The Exegetical Terminology of Akkadian Commentaries

The Exegetical Terminology of Akkadian Commentaries
Author: Uri Gabbay
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2016-06-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004323473

In The Exegetical Terminology of Akkadian Commentaries Uri Gabbay offers the first detailed study of the well-developed set of technical terms found in ancient Mesopotamian commentaries. Understanding the hermeneutical function of these terms is essential for reconstructing the ancient Mesopotamian exegetical tradition. Using the exegetical terminology attested in the large corpus of Akkadian commentaries from the first millennium BCE, the book addresses the hermeneutics of the commentaries, investigates the scholastic environment in which they were composed, and considers the relationship between the terminology of commentaries and the divine authority of the texts they elucidate. The book concludes with a comparative study that traces links between the terminology used in Akkadian commentaries and that used in early Hebrew exegesis.

Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World

Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World
Author: Mladen Popović
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004336915

The essays in this volume originate from the Third Qumran Institute Symposium held at the University of Groningen, December 2013. Taking the flexible concept of “cultural encounter” as a starting point, the essays in this volume bring together a panoply of approaches to the study of various cultural interactions between the people of ancient Israel, Judea, and Palestine and people from other parts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. In order to study how cultural encounters shaped historical development, literary traditions, religious practice and political systems, the contributors employ a broad spectrum of theoretical positions (e.g., hybridity, métissage, frontier studies, postcolonialism, entangled histories and multilingualism), to interpret a diverse set of literary, documentary, archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, and iconographic sources.

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig
Author: John Z Wee
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004417567

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig is intended for specialists in cuneiform studies, and includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, as well as a study on technical notations recurring in these commentaries. Within the Cuneiform Monographs series, this book represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary
Author: John Z Wee
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004417532

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook. In line with commentators’ self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators’ choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoric—supposedly unfettered to any discipline—served in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.

Language and Cosmos in Greece and Mesopotamia

Language and Cosmos in Greece and Mesopotamia
Author: Jacobo Myerston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2023-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009289926

Argues that Greek thinkers engaged with linguistic concepts developed by Mesopotamian scribes in a process leading to new discoveries.

From Scribes to Scholars

From Scribes to Scholars
Author: Yakir Paz
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2022-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 3161616308

Yakir Paz argues that ancient Homeric scholarship had a major impact on the formation of rabbinic biblical commentaries and their modes of exegesis. This impact is discernible not only in the terminology and hermeneutical techniques used by the rabbis, but also in their perception of the Bible as a literary product, their didactic methods, editorial principles and aesthetic sensitivities. In fact, it is the influence of Homeric scholarship which can best explain the drastic differences between earlier biblical commentaries from Palestine, such as those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the scholastic Halakhic Midrashim (second to third century CE). The results of the author's study call for a re-examination of many assumptions regarding the emergence of Midrash, as well as a broader appreciation of the impact of Homeric scholarship on biblical exegesis in Antiquity.

Legal Writing, Legal Practice

Legal Writing, Legal Practice
Author: Yael Landman
Publisher: SBL Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2022-03-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1951498879

Prescriptive law writings rarely mirror the ways a society practices law, a fact that raises special problems for the social and legal historian. Through close analysis of the laws of bailment (i.e., temporary safekeeping) in Exodus 22, Yael Landman probes the relationship of law in the biblical law collections and law-in-practice in ancient Israel and exposes a vision of divine justice at the heart of pentateuchal law. Landman further demonstrates that ancient Near Eastern bailment laws continue to influence postbiblical Jewish law. This book advances an approach to the study of biblical law that connects pentateuchal and ancient Near Eastern law collections, biblical narrative and prophecy, and Mesopotamian legal documents and joins philological and comparative analysis with humanistic legal approaches, in order to access how people thought about and practiced law in ancient Israel.

Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk

Scholars and Scholarship in Late Babylonian Uruk
Author: Christine Proust
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 303004176X

This volume explores how scholars wrote, preserved, circulated, and read knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. It offers an exercise in micro-history that provides a case study for attempting to understand the relationship between scholars and scholarship during this time of great innovation. The papers in this collection focus on tablets written in the city of Uruk in southern Babylonia. These archives come from two different scholarly contexts. One is a private residence inhabited during successive phases by two families of priests who were experts in ritual and medicine. The other is the most important temple in Uruk during the late Achemenid and Hellenistic periods. The contributors undertake detailed studies of this material to explore the scholarly practices of individuals, the connection between different scholarly genres, and the exchange of knowledge between scholars in the city and scholars in other parts of Babylonia and the Greek world. In addition, this collection examines the archives in which the texts were found and the scribes who owned or wrote them. It also considers the interconnections between different genres of knowledge and the range of activities of individual scribes. In doing so, it answers questions of interest not only for the study of Babylonian scholarship but also for the study of ancient Mesopotamian textual culture more generally, and for the study of traditions of written knowledge in the ancient world.

Mathematical Commentaries in the Ancient World

Mathematical Commentaries in the Ancient World
Author: Karine Chemla
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2022-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108839576

Comparative analysis of the techniques and procedures of important mathematical commentaries in five ancient cultures from China to Greece.

Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia

Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia
Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501506579

Babylonian medicine is the most important corpus of ancient medicine prior to the Greeks. This volume provides a comprehensive picture of how gasrtrointestinal illness, jaundice and related fevers, as well as diarrhea were treated in ancient Mesopotamia. The editions include transliterations, straightforward translations and essential commentary, and are divided into three main sections: the standard corpus for the treatment of gastrointestinal illness in Royal Library in Nineveh (otherwise known as the sualu subcorpus), the related group of texts that attribute intestinal disturbances to malevolent ghosts and a third group of texts focused on diarrhea. In addition to the standard compendia, isolated precursor texts, which were incorporated into these compendia, are included here in appendices. This volume provides an overarching picture of the entire field of gastrointestinal illnesses and related conditions in ancient Mesopotamia.