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3 - The ancient Near Eastern context
- from Part II - Historical background
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- By Kenton L. Sparks, Eastern University
- Edited by Stephen B. Chapman, Duke University, North Carolina, Marvin A. Sweeney, Claremont School of Theology, California
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
- Published online:
- 05 July 2016
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2016, pp 57-85
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Summary
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeologists began to recover the lost societies of the ancient Near East from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, Persia and the Levant. Many texts were unearthed in these digs, but at first the languages were unknown and the texts could not be read. Scholars managed to decipher the ancient scripts in a relatively short time, thanks to linguistic brilliance and the discovery of two multi-language texts, the Behistun Inscription of Darius (which permitted scholars to decipher the Akkadian script of Mesopotamia) and the Rosetta Stone (which permitted the same for Egyptian hieroglyphs). The feat of decipherment was so great that some of the world's best scholars doubted its accomplishment; these sceptics turned out to be wrong.
The texts from Mesopotamia had the most sensational effects in Europe and America. During the 1870s, scholars published Akkadian literature that was closely connected to the Bible. Some of these texts, which referred to Israel, Judah and their kings, were heralded as proof of the Bible's historicity and accuracy, but other texts created certain problems. Notable in this regard were Enuma Elish, the Gilgamesh Epic and the Sargon Birth Legend, which were, respectively, similar (for many, uncomfortably similar) to the creation story in Genesis, the biblical flood story and the story of Moses’ birth. These texts appeared to undermine the supposed uniqueness of the Bible as the divine word. Some influential scholars began to think of Israel and its Bible as merely one small part of ancient Babylonian culture. Strong tensions soon emerged between the new field of Assyriology, which was discovering and publishing these new texts, and the field of Biblical studies, which was largely influenced by conservative Judaism and Christianity. The tensions persist to this day in some quarters of scholarship.
The ‘pan-Babylonian’ and ‘parallelomania’ approaches tended to assume that every similarity between Israelite and Mesopotamian literature was a result of borrowing from Mesopotamia. For some, this meant that the writers of the Bible were reading and copying Mesopotamian texts, whereas others thought that the Bible reflected a degenerate memory of the more ancient and impressive Mesopotamian tradition. Scholars soon realized, however, that these theories offered deficient accounts of the matter.
2 - Genre Criticism
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- By Kenton L. Sparks, Professor of Biblical Studies, Eastern University
- Edited by Thomas B. Dozeman
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- Book:
- Methods for Exodus
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2010, pp 55-94
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Summary
THE METHODOLOGY OF GENRE CRITICISM
Genre is a loan word from the French that means “kind” or “type.” The term is widely used with reference to human discourse; to inquire about the genre of verbal discourse, whether of a spoken utterance or written text, is to ask about the sort of discourse that it is. Utterances might be “commands,” “questions,” “poems,” or “stories,” just as texts might be “biographies,” “histories,” “letters,” or “newspaper articles.” When we identify verbal discourse using one of these labels, we imply that we know something about how that type of discourse works and that we have the competence to understand it to some degree. If we have this skill as interpreters of literature, scholars would say that we have generic or literary competence. Our objective in the present article is modestly to pursue generic competence as readers of the Bible and, more specifically, as readers of the Book of Exodus. The quest begins with a bit of historical reflection on form criticism, which is the theoretical forerunner of genre criticism.
The Origins and Nature of Form Criticism
It would be accurate to say that prior to the Enlightenment (c. eighteenth cent.), the Bible's genre was foremost understood as “divine word.” By this I do not mean to say that pre-Enlightenment scholars failed to notice that different types of literature were in the Bible; I mean instead that, whatever these other genres were, they were considered secondary to the Bible's status as divine discourse.