Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament

Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible

Walton, John H.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493414369
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Studies

Leading evangelical scholar John Walton surveys the cultural context of the ancient Near East, bringing insight to the interpretation of specific Old Testament passages. This new edition of a top-selling textbook has been thoroughly updated and revised throughout to reflect the refined thinking of a mature scholar. It includes over 30 illustrations. Students and pastors who want to deepen their understanding of the Old Testament will find this a helpful and instructive study.

Part 1: Comparative Studies

1
History and Methods

History

The rediscovery of Egypt began in earnest in the eighteenth century AD and of Mesopotamia in the mid-nineteenth century AD. With the decipherment of the ancient languages, the tens of thousands of texts that were being unearthed began to be translated and analyzed. Today the number of texts exceeds one million. In many cases the motives of the adventurers and scholars represented a strange combination of politics, interest in antiquities (or treasures), and biblical apologetics. Initial studies were inclined to be defensive of the Bible, even if such a stance required the dismissal or distortion of the cuneiform texts. The flurry of activity in connection with the relationship of these texts to the Bible had reached a critical mass of sorts by the turn of the twentieth century; and, consequently, widespread attention was attracted by the series of lectures presented in 1902 under the auspices of the German Oriental Society and attended by Kaiser Wilhelm II. What the Scopes trial was to the discussion of evolution, these lectures were to comparative studies. The lecturer was the noted Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch, son of the famous conservative biblical commentator, Franz Delitzsch.

Delitzsch’s lectures, titled “Babel und Bibel,” brought a more focused attention to the impact of Assyriology on the understanding of the Bible. More controversial, however, was his claim that the literature of the Bible was dependent on, and even borrowed from, the literature of the dominant culture represented in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. His contention was: “The Mesopotamian evidence shows us not just parallels to Old Testament customs and ideas, but genuine evidence regarding their origin.”1 The logical conclusion would therefore be that the origin of the Old Testament was human, not divine, and that the Christian faith therefore had its roots in pagan mythology. Two more lectures elaborating on this thesis came over the next two years. In the second, more objectionable than the first, he questioned the appropriateness of the traditional theological terminology used to describe the Bible (e.g., revelation, inspiration) in light of its putatively evident dependence. As H. Huffmon observes, “Delitzsch had moved from Babylonia as interpreter and illustrator of the Old Testament to a general attack on the religious value of the Old Testament for the modern German.”2 At this time, many Assyriologists were people of faith, with the result that Delitzsch was criticized vehemently in their written responses to his lectures. Over the following decades, however, as Assyriology became increasingly secular and its scholars, if concerned with the Bible at all, had embraced the tenets of critical scholarship, Delitzsch’s lectures became recognized as a watershed in comparative studies.

The result was a growing ideological divide between those who viewed comparative studies from a confessional standpoint, seeking to use Assyriology in their apologetics, and those who viewed it from a scientific or secular standpoint, seeing the Bible as a latecomer in world literature filled with what were little more than adaptations from the mythology of the ancient Near East. Critical scholars considered their opponents naive traditionalists. Confessional scholars considered their opponents godless heretics.3 As evidence emerged that did not fit easily with a desire to vindicate the Bible, the critics became more strident, and many came to agree with Delitzsch’s contention that “the Old Testament was no book of Christian religion and should be excluded from Christian theology.”4 In response, confessional scholars became more entrenched and defensive. The cycle of division drove its wedges deeper and deeper.

The space of over a century allows current scholars to recognize that Delitzsch’s lectures were not motivated solely by a sense of scientific objectivity. He was a child of his culture as we all are, and his obvious nationalism can now be seen to have been encumbered with not only anti-Christian but also anti-Semitic sentiment.5 Huffmon summarizes the regression well: “In dealing with Assyriological matters, as Delitzsch did in his first two lectures, he combined scholarship with special pleading; in dealing with Old Testament materials, Delitzsch mixed learning with considerable naiveté; in dealing with the New Testament, or, more specifically Jesus, Delitzsch displayed naiveté and perfidy.”6

Delitzsch’s work spawned a movement, never widely popular but remarkable for its excesses, called “Pan-Babylonianism,” which argued that all world myths and all Christian Scriptures (Old and New Testament alike) were simply versions of Babylonian mythology. For instance, the stories of Jesus in the Gospels were based on the Gilgamesh Epic, and the passion of Christ was based on Marduk mythology.7

Even as Assyriology and Egyptology (and also Hittitology) emerged as serious, autonomous, academic disciplines, the attention of many remained focused on the Bible. As discoveries of major archives followed one after another from the 1920s to the 1970s, each was greeted with initial excitement as scholars made great claims for the impact of the archive on the Bible. In most cases, time and more careful attention resulted in many, if not all, of the initial claims being rejected. Methodological maturity began to be displayed in the careful work of W. W. Hallo, who promoted a balanced approach called the “contextual approach,” which seeks to identify and discuss both similarities and differences that can be observed between the Bible and the texts from the ancient Near East. “Hallo’s goal, ‘is not to find the key to every biblical phenomenon in some ancient Near Eastern precedent, but rather to silhouette the biblical text against its wider literary and cultural environment.’ Thus we must not succumb either to ‘parallelomania’ or to ‘parallelophobia.’”8 It is Hallo’s work that has provided the foundation for the following discussion of methodology.

Methodology

What Is Comparative Study?

Just as it would be foolish to think that all Europeans share the same culture, it would be a mistake to suppose that Babylonians, Hittites, Egyptians, Israelites, and Sumerians all shared the same culture. There would even be noticeable differences between the second-millennium Babylonians of Hammurabi’s time and the first-millennium Babylonians at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. More importantly, caution must be exercised when using both Egypt and the ancient Mesopotamian world for comparison. Egyptian culture is markedly different than others found in the rest of the ancient Near East. Nevertheless, there were some elements that many of the cultures of the ancient Near East held in common with Egyptians, and certainly many areas in which they shared more commonality with one another than they do with our modern culture.

Though we recognize distinct cultural differences across time and place, the commonalities warrant our attention. To think about how these ancient commonalities need to be differentiated from our modern ways of thinking, we can use the metaphor of a cultural river, where the currents represent ideas and conventional ways of thinking. Among the currents in our modern cultural context we would find fundamentals such as rights, privacy, freedom, capitalism, consumerism, democracy, individualism, globalism, social media, market economy, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. As familiar as these are to us, such ways of thinking were unknown in the ancient world. Conversely, the ancient cultural river had among their shared ideas currents that are totally foreign to us. Included in the list we would find fundamental concepts such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, and the reality of the spirit world and magic. It is not easy for us to grasp their shape or rationale, and we often find their expression in texts impenetrable.

In today’s world people may find that they dislike some of the currents in our cultural river and wish to resist them. Such resistance is not easy, but even when we might occasionally succeed, we are still in the cultural river—even though we may be swimming upstream rather than floating comfortably on the currents.

This was also true in the ancient world. When we read the Old Testament, we may find reason to believe that the Israelites were supposed to resist some of the currents in their cultural river. Be that as it may (and the nuances are not always easy to work with), they remain in that ancient cultural river. We dare not allow ourselves to think that just because the Israelites believed themselves to be distinctive among their neighbors that they thought in the terms of our cultural river (including the dimensions of our theology). We need to read the Old Testament in the context of its own cultural river. We cannot afford to read instinctively because that only results in reading the text through our own cultural lenses. No one reads the Bible free of cultural bias, but we seek to replace our cultural lenses with theirs. Sometimes the best we can do is recognize that we have cultural lenses and try to take them off even if we cannot reconstruct ancient lenses.

When we consider similarities and differences between the ancient cultural river and our own, we must be alert to the dangers of maintaining an elevated view of our own superiority or sophistication as a contrast to the naïveté or primitiveness of others. Identification of differences should not imply ancient inferiority. Our rationality may not be their rationality, but that does not mean that they were irrational.9 Their ways of thinking should not be thought of as primitive or prehistorical. We seek to understand their texts and culture, not to make value judgments on them.

Ultimately the goal of background studies is to examine the literature and archaeology of the ancient Near East in order to reconstruct the behavior, beliefs, culture, values, and worldview of the people—that is, to explore the dimensions and nature of the ancient cultural river. These could alternatively be called cultural studies. Comparative studies constitutes a branch of cultural studies in that it attempts to draw data from different segments of the broader culture (in time and/or space) into juxtaposition with one another in order to assess what might be learned from one to enhance the understanding of another. The range of this understanding can include behavior and belief within the culture or the ways in which a culture is represented in art or literature. Within the literary category, areas for research include the larger issues of literary genre, the analysis of specific traditions and texts, and the use of individual metaphors, idioms, and words.

Development of Sound Methodology for Comparative Study

As one can infer from the history related at the beginning of the chapter, early practitioners were distracted from this larger task by curiosity or by axes to grind. Whether defending or critiquing the Bible or defending the ancient Near East, some scholars became enmeshed in using cultural and comparative studies as a means to a polemical end. As is often the case in polemics of any stripe, techniques such as selectivity and special pleading can create distortion. This polemical application resulted in the abuse of comparative studies from scholars at either end of the spectrum. Consequently some confessional scholars concluded that comparative studies posed a danger to the biblical text when they saw it wielded as a weapon of skepticism and unbelief. At the same time some critical scholars openly ridiculed what they saw as feeble attempts by apologists to use comparative studies to prove that the Bible was true.

It took some generations for correctives to be put in place that served to establish an app...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Special Material
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Comparative Studies
• Part 2: Literature of the Ancient Near East
• Part 3: Religion
• Part 4: Cosmos
• Part 5: People
• Concluding Remarks
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Foreign Words Index
• Modern Author Index
• Ancient Literature Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover