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The Context of Scripture. Vol. 1, Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. Leiden/New York/Cologne: Brill, 1997. Pp. xviii+ 599.$109.50.
This substantial work is the first installment of a promised three-volume set. Whereas the first volume is devoted to canonical compositions, the second and third volumes will be devoted to monumental inscriptions and to archival documents from the ancient Near Eastern world. The title's reference to "the context of scripture" is deliberate. The volume contains no biblical texts, yet the work is paradoxically about the Bible. The editors of this ambitious project, William W. Hallo of Yale University and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., of LeTourneau University, have deliberately selected a variety of documents from the ancient Near East and Egypt that readers may compare with portions of the Hebrew Bible. The biblical orientation of this publication is apparent in another respect. The page layout features full cross-referencing to comparable passages in the Hebrew scriptures and other ancient Near Eastern works. In this sense, the compendium has an intertextual orientation.
But, lest readers be misled by the work's title, context is also used in another, very different sense. The editors have asked the translators, all eminent authorities in their fields, to comment on the contexts of their assigned texts. Instead of scriptural context or contemporary context, context in this sense designates a given document's original geographical, historical, religious, political, and literary setting. The contextual approach employed by the various translators thus concentrates on the reconstruction and evaluation of the ancient Near Eastern settings in which these documents were created and disseminated. Some attention is also paid to the questions of genre (Gattung), earlier literary influence, and structure. Much less attention, if any, is given to the reconstruction of the later contexts in which these same texts may have been read by worshipers, artists, and scholars in the two or three millennia since their creation.
The work is divided into five major sections: Egyptian canonical compositions, Hittite canonical compositions, West Semitic canonical compositions, Akkadian canonical compositions, and Sumerian canonical compositions. Each of these major sections is in turn divided into parts and subparts (which may vary), categorized according to the principle of focus. It will be useful to take...