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MORDECHAI COGAN (trans, and ed.), The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). Pp. xiv + 250. $64.
The editor/translator of this handbook is well known to historians, Assyriologists, and biblical scholars. His two-volume Anchor Bible commentary on the books of 1-2 Kings, coauthored with his late teacher and colleague Hayim Tadmor (AB 10, 11; New York: Doubleday, 2001, 1988), is justly hailed as "the best commentary available" on this ancient Hebrew text because of its sweeping "mastery of both biblical and Mesopotamian sources" (Marc Zvi Brettler, review of Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings, JQR 81 [1990] 155). The present volume publishes many of Cogan's translations and notes on these "Mesopotamian sources" in a handbook surveying "all the cuneifonn historical texts composed during the 9th to 6th centuries B.c. E. that relate to ancient Israel" (pp. ix-x). Other translations of these primary sources are available, but this one seems to aim at a particular target authence comprised of Hebrew-reading students able to go deeper than James B. Pritchard's ANET or Rainer Albertz's History of Israelite Religion (OTL; Louisville:...