From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature

Professors of the literature and cultures of the ancient Near East can no longer complain about a lack of competent and engaging resources. Since the completion of Hallo and Younger’s three-volume Context of Scripture in 2002, we have seen the arrival of several helpful handbooks and introductions, in addition to other collections of texts. This new volume, characterized best by its subtitle, is distinctive in a number of ways and is a welcome addition to the resources available to students and instructors alike.

This monograph is a good introduction not only to the literature of the ancient Near East, but also to its cultures, people, and history. Its fundamental strength and the feature that sets it apart from similar studies is its methodology: From an Antique Land is diachronic.

This wonderful volume gives the curious reader magisterial overviews and reliable details on a vast literature, resurrected only recently from the mounds and tombs of the ancient Near East. This literature is among the world”s oldest and most distinct, articulating a lore that, but for a few stray samples embedded in the Hebrew Bible or in the Classics, is hardly familiar. Luckily, we have here experienced contributors and their presentations, while personal, are all informative and enriching. — Jack M. Sasson, Vanderbilt University

An important collection of essays from which both students and scholars will learn much. — Michael D. Coogan, Stonehill College

This is a comprehensive and searching treatment of the literatures of the major cultures of the ancient Near East. Carl Ehrlich has gathered a group of well-known specialists, who not only summarize and comment on the literary works of each culture, but put them in context, in terms of the languages, styles, genres, and themes, and against the political, social, and cultural history from which they come and which they reflect. A distinctive and welcome mark of this book is that although it has a large,discerning chapter on the Hebrew Bible, it is not a book of “Bible backgrounds,” of which there are many examples. Rather, the treatment of the Hebrew Bible takes its place alongside equally large and substantial examinations of the other major ancient Near Eastern literatures on their own. The result is revealing testimony to the richness and variety of the ancient Near Eastern literary world altogether, not just of the Hebrew Bible, and a solid foundation of reference for further study of it. — Peter Machinist, Harvard University