CONTENTS Editor’s Note ................................................................................ Articles Nadav Naxaman – The Sanctuary of the Gibeonites Revisited ............................................................................. Jeremiah Peterson – An Old Babylonian Incantation Collective with Incantations Involving a Counter-Measure Against Oath-Breaking and the Alteration of a Dream of the King .......................................................................... Catalin Anghelina – On the Mythology of Okeanos ............. Seth L. Sanders – The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propaganda to Early Jewish Revelation ..... John P. Nielsen – Trading on Knowledge: The Iddin-Papsukkal Kin Group in Southern Babylonia in the 7th and 6th Centuries B.C. ..................................... Christopher Woods – At the Edge of the World: Cosmological Conceptions of the Eastern Horizon in Mesopotamia .... Book Review Hannah Marcuson – Review of The Hittites and Their World ...
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EDITOR’S NOTE Religion has been one of the most powerful motivations for the modern scholarly resurrection of the Ancient Near East, from the 19th-century “Babel und Bibel” controversy to today’s continuing excitement over Egyptian tombs and the Dead Sea Scrolls. What has changed is that scholarship revived some of these cultures fully enough for them to speak to us on their own distinctive terms. Today, every season offers surprising new discoveries and connections dug from both the soil and the library, as well as fresh insights on the oldest documents of human religious thought. The distinctive task of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions is to report from the intellectual cutting edge of this area. As the incoming editor, my goal is to maintain the superb scholarly standard set by Theo van den Hout and Christopher Woods, who led the journal to cover all parts of the Ancient Near East and related Mediterranean religious life. At the same time, I intend to emphasize the comparative and interdisciplinary dimension of the study of ancient religion. One way we plan to facilitate scholarly connections and work that would not otherwise happen, will be to propose themed issues and problem-specific panels at scholarly meetings on exciting questions such as Mysticism (precisely what does it mean, for example, for a human speaker to identify with a god, and how is this accomplished ritually?) Cryptic writing (why do esoteric texts in the Hellenistic period begin to multiply scripts, from hieroglyphic and archaic Hebrew to the charactéres that are the supposed language of the angels?), and the multiple bodies of God (can we, as Benjamin Sommer has recently argued, uncover “a lost ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity according to which an essential difference between gods and humans was that gods had more than one body and fluid, unbounded selves”?). I am interested in proposals from the journal’s scholarly audience, and invite you to get in touch with me at
[email protected] to share ideas.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 JANER 9.2 Also available online – brill.nl/jane DOI: 10.1163/156921109X12520501747679
THE SANCTUARY OF THE GIBEONITES REVISITED NADAV NA AMAN Abstract The article examines three biblical narratives in which the city of Gibeon and its inhabitants play a major role ( Joshua 9; II Sam 21:1-14; I Kgs 3:3-15a). It is suggested that Gibeon’s sanctuary played—directly or by inference—a significant role in the plot of the three stories. The story of Joshua’s treaty with the Gibeonites, ostensibly describing an event in the conquest of Canaan, in reality reflects a hidden Deuteronomistic satirical polemic whose background