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9780252032844 Academic Inspection Copy

The Invention of Hebrew

  • ISBN-13: 9780252032844
  • Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
    Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
  • By Seth L. Sanders
  • Price: AUD $239.00
  • Stock: 1 in stock
  • Availability: Order will be despatched as soon as possible.
  • Local release date: 14/05/2010
  • Format: Hardback (229.00mm X 152.00mm) 280 pages Weight: 600g
  • Categories: Religion & beliefs [HR]
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Contents
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The Invention of Hebrew is the first book to approach the Bible in light of recent findings on the use of the Hebrew alphabet as a deliberate and meaningful choice. Seth L. Sanders connects the Bible's distinctive linguistic form--writing down a local spoken language--to a cultural desire to speak directly to people, summoning them to join a new community that the text itself helped call into being. Addressing the people of Israel through a vernacular literature, Hebrew texts gained the ability to address their audience as a public. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book details distinct ways in which Hebrew was a powerfully self-conscious political language. Revealing the enduring political stakes of Biblical writing, The Invention of Hebrew demonstrates how Hebrew assumed and promoted a source of power previously unknown in written literature: ''the people'' as the protagonist of religion and politics.
Preface; Dedication; Illustrations; Abbreviations; Introduction; Modernity's Ghosts: The Bible as Political Communication; What was the Alphabet for?; Empires and Alphabets in Late Bronze Age Canaan; The Invention of Hebrew in Iron Age Israel; C
''An absolutely innovative way of reading the use of ancient Hebrew for generating political identity and for understanding the Hebrew Bible itself. It is refreshing to see such profound insight and analyses come out of material that has otherwise not received substantial recognition of its cultural and political importance.'' Mark S. Smith, author of God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World ''S. Brings anthropology and epigraphy together in an original and stimulating way, seeking to discern the roots of biblical texts by exploring the contexts and development of writing in the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages...This wide-ranging, extensively annotated book deserves careful study and offers much of value to OT scholars.'' A. R. Millard Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
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