Download or read book Love Death in the Ancient Near East written by John Henry Marks and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love Death in the Ancient Near East written by John Henry Marks and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love and death in the ancient near east essays in honor of Marvin H Pope written by Robert M. ; Marks Good (John H. ; Pope, Marvin H., eds) and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love and Death in the Ancient Near East written by John H. Marks and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East written by Olga Drewnowska and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the week between July 21 and 25, 2014, the University of Warsaw hosted more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over the world. In the course of five days, nearly 150 papers were read in three (and sometimes four) parallel sessions. Many of them were delivered within the framework of nine thematic workshops. The publication of most of these panels is underway, in separate volumes. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and cultural benefits of Warsaw. Special honor was accorded to two American Assyriologists whose origins can be traced to Warsaw, Piotr Michalowski and Piotr Steinkeller, and a special session to recognize their contributions to the study of ancient Mesopotamia was organized. In this book are presented papers on the main theme of the meeting, “Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East.” The 31 essays are organized into 5 sections: (1) plenary presenations on “What Is Fortune? What Is Misfortune?” ; (2) humanity and fortune/misfortune and luck, with discussion of specific examples; (3) additional papers on definitions of fortune and misfortune; (4) the effects on city and state; and (5) God and temple.
Download or read book Creation and Ecology written by Ronald A. Simkins and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Ronald A. Simkins addresses the current environmental crisis and what the Bible might contribute in response to it. The environmental crisis includes loss of biodiversity, degradation of the soil, and especially climate change. If left unchecked, these trends will bring about the collapse of human civilization. These environmental problems are interrelated and share a similar cause: the exploitation of the natural world through an economy structured by capitalist relations of production and powered by the burning of fossil fuels. Through our economic relations, we have depleted natural resources, polluted natural environments, and altered natural processes. These problems are a product of our political economy, which entails not only our politics, ideology, and religion, but primarily our economic system. Because the crisis is economic at its core, Simkins first sets the Bible within its own economic context, exploring how the biblical ideas of creation--an understanding of the human relationship to the natural world--were the product of the ancient Israelite political economy. Then Simkins places the biblical tradition in conversation with the current environmental crisis. The result is a far richer view of creation in the biblical tradition and a better understanding of what is at stake in the current environmental crisis.
Download or read book Words Remembered Texts Renewed written by Jon Davies and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1995-05-01 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To mark the retirement of John F. A. Sawyer, Professor of Religious Studies in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, colleagues and former students from around the world have contributed studies on his areas of interest: the study of Hebrew, the books of the Jewish Bible, and the culture and traditions of Judaism. The essayists consider not simply the origin of the meaning of word and text, but also the many and strange ways in which word and text become transposed, re-oriented and often enough traduced by later interests and purposes. The roll call of scholars reads: Philip Alexander, Francis Andersen, Graeme Auld, Calvin Carmichael, Robert Carroll, David Clines, Richard Coggins, Jon Davies, Philip Davies, James Dunn, John Elwolde, John Gibson, Graham Harvey, Peter Hayman, Dermot Killingley, Jonathan Magonet, Robert Morgan, Takamitsu Muraoka, Christopher Rowland, Deborah Sawyer, Clyde Curry Smith, Max Sussman, William Telford, Marc Vervenne, Wilfred Watson, Keith Whitelam and Isabel Wollaston.
Download or read book Who Were the Babylonians written by Bill T. Arnold and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and informative introduction to the the Babylonians were important not only because of their many historical contacts with ancient Israel but because they and their predecessors, the Sumerians, established the philosophical and social infrastructure for most of Western Asia for nearly two millennia. Beginning and advanced students as well as biblical scholars and interested nonspecialists will read this introduction to the history and culture of the Babylonians with interest and profit.
Download or read book The Origins of Biblical Monotheism written by Mark S. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-06 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the leading scholars of ancient West Semitic religion discusses polytheism vs. monotheism by covering the fluidity of those categories in the ancient Near East. He argues that Israel's social history is key to the development of monotheism.
Download or read book When Heroes Love written by Susan Ackerman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love of women." These passages, along with other ambiguous erotic and sexual language found in the Gilgamesh epic and the biblical David story, have become the object of numerous and competing scholarly inquiries into the sexual nature of the heroes' relationships. Susan Ackerman's innovative work carefully examines the stories' sexual and homoerotic language and suggests that its ambiguity provides new ways of understanding ideas of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East and its literature. In exploring the stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and David and Jonathan, Ackerman cautions against applying modern conceptions of homosexuality to these relationships. Drawing on historical and literary criticism, Ackerman's close readings analyze the stories of David and Gilgamesh in light of contemporary definitions of sexual relationships and gender roles. She argues that these male relationships cannot be taken as same-sex partnerships in the modern sense, but reflect the ancient understanding of gender roles, whether in same- or opposite-sex relationships, as defined as either active (male) or passive (female). Her interpretation also considers the heroes' erotic and sexual interactions with members of the opposite sex. Ackerman shows that the texts' language and erotic imagery suggest more than just an intense male bonding. She argues that, though ambiguous, the erotic imagery and language have a critical function in the texts and serve the political, religious, and aesthetic aims of the narrators. More precisely, the erotic language in the story of David seeks to feminize Jonathan and thus invalidate his claim to Israel's throne in favor of David. In the case of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whose egalitarian relationship is paradoxically described using the hierarchically dependent language of sexual relationships, the ambiguous erotic language reinforces their status as liminal figures and heroes in the epic tradition.
Download or read book written by Michael Fishbane and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Shir ha-Shirim" -- Top of the title page.
Download or read book Sacred Marriages written by Martti Nissinen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2008-06-23 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title of this volume, Sacred Marriages, consciously plays with the traditional concept of sacred marriage, but the plural form, “sacred marriages,” gives the reader an idea that something more is at stake here than a monomaniacal idea of manifestations deriving from a single prototype. Following the guidelines of one of the contributors, Ruben Zimmermann, the editors tentatively define “sacred marriage” as a “real or symbolic union of two complementary entities, imagined as gendered, in a religious context.” “Sacred marriages” (plural), then, refers to various expressions of this kind of union in different cultures that seek to overcome, to cite Zimmermann again, “the great dualism of human and cosmic existence.” The subtitle indicates that the contributors are primarily interested in different aspects of the divine-human sexual metaphor—that is, the imagining and reenactment of a gendered relationship between the human and divine worlds. This metaphor, which is essentially about relationship rather than sexual acts, can find textual, ritual, mythical, and social expressions in different times and places. Indeed, the sacred marriage ritual itself should be considered not a manifestation of the “sacralized power of sexuality experienced in sexual intercourse” but one way of objectifying the divine-human sexual metaphor.
Download or read book Etched in Stone written by David H. Aaron and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-03-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The document known as The Ten Commandments, more formally referred to as The Decalogue, remains among the most controversial and complicated passages in the Hebrew Bible. Even today, the twentieth chapter of Exodus continues to serve as a major religious and ethical icon within popular culture and religious communities, despite its many unexplained elements. Lawsuits over the display of Decalogue Tablets have occupied courtrooms in more than half the states of this country. And yet, few people understand that there is not one, but three versions of what are usually called "The Ten Commandments." Moreover, when their ideological underpinnings are examined closely, these versions prove to be quite antithetical to one another. Even fewer are aware of the probability that these documents were written very late in the history of biblical literature-indeed, so late as to constitute a literary afterthought in the development of Israelite ethnic self-definition. In Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue Tradition, Aaron examines the question of when the Decalogue versions were written and why. The main focus of this book is the literary phenomenon known as "the tablets" and how it functioned within the broader narrative. Aaron argues not only that the inclusion of the Decalogue texts was quite late in the development of the Pentateuch's canon, but that their integration preserves vestiges of highly charged ideological conflicts that were inadvertently neutralized by the rather bland and generic ethical precepts coined among its verses. Etched in Stone provides a paradigm for merging a variety of critical methods (source criticism, tradition criticism, ideological criticism, redaction criticism) and literary approaches that have heretofore been under-explored. In this sense, Etched in Stone will be read by scholars for its far-reaching conclusions and used by students (undergraduates, seminary, graduate) for learning approaches to the sequencing of biblical materials.
Download or read book Gilgamesh written by Sophus Helle and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poem for the ages, freshly and accessibly translated by an international rising star, bringing together scholarly precision and poetic grace Gilgamesh is a Babylonian epic from three thousand years ago, which tells of King Gilgamesh’s deep love for the wild man Enkidu and his pursuit of immortality when Enkidu dies. It is a story about love between men, loss and grief, the confrontation with death, the destruction of nature, insomnia and restlessness, finding peace in one’s community, the voice of women, the folly of gods, heroes, and monsters—and more. Millennia after its composition, Gilgamesh continues to speak to us in myriad ways. Translating directly from the Akkadian, Sophus Helle offers a literary translation that reproduces the original epic’s poetic effects, including its succinct clarity and enchanting cadence. An introduction and five accompanying essays unpack the history and main themes of the epic, guiding readers to a deeper appreciation of this ancient masterpiece.
Download or read book Poetic Heroes written by Mark S. Smith and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warfare exerts a magnetic power, even a terrible attraction, in its emphasis on glory, honor, and duty. In order to face the terror of war, it is necessary to face how our biblical traditions have made it attractive -- even alluring. In this book Mark Smith undertakes an extensive exploration of "poetic heroes" across a number of ancient cultures in order to understand the attitudes of those cultures toward war and warriors. Smith examines the Iliad and the Gilgamesh; Ugaritic poems commemorating Baal, Aqhat, and the Rephaim; and early biblical poetry, including the battle hymn of Judges 5 and the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1. Smith's Poetic Heroes analyzes the importance of heroic poetry in early Israel and its disappearance after the time of David, building on several strands of scholarship in archaeological research, poetic analysis, and cultural reconstruction.
Download or read book Mirages in the Desert written by Roy E. Garton and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In der Reihe Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) erscheinen Arbeiten zu sämtlichen Gebieten der alttestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Im Zentrum steht die Hebräische Bibel, ihr Vor- und Nachleben im antiken Judentum sowie ihre vielfache Verzweigung in die benachbarten Kulturen der altorientalischen und hellenistisch-römischen Welt. Die BZAW akzeptiert Manuskriptvorschläge, die einen innovativen und signifikanten Beitrag zu Erforschung des Alten Testaments und seiner Umwelt leisten, sich intensiv mit der bestehenden Forschungsliteratur auseinandersetzen, stringent aufgebaut und flüssig geschrieben sind.
Download or read book Adapa and the South Wind written by Shlomo Izre'el and published by Eisenbrauns. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scholarly world first became aware of the myth of Adapa and the South Wind when it was discovered on a tablet from the El-Amarna archive in 1887. We now have at our disposal six fragments of the myth. The largest and most important fragment, from Amarna, is dated to the 14th century B.C.E. This fragment of the Adapa myth has red-tinted points applied on the tablet at specific intervals. Izre'el draws attention to a few of these points that were missed in previous publications by Knudtzon and Schroeder. Five other fragments were part of the Assurbanipal library and are representative of this myth as it was known in Assyria about seven centuries later. The discovery of the myth of Adapa and the South Wind immediately attracted wide attention. Its ideology and its correspondence to the intellectual heritage of Western religions precipitated flourishing studies of this myth, both philological and substantive. Many translations have appeared during the past century, shedding light on various aspects of the myth and its characters. Izre'el unveils the myth of Adapa and the South Wind as mythos, as story. To do this, he analyzes the underlying concepts through extensive treatment of form. He offers an edition of the extant fragments of the myth, including the transliterated Akkadian text, a translation, and a philological commentary. The analysis of poetic form that follows leads to understanding the myth as a piece of literature and to uncovering its meanings. This study therefore marks a new phase in the long, extensive research into this Mesopotamian myth.
