Introducing the Old Testament

Fourth Edition

John Drane

• Publisher: Lion Scholar
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912552146
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Continuously in print for over 30 years, and available in many different languages, John Drane's Introducing the Old Testament has long been recognized as an authoritative and accessible survey of the subject.

This new edition has been fully revised and updated with fresh material on a range of topics, especially the political and cultural context that influenced the compilation of its books and the development of the faith of ancient Israel and Judah. Specific issues that will be of particular interest to students are highlighted in special boxed feature sections, along with an extensive glossary of technical terms and key maps and diagrams. This book is the ideal starting point for readers who wish to explore the Old Testament and its world in the light of recent scholarship, and its relevance to life in the twenty-first century.

PART 1

NATIONS AND PEOPLES

CHAPTER 1

ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

The Hebrew Bible is, as its name suggests, mostly concerned with the history of the ancient Hebrew and Israelite people. But in its opening pages (Genesis 1–11), it invites its readers into a different world altogether, with a narrative that goes even further back in time than the start of Israelite history – to the very beginning of all things, with the story of creation and of humankind’s earliest ancestors. The way these stories are told can be traced back to the world of ancient Mesopotamia. The term ‘Mesopotamia’ literally means ‘between the rivers’, and is a reference to the rivers Tigris and Euphrates which begin in the mountains of Turkey and then wind their way south through various countries of what is now referred to as the Middle East, before emerging into the Persian Gulf. The ancient inhabitants of this region never referred to their homeland by that name, and first to use it appear to have been Greek historians towards the end of the Old Testament period, referring to an area that includes land now located in Iraq and Iran, along with parts of Syria and Turkey. If any part of the world can be regarded as the birthplace of civilization, this region has more of a claim than most. As far as anyone can tell, there were no towns or villages anywhere in the world before about 9000 BC (the start of the Neolithic or New Stone Age), but some of the earliest settlements ever known were located here in Mesopotamia where genuinely urban communities were starting to develop in the form of localized city-states from about 3500 BC. The first evidence of real writing also comes from this period, as city administrators developed new ways of keeping track of their citizens.

Digging up the past

Knowledge of the earliest period of Mesopotamian history is largely dependent on the findings of archaeologists, though much of the primary evidence is no longer readily accessible. The invasion of Iraq at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to the destruction of many of the surviving sites along with the disappearance of large numbers of artefacts that had been preserved in museums in the area – as well as curtailing further investigations that would no doubt have shed more light on the earliest inhabitants of this region, whose customs and lifestyles exerted an influence that has extended well beyond their own time and place.

Tourists and archaeologists

The existence of ancient remains in these lands had been known long before the development of formal methods of investigation. From the Middle Ages onwards, rich Europeans had developed an interest in countries that not only had a longer history than their own, but which also seemed to belong to an entirely different world that was all the more fascinating because of its apparently mysterious and mystical past. Such affluent visitors regularly went back home with souvenirs that they had collected along the way. Stone carvings, inscriptions, and jewellery found their way into the rich houses and castles of Europe during this period and ancient artworks that could stand by the fireplace were a highly desirable status symbol in upper-class European homes, resulting in a steady stream of treasure hunters who ransacked the area of ancient Mesopotamia during this time. In the early eighteenth century scholars were beginning to take a more systematic approach to the understanding of these antiquities, though it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that rigorous procedures began to be applied to investigating the sites of ancient cities.

A typical ancient site in this region often takes the form of a large mound, or tell. On the surface it might appear to be just a big hill covered with trees or grass, but buried deep inside a tell will be the remains of an ancient city. Settlements were often built on a natural promontory to provide a good view of the surrounding countryside in the face of potential invaders, though that was not universally the case and many of these tells actually started at ground level, and have been raised to their present height by the normal processes of building over many years. In the ancient world most buildings were made of mud and wood, and when a place fell into decay the inhabitants would gather together any available materials that could be recycled and then set to work building their own new town on the ruins of the old. Inevitably, the new level would always be higher than the one that preceded it, so that over time the ground level was gradually raised. If it were possible to take an x-ray image of one of these mounds it would look a bit like a giant gateau with many different layers superimposed one on top of the other. To make the most sense out of what is contained in a site like this it is important to keep the contents of the various layers separate from one another. If the remains of one city were to become jumbled up with debris from another that would give a very misleading picture, because each layer represents the remains of a different settlement that might easily have been separated from the others by several hundreds of years. In theory, the ideal way to accomplish this would be to start at the top and slice off the entirety of each layer in turn, though that would never have been a practical possibility because of the amount of time (and therefore cost) that would be involved. As a way around that, archaeologists have developed a compromise that involves cutting into a mound in much the same way as a slice might be cut from a cake, in a process known as ‘stratigraphic excavation’. This technique makes it possible to uncover a cross-section of the entire contents of a mound at the particular point where the excavation takes place, though to be worthwhile it requires a careful judgment by the archaeologists as to where might be the best place to start digging.

Dates and provenance

A typical excavation will usually unearth more pottery than anything else. Being in widespread everyday use, and easy to break, there will always be a lot of it, and because it is also virtually impossible to destroy completely even the tiniest fragments can yield valuable information about the time when it was made and the use to which it was put. Fashions in pottery changed with remarkable frequency and varied from one place to another. While some styles were in use for longer than others, fashions in size, shape, texture, and decoration generally lasted for a limited period, which means that when the same types are discovered at several different locations it is reasonable to conclude that the layers in which they are found were occupied at about the same time. This has become one of the main methods by which dates are assigned to objects that may be found in any particular site. After examining pottery styles that were excavated across many different locations, archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) came up with a ‘Ceramic Index’, consisting of a catalogue of typical pottery types which could be accurately dated, and since his day it has been refined with such accuracy that it is possible to assign very precise dates to a particular layer of almost any excavation by reference to the type of pottery that is found there.

From hunter-gatherers to city-dwellers

A significant point in the emergence of urban environments was the development of agriculture. Prior to that, the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer meant that people collected whatever food was to be found in their local environment, and then when the supply was exhausted they moved on. This particular region was always blessed with rich resources of wild cereals, nuts, and fruits, along with a plentiful supply of fish and meat, and there is no obvious explanation for the move into more settled communities where crops could be cultivated and animals domesticated. Indeed, some evidence indicates that the earliest agriculturalists may well have had a harder life than their hunter-gatherer forebears, so presumably the move to a less nomadic lifestyle did not happen in direct response to any particular issues of environment or food supply but rather came about through greater social awareness and a preference for life in more diverse groups of people. This was of course a shift that took place over a long period of time, with evidence of increasing urbanization between 9000 and 7000 BC in those areas where the natural climate made agriculture relatively straightforward. But it was only a matter of time before artificially constructed irrigation systems began to appear in the form of canals that drew water from the major rivers and distributed it through an elaborate system of trenches and pipes into the fields, thereby enabling crops to be cultivated on land that might otherwise have been unproductive.

Interpreting the evidence

On the basis of archaeological remains, it is conventional to identify several cultural developments in the period from 7000 to about 3500 BC, each of them being named for the sites where their settlements have been found: the Hassuna/Samarra period, followed by the Halaf period (roughly 6500–5500 BC), which in turn was succeeded by the Ubaid period (5500–4000 BC). Evidence for the first two comes from the northern extremities of Mesopotamia (Halaf takes its name from Tell Halaf in north-eastern Syria), and is characterized by distinctive pottery designs, as well as the development of private housing in the villages and, in at least one place, the remains of something approximating to streets. There is also extensive evidence of highly skilled craft workers making jewellery in this period and using materials that were not local – something that suggests that these individual communities were not isolated, but were developing significant trading relationships with other people, which must also have entailed the emergence of recognized routes by which it was possible to travel from one place to another.

The Ubaid people were based in southern Mesopotamia, and developed communal living into a more complex pattern with the establishment of larger cities. Two of these – Ur and Uruk – feature in the Bible narratives. Ur is identified as the original home of Abraham and his family (Genesis 11:28–32), while Uruk (called Erech in the Old Testament) is listed as one of the places associated with ‘a mighty hunter’ named Nimrod in Genesis 10:9, and also features in stories from many centuries later (Ezra 4:9). Excavations at Uruk suggest that the population there might have been as many as 10,000 by about 3200 BC. The varied shapes and sizes of buildings in this culture indicate the development of a stratified society, with the emergence of ruling bureaucrats who controlled the community’s resources and who were responsible for the organization of a substantial labour force that contributed to the growing prosperity of the region. By the end of this period there is evidence not only of an increasingly complex system of trade, but also the construction of buildings that appear to have had religious as well as commercial use in mind. The site of Tepe Gawra in the north has several temple buildings alongside each other, suggesting that many divinities were recognized there, while a seal discovered in the remains of a house also provides the earliest evidence of beer drinking ever to be uncovered anywhere in the world. In the south, the city of Eridu, just to the south-west of Ur, had a particularly important temple that came to be associated with a deity later known as Enki or Ea. In line with the customary use of temples at a slightly later date, it is likely that such buildings had a commercial as well as a narrowly religious purpose, serving as warehouses and marketplaces as well as places of worship – something that was replicated in the construction of the temple in Jerusalem that plays such a big part in the later Old Testament story. Large numbers of fish bones have been unearthed in some parts of the Eridu temple, suggesting that they may be the remains of sacrificial offerings left there for the deities. The city itself was subsequently named as one of five cities to be established before an extensive flood occurred in the area, something that is reported and reflected upon in many ancient sources, including the book of Genesis (6:1 – 9:29).

New ways of organizing

The period between about 3500 and 2700 BC saw some significant developments in human interaction and culture, and has often been called the proto-literate period because it was at this time that the first evidence of anything like writing started to appear. It also marked the emergence of the first communities that might reasonably be regarded as a state, as distinct from the self-contained local settlements of the earlier period. Our knowledge of this era is still largely derived from discoveries at particular sites, and Uruk in particular has provided so much information about city life at this time that the early years of the period are regularly referred to simply as the Uruk period. Such evidence as there is for cities further to the north seems to suggest that life continued more or less as it had been previously. Various theories have been advanced to try and explain why this development started in the south, but the most likely factor was probably related to the physical environment. The city of Uruk was located right at the point where the rivers run into the Persian Gulf, providing the opportunity for the development of a wide variety of agricultural lifestyles – fishing in the marshes and hunting in the surrounding countryside – while the proximity of a ready supply of fresh water flowing into the sea made the irrigation of crop growing areas relatively straightforward. Moreover, the need for all these different activities to integrate with one another led to the emergence of new relational networks between workers, and opportunities for even greater collaboration in the development of an urban lifestyle. One of the other features of life in this environment is marked by the discovery of large quantities of everyday pottery that was made in a mould or on a potter’s wheel, as distinct from the specialized hand-made pieces of a previous era – one of the earliest examples of mass production, which in turn offers a further indication of a fast-growing population in which employment was becoming increasingly specialized as one section of the workforce supplied another with their own distinctive products.

Collaborating and trading

In earlier times each family will most likely have been capable of producing all the goods it needed, whether that was food, clothing, shelter, or tools. But as soon as workers’ skills became more narrowly focused the exchange of one’s own goods for other necessities of life became an indispensable part of life, and for that to work fairly the development of formal structures and systems was inevitable. The temples played an important part in this, and an alabaster vessel of the period shows goods being carried into a temple where they were symbolically given into the care of the gods, whose responsibility it would then be to ensure their fair distribution. All this in turn required the development of other new skills in counting and measuring, and then some way of recording what had been received – requirements that in turn brought into being other specialized jobs for those who were able to create the systems that would facilitate the accomplishment of all these tasks. The region itself offered a ready supply of natural materials that could support the development of writing and record keeping, in the form of mud that was easy to shape into portable tablets which could be inscribed while still soft, and then left to bake hard in the heat of the sun. Even bef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Nations and Peoples
• Part 2: The Books and the Stories
• Part 3: The Faith Behind the Story
• Other resources on the Old Testament
• Glossary
• Index