Deuteronomy And The Material Transmission Of Tradition

Deuteronomy and the inscribed texts depicted within it are often called “books.” Moreover, its treatment of writing has earned it a prominent place in historical accounts of the religion of ancient Israel and Judah. Neither Deuteronomy nor its text-artifacts, however, are books in any conventional sense of the term. This interdisciplinary study reorients the analysis of Deuteronomic textuality around the materiality, visuality, and rhetoric of ancient rather than modern media. It argues that the Deuteronomic composition adapts the media aesthetics of ancient treaty tablets and monumental inscriptions to a story that is itself transformed into an artifact of the past.

In Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel, Boyd offers the first book-length incorporation of language contact theory with data from the Bible. It allows for a reexamination of the nature of contact between biblical authors and the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid empires.

This collection of essays by a group of well-known international scholars deals with the complex and fluid ways in which biblical traditions are transmitted in a variety of contexts focusing especially on the versions, the pseudepigrapha and Qumran, and early Christian literature.

Connects monumentality and material culture to questions of textual authority and literary history. It includes a comprehensive comparative study of the Decalogue (including new translation and analysis) and Levantine monuments that will be of interest to scholars of Hebrew Bible, Jewish studies, religious studies, archaeology, and art history.

"This book began as my doctoral dissertation, completed at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford"--Page vii.

David Firth and Philip Johnston edit this new collection of essays from the vanguard of Old Testament studies. Beginning with the unique literary and theological dimensions of Deuteronomy, these essays open up the major approaches, issues and debates occupying today's best evangelical interpreters.

Ritual in Deuteronomy explores the symbolic world of Deuteronomy’s ritual covenant and curses through a lens of religious studies and anthropology, drawing on previously unexamined Mesopotamian material. This book focuses on the ritual material in Deuteronomy including commands regarding sacrifice, prayer objects, and especially the dramatic ritual enactment of the covenant including curses. The book’s most unique feature is an entirely new comparative study of Deut 27–30 with two ritual texts from Mesopotamia. No studies to date have undertaken a comparison of Deut 27–30 with ancient Near Eastern ritual texts outside of the treaty oath tradition. This fresh comparison illuminates how the ritual life of ancient Israel shaped the literary form of Deuteronomy and concludes that the performance of oaths was a social strategy, addressing contemporary anxieties and reinforcing systems of cultural power. This book offers a fascinating comparative study which will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in biblical studies, classical Hebrew, theology, and ancient Near Eastern studies. The book’s more technical aspects will also appeal to scholars of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, Biblical Law, Ancient Near Eastern History, Mesopotamian Studies, and Classics.

“The book of Deuteronomy can rightly be called a compendium of the most important ideas of the Old Testament.” So begins this commentary on the book of Deuteronomy, which Bill Arnold treats as the heart of the Torah and the fulcrum of the Old Testament—crystallizing the themes of the first four books of the Bible and establishing the theological foundation of the books that follow. After a thorough introduction that explores these and other matters, Arnold provides an original translation of the first eleven chapters of Deuteronomy along with verse-by-verse commentary (with the translation and commentary of the remaining chapters following in a second volume). As with the other entries in the New International Commentary on the Old Testament, Arnold remains rooted in the book’s historical context while focusing on its meaning and use as Christian Scripture today. Ideal for pastors, students, scholars, and interested laypersons, this commentary is an authoritative yet accessible companion to the book of Deuteronomy.