Search results for ""Pennsylvania State University Press""

One of America’s great rock and roll pioneers, Richie Furay played alongside Neil Young and Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield, producing some of the signature sounds of American folk rock. He went on to form Poco, one of the bands that founded California country rock, and then Souther-Hillman-Furay. After declaring himself a Christian in 1974, Furay released four solo albums before taking up the ministry in 1983. He began recording again in 1997, and over the next twenty-five years he released two Christian and five secular albums.In this biography of Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Richie Furay, Thomas Kitts provides an intimate look at Furay’s life and music. Kitts chronicles the musician’s upbringing, his musical career, and his Christianity, drawing on interviews with Furay and others close to him. In documenting Furay’s extraordinary talent as a songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist, Kitts argues that although he never attained the level of stardom of many of his bandmates, Furay is a pivotal figure in American popular music.Fans of Buffalo Springfield, Poco, and country-rock music will enjoy this quintessentially American story of a young man on a quest to fulfill his rock-and-roll dreams.

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Mr. Ito’s children act as his informal translators, but his doctor isn’t sure their translations are accurate or complete. Is Mr. Ito getting the medical information he needs?Ten-year-old Hannah arrives for her checkup with a bruised nose and an irritable father. Medical student Melanie is concerned for Hannah’s safety but wary of making accusations without evidence.Dr. Joshi worries that her patient is putting her husband, who is also Dr. Joshi’s patient, at risk by concealing a sexually transmitted disease. How can she act in the interest of both husband and wife without compromising doctor-patient confidentiality?Using the accessible and richly layered medium of comics, this collection reveals how ethical dilemmas in medical practice play out in real life. Designed for the classroom, Clinical Ethics provides an excellent introduction to medical ethics and presents case studies that will spark meaningful discussions among students and practitioners. The topics covered include patient autonomy, informed consent, unconscious bias, mandated reporting, confidentiality, medical mistakes, surrogate decision-making, and futility. The “Questions for Further Reflection” and “Related Readings” sections provide additional materials for a deeper exploration of the issues.Co-created by experts in clinical medicine, ethics, literature, and comics, Clinical Ethics presents a new way for students and practitioners to engage with fundamental concerns in medical ethics.

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One of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran.The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste.An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.

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The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

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This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values.Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science.Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.

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Montague Rhodes James authored some of the most highly regarded ghost stories of all time—classics such as “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” that have been adapted many times over for radio and television and have never gone out of print. But while James is best known as a fiction writer and storyteller, he was also a provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and a legendary and influential scholar whose pioneering work in the study of biblical texts and medieval manuscripts, art, and architecture is still relevant today.In Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Patrick J. Murphy argues that these twin careers are inextricably linked. James’s research not only informed his fiction but also reflected his anxieties about the nature of academic life and explored the delicate divide between professional, university men and erratic hobbyists or antiquaries. Murphy shows how detailed attention to the scholarly inspirations behind James’s fiction provides considerable insight into a formative moment in medieval studies, as well as into James’s methods as a master stylist of understated horror.During his life, James often claimed that his stories were mere entertainments—pleasing distractions from a life largely defined by academic discipline and restraint—and readers over the years have been content to take him at his word. This intriguing volume, however, convincingly proves otherwise.

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This is the third and last volume of the only complete and fully reliable English-language version of the memoirs of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In the first two volumes, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2005 and 2006, respectively, Khrushchev tells the story of his rise to power and his part in the fight against Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He also discusses agriculture, the housing problem, and other issues of domestic policy, as well as defense and disarmament. This volume is devoted to international affairs. Khrushchev describes his dealings with foreign statesmen and his state visits to Britain, the United States, France, Scandinavia, India, Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and Indonesia. In the first part, Khrushchev talks about relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. Of particular interest is his perspective on the Berlin, U-2, and Cuban missile crises. The second part focuses on the Communist world—above all, the deterioration of relations with China and the tensions in Eastern Europe, including relations with Tito’s Yugoslavia, Gomulka’s Poland, and the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary. In the third part, Khrushchev discusses the search for allies in the Third World. The Appendixes contain biographies, a bibliography, and a chronology, as well as the reminiscences of Khrushchev’s chief bodyguard about the visit to the United Nations in 1960 at which the famous “shoe-banging” incident occurred—or, perhaps, did not occur.

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Studies the reconstruction of Byzantine Constantinople as the capital city of the Ottoman empire following its capture in 1453, delineating the complex interplay of socio-political, architectural, visual, and literary processes that underlay the city's transformation.

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Continuing his quest to bring American philosophy back to its roots, Bruce Wilshire connects the work of such thinkers as Thoreau, Emerson, Dewey, and James with Native American beliefs and practices. His search is not for exact parallels, but rather for fundamental affinities between the equally "organismic" thought systems of indigenous peoples and classic American philosophers.Wilshire gives particular emphasis to the affinities between Black Elk’s view of the hoop of the world and Emerson’s notion of horizon, and also between a shaman’s healing practices and James’s ideas of pure experience, willingness to believe, and a pluralistic universe. As these connections come into focus, the book shows how European phenomenology was inspired and influenced by the classic American philosophers, whose own work reveals the inspiration and influence of indigenous thought.Wilshire’s book also reveals how artificial are the walls that separate the sciences and the humanities in academia, and that separate Continental from Anglo-American thought within the single discipline of philosophy.

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Archaeological exploration in the Central Highlands of the Southern Levant conducted during the 1970s and 1980s dramatically transformed the scholarly understanding of the early Iron Age and led to the publication of From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel, by Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na’aman. This volume explores and reassesses the legacy of that foundational text. Using current theoretical frameworks and taking into account new excavation data and methodologies from the natural sciences, the seventeen essays in this volume examine the archaeology of the Southern Levant during the early Iron Age and the ways in which the period may be reflected in biblical accounts. The variety of methodologies employed and the historical narratives presented within these contributions illuminate the multifaceted nature of contemporary research on this formative period.Building upon Finkelstein and Na’aman’s seminal study, this work provides an essential update. It will be welcomed by ancient historians, scholars of early Israel and the early Iron Age Southern Levant, and biblical scholars. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Eran Arie, Erez Ben-Yosef, Cynthia Edenburg, Israel Finkelstein, Yuval Gadot, Assaf Kleiman, Gunnar Lehmann, Defna Langgut, Aren M. Maeir, Nadav Na’aman, Thomas Römer, Lidar Sapir-Hen, Katja Soennecken, Dieter Vieweger, Ido Wachtel, and Naama Yahalom-Mack.

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The present volume collects eighteen essays exploring the history of ancient Near Eastern studies. Combining diverse approaches—synthetic and analytic, diachronic and transnational—this collection offers critical reflections on the who, why, and how of this cluster of fields. How have political contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests? How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured, and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East? Contributions treating research during the Nazi and fascist periods examine the interpenetration of academic work with politics, while contributions dealing with specific national contexts disclose fresh perspectives on individual scholars as well as the conditions and institutions in which they worked. Particular attention is given to scholarship in countries such as Turkey, Portugal, Iran, China, and Spain, which have hitherto been marginal to historiographic accounts of ancient Near Eastern studies.In addition to the editors, the contributors are Selim Ferru Adali, Silvia Alaura, Isabel Almeida, Petr Charvát, Parsa Daneshmand, Eva von Dassow, Hakan Erol, Sebastian Fink, Jakob Flygare, Pietro Giammellaro, Carlos Gonçalves, Katrien de Graef, Steven W. Holloway, Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, Changyu Liu, Patrick Maxime Michel, Emanuel Pfoh, Jitka Sýkorová, Luděk Vacín, and Jordi Vidal.

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Appropriate for beginning and advanced students of Biblical Hebrew, this easy-to-use reference provides a concise summary of basic grammar concepts in an accessible format. Condensed into a six-page trifold format, the Biblical Hebrew Grammar Card neatly presents topics such as prefixes, nouns, adjectives, and suffixes, as well as numbers, weights, and measures. The verb charts are straightforward and comprehensive, with hundreds of examples organized according to stem, tense, and root.

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Based on Daniel C. Snell’s original workbook and informed by his decades of teaching, this new and improved textbook provides an introductory course in basic cuneiform signs. Using a method of repetition that asks the student to actively produce the signs as well as passively read them, it efficiently teaches more than one hundred basic signs in their Neo-Assyrian forms, all of which have been chosen for their recurrence and usefulness to the student. The workbook includes instructions and drills, frequent quizzes to reinforce retention, and notes that both provide context about the ancient cultures that used cuneiform and introduce modern scholarly conventions.Designed for beginning students of cuneiform languages and cultures, A New Workbook of Cuneiform Signs is an easy and intuitive way to learn cuneiform. It is a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

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Do shifts in material culture instigate administrative change, or is it the shifting political winds that affect material culture? This is the central question that Shlomit Bechar addresses in this book, taking the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (seventeenth–fourteenth centuries BCE) in northern Canaan as a test case.Combining archaeological and historical analysis, Bechar identifies the most significant changes evident in architectural and ceramic remains from this period and then explores how and why contemporary political shifts may have influenced, or been influenced by, these developments. Bechar persuasively argues that the Egyptian conquest of the southern Levant—enabled by local economic decline following the expulsion of the Hyksos and the fall of northern Syrian cities—was the impetus for these changes in ceramics and architecture. Using a macro-typological approach to examine the ceramic assemblages, she also discusses the impact of the influx of Aegean imports, suggesting that while “attached specialists” were primarily responsible for ceramic production in the Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age ceramics were increasingly made by “independent specialists,” another important result of the new administrative system created following Thutmose III’s campaign.An important contribution to our understanding of the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, this original and insightful book will appeal to specialists in the Bronze Age Levant, especially those interested in using ceramic assemblages to examine social and political change.

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This book publishes 323 handcopies of cuneiform tablets found in the academic papers of W. G. Lambert (1926–2011), one of the foremost Assyriologists of the twentieth century. Prepared by A. R. George and Junko Taniguchi, it completes a two-part edition of Lambert’s previously unpublished handcopies.Written by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes in ancient Mesopotamia, the texts collected here are organized by genre and presented with a descriptive catalogue and indexes. The contents include omen literature, divinatory rituals, religious texts, a scribal parody of Babylonian scholarship, theological and religious texts, lexical lists, god lists, and a small group of miscellaneous texts of various genres. The tablets are mainly from the British Museum, but some come from museums in Baghdad, Berlin, Chicago, Geneva, Istanbul, Jerusalem, New Haven, Oxford, Paris, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington. In addition, there are copies of eight tablets whose current whereabouts are unknown.This third collection of Lambert’s handcopies published by Eisenbrauns—following Babylonian Creation Myths and Cuneiform Texts from the Folios of W. G. Lambert, Part One—is a crucial part of the intellectual history of the field of Assyriology. In addition, many of these texts are published herein for the first time, making them a valuable and important resource for further study.

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It is generally accepted that Revelation’s heavenly scenes were intended to demonstrate that God continued to exercise his control even when the audience’s experience might suggest otherwise. In The Abyss in Revelation, Edward Gudeman argues that even though the scenes of the underworld and its inhabitants are describing reality from the opposite perspective, they declare God’s sovereignty and power in an equally powerful way.Examining the motif and imagery of the abyss and the sea in Old Testament, New Testament, Greco-Roman, and Second Temple Jewish writings, Gudeman identifies traditions that John appropriates in Revelation in order to create his unique vision of the abyss. Gudeman shows that the abyss and related concepts in Revelation are variously envisioned as the abode of evil creatures, the place from which they exit, and a prison that holds them captive. In all of this, John consistently demonstrates that God is in control of the activity of Satan and demonic beings and that their destruction is both planned and certain.Original and convincing, this volume sheds light on Revelation’s message about how God responds to evil and advances our understanding of several interpretive problems related to the abyss and its inhabitants. Biblical scholars especially will benefit from Gudeman’s research.

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The past fifty years have seen a strong interest in the shape and the message of the book of Psalms. In A Voice Without End, Andrew C. Witt evaluates the significance of Psalms 3–14, and in particular, the presence and function of the figure of David. Using representative interpreters and canonical and literary approaches, Witt uncovers how the book of Psalms develops its own speaking personae. He argues that the introduction to the book in Psalms 1–2 and the association with David in the superscriptions set up the figure of David as the principal voice within Psalms 3–14, constructing a Davidic persona who can speak as an ideal and representative figure, as well as a typological figure, in expectation of the establishment of a just kingdom in the context of the Davidic promises. In addition to its original analysis of Psalms 3–14, this study contributes to Psalms research by sharpening our understanding of the Davidic voice and by showing that key themes and motifs at the seams of the Psalter and in its thematic center are already active and engaged at the very beginning. Further, it helps to bridge premodern and modern psalm interpreters by demonstrating the ongoing value of premodern conceptual models for analyzing voices in the text.Pathbreaking and eminently readable, this book changes both the way we read the Psalter and how we understand its relationship with David. It will appeal to biblical studies scholars and seminarians.

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While she battles her own demons during the day, Indigo’s nights are haunted by something much darker. Everyone else may be enjoying the summer, but Indigo’s life isn’t going so well. Her dad’s marriage just ended in a very public divorce, and now he’s drinking again. Indy barely graduated from high school, she just lost her job, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. The stress is causing her nightmarish sleep paralysis—or so she thinks. Indy confides in her best friend, Kasia, who blames “The Mare” for her troubles—the spirit of someone wronged that saps its victim’s energy at night. It sounds crazy to Indy, but is it? Steeped in the nostalgia of lazy summers and mixtapes, concert tickets and coffee, The Mare is a story about friends, family, and finding one’s way—with a touch of the supernatural and a powerful, surprising twist.

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Marriage doesn’t define a relationship. Unless you want it to.In Marry Me a Little, Rob Kirby recounts his experience of marrying his longtime partner, John, just after same-sex marriage was legalized in Minnesota in 2013, and two years before the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage the law of the land. This is a personal story—about Rob’s ambivalence (if not antipathy) toward the institution of marriage, his loving relationship with John, and the life that they share together—set against the historical and political backdrop of shifting attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights and marriage. With humor, candor, and a near-whimsical drawing style, Rob relates how he and John navigated this changing landscape, how they planned and celebrated their wedding, and how the LGBTQ+ community is now facing the very real possibility of setbacks to marriage equality.Heartwarming, honest, and slyly humorous, Marry Me a Little is a wonderfully illustrated celebration of a romantic partnership between two men and a personal account of a momentous and historic moment in the fight for gay rights.

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Gila, 26, was at a party when the police showed up. The men were able to get away with bribes, but the women were taken to the station, and anyone who’d been drinking was forced to submit to a virginity test. She never went to another party after that.Zeinab is 20 and she loves being a woman in Iran. She says that she feels like a queen! And despite all the risks, she confesses that she makes love with her boyfriend because the danger excites her.Vahid is 26. He was a leader with the Green Movement. Then he watched his friend Neda die right in front of him. Now he keeps his head down, trying to finish his studies.In a series of vignettes based on clandestine interviews, this award-winning graphic novel explores the politics and love lives of ten young Iranian men and women from diverse backgrounds. The result is an honest portrait of Iranian youth today and a rare glimpse into a society where the sexes are strictly segregated—and Western journalists aren’t welcome. Through testimonies from across the country, we learn about traditional marriages, the pressures of living under the regime, and how young people escape the police and defy tradition to live their love stories.

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In antiquity, “son of god”—meaning a ruler designated by the gods to carry out their will—was a title used by the Roman emperor Augustus and his successors as a way to reinforce their divinely appointed status. But this title was also used by early Christians to speak about Jesus, borrowing the idiom from Israelite and early Jewish discourses on monarchy. This interdisciplinary volume explores what it means to be God’s son(s) in ancient Jewish and early Christian literature. Through close readings of relevant texts from multiple ancient corpora, including the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greco-Roman texts and inscriptions, early Christian and Islamic texts, and apocalyptic literature, the chapters in this volume engage a range of issues including messianism, deification, eschatological figures, Jesus, interreligious polemics, and the Roman and Jewish backgrounds of early Christianity and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The essays in this collection demonstrate that divine sonship is an ideal prism through which to better understand the deep interrelationship of ancient religions and their politics of kingship and divinity. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Richard Bauckham, Max Botner, George J. Brooke, Jan Joosten, Menahem Kister, Reinhard Kratz, Mateusz Kusio, Michael A. Lyons, Matthew V. Novenson, Michael Peppard, Sarah Whittle, and N. T. Wright.

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In Western tradition, St. George is known as the dragon slayer. In the Middle East, he is called Khidr (“Green One”), and in addition to being a dragon slayer, he is also somehow the prophet Elijah. In this book, Robert D. Miller II untangles these complicated connections and reveals how, especially in his Middle Eastern guise, St. George is a reincarnation of the Canaanite storm god Baal, another “Green One” who in Ugaritic texts slays dragons.Combining art history, theology, and archeology, this multidisciplinary study demystifies the identity of St. George in his various incarnations, laying bare the processes by which these identifications merged and diverged. Miller traces the origins of this figure in Arabic and Latin texts and explores the possibility that Middle Eastern shrines to St. George lie on top of ancient shrines of the Canaanite storm god Baal. Miller examines these holy places, particularly in modern Israel and around Mount Hermon on the Syrian-Lebanese-Israeli border, and makes the convincing case that direct continuity exists from the Baal of antiquity to the St. George/Khidr of Christian lore.Convincingly argued and thoroughly researched, this study makes a unique contribution to such diverse areas as ancient Near Eastern studies, Roman history and religion, Christian hagiography and iconography, Quranic studies, and Arab folk religion.

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The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon continues its final report series with a study of the fortifications of the North Slope. From the first gate and rampart in the Middle Bronze Age through mud-brick towers from the Iron Age, these defenses are evidence of how the seaport of Ashkelon was both a political force in the southern Levant and an economic power in the eastern Mediterranean. This volume includes the monumental mud-brick gate of Ashkelon, the shrine of the silver calf, and towers from the time of the Philistines. Since each ancient fortification phase was also a massive earth-moving project, the detritus of the entire city found its way to the North Slope. Within the extensive fill, excavators uncovered indications of connections with Crete, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Egypt, while also collecting evidence of local Bronze Age agriculture and animal husbandry in an urban center.An indispensable resource for scholars interested in the history of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean, Ashkelon 6 spans twenty-five chapters with more than 500 full-color pages and a number of foldout plans. The architecture, stratigraphy, pottery, and other finds are presented in detail, shedding new light on this important period in the history of ancient Canaan.

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Harlot or Holy Woman? presents an exhaustive study of qedešah, a Hebrew word meaning “consecrated woman” but rendered “prostitute” or “sacred prostitute” in Bible translations. Reexamining biblical and extrabiblical texts, Phyllis A. Bird questions how qedešah came to be associated with prostitution and offers an alternative explanation of the term, one that suggests a wider participation for women as religious specialists in Israel’s early cultic practice.Bird’s study reviews all the texts from classical antiquity cited as sources for an institution of “sacred prostitution,” alongside a comprehensive analysis of the cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia containing the cognate qadištu and Ugaritic texts containing the masculine cognate qdš. Through these texts, Bird presents a portrait of women dedicated to a deity, engaged in a variety of activities from cultic ritual to wet-nursing, and sharing a common generic name with the qedešah of ancient Israel. In the final chapter she returns to biblical texts, reexamining them in light of the new evidence from the ancient Near East.Considering alternative models for constructing women’s religious roles in ancient Israel, this wholly original study offers new interpretations of key texts and raises questions about the nature of Israelite religion as practiced outside the royal cult and central sanctuary.

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The story of copper and the role it has played since the dawn of metallurgy more than 7,000 years ago is a remarkable, at times breathtaking, often inspiring tale of evolution and innovation; it imparts some of the greatest technological achievements of man and his persistent striving towards efficacy in the transformation of stone into metal.The 37 chapters of this volume, dedicated to the memory of Beno Rothenberg, present a variety of new studies related to copper in antiquity, with case studies spanning from the British Isles to Oman, Cyprus, and Greece. Special emphasis is given to Timna and other copper ore districts of the Arabah Valley, which have been subjected to a surge of research in recent years. This new research is a direct continuation of Rothenberg’s pioneering work at Timna, and similarly takes advantage of the extraordinary preservation of archaeological sites there to shed new light on copper production technologies and the societies behind them. Rothenberg’s collaborative work at Timna during the second half of the 20th century was an important milestone in the foundation of the research discipline of archaeometallurgy, the study of metal and metal production in antiquity. The present volume, the work of 66 scholars, reflects the current prosperity of this discipline in its broadest sense, with contributions that reach beyond technological reconstructions and analytical reports, including studies on metalworkers’ diet and habitation and the metal trade. In this, the book aptly emphasizes Rothenberg’s impact, as his research on ancient copper was always part of a comprehensive search for a better understanding of past societies and historical processes.

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The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon continues its final report series with a study of the city destroyed in the campaign of the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar in December of 604 B.C. In this era, Ashkelon’s markets linked land routes from the southeast to a web of international Mediterranean merchants, and this volume describes the Iron Age bazaar where shopkeepers sold the goods of Egypt, Greece, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Judah. In addition, in another part of the city, a winery produced a homegrown vintage for distribution abroad.This volume spans more than 800 full-color pages illustrating the range of imported and local artifacts recovered by more than ten years of excavation. The twenty-eight chapters, by more than two dozen contributors, combine to describe Ashkelon’s pivotal role in the economy and politics of the late seventh century B.C. As such, Ashkelon 3: The Seventh Century B.C. is a indispensable resource for those interested in the Iron Age history of the Eastern Mediterranean and the study of trade and economy in the ancient world.

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This book traces the theme of justice throughout the narrative of Exodus in order to explicate how yhwh’s reclamation of Israel for service-worship reveals a distinct theological ethic of justice grounded in yhwh’s character and Israel’s calling within yhwh’s creational agenda.Adopting a synchronic, text-immanent interpretive strategy that focuses on canonical and inner-biblical connections, Nathan Bills identifies two overlapping motifs that illuminate the theme of justice in Exodus. First, Bills considers the importance of Israel’s creation traditions for grounding Exodus’s theology of justice. Reading Exodus against the backdrop of creation theology and as a continuation of the plot of Genesis, Bills shows that the ethical disposition of justice imprinted on Israel in Exodus is an application of yhwh’s creational agenda of justice. Second, Bills identifies an educational agenda woven throughout the text. The narrative gives heightened attention to the way yhwh catechizes Israel in what it means to be the particular beneficiary and creational emissary of yhwh’s justice. These interpretative lenses of creation theology and pedagogy help to explain why Israel’s salvation and shaping embody a programmatic applicability of yhwh’s justice for the wider world.This volume will be of substantial interest to divinity students and religious professionals interested in the themes of exodus, exile, and return.

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History and Hope examines the rhetorical function of Isaiah 28–35, a relatively overlooked series of six woe oracles, in relation to reading the book of Isaiah as a whole. These eight chapters rely on the language of agrarian wisdom to transport the reader from prior reflections on historical destruction into a vision of ultimate hope. Stulac’s study, therefore, offers new insight into the book of Isaiah, but perhaps more importantly, it does so through two methodological innovations that promise to enhance biblical research at large.First, History and Hope develops an interpretive strategy based on ancient Israel’s agro-ecological past. Through comparisons to the thought and practice of several contemporary agrarian thinkers (such as Wendell Berry), it draws attention to the holistic, traditional worldview of the people who created the Bible and develops an “agrarian hermeneutic” that is then used to examine the book of Isaiah. This interpretive strategy, which introduces a variety of observations consistent with ancient Israel’s subsistence culture, offers a new lens on the Bible that is historically and phenomenologically appropriate to its premodern character. Second, the study applies modern narratology to the book of Isaiah in its final form, a move that allows for a careful delineation of the differences in knowledge that stand between the book’s characters and its implied reader. When combined with an agrarian hermeneutic, narratological precision opens understanding of Isaiah’s written rhetoric to the associative, soil-bound logic by which it is constructed.In the past, many scholars have regarded Isaiah 28–35 as little more than a fragmentary reiteration of ideas already found in prior parts of the book. Now, through exegetical analysis of Isaiah 28–35 from an agrarian perspective, these eight chapters are interpreted as a rhetorical key to the overall book’s coherent vision of destruction and hope.

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In the 5 days from July 16 through July 20, 2012, more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over the world gathered in Leiden, the Netherlands, to read more than 130 papers and to contribute to a variety of workshops. Many of the papers were read in the context of several thematic workshops, some of which were related to the main theme of the conference. This volume publishes 21 of the revised essays on the main topic of the Rencontre-Private and State in the Ancient Near East. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and cultural benefits of Leiden. The book is divided into two sections. In the first section are three "Opening Lectures,"  by Hans Neumann on Mesopotamian society at the turn of the 3rd millennium B.C.; by Adelheid Otto on archaeological perspectives on private and state in the second millennium B.C.; and by Michael Jursa on the state and its subjects during Neo-Babylonian times. In the second section, 18 essays on various aspects of the relationship of private life and activity to the state and government in various periods are presented.

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In this volume, Witte presents three case studies on biblical theology and demonstrates how the ways of speaking and thinking about God in the Old Testament constitute the religio-historical and theological basis for the discourse on God’s acts in the person of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. The theology of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament are inseparably connected, even if discrete theologies of the Old and New Testaments can be identified. The first study traces the development of the understanding of God in the Old Testament through the Hebrew divine title, El Shaddai, and one of its most important Greek equivalents, pantokrator. The use of the title El Shaddai, its ancient Near Eastern religious background, its transfer into Hellenistic Judaism, and its theological significance reveal fundamental aspects of a biblical theology that is equally indebted to comparative philology and to the history of religion. The second essay discusses justice as a central theme of the theology of the Old Testament and as an essential category in defining the relationship between God and humanity through a selection of different texts from the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint. The third study offers a short literary-historical biography of Yahweh as the creator of the world, the master of history, the guarantor of justice, and the donor of wisdom. It takes into account the approach of the first essay, which presents theology as a sort of religio-historical onomastics, and reflects, on the basis of the second essay, the traditio-historical presentation of images of God and his anointed in the Old Testament as a background for theology and christology in the New Testament.

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In ancient traditions, Assyria was the first world empire in a series that continued with Persia, Macedonia, and Rome. After Rome, we imagine the series bifurcating into a Western trajectory (from Charlemagne to Napoleon and the Third Reich) and an Oriental trajectory (from the Parthians and Sasanians to the Abbasids until the modern Caliphate). Assyria, often overlooked or slighted by modern studies of empire, still maintains our interest because it provides an example of the “simple form” of empire and imperialism, before subsequent developments resulted in structures of greater complexity.Most important among basic features of “empire” is the “imperial mission”—the mandate given by the gods or God to the emperor to extend, through conquest or persuasion, annexation or hegemony, the only legitimate power of the central state to the entire (known) world. This accomplishment can only be ideological, since in practice no empire, ancient or modern, could actually conquer the world. Nonetheless, ancient empires could come closer to the target, because their known world, the mental map of their oikoumene, was limited to their close surroundings. Assyria, by bringing the most populated and civilized countries of its time (surrounded by mountains, seas, deserts) into submission came close to fulfilling its mission. In our modern, Western perspective, however, the term empire is usually applied to alien and despotic (mainly Oriental) polities, while we in the West prefer to belong to more democratic “alliances.”Nevertheless, ancient Assyria still retains its value as a prototype of the “empire of evil” against which democracy fights and must resist. This book outlines the basic features of Assyrian imperialism within the framework of the general development of the imperial idea, all the while insisting on noting comparative material.The intent is twofold: (1) to better understand Assyria through comparison with later empires, and (2) to underscore the relevance of the “Assyrian model” and its influence on later history. Although the first intention profits ancient historians, the second goal is addressed to modern and contemporary historians, who too often ignore (or at least disregard) the long historical background lying behind more recent developments. The world in general, in the present climate of globalization, deserves to be better informed about pre-modern and non-Western trajectories of world history.

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A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts is designed as a six-volume study of the earliest comprehensive corpus of ancient Egyptian texts, inscribed in the pyramids of five pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2325–2150 BC) and several of their queens. The first volume, devoted to the earliest corpus, that of Unis, is based on a database that allows for detailed analysis of the orthography of the texts and every aspect of their grammar; it includes a complete hieroglyphic lexicon of the texts and a consecutive transcription and translation on facing pages. The grammatical analysis incorporates both the most recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar and a few new interpretations published here for the first time.

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Attested as both a human and a divine expression, the biblical Hebrew term qinʾâ is most often translated as “jealousy” or “envy.” In this study, Erin Villareal makes the case for reading qinʾâ as more than a simple reference to an emotion, instead locating the term’s origins in ancient Israel’s social and legal spheres.Jealousy in Context evaluates the socioliterary context of qinʾâ. Through a series of case studies examining this term as it is applied to residents, sister-wives, brothers, and husbands in biblical narrative passages, Villareal explains that qinʾâ is felt by people who experience a threat or disruption to their rights and status within a social arrangement or community and is therefore grounded in practical concerns that have social and juridical ramifications. Investigating examples of divine qinʾâ, Villareal shows that its social meaning was adapted into theological language about the Israelite deity and his relationship with the people of Israel, and that Yahweh expresses qinʾâ whenever there is a threat to the integrity of his land or his sanctuary. Villareal examines the term through this socioliterary lens to reveal ancient Israelite perceptions concerning social organization and divine-human relationships. Additionally, she explores how the socioliterary character of qinʾâ in the Hebrew Bible communicates representations of ancient Israelite beliefs, values, and social expectations.This convincing new understanding of a key biblical term will be appreciated by students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew linguistics, and ancient Near Eastern societies more generally.

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Since the early 1990s, about two thousand Idumean Aramaic ostraca have found their way onto the antiquities market and are now scattered across a number of museums, libraries, and private collections. This multivolume textbook classifies these ostraca according to subject matter and brings them together into a single publication. With this fourth installment, Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni continue their comprehensive edition of Aramaic ostraca from Idumea. Volumes 1–3 published and cataloged 255 Personal Name Dossiers containing 1,152 texts. Volume 4 contains 377 texts divided into six dossiers, including 54 payment orders, 77 accounts, 74 workers texts, 62 names, 87 jar inscriptions, and 23 letters. The payment orders document officially authorized transfers of goods, while the accounts show how those goods were inventoried. The workers texts illustrate the distribution and supply of laborers, the name lists show people as individuals, and the jar inscriptions track vessels in motion. Color photographs, ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcriptions, translations, and commentaries are provided for the texts, along with figures and tables, and introductions and summaries of each dossier.A unique source for the onomastics and social and economic history of fourth-century Idumea—and, by extension, of Judah—this multivolume work will become the primary resource for information on these texts.

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This book initiates the reader into the study of Akkadian literature from ancient Babylonia and Assyria. With this one relatively short volume, the novice reader will develop the literary competence necessary to read and interpret Akkadian texts in translation and will gain a broad familiarity with the major genres and compositions in the language.The first part of the book presents introductory discussions of major critical issues, organized under four key rubrics: tablets, scribes, compositions, and audiences. Here, the reader will find descriptions of the tablets used as writing material; the training scribes received and the institutional contexts in which they worked; the general characteristics of Akkadian compositions, with an emphasis on poetic and literary features; and the various audiences or users of Akkadian texts. The second part surveys the corpus of Akkadian literature defined inclusively, canvasing a wide spectrum of compositions. Legal codes, historical inscriptions, divinatory compendia, and religious texts have a place in the survey alongside narrative poems, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma elish, and Babylonian Theodicy. Extensive footnotes and a generous bibliography guide readers who wish to continue their study.Essential for students of Assyriology, An Introduction to Akkadian Literature will also prove useful to biblical scholars, classicists, Egyptologists, ancient historians, and literary comparativists.

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In ancient Mesopotamia, men training to be scribes copied model letters in order to practice writing and familiarize themselves with epistolary forms and expressions. Similarly, model contracts were used to teach them how to draw up agreements for the transactions typical of everyday economic life. This volume makes available a trove of previously unknown tablets and fragments, now housed in the Shøyen Collection, that were produced in the training of scribes in Old Babylonian schools.Following on Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection, Part One: Selected Letters, this volume publishes the contents of sixty-five tablets bearing Akkadian letters used to train scribes and twenty-six prisms and tablets carrying Sumerian legal texts copied in the same context. Each text is presented in transliterated form and in translation, with appropriate commentary and annotations and, at the end of the book, photographs of the cuneiform. The material is made easily navigable by a catalogue, bibliography, and indexes.This collection of previously unknown documents expands the extant corpus of educational texts, making an essential contribution to the study of the ancient world.

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The proliferation of work on the theological hermeneutics of Scripture in recent years has challenged and reimagined the divisions between systematic theology and biblical studies on the one hand and academy and church on the other. Also notable, however, has been the absence of a full-length treatment of theological interpretation from a Wesleyan perspective. This monograph develops a Wesleyan theological hermeneutic of Scripture, approached as a craft learned from a tradition-constituted appropriation of John Wesley’s hermeneutics. This hermeneutic requires a descriptive analysis of the context, grammar, and ruled reading of the literal sense in Wesley’s interpretive practices, as well as critical interaction with the analysis in light of contemporary issues. As a result of this interaction, continuity and discontinuity between Wesley’s and Wesleyan interpretation emerges and is accounted for.The Wesleyan theological hermeneutic developed here defines the church as Spirit-formed context within the larger divine economy of salvation, in contrast with Wesley’s emphasis on individual soteriology and underdeveloped ecclesiology. Within this community context, Wesleyan theological interpretation is a means of grace whereby the Holy Spirit reinterprets the identity of readers into children of God. Theological interpretation invites readers on a Wesleyan account to participate in the textually mediated identity of Jesus Christ through the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. Wesleyan identity is therefore a figurally created identity based on the literal sense of Scripture. Wesley’s analogy of faith, which rules his reading of Scripture, thus gives way to a more explicitly trinitarian rule of faith.

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While topics such as death, funerary cult, and the netherworld have received considerable scholarly attention in the context of the Ugaritic textual corpus, the related concept of life has been relatively neglected. Life and Mortality in Ugaritic takes as its premise that one cannot grasp the significance of mwt (“to die”) without first having wrestled with the concept of ḥyy (“to live”). In this book, Matthew McAffee takes a lexical approach to the study of life and death in the Ugaritic textual corpus. He identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics, and he concludes by synthesizing the results of this lexical study into a broader literary discussion that considers, among other things, the implications for our understanding of the first-millennium Katumuwa stele from Zincirli.McAffee’s study complements previous scholarly work in this area, which has tended to rely on conceptual and theoretical treatment of mortality, and advances the discussion by providing a more focused lexical analysis of the Ugaritic terms in question. It will be of interest to Semitic scholars and those who study Ugaritic in particular, in addition to students of the culture of the ancient Levant.

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In the week between July 21 and 25, 2014, the University of Warsaw hosted more than three hundred Assyriologists from all over the world. In the course of five days, nearly 150 papers were read in three (and sometimes four) parallel sessions. Many of them were delivered within the framework of nine thematic workshops. The publication of most of these panels is underway, in separate volumes. As is usually the case, the academic sessions were accompanied by many opportunities for social interaction among the participants, and there was time to enjoy the historical and cultural benefits of Warsaw. Special honor was accorded to two American Assyriologists whose origins can be traced to Warsaw, Piotr Michalowski and Piotr Steinkeller, and a special session to recognize their contributions to the study of ancient Mesopotamia was organized. In this book are presented papers on the main theme of the meeting, “Fortune and Misfortune in the Ancient Near East.” The 31 essays are organized into 5 sections: (1) plenary presenations on “What Is Fortune? What Is Misfortune?”; (2) humanity and fortune/misfortune and luck, with discussion of specific examples; (3) additional papers on definitions of fortune and misfortune; (4) the effects on city and state; and (5) God and temple.

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In 2009, Mario Liverani celebrated his 70th birthday and retired from teaching at the Sapienza in Rome, although his book Antico Oriente: Storia, società, economia remains in wide use and is still foundational for anyone studying the ancient Near East. The Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Archeologiche e Antropologiche dell’Antichità, where Mario Liverani was a leading specialist since the department’s inception, celebrated Liverani’s milestone birthday and retirement with a conference held in his honor, and this book publishes the papers that were read at the conference on April 20–21, 2009.The title chosen for the conference was “Not Only History/Non solo storia,” which alludes to Liverani’s multiple interests and forays into the field of the ancient Near East and Egypt. A select group of scholars and colleagues was chosen to represent Prof. Liverani’s fields of interests, because it was impossible to include all of the Italian and international colleagues who could have been invited. Even so, the list of eminent contributors in the fields of ancient Near Eastern history, art, linguistics, and archaeology is more than adequate to recommend acquisition of this fine collection: John Baines (Oxford), Dominique Charpin (Collège de France), Joaquín María Córdoba (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Jerrold Cooper (Johns Hopkins), Jean-Marie Durand (Collège de France), Peter Machinist (Harvard), David Mattingly (University of Leicester), Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), Nadav Naʾaman (Tel Aviv University), Nicholas Postgate (Cambridge), Johannes Renger (Free University of Berlin), Marc Van de Mieroop (Columbia University), Irene Winters (Harvard), and Norman Yoffee (University of Michigan).

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This second edition of A Corpus of Ammonite Inscriptions presents all of the published inscriptions that have been identified as Ammonite in one volume. Each entry is accompanied by a complete bibliography, a physical description and details about its location, a photograph and/or drawing, relevant linguistic information, and a history of the inscription’s interpretation.The discovery of the Amman Theater Inscription, Amman Citadel Inscription, Tall Sīrān Bottle, Ḥisbān Ostraca, and Tall al-Mazar Ostraca opened a new chapter in the study of ancient Northwest Semitic inscriptions with the recognition and analysis of the language and script of ancient Ammon. These new discoveries prompted a reclassification of a number of epigraphs previously identified as Hebrew, Phoenician, or Aramaic. Since the first edition of this corpus, the discussion of the criteria used to classify inscriptions as Ammonite, including provenance, language, onomastics, paleography, and iconography, has advanced considerably. In addition, the number of known inscriptions has increased. This updated edition includes 254 additional inscriptions, four new appendixes, and in many cases, new and improved images.

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The Hebrew Bible has long been the subject of theological inquiries and debates in Judaism and Christianity. But is there something like theology already in the Hebrew Bible itself? Is it possible to describe the literary growth of the Hebrew Bible by means of an ongoing theological debate? Answers to these questions depend on how one conceives of the category “theology.” In this book, Konrad Schmid reconstructs the development of this category, then describes and discusses biblical texts in the Hebrew Bible that are relevant to the question Is There Theology in the Hebrew Bible?The book consists of two main sections. In the first, Schmid traces the notion of “theology” from its earliest use, in Greek philosophy, through the medieval period and to today. He pays close attention to “biblical theology,” particularly the different understandings of this idea as something emanating from the Hebrew Bible itself versus something that readers impose onto the biblical text. He also tracks the influence of the discipline of comparative religion on biblical theology, especially with regard to the growing division between biblical and systematic theology. In the second part, Schmid focuses specifically on “implicit” biblical theology, that is, theological reflection apparent within the Hebrew Bible itself. He provides several examples, such as the theologization of the law that resulted from inner-biblical exegesis and Jeremiah’s universal theology of history.Is There Theology in the Hebrew Bible? will serve as an important reference to all those interested in the question posed by the title. Schmid provides a nuanced answer to this question that both takes into account the convoluted history of biblical theology and lays out new ways of approaching the subject.

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The title, Marbeh Ḥokmah, meaning “increases wisdom,” reflects the fact that Victor Avigdor Hurowitz was a scholar who increased wisdom and who continues to increase the wisdom of scholars throughout the world even after his untimely death at the age of 64. The book was edited by five of Professor Hurowitz’s colleagues: Profs. Shamir Yona and Mayer I. Gruber of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Edward L. Greenstein of Bar-Ilan University, Peter Machinist of Harvard University, and Shalom M. Paul of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The two-volume collection contains 49 groundbreaking essays written by 53 distinguished authors from various institutions of higher learning in Israel and around the world. The authors include Victor’s teachers, colleagues, and students, and the essays deal with a great variety of subjects. The breadth of subject matter featured in Marbeh Ḥokmah is a most appropriate tribute to Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, whose published scholarship encompassed a wide variety of fields of interest pertaining to the study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East: Wisdom Literature, Psalmody, prophecy and prophets, the priesthood, eschatology, historiography, ancient inscriptions, medieval Hebrew biblical exegesis, religious rites, building and architecture, temples, the art of warfare, Semitic philology, Sumerian proverbs, epigraphy, rhetoric and stylistics, poetry, lamentations, the interconnections between Hebrew Scripture and the ancient Near East, the cultures of ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, innerbiblical parallels, and many other subjects.

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This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.).The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.

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Bernard F. Batto spent the bulk of his career examining the ancient Near Eastern context of the Hebrew Bible, with particular interest in the influence of the surrounding cultures on the biblical creation stories. This collection gathers six of his most important previously published essays and adds two new contributions. Among the essays, Batto identifies various creation motifs prevalent in the ancient Near East and investigates the reflexes of these motifs in Genesis 1–11 and other biblical accounts of the primeval period. He demonstrates how the biblical writers adapted and responded to the creation ideas of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ugarit, and elsewhere.The articles in the volume were written as independent essays. Nevertheless, they are united by theme. Throughout, Batto makes clear his understanding of the Hebrew Bible as a patently unique text, yet one that cannot possibly be understood independent of greater cultural sphere in which it developed. In the Beginning will serve as an indispensable resource for those interested in both the biblical ideas of creation and the mythology of the ancient Near East that influenced them.

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In July, 2009, the International Association for Assyriology met in Paris, France, for 5 days to deliver and listen to papers on the theme “La famille dans le Proche-Orient.” This volume, the proceedings of the conference, contains 53 of the papers read at the 55th annual Rencontre, including primarily papers directly connected with the theme and some on areas of related interest. The papers covered every period of Mesopotamian history, from the third millennium through the end of the first millennium B.C.E. The photo on the back cover shows only a representative portion of the attendees, who were warmly hosted by faculty and students from the Collège de France.

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Using narrative devices such as allusions and free associations, multivalent expressions, and irony, the author of Esther wrote a story that is about a Jewish woman, Esther, during the time of the Persian exile of Yehudites, and the Persian king, Ahasuerus, who was in power at the time. At various junctures, the author also used secret writing, or we could say that he conveys mixed messages: one is a surface message, but another, often conflicting message lies beneath the surface. For instance, the outer portrayal of the king as one of the main protagonists is an ironic strategy used by the author to highlight the king’s impotent, indecisive, “antihero” status. He may wield authority—as symbolized by his twice-delegated signet ring—but he remains powerless. Among all the concealments in the story, the concealment of God stands out as the most prominent and influential example.A growing number of scholars regard the book of Esther as a “comic diversion,” the function and intention of which are to entertain the reader. However, Grossman is more convinced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach, and he labels his application of this approach to the reading of Esther as “theological carnivalesque.” Bakhtin viewed the carnival (or the carnivalesque genre) as a challenge by the masses to the governing establishment and to accepted social conventions. He described the carnival as an eruption of ever-present but suppressed popular sentiments. The connection between the story of Esther and Bakhtin’s characterization of the carnivalesque in narrative is evident especially in the book of Esther’s use of the motifs of “reversal” and “transformation.” For example, the young girl Esther is transformed from an exiled Jewess into a queen in one of the turnabouts that characterize the narrative. Many more examples are provided in this analysis of one of the Bible’s most fascinating books.

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The first half of the proceedings, Language in the Ancient Near East (in 2 parts), is available here. A workshop volume is available here.The topic of the meetings in St. Petersburg portion of the 53e RAI was, as the title indicates, city administration. Of the 19 papers published in this volume, 2 are based on plenary, opening papers; 16 discuss various aspects of administration from very early times in geographic regions stretching from the extreme south of Mesopotamia, through the middle and upper Euphrates, to Ugarit; and 3 discuss labor and professions in the Ur III period.

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