
BS1171.3.R63 2002
221.6u7—dc21
2002012640
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. †‘
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Patrick D. Miller
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Part 1
Fundamental Issues
1. The Ancient Near Eastern Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The Bible and the Literature of the Ancient Near East . . . . . . . . . . 44
3. Myth versus History: Relaying the Comparative Foundations . . . . 59
4. Divine Freedom and Cultic Manipulation
in Israel and Mesopotamia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5. Nebuchadnezzar I’s Elamite Crisis in Theological Perspective . . . . . 83
Part 2
Themes and Motifs
6. The Hand of Yahweh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
7. A New Parallel to 1 Kings 18:28–29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
8. The King of Glory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
9. Job and the Israelite Religious Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
10. Job’s Summons to Yahweh:
The Exploitation of a Legal Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
11. Does God Lie? Divine Deceit as a Theological Problem
in Israelite Prophetic Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
12. The Motif of the Weeping God in Jeremiah and Its Background
in the Lament Tradition of the Ancient Near East . . . . . . . . . . . 132
13. Whose Child Is This?
Reflections on the Speaking Voice in Isaiah 9:5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
14. The Mari Prophetic Texts in Transliteration
and English Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
v
vi Contents
Part 3
Solving Difficult Problems:
New Readings of Old Texts
15. A New Root for an Old Crux, Psalm 22:17c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
16. The Young Lions of Psalm 34:11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
17. The Religio-political Setting of Psalm 47 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
18. Of Signs, Prophets, and Time Limits: A Note on Psalm 74:9 . . . . . 274
19. Blindfolding the Prophet: Political Resistance to First Isaiah’s
Oracles in the Light of Ancient Near Eastern Attitudes
toward Oracles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
20. Yahweh’s Foundation in Zion (Isaiah 28:16) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
Part 4
Kingship and Messiah
21. The Davidic Origin of the Zion Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
22. Zion in the Theology of the Davidic-Solomonic Empire . . . . . . . . 331
23. The Divine King and the Human Community
in Isaiah’s Vision of the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
24. In Defense of the Monarchy: The Contribution of
Israelite Kingship to Biblical Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358
25. The Old Testament’s Contribution to Messianic Expectations . . . . 376
Part 5
Interpreting Prophecy
26. Historical-Critical Method, Theology,
and Contemporary Exegesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
27. A Christian Perspective on Prophetic Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
Indexes
Index of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
Index of Scripture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Preface
Patrick D. Miller
No development in biblical studies over the last century has been more im-
portant than the study of the many texts and artifacts from the ancient world
that have been unearthed to shed light on the past and provoke new thinking
about the Bible. Uppermost among these discoveries are the Qumran scrolls,
but they are only among the best known. The sheer quantity of material from
the time and locale in which the Bible took shape is far beyond the capacity of
any single scholar to control and use. Among those scholars who have spent
their lifetime in the study of the ancient texts to see what light they shed on
Scripture, few have been as productive and successful as J. J. M. Roberts.
Mastering Greek and Hebrew in college and seminary courses, he turned to the
study of the languages and texts of ancient Mesopotamia and Palestine in his
doctoral study. His dissertation was a study of the Old Akkadian pantheon that
has remained the definitive treatment of the topic in the thirty years since its
publication. He has continued to teach courses and seminars in the languages
of the ancient Near East and in the interpretation of the texts as they illumine
the world, thought, and religious practice of the Old Testament.
There are at least three possible avenues of research for biblical scholars as
they approach the extra-biblical languages and texts. One is so to engage these
texts that one becomes a student and interpreter of the texts in themselves, thus
becoming essentially an assyriologist or an egyptologist, even a ugaritologist.
The demands placed upon anyone who would interpret the ancient texts in
knowledgeable and sophisticated fashion are such that it is not surprising that
a number of people who begin as biblical scholars end up as assyriologists.
Another approach is to gather together the many examples of words, concepts,
and practices that parallel material from the Bible. Both of these approaches to
the literature of the ancient Near East are valuable and necessary. Careful in-
terpretation of texts and artifacts on the basis of years of study of the language,
iconography, or archaeology of the ancient Near East is a sine qua non for be-
ing able to draw upon that material for illuminating the Bible. So also the scru-
tiny of the thousands of pieces of data to uncover materials that reflect
something of what is found in the Bible, or may be associated with it in some
way or another, serves to create a store of resources of potential usefulness for
understanding biblical texts.
vii
viii Patrick D. Miller
What finally matters, however, is the capacity to see what is important in
the connections, to discern from the sea of data what is really relevant to un-
derstanding the biblical text and provides either a corrective to current inter-
pretation or fresh insight into the biblical text. Few persons have done this last
task better than Roberts—both correction of existing views and new under-
standing. This volume brings together a large number of his essays in this
vein, most of them previously published in scattered collections and journals,
so that they may be more accessible to biblical interpreters. Several of them
deal with large methodological questions or with substantive matters of theol-
ogy and practice shared by Mesopotamian and Israelite literature and religion.
In all of these, Roberts is careful about generalizing out of the literature or
religion as a whole. His focus tends to be on particular texts. In most instances,
he will seek to draw together a complex of texts from different genres or peri-
ods around a particular issue, such as the significance of the downfall of a cul-
tic center, a matter much attested in Mesopotamian literature and, of course,
central to Israel’s history and its theological interpretation (“Nebuchadnezzar
I’s Elamite Crisis in Theological Perspective”). Throughout these founda-
tional essays, Roberts queries the common tendency to claim uniqueness for
Israel’s theological expressions or to set myth (Near Eastern) and history (Is-
raelite) over against each other, a tendency still evident in the scholarly litera-
ture and in its appropriation by those outside the field of Old Testament studies
(“Myth Versus History: Relaying the Comparative Foundations”). What Rob-
erts seeks and demonstrates in many instances is a kind of “thick description”
through a complex of texts in order to avoid oversimplification and to show
the breadth of perspective in the Near Eastern literature. One may also com-
pare his work to a slice through the mound of literary remains at a particular
point, that is, around a particular topic, theme, or motif, whether of a very
broad sort—for example, myth and history or divine freedom versus cultic
manipulation—or of a more pointed nature, as in his studies of the motifs of
the hand of the god, the weeping god, and divine deceit.
Not infrequently, Roberts addresses major issues of debate or matters on
which the issue of uniqueness has been ardently argued. A good example is his
critique of the presumed difference between the manipulation of the deity by
cultic apparatus and magic in Mesopotamian religion and the careful preserva-
tion of the freedom of God in Israelite worship (“Divine Freedom and Cultic
Manipulation in Israel and Mesopotamia”). In the process of demonstrating the
oversimplification in this reading of the two religious cultures, Roberts shows
his capacity to read the texts of “pagan” religion empathetically while not us-
ing such reading as a polemical or ideological tool against Israelite religion.
The interpretation of the notion of the king as son of the deity has regularly
been understood as an adoptive notion in contrast to more mythopoeic and pre-
sumably cruder ideas of the god as giving birth to the king, as, for example, in
Preface ix
Egyptian thought. In his essay on Isa 9:5, Roberts challenges the assumption
of adoption as the relationship but also provides a reinterpretation of the birth
imagery in Egyptian theology. Along the way, he uncovers the arbitrariness
evidenced when interpreters decree some language to be metaphorical and ac-
ceptable—for example, adoption—while other language is to be regarded as
literal and thus more crude and not as acceptable—birth, for instance.
The effort to counter denigrations and misreadings of Near Eastern litera-
ture and its differences from Israelite literature does not mean Roberts simply
regards them as identical. He regularly uncovers both continuity and disconti-
nuity in the relationships, as one would expect for the literature of a nation
with a long history but one that was always in interaction with many other na-
tional communities. In his masterful and sweeping perusal of the various
genres of biblical literature in relation to Near Eastern literature (“The Bible
and the Literature of the Ancient Near East”), for example, Roberts provides a
concise survey of psalmic and prayer literature that brings a large amount of
material into manageable scope. This survey, complemented by the essay on
“The Ancient Near Eastern Environment” with its extensive bibliography,
identifies many similarities in form, some of which have been further devel-
oped in his own work (see, for example, the treatment of the weeping god mo-
tif in Jeremiah in relation to the lament tradition of the ancient Near East in
this volume) as well as in that of his students.1 Along the way, however, Rob-
erts identifies significant differences that arise primarily from the more poly-
theistic theological context of the Mesopotamian literature. Implicit in such an
analysis, though never explicitly articulated, is the conclusion that one cannot
easily read Israelite literature—and Roberts would probably say this is true of
extrabiblical or epigraphic Hebrew also—as ever being polytheistic in orien-
tation. The growing tendency to revert to earlier models of an early and wide-
spread polytheistic character to Israelite religion in its formative period does
not appear to be substantiated in these essays if one reads between the lines of
Roberts’s work—an important outcome for a body of scholarly contributions
that so thoroughly identifies the continuities between Near Eastern and Israel-
ite literature.
Of particular significance among these probes into major issues and themes
is Roberts’s essay on divine deceit, a subject he anticipates taking up in more
detail. A comparative work again, this essay asks the provocative theological
questions: Can one trust the gods? Can one trust God? To the first question he
answers “probably not.” His answer to the second question may be surprising
1. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre
in the Hebrew Bible (Biblica et Orientalia 44; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1993); and
Walter C. Bouzard, We Have Heard with Our Ears, O God: Sources of the Communal La-
ments in the Psalms (SBLDS 159; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997).