BiblioVault - Books about Assyro-Babylonian religion

Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires

Alan Lenzi

SBL Press, 2014

Advance your understanding of divination’s role in supporting or undermining imperial aspirations in the ancient Near East

This collection examines the ways that divinatory texts in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East undermined and upheld the empires in which the texts were composed, edited, and read. Nine essays and an introduction engage biblical scholarship on the Prophets, Assyriology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the critical study of Ancient Empires.

Features:

Interdisciplinary approaches include propaganda studies
Essays examine how biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts were shaped by political and theological empires
Index of ancient sources

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Kingship and the Gods

A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature

Henri Frankfort

University of Chicago Press, 1948

This classic study clearly establishes a fundamental difference in viewpoint between the peoples of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. By examining the forms of kingship which evolved in the two countries, Frankfort discovered that beneath resemblances fostered by similar cultural growth and geographical location lay differences based partly upon the natural conditions under which each society developed. The river flood which annually renewed life in the Nile Valley gave Egyptians a cheerful confidence in the permanence of established things and faith in life after death. Their Mesopotamian contemporaries, however, viewed anxiously the harsh, hostile workings of nature.

Frank's superb work, first published in 1948 and now supplemented with a preface by Samuel Noah Kramer, demonstrates how the Egyptian and Mesopotamian attitudes toward nature related to their concept of kingship. In both countries the people regarded the king as their mediator with the gods, but in Mesopotamia the king was only the foremost citizen, while in Egypt the ruler was a divine descendant of the gods and the earthly representative of the God Horus.

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Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns

An Introduction

Alan Lenzi

SBL Press, 2011

A thorough text for students of ancient Mesopotamian religion and the Hebrew Bible

Alan Lenzi places Akkadian prayers and hymns within both a religious studies perspective and a Mesopotamian studies perspective. Complete with vocabulary glosses, grammatical notes, literary commentary, and comparative suggestions to biblical material, this book provides a crucial tool for accessing ancient texts related to our understanding of the Hebrew Bible.

Features:

Background essays
Discussion of classes of Mesopotamian prayers and their comparative use in biblical studies
Akkadian text, transliteration, translation, and commentary
Notes on vocabulary and grammar

Alan Lenziis Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East at University of the Pacific. He is the author of Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project).

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