Word frequencies and other linguistic measures have been compiled from Biblical sources from the ... more Word frequencies and other linguistic measures have been compiled from Biblical sources from the time of the Masoretes. However, it has only been about 50 years since formal statistical analyses have been applied to such data (with varying amounts of cogency and success). In an effort to suggest what statistical analysis may bring to the study of the Hebrew Bible, we present an imaginary dialog between a Statistical expert and a Biblical Scholar.
Encyclopedia of the Material Culture of the Biblical World,, 2021
“Chariots: Technological Developments from the 3rd Millennium BCE to the Hellenistic Age,” in Ang... more “Chariots: Technological Developments from the 3rd Millennium BCE to the Hellenistic Age,” in Angelika Berlejung, Michelle Daviau, Jens Kamlah, Gunnar Lehman, Encyclopedia of the Material Culture of the Biblical World, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021.
On The New Yorker's list of The Best Books We've Read in 2023
One of the five books on religio... more On The New Yorker's list of The Best Books We've Read in 2023
One of the five books on religion selected by Publishers Weekly's for their list of The Best Books of 2023***
A lively and wide-ranging portrait of both ancient Israel and its "astounding achievement": producing the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. Utilizing a broad array of ancient and modern works, Wright illustrates how the Bible came into being as national literature, helping a nation survive catastrophe and trauma.
War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible , 2020
The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped t... more The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped the way many think about war. Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible? In this book, Jacob Wright offers a fresh and fascinating response to this question: War pervades the Bible not because ancient Israel was governed by religious factors (such as "holy war") or because this people, along with its neighbors in the ancient Near East, was especially bellicose. The reason is rather that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel, one that can both transcend deep divisions within the population and withstand military conquest by imperial armies. Drawing on the intriguing interdisciplinary research on war commemoration, Wright shows how biblical authors, like the architects of national identities from more recent times, constructed their groundbreaking new notion of peoplehood in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The raison d’être of the Mosaic covenant was not to generate
a sense of kinship and solidarity am... more The raison d’être of the Mosaic covenant was not to generate a sense of kinship and solidarity among the nation’s members, as Mendenhall maintained. While kinship is central to the biblical project, and the covenant certainly fosters fraternity, the primary purpose of the latter is something much more groundbreaking: It infuses the primordial relationship between a deity and his people with new categories of conditionality and culpability that made it possible for Israel to become a nation capable of withstanding the loss of statehood. This impressive achievement cannot be attributed to Moses or any other extraordinary individual, but to the combined efforts of the nameless biblical scribes, who, in seeking to come to terms with their defeat, created a new legal-rational order that no army could erase.
Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew Bible, 2018
This volume includes ten original essays that demonstrate clearly how common, varied, and signifi... more This volume includes ten original essays that demonstrate clearly how common, varied, and significant the phenomenon of supplementation is in the Hebrew Bible. Essays examine instances of supplementation that function to aid pronunciation, fill in abbreviations, or clarify ambiguous syntax. They also consider more complex additions to and reworkings of particular lyrical, legal, prophetic, or narrative texts. Scholars also examine supplementation by the addition of an introduction, a conclusion, or an introductory and concluding framework to a particular lyrical, legal, prophetic, or narrative text.
The volume represents a contribution to the further development of a panbiblical compositional perspective, with examples from Psalms, the pentateuchal narratives, the Deuteronomistic History, the Prophets, and legal texts.
Essays from an international group of experts on the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible honor... more Essays from an international group of experts on the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible honor Oded Borowski's pioneering work in the archaeology and history of ancient Israel and Judah. Contributors approach the question of what we know of eighth-century Judah from multiple angles, including a survey of Judah's neighbors, the land of Judah and its cities, daily life and material culture, religious beliefs and practices, and early forms of what are now biblical texts.
http://www.amazon.com/David-Israel-Caleb-Biblical-Memory/dp/1107672635
"Of all the Bible's perso... more http://www.amazon.com/David-Israel-Caleb-Biblical-Memory/dp/1107672635 "Of all the Bible's personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability. No wonder it has been said that Israel revered Moses yet loved David. But what do we now know about the historical David? Why does his story stand at the center of the Bible? Why didn't the biblical authors present him in a more favorable light? And what is the special connection between him and Caleb - the Judahite hero remembered for his valor during the wars of conquest? In this groundbreaking study, Jacob L. Wright addresses all these questions and presents a new way of reading the biblical accounts. His work compares the function of these accounts to the role war memorials play over time. The result is a rich study that treats themes of national identity, statehood, the exercise of power, and the human condition."
Of all the Bible’s personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability.
But what do we know about the historical David? Why didn't the biblical authors present a more flattering image of him? Why are their stories of his life filled with so many confusing details (about people, places, communities, and so on)? And why do these stories stand at the center of the Bible?
In this groundbreaking study, the award-winning biblical scholar Jacob L. Wright answers these fundamental questions. He shows how the earliest biblical sources knew David as a warlord whose greatest feat is the creation of the kingdom of Judah. Only later did David become known as the one who slew Goliath, won the love of Jonathan and Michal, took the throne of Saul, and ruled Israel.
This beautifully designed enhanced book reveals the political concerns that prompted later generations to drastically transform David’s identity. As the first work of its kind, King David and His Reign Revisited features a dazzling array of paintings, photographs, and multimedia. Drawing on his research on war commemoration, Wright introduces an exciting new approach to the interpretation of biblical literature.
***Redaction history of much of the Book of Samuel, with extensive chapter on Chronicles. Appealing to findings from NEH-funding research project on "war commemoration," it presents new model of the formation of biblical literature and Israel's ethnogenesis. Argues that the David narrative was originally fully separate from the Saul narrative, and that the David narrative was solely focused on the Kingdom of Judah (lacking any reference to Israel).***
Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts , 2012
Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts
Editors: Bra... more Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts
Editors: Brad Kelle, Frank Richard Ames and Jacob L. Wright
Interpreting Exile considers forced displacement and deportation in ancient Israel and comparable modern contexts in order to offer insight into the realities of war and exile in ancient Israel and their representations in the Hebrew Bible. Introductory essays describe the interdisciplinary and comparative approach and explain how it overcomes methodological dead ends and advances the study of war in ancient and modern contexts. Following essays, written by scholars from various disciplines, explore specific cases drawn from a wide variety of ancient and modern settings and consider archaeological, anthropological, physical, and psychological realities, as well as biblical, literary, artistic, and iconographic representations of displacement and exile. The volume as a whole places Israel’s experiences and expressions of forced displacement into the broader context of similar war-related phenomena from multiple contexts. The contributors are Rainer Albertz, Frank Ritchel Ames, Samuel E. Balentine, Bob Becking, Aaron A. Burke, David M. Carr, Marian H. Feldman, David G. Garber Jr., M. Jan Holton, Michael M. Homan, Hugo Kamya, Brad E. Kelle, T. M. Lemos, Nghana Lewis, Oded Lipschits, Christl M. Maier, Amy Meverden, William Morrow, Shelly Rambo, Janet L. Rumfelt, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, and Jacob L. Wright.
BEHOLD-NÅ̄, STATISTICS IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL, USE IT-NÅ̄, 2022
In recent years a debate has erupted around the possibility of using quantitative tools to date b... more In recent years a debate has erupted around the possibility of using quantitative tools to date biblical texts. Our article sets forth a new methodology for discerning statistically significant traces of diachronic layers in texts from the Hebrew Bible. This is not to suggest that an irregularity in a book is sufficient to determine that it is made of more than one source. We are only making the argument on the negative: that there is no reason to explain phenomena that 'seem interesting' if there is no statistical model that shows a significant difference from random distribution. More generally, this study demonstrates the need for informed and careful application of recent statistical theory to the field of biblical studies.
Fear is an emotion that is often expressed in a bodily reaction and that frequently leads to a co... more Fear is an emotion that is often expressed in a bodily reaction and that frequently leads to a concrete action. It is thus notsurprising that the conceptualization of fear in the book of Deuteronomy is strongly linked to the activation and moral formation of both individual and community. On the one hand, and especially in the book’s eve-of-battle rhetoric, fear is something to be avoided and confined so that it does not contaminate the entire community (“fear not!”). On the other hand, whenits object is the nation’s deity, fear is something to be learned and taught (“so that they may learn to fear me… and teach theirchildren for ever”). In both capacities, fear in Deuteronomy has an extraordinary potential to shape the social order. It has akey role to play in stabilizing society and promoting both collective and individual flourishing, while also being understoodas a destabilizing, destructive force that is to be quarantined as if it were a contagious virus. </
Military Practice and Polemic: Israel's Laws of Warfare in Near Eastern Perspective, by Micha... more Military Practice and Polemic: Israel's Laws of Warfare in Near Eastern Perspective, by Michael G. Hasel. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 193. $24.99 (paper). ISBN 1883925479. In this brief volume, the author of Domination and Resistance: Egyptian Military Activity in the Southern Levant 1300-1185 B.C. (Brill, 1998) continues his research in the area of ancient warfare by focusing on the regulations in Deut 20:10-20. In particular Hasel examines the rules related to the destruction of trees in times of war (w. 19-20), arguing that they must be interpreted within a context of the second millennium B.C.E. In the foreword to the book, Kenneth A. Kitchen praises Hasel's work and underscores its importance as a corrective to the "fixation over a supposed (wholly theoretical!) seventh-century date for Deuteronomy" that has "warped [not a few scholars'] attitude to the external sources" (ix). After discussing in the introduction the prejudices of past research on Deuteronomy and laying out the basic historical-critical premises of his own approach, Hasel presents in the first chapter a contextual, syntactical, and linguistic analysis of Deut 20:10-20. In the remaining two chapters he turns his attention to v. 20, which proscribes the destruction of fruit-bearing trees or the use of them in the construction of siegeworks. Assuming that this prohibition must represent a polemic against practices by foreign nations, he examines all the relevant material from ancient western Asia in search of a context in which the prohibition would make sense. The only match he finds is a second-millennium source, the annals of Thutmose III, which refers to fruit trees being cut down and employed in siege warfare. Hasel summarizes the findings of his study: "After a comprehensive survey of currently available iconographie, textual, and archaeological evidence, it can only be concluded that such a destruction of fruit trees points to an Egyptian background [for Deut 20:19-20] in the second millennium B.C.E." (128). Hasel has helpfully collected and discussed a wide range of data relating to destruction of trees in western Asian warfare during second and first millennia, and his argument initially seems quite persuasive. Yet before one fixes the date of Deuteronomic legislation to the mid-second millennium B.C.E., there are several things one should consider. To begin with, Hasel's interpretation of Deut 20:19-20 may be too literal and unduly limit the scope of the prohibitions. The ancient author seems to be presenting Israel with a general ethos for the way Israel should treat the environment of its military opponents. To this end, the author moves within the narrative setting or Textwelt portrayed in ch. 20. Beginning in v. 12, this Textwelt is the situation of a siege. If this siege were to last "many days," Israel should not retaliate by destroying its enemy's life-support systems (v. 19a). The implication is that Israel should never destroy these life-support systems, even when tempted to do so in situations such as a lengthy siege. (The rationale for this prohibition is provided in v. 19b.) The only trees Israel is permitted to cut down are those that "you know do not yield food" (v. 20a). But even those should be cut down, as Ramban points out, only when necessary, such as when materials are needed to build a siegework (v. 20b). By referring to a siegework here, the ancient author is simply working within the Textwelt created in v. 12. This interpretation has direct ramifications for Hasel's study: instead of confining the search for parallels solely to sources depicting the use of fruit trees in the construction of siegeworks, one should look for depictions of life-support systems being destroyed, and perhaps specifically in siege activities. In so doing, one finds a vast range of such depictions in both iconographic and textual sources. Significantly, the Neo-Assyrian exemplars are especially numerous. …
Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. Open Journal Systems. Journal Help. User Username, Password, Rememb... more Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. Open Journal Systems. Journal Help. User Username, Password, Remember me. Journal Content Search. All. Browse: ...
Page 1. lACOB L. Rebuilding Identity The Nchemiah-Memoir and its Earliest Readers W 01 G Page 2. ... more Page 1. lACOB L. Rebuilding Identity The Nchemiah-Memoir and its Earliest Readers W 01 G Page 2. Jacob L. Wright Rebuilding Identity Page 3. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Herausgegeben von ...
Word frequencies and other linguistic measures have been compiled from Biblical sources from the ... more Word frequencies and other linguistic measures have been compiled from Biblical sources from the time of the Masoretes. However, it has only been about 50 years since formal statistical analyses have been applied to such data (with varying amounts of cogency and success). In an effort to suggest what statistical analysis may bring to the study of the Hebrew Bible, we present an imaginary dialog between a Statistical expert and a Biblical Scholar.
Encyclopedia of the Material Culture of the Biblical World,, 2021
“Chariots: Technological Developments from the 3rd Millennium BCE to the Hellenistic Age,” in Ang... more “Chariots: Technological Developments from the 3rd Millennium BCE to the Hellenistic Age,” in Angelika Berlejung, Michelle Daviau, Jens Kamlah, Gunnar Lehman, Encyclopedia of the Material Culture of the Biblical World, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021.
On The New Yorker's list of The Best Books We've Read in 2023
One of the five books on religio... more On The New Yorker's list of The Best Books We've Read in 2023
One of the five books on religion selected by Publishers Weekly's for their list of The Best Books of 2023***
A lively and wide-ranging portrait of both ancient Israel and its "astounding achievement": producing the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. Utilizing a broad array of ancient and modern works, Wright illustrates how the Bible came into being as national literature, helping a nation survive catastrophe and trauma.
War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible , 2020
The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped t... more The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped the way many think about war. Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible? In this book, Jacob Wright offers a fresh and fascinating response to this question: War pervades the Bible not because ancient Israel was governed by religious factors (such as "holy war") or because this people, along with its neighbors in the ancient Near East, was especially bellicose. The reason is rather that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel, one that can both transcend deep divisions within the population and withstand military conquest by imperial armies. Drawing on the intriguing interdisciplinary research on war commemoration, Wright shows how biblical authors, like the architects of national identities from more recent times, constructed their groundbreaking new notion of peoplehood in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The raison d’être of the Mosaic covenant was not to generate
a sense of kinship and solidarity am... more The raison d’être of the Mosaic covenant was not to generate a sense of kinship and solidarity among the nation’s members, as Mendenhall maintained. While kinship is central to the biblical project, and the covenant certainly fosters fraternity, the primary purpose of the latter is something much more groundbreaking: It infuses the primordial relationship between a deity and his people with new categories of conditionality and culpability that made it possible for Israel to become a nation capable of withstanding the loss of statehood. This impressive achievement cannot be attributed to Moses or any other extraordinary individual, but to the combined efforts of the nameless biblical scribes, who, in seeking to come to terms with their defeat, created a new legal-rational order that no army could erase.
Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew Bible, 2018
This volume includes ten original essays that demonstrate clearly how common, varied, and signifi... more This volume includes ten original essays that demonstrate clearly how common, varied, and significant the phenomenon of supplementation is in the Hebrew Bible. Essays examine instances of supplementation that function to aid pronunciation, fill in abbreviations, or clarify ambiguous syntax. They also consider more complex additions to and reworkings of particular lyrical, legal, prophetic, or narrative texts. Scholars also examine supplementation by the addition of an introduction, a conclusion, or an introductory and concluding framework to a particular lyrical, legal, prophetic, or narrative text.
The volume represents a contribution to the further development of a panbiblical compositional perspective, with examples from Psalms, the pentateuchal narratives, the Deuteronomistic History, the Prophets, and legal texts.
Essays from an international group of experts on the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible honor... more Essays from an international group of experts on the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible honor Oded Borowski's pioneering work in the archaeology and history of ancient Israel and Judah. Contributors approach the question of what we know of eighth-century Judah from multiple angles, including a survey of Judah's neighbors, the land of Judah and its cities, daily life and material culture, religious beliefs and practices, and early forms of what are now biblical texts.
http://www.amazon.com/David-Israel-Caleb-Biblical-Memory/dp/1107672635
"Of all the Bible's perso... more http://www.amazon.com/David-Israel-Caleb-Biblical-Memory/dp/1107672635 "Of all the Bible's personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability. No wonder it has been said that Israel revered Moses yet loved David. But what do we now know about the historical David? Why does his story stand at the center of the Bible? Why didn't the biblical authors present him in a more favorable light? And what is the special connection between him and Caleb - the Judahite hero remembered for his valor during the wars of conquest? In this groundbreaking study, Jacob L. Wright addresses all these questions and presents a new way of reading the biblical accounts. His work compares the function of these accounts to the role war memorials play over time. The result is a rich study that treats themes of national identity, statehood, the exercise of power, and the human condition."
Of all the Bible’s personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability.
But what do we know about the historical David? Why didn't the biblical authors present a more flattering image of him? Why are their stories of his life filled with so many confusing details (about people, places, communities, and so on)? And why do these stories stand at the center of the Bible?
In this groundbreaking study, the award-winning biblical scholar Jacob L. Wright answers these fundamental questions. He shows how the earliest biblical sources knew David as a warlord whose greatest feat is the creation of the kingdom of Judah. Only later did David become known as the one who slew Goliath, won the love of Jonathan and Michal, took the throne of Saul, and ruled Israel.
This beautifully designed enhanced book reveals the political concerns that prompted later generations to drastically transform David’s identity. As the first work of its kind, King David and His Reign Revisited features a dazzling array of paintings, photographs, and multimedia. Drawing on his research on war commemoration, Wright introduces an exciting new approach to the interpretation of biblical literature.
***Redaction history of much of the Book of Samuel, with extensive chapter on Chronicles. Appealing to findings from NEH-funding research project on "war commemoration," it presents new model of the formation of biblical literature and Israel's ethnogenesis. Argues that the David narrative was originally fully separate from the Saul narrative, and that the David narrative was solely focused on the Kingdom of Judah (lacking any reference to Israel).***
Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts , 2012
Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts
Editors: Bra... more Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts
Editors: Brad Kelle, Frank Richard Ames and Jacob L. Wright
Interpreting Exile considers forced displacement and deportation in ancient Israel and comparable modern contexts in order to offer insight into the realities of war and exile in ancient Israel and their representations in the Hebrew Bible. Introductory essays describe the interdisciplinary and comparative approach and explain how it overcomes methodological dead ends and advances the study of war in ancient and modern contexts. Following essays, written by scholars from various disciplines, explore specific cases drawn from a wide variety of ancient and modern settings and consider archaeological, anthropological, physical, and psychological realities, as well as biblical, literary, artistic, and iconographic representations of displacement and exile. The volume as a whole places Israel’s experiences and expressions of forced displacement into the broader context of similar war-related phenomena from multiple contexts. The contributors are Rainer Albertz, Frank Ritchel Ames, Samuel E. Balentine, Bob Becking, Aaron A. Burke, David M. Carr, Marian H. Feldman, David G. Garber Jr., M. Jan Holton, Michael M. Homan, Hugo Kamya, Brad E. Kelle, T. M. Lemos, Nghana Lewis, Oded Lipschits, Christl M. Maier, Amy Meverden, William Morrow, Shelly Rambo, Janet L. Rumfelt, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, and Jacob L. Wright.
BEHOLD-NÅ̄, STATISTICS IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL, USE IT-NÅ̄, 2022
In recent years a debate has erupted around the possibility of using quantitative tools to date b... more In recent years a debate has erupted around the possibility of using quantitative tools to date biblical texts. Our article sets forth a new methodology for discerning statistically significant traces of diachronic layers in texts from the Hebrew Bible. This is not to suggest that an irregularity in a book is sufficient to determine that it is made of more than one source. We are only making the argument on the negative: that there is no reason to explain phenomena that 'seem interesting' if there is no statistical model that shows a significant difference from random distribution. More generally, this study demonstrates the need for informed and careful application of recent statistical theory to the field of biblical studies.
Fear is an emotion that is often expressed in a bodily reaction and that frequently leads to a co... more Fear is an emotion that is often expressed in a bodily reaction and that frequently leads to a concrete action. It is thus notsurprising that the conceptualization of fear in the book of Deuteronomy is strongly linked to the activation and moral formation of both individual and community. On the one hand, and especially in the book’s eve-of-battle rhetoric, fear is something to be avoided and confined so that it does not contaminate the entire community (“fear not!”). On the other hand, whenits object is the nation’s deity, fear is something to be learned and taught (“so that they may learn to fear me… and teach theirchildren for ever”). In both capacities, fear in Deuteronomy has an extraordinary potential to shape the social order. It has akey role to play in stabilizing society and promoting both collective and individual flourishing, while also being understoodas a destabilizing, destructive force that is to be quarantined as if it were a contagious virus. </
Military Practice and Polemic: Israel's Laws of Warfare in Near Eastern Perspective, by Micha... more Military Practice and Polemic: Israel's Laws of Warfare in Near Eastern Perspective, by Michael G. Hasel. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 193. $24.99 (paper). ISBN 1883925479. In this brief volume, the author of Domination and Resistance: Egyptian Military Activity in the Southern Levant 1300-1185 B.C. (Brill, 1998) continues his research in the area of ancient warfare by focusing on the regulations in Deut 20:10-20. In particular Hasel examines the rules related to the destruction of trees in times of war (w. 19-20), arguing that they must be interpreted within a context of the second millennium B.C.E. In the foreword to the book, Kenneth A. Kitchen praises Hasel's work and underscores its importance as a corrective to the "fixation over a supposed (wholly theoretical!) seventh-century date for Deuteronomy" that has "warped [not a few scholars'] attitude to the external sources" (ix). After discussing in the introduction the prejudices of past research on Deuteronomy and laying out the basic historical-critical premises of his own approach, Hasel presents in the first chapter a contextual, syntactical, and linguistic analysis of Deut 20:10-20. In the remaining two chapters he turns his attention to v. 20, which proscribes the destruction of fruit-bearing trees or the use of them in the construction of siegeworks. Assuming that this prohibition must represent a polemic against practices by foreign nations, he examines all the relevant material from ancient western Asia in search of a context in which the prohibition would make sense. The only match he finds is a second-millennium source, the annals of Thutmose III, which refers to fruit trees being cut down and employed in siege warfare. Hasel summarizes the findings of his study: "After a comprehensive survey of currently available iconographie, textual, and archaeological evidence, it can only be concluded that such a destruction of fruit trees points to an Egyptian background [for Deut 20:19-20] in the second millennium B.C.E." (128). Hasel has helpfully collected and discussed a wide range of data relating to destruction of trees in western Asian warfare during second and first millennia, and his argument initially seems quite persuasive. Yet before one fixes the date of Deuteronomic legislation to the mid-second millennium B.C.E., there are several things one should consider. To begin with, Hasel's interpretation of Deut 20:19-20 may be too literal and unduly limit the scope of the prohibitions. The ancient author seems to be presenting Israel with a general ethos for the way Israel should treat the environment of its military opponents. To this end, the author moves within the narrative setting or Textwelt portrayed in ch. 20. Beginning in v. 12, this Textwelt is the situation of a siege. If this siege were to last "many days," Israel should not retaliate by destroying its enemy's life-support systems (v. 19a). The implication is that Israel should never destroy these life-support systems, even when tempted to do so in situations such as a lengthy siege. (The rationale for this prohibition is provided in v. 19b.) The only trees Israel is permitted to cut down are those that "you know do not yield food" (v. 20a). But even those should be cut down, as Ramban points out, only when necessary, such as when materials are needed to build a siegework (v. 20b). By referring to a siegework here, the ancient author is simply working within the Textwelt created in v. 12. This interpretation has direct ramifications for Hasel's study: instead of confining the search for parallels solely to sources depicting the use of fruit trees in the construction of siegeworks, one should look for depictions of life-support systems being destroyed, and perhaps specifically in siege activities. In so doing, one finds a vast range of such depictions in both iconographic and textual sources. Significantly, the Neo-Assyrian exemplars are especially numerous. …
Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. Open Journal Systems. Journal Help. User Username, Password, Rememb... more Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. Open Journal Systems. Journal Help. User Username, Password, Remember me. Journal Content Search. All. Browse: ...
Page 1. lACOB L. Rebuilding Identity The Nchemiah-Memoir and its Earliest Readers W 01 G Page 2. ... more Page 1. lACOB L. Rebuilding Identity The Nchemiah-Memoir and its Earliest Readers W 01 G Page 2. Jacob L. Wright Rebuilding Identity Page 3. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Herausgegeben von ...
For the 2010-11 Annual Lecture in “Milieux Bibliques” (chair occupied by Prof. Thomas Romer), Jac... more For the 2010-11 Annual Lecture in “Milieux Bibliques” (chair occupied by Prof. Thomas Romer), Jacob L. Wright from Emory University treated the subject of “name-making” as represented in ancient Near Eastern sources and the Hebrew Bible. Wright began by citing a letter that the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad (18th cent. BCE) sent to his son Yasmah-Adad in Mari, petitioning him to “be a man” and to “make a name” for himself by conquering the city of Qatna: Here your brother won a victory, but the...
The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Jul 1, 2007
... Available: In Print. 134.00$184.00. Author: Ann Killebrew. Category: Ancient Near East &... more ... Available: In Print. 134.00$184.00. Author: Ann Killebrew. Category: Ancient Near East & Egypt - Archaeology. Series: SBL - Archaeology and Biblical Studies. ISSN: 1570-5986. ISBN13: 9789004130456. Publication Year: 2005. ...
Fear is an emotion that is often expressed in a bodily reaction and that frequently leads to a co... more Fear is an emotion that is often expressed in a bodily reaction and that frequently leads to a concrete action. It is thus not surprising that the conceptualization of fear in the book of Deuteronomy is strongly linked to the activation and moral formation of both individual and community. On the one hand, and especially in the book’s eve-of-battle rhetoric, fear is something to be avoided and confined so that it does not contaminate the entire community (“fear not!”). On the other hand, when its object is the nation’s deity, fear is something to be learned and taught (“so that they may learn to fear me… and teach their children for ever”). In both capacities, fear in Deuteronomy has an extraordinary potential to shape the social order. It has a key role to play in stabilizing society and promoting both collective and individual flourishing, while also being understood as a destabilizing, destructive force that is to be quarantined as if it were a contagious virus.
In the redacted form of her story, Rahab likely represents a generic outsider who secures her bel... more In the redacted form of her story, Rahab likely represents a generic outsider who secures her belonging in Israel by contributing to the nation’s war effort. It is improbable that this Canaanite prostitute stands for a specific clan (the “Rahabites”). Instead, the authors of Joshua appear to have been addressing issues posed by contested population groups, and desired their readers to view these issues in relation to her story. One such group would have been the Gibeonites, whose disputed status is reflected in texts from the book of Joshua and a number of other biblical passages. The commonalities between the Rahab story and the account of the Gibeonites serve to highlight the gulf of difference between the two: Both manage to secure a place “in the midst of Israel.” But whereas Rahab does so by courageously risking her life to contribute to Israel’s war effort, the Gibeonites secure their protected place through an act of pusillanimous duplicity. But why do the biblical authors cast aspersions on the Gibeonites by depicting them in this way? My answer to this question employs a new model for the formation of biblical literature. Developed in my work on the biblical David narratives, this model compares the growth and evolution of biblical texts to the ways political communities negotiate belonging and identity via war commemoration.
As the first to bring the study of "urbicide" to bear on antiquity, this article focuses on the a... more As the first to bring the study of "urbicide" to bear on antiquity, this article focuses on the ancient Near and the Hebrew Bible.
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Books by Jacob Wright
One of the five books on religion selected by Publishers Weekly's for their list of The Best Books of 2023***
A lively and wide-ranging portrait of both ancient Israel and its "astounding achievement": producing the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. Utilizing a broad array of ancient and modern works, Wright illustrates how the Bible came into being as national literature, helping a nation survive catastrophe and trauma.
a sense of kinship and solidarity among the nation’s members, as
Mendenhall maintained. While kinship is central to the biblical project,
and the covenant certainly fosters fraternity, the primary purpose of the
latter is something much more groundbreaking: It infuses the primordial
relationship between a deity and his people with new categories of
conditionality and culpability that made it possible for Israel to become
a nation capable of withstanding the loss of statehood. This impressive
achievement cannot be attributed to Moses or any other extraordinary
individual, but to the combined efforts of the nameless biblical scribes,
who, in seeking to come to terms with their defeat, created a new legal-rational order that no army could erase.
The volume represents a contribution to the further development of a panbiblical compositional perspective, with examples from Psalms, the pentateuchal narratives, the Deuteronomistic History, the Prophets, and legal texts.
"Of all the Bible's personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability. No wonder it has been said that Israel revered Moses yet loved David. But what do we now know about the historical David? Why does his story stand at the center of the Bible? Why didn't the biblical authors present him in a more favorable light? And what is the special connection between him and Caleb - the Judahite hero remembered for his valor during the wars of conquest? In this groundbreaking study, Jacob L. Wright addresses all these questions and presents a new way of reading the biblical accounts. His work compares the function of these accounts to the role war memorials play over time. The result is a rich study that treats themes of national identity, statehood, the exercise of power, and the human condition."
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/king-david-and-his-reign-revisited/id741571300?mt=11
Of all the Bible’s personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability.
But what do we know about the historical David? Why didn't the biblical authors present a more flattering image of him? Why are their stories of his life filled with so many confusing details (about people, places, communities, and so on)? And why do these stories stand at the center of the Bible?
In this groundbreaking study, the award-winning biblical scholar Jacob L. Wright answers these fundamental questions. He shows how the earliest biblical sources knew David as a warlord whose greatest feat is the creation of the kingdom of Judah. Only later did David become known as the one who slew Goliath, won the love of Jonathan and Michal, took the throne of Saul, and ruled Israel.
This beautifully designed enhanced book reveals the political concerns that prompted later generations to drastically transform David’s identity. As the first work of its kind, King David and His Reign Revisited features a dazzling array of paintings, photographs, and multimedia. Drawing on his research on war commemoration, Wright introduces an exciting new approach to the interpretation of biblical literature.
***Redaction history of much of the Book of Samuel, with extensive chapter on Chronicles. Appealing to findings from NEH-funding research project on "war commemoration," it presents new model of the formation of biblical literature and Israel's ethnogenesis. Argues that the David narrative was originally fully separate from the Saul narrative, and that the David narrative was solely focused on the Kingdom of Judah (lacking any reference to Israel).***
Editors: Brad Kelle, Frank Richard Ames and Jacob L. Wright
Interpreting Exile considers forced displacement and deportation in ancient Israel and comparable modern contexts in order to offer insight into the realities of war and exile in ancient Israel and their representations in the Hebrew Bible. Introductory essays describe the interdisciplinary and comparative approach and explain how it overcomes methodological dead ends and advances the study of war in ancient and modern contexts. Following essays, written by scholars from various disciplines, explore specific cases drawn from a wide variety of ancient and modern settings and consider archaeological, anthropological, physical, and psychological realities, as well as biblical, literary, artistic, and iconographic representations of displacement and exile. The volume as a whole places Israel’s experiences and expressions of forced displacement into the broader context of similar war-related phenomena from multiple contexts. The contributors are Rainer Albertz, Frank Ritchel Ames, Samuel E. Balentine, Bob Becking, Aaron A. Burke, David M. Carr, Marian H. Feldman, David G. Garber Jr., M. Jan Holton, Michael M. Homan, Hugo Kamya, Brad E. Kelle, T. M. Lemos, Nghana Lewis, Oded Lipschits, Christl M. Maier, Amy Meverden, William Morrow, Shelly Rambo, Janet L. Rumfelt, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, and Jacob L. Wright.
Papers by Jacob Wright
One of the five books on religion selected by Publishers Weekly's for their list of The Best Books of 2023***
A lively and wide-ranging portrait of both ancient Israel and its "astounding achievement": producing the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. Utilizing a broad array of ancient and modern works, Wright illustrates how the Bible came into being as national literature, helping a nation survive catastrophe and trauma.
a sense of kinship and solidarity among the nation’s members, as
Mendenhall maintained. While kinship is central to the biblical project,
and the covenant certainly fosters fraternity, the primary purpose of the
latter is something much more groundbreaking: It infuses the primordial
relationship between a deity and his people with new categories of
conditionality and culpability that made it possible for Israel to become
a nation capable of withstanding the loss of statehood. This impressive
achievement cannot be attributed to Moses or any other extraordinary
individual, but to the combined efforts of the nameless biblical scribes,
who, in seeking to come to terms with their defeat, created a new legal-rational order that no army could erase.
The volume represents a contribution to the further development of a panbiblical compositional perspective, with examples from Psalms, the pentateuchal narratives, the Deuteronomistic History, the Prophets, and legal texts.
"Of all the Bible's personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability. No wonder it has been said that Israel revered Moses yet loved David. But what do we now know about the historical David? Why does his story stand at the center of the Bible? Why didn't the biblical authors present him in a more favorable light? And what is the special connection between him and Caleb - the Judahite hero remembered for his valor during the wars of conquest? In this groundbreaking study, Jacob L. Wright addresses all these questions and presents a new way of reading the biblical accounts. His work compares the function of these accounts to the role war memorials play over time. The result is a rich study that treats themes of national identity, statehood, the exercise of power, and the human condition."
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/king-david-and-his-reign-revisited/id741571300?mt=11
Of all the Bible’s personalities, David is the most profoundly human. Courageous, cunning, and complex, he lives life to the hilt. Whatever he does, he does with all his might, exuding both vitality and vulnerability.
But what do we know about the historical David? Why didn't the biblical authors present a more flattering image of him? Why are their stories of his life filled with so many confusing details (about people, places, communities, and so on)? And why do these stories stand at the center of the Bible?
In this groundbreaking study, the award-winning biblical scholar Jacob L. Wright answers these fundamental questions. He shows how the earliest biblical sources knew David as a warlord whose greatest feat is the creation of the kingdom of Judah. Only later did David become known as the one who slew Goliath, won the love of Jonathan and Michal, took the throne of Saul, and ruled Israel.
This beautifully designed enhanced book reveals the political concerns that prompted later generations to drastically transform David’s identity. As the first work of its kind, King David and His Reign Revisited features a dazzling array of paintings, photographs, and multimedia. Drawing on his research on war commemoration, Wright introduces an exciting new approach to the interpretation of biblical literature.
***Redaction history of much of the Book of Samuel, with extensive chapter on Chronicles. Appealing to findings from NEH-funding research project on "war commemoration," it presents new model of the formation of biblical literature and Israel's ethnogenesis. Argues that the David narrative was originally fully separate from the Saul narrative, and that the David narrative was solely focused on the Kingdom of Judah (lacking any reference to Israel).***
Editors: Brad Kelle, Frank Richard Ames and Jacob L. Wright
Interpreting Exile considers forced displacement and deportation in ancient Israel and comparable modern contexts in order to offer insight into the realities of war and exile in ancient Israel and their representations in the Hebrew Bible. Introductory essays describe the interdisciplinary and comparative approach and explain how it overcomes methodological dead ends and advances the study of war in ancient and modern contexts. Following essays, written by scholars from various disciplines, explore specific cases drawn from a wide variety of ancient and modern settings and consider archaeological, anthropological, physical, and psychological realities, as well as biblical, literary, artistic, and iconographic representations of displacement and exile. The volume as a whole places Israel’s experiences and expressions of forced displacement into the broader context of similar war-related phenomena from multiple contexts. The contributors are Rainer Albertz, Frank Ritchel Ames, Samuel E. Balentine, Bob Becking, Aaron A. Burke, David M. Carr, Marian H. Feldman, David G. Garber Jr., M. Jan Holton, Michael M. Homan, Hugo Kamya, Brad E. Kelle, T. M. Lemos, Nghana Lewis, Oded Lipschits, Christl M. Maier, Amy Meverden, William Morrow, Shelly Rambo, Janet L. Rumfelt, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, and Jacob L. Wright.
But why do the biblical authors cast aspersions on the Gibeonites by depicting them in this way? My answer to this question employs a new model for the formation of biblical literature. Developed in my work on the biblical David narratives, this model compares the growth and evolution of biblical texts to the ways political communities negotiate belonging and identity via war commemoration.