Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World ed. by Mladen Popović, Myles Schoonover and Marijn Vandenberghe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World ed. by Mladen Popović, Myles Schoonover and Marijn Vandenberghe Scott Charlesworth mladen popović, myles schoonover, and marijn vandenberghe (eds.), Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World (JSJSup 178; Leiden: Brill, 2017). Pp. vi + 317. Paper €125/$138. The sixteen essays in this edited volume, which developed out of the Third Qumran Institute Symposium of 2013, examine the ways in which cultural encounters in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East shaped the literary traditions, religious and political systems, and historical development of people from Israel, Judea, and Palestine. In the introduction to the book ("Ancient Jewish Cultural Encounters and a Case Study on Ezekiel"), Popović discusses "cultural encounter" in relation to methodology, a prominent theme throughout the book. As regards "real or perceived transfers from a given literary corpus to another," if the only evidence for a cultural encounter is literary, "any hypothesis should be confronted with what we do know about the presumed context on the basis of other [i.e. archaeological and documentary] evidence" (p. 11). Similarly, he asserts that the inferences that might be drawn from archaeological remains may be limited by the absence of accompanying documentary sources. Thus, he rejects the argument that in the sixth century b.c.e. an elite Judean like Ezekiel would have had access to the Babylonian cuneiform learned tradition and borrowed from it in his description of the heavenly throne room. The next essay, "Taming Egypt: The Impact of Persian Imperial Ideology and Politics on the Biblical Exodus Account," by Konrad Schmid, illustrates the nature of the problem quite well. Schmid argues on purely literary-critical grounds that the Persian pax influenced [End Page 348] the Priestly account of the exodus from Egypt. Further, P probably comes from the early Persian period because it "does not yet presuppose Egypt's inclusion in the Persian Empire" (p. 26). In his last footnote, Schmid then takes issue with those who reject this commonly used method of speculatively dating a text by matching its ideas with a particular historical period. As might be expected, the majority of studies in the book deal with literary texts. Jonathan Stökl ("Netting Marduk? The Concept of Hidden Transcripts and the Transfer of Cultural Knowledge from Mesopotamian to Judean Texts") urges caution in noting that less evidence is usually required for shared streams of traditions as against contact between specific texts. Thus, he argues that a wider combat myth tradition influenced Yhwh's use of a net against Egypt (Ezek 32:3) rather than the text of the Enūma eliš. Caroline Waerzeggers ("The Prayer of Nabonidus in the Light of Hellenistic Babylonian Literature") strikes a similar note in using a range of evidence to locate the Prayer of Nabonidus, often invoked as a sixth-century parallel to the prayer of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods (two hundred to four hundred years later). In contrast, in arguing that there is a philological and methodological connection between the two exegetical traditions, Uri Gabbay ("Levels of Meaning and Textual Polysemy in Akkadian and Hebrew Exegetical Texts") asserts that Akkadian commentaries influenced early tannaitic midrash. In the absence of any other evidence for contact, he offers three "entirely hypothetical" historical scenarios in which the two exegetical traditions might have come into contact with each other. Other discussions of the literary evidence include Benjamin G. Wright, "What Does India Have to Do with Jerusalem? Ben Sira, Language, and Colonialism"; Judith H. Newman, "Hybridity, Hydrology, and Hidden Transcript: Sirach 24 and the Judean Encounter with Ptolemaic Isis Worship"; Hindy Najman, "Philo's Greek Scriptures and Cultural Symbiosis"; and J. Cornelius de Vos, "'I Wish Those Who Unsettle You Would Mutilate Themselves!' (Gal 5:12): Circumcision and Emasculation in the Letter to the Galatians." Lastly, in a discussion of both literary and documentary (funerary inscriptions) evidence, Sacha Stern ("Subversion and Subculture: Jewish Time-Keeping in the Roman Empire") elaborates on the unofficial subculture and/or political subversion evident in Jewish use of a lunar calendar in cultic contexts and the Julian solar calendar in everyday life. On the documentary side, Bob...