11. To Refer or Not to Refer: That is the Question
Subtle Citation, Allusion, and Translation in the Hebrew Bible - Ziony Zevit
Peter Machinist [+ ]
Harvard University
Peter Machinist is Hancock Research Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard University. His work lies in the intellectual and cultural history of the ancient Near East, with particular attention to Israel and Mesopotamia. Among his publications are Letters from Priests to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (co-edited with Steven Cole, 1998), and articles including: ‘How Gods Die, Biblically and Otherwise: A Problem of Cosmic Restructuring’ (2011); ‘Cities and Ideology: The Case of Assur in the Neo-Assyrian Period’ (2016); and ‘“Ah, Assyria…” (Isaiah 10:5ff.): Isaiah’s Assyrian Polemic Revisited’ (2016).
Description
PM provides extensive discussions of four, well-known cases of textual referencing that involve connections between biblical texts or expressions and literary and linguistic phenomena outside the Bible in Canaanite and Mesopotamian literary materials. His chapter focuses on developing criteria that enable scholars to respond to the following question: How do we know that we such references and, when connections can be established, that the references are deliberate?