Royal Cities Of The Biblical World

This text is designed to introduce students of the Bible to the archaeology, geography, and history of many of the important sites of the Old and New Testament worlds. Many of these sites were centers for trade, religion, defense, culture, industry, and government. DeVries details the development of significant sites from villages and towns to cities, based on how the site could meet the essential needs of the people. The availability of water or arable land, proximity to trade routes, and easily defensible terrain were prime factors in determining a city's prominence. This study concentrates on the cities in Mesopotamia, Aram/Syria and Phoenicia, Anatolia, Egypt, and Palestine during the Old Testament period, and Palestine and the provinces of the Roman world during the New Testament period. Special attention is given to the geographical setting of the city, the history of its development, its relevance to the Bible, its distinguishing features, and any significant archaeological discoveries made at the site.

This text is designed to introduce students of the Bible to the archaeology, geography, and history of many of the important sites of the Old and New Testament worlds. Many of these sites were centers for trade, religion, defense, culture, industry, and government. DeVries details the development of significant sites from villages and towns to cities, based on how the site could meet the essential needs of the people. The availability of water or arable land, proximity to trade routes, and easily defensible terrain were prime factors in determining a city's prominence. This study concentrates on the cities in Mesopotamia, Aram/Syria and Phoenicia, Anatolia, Egypt, and Palestine during the Old Testament period, and Palestine and the provinces of the Roman world during the New Testament period. Special attention is given to the geographical setting of the city, the history of its development, its relevance to the Bible, its distinguishing features, and any significant archaeological discoveries made at the site.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the contents, historical setting, and social context of the Bible.

The Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch' is the first in a four-volume series covering the text of the Old Testament. Following in the tradition of the four award-winning IVP dictionaries focused on the New Testament and its background, this encyclopedic work is characterized by close attention to the text of the Old Testament and the ongoing conversation of contemporary scholarship. In exploring the major themes and issues of the Pentateuch, it informs and challenges its readers with authoritative overviews, detailed examinations and new insights from the world of the ancient Near East. The 'Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch' is designed to be your first stop in the study and research of the Pentateuch, on which the rest of the Bible is built.

The city is an ambiguous symbol in the Bible. The founder of the first city is the murderer, Cain. The city of Jerusalem is the place chosen by God, yet is also a place of wrong-doing and injustice. Jesus seems to have largely avoided cities except Jerusalem, where he was crucified. 'The City in Biblical Perspective' examines the archaeological and social background of the urban biblical world and explores the implications of the deliberate ambiguities in the biblical text. The book aims to deepen our understanding of both the biblical and the contemporary city by asking how the Bible's complex understanding of the city can illuminate our own ever more urban time.

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.