Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East

Bulls on Parade

Timothy Hogue — 2024-04-14

1 Kgs 12:25-33 is composed of two significant layers – an earlier stratum that may be based on an Israelite royal inscription and a later, likely Judahite redaction. These can be disentangled based on a redaction critical approach rooted in studies of compilational and editorial practices attested in biblical and Cuneiform sources. Though the final text is often analyzed as an idol polemic, the Israelite strata suggest that Jeroboam is not depicted as constructing idols but rather pilgrimage outposts. This is borne out by the use of bovine iconography to direct ritual movement at other Levantine sites, as well as the broader Near Eastern practice of establishing pilgrimage networks in order to project political authority over multiple settlements, knitting them together into a kingdom. Accordingly, this article argues that the Israelite text depicted Jeroboam creating a pilgrimage network to performatively bring his Israel into being. Participating in this pilgrimage was a performance of Israelite identity. The Judahite redaction disavowed this by othering key aspects of the Israelite material culture depicted in the text. The final text is thus an example of identity politics rather than an idol polemic.

The Iltani Archive and the Messiness of Spousal Violence

Noam Cohen — 2024-04-14

The Old Babylonian archive of Iltani, a royal woman living in Qaṭṭara (Tell Al-Rimah), offers a glimpse into the messiness that often surrounds gendered violence. The archive attests to two distinct cases of spousal violence against women – namely, Iltani and her acquaintance Belessunu. When only her case is considered, Iltani may appear uncomplicated, a righteous victim. However, this neat and flat narrative is greatly complicated by her demonstrated resistance to helping Belessunu leave her abusive husband, despite Iltani’s personal history and unique ability to intervene. Letters from Belessunu and a mutual friend of the two, Azzu, offer a rare opportunity to read conversations between ancient West Asian women in response to gendered violence, and these relationships too are messy. The correspondence demonstrates that spousal violence could alternatively strengthen or strain female friendships, and offers the possibility of studying spousal violence in a way that decenters the violent (male) spouse. Despite the remarkable attestation of a women’s support network in the Old Babylonian period, it appears that the network failed to achieve its aims, whereas Yarim-Lim, a man who identifies as Belessunu’s ‘brother,’ succeeded in meeting their initial goal.

Liken God to the (Disabled) Servant

Eric Wagner — 2024-04-14

When Isaiah 40:18 asks “To whom might you liken God? What likeness might you set up for him?” readers of Isaiah 40-55 encounter potent rhetoric that invites analysis. Recognizing that corporeality is key to the rhetoric of Isaiah 40-55, spatial theory and disabilities studies offer promising hermeneutical approaches to analyze the bodies of Isaiah 40-55. By synthesizing these approaches, this study establishes a mixed-methods approach which it then applies to representations of corporeality in Isaiah 40-55. This mixed-methods analysis reveals an underlying corporeal spatial rhetoric throughout Isaiah 40-55. Characters portrayed with only a single reference to their body tend to remain insignificant. Characters with two or three references to their body typically appear in weak (straw man) arguments. Characters represented with greater corporeal complexity (i.e., more than three body parts) prove to be rhetorically complex figures. Identifying comparable complexity in God’s body and the body of the Servant, the conclusion emerges: liken God to the (disabled) Servant.

Patronage, Sectarianism, and Cultural Hegemony

Emanuel Pfoh — 2024-04-14

Patronage relationships have been ethnographically found at many locations in the Middle East during the second half of the twentieth century but also detected in ancient Near Eastern sources in more recent times, in every case mostly in connection with political situations. Patronage, however, also operates at the level of mentalities and its expression is equally discovered in worldviews of different cultures. This condition may therefore be observed as well in textualized mental expressions like the Hebrew Bible. In cases exposing sectarianism in the biblical stories, we may assert that patron-client bonds are taken by ancient scribes as the key mode for illustrating domination, subordination and in general an ontological order, transcending socio-politics and impacting also on what we would analytically deem a socio-religious imagination and its ulterior conceptual derivations. This paper seeks to relate clues and examples of patronage and sectarianism in the Hebrew Bible while focussing on their socio-cultural background. These expressions, in the history of the production of the biblical texts, would end up manifesting a particular cultural hegemony of a biblical ontology articulated by patronage dynamics in the southern Levant since the Persian period, but especially in connection with the Hasmonean rise to power, centred in Jerusalem.

“My Hand Has Found, Like a Nest, the Wealth of the Peoples” (Isa 10:14):

Ekaterina E Kozlova — 2024-04-14

Concerning Isa 10:5‒15, and the fictional speeches of an Assyrian king in it, scholars agree that much of this text’s content appears in the Neo-Assyrian royal annals, yet the referenced material is reversed to cast Assyria and its royal representative as the antithesis of everything the imperial discourse sought to uphold and propagate. The focus of this article is on the king’s plunder of the nations’ treasures which is presented through the symbolism of bird hunting and egg robbing (Isa 10:14). Drawing on ANE textual and iconographic material, this article suggests that the bird imagery in v. 14 reflects the Assyrian practice of hunting and collecting ostriches and their eggs, both of which were exotic commodities that signified wealth, prestige, and world domination. Deploying this symbolism, the Judean prophet, however, overlays it with his own Israelite negative understanding of the ostrich. Blending the two “ostrich ideologies,” the prophet satirizes the hubristic claims of the Assyrian king. Subverting the king’s self-aggrandizing claims and making him laughable, the prophet signals the king’s impending demise.

Front Matter

Eric Trinka — 2024-04-14