Ancient Prophecy
Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives
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Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198808558
Number of Pages: 470
Published: 07/12/2017
Width: 16.4 cm
Height: 24.1 cm
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives is the first monograph-length comparative study on prophetic divination in ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and Greek sources. Prophecy is one of the ways humans have believed to become conversant with what is believed to be superhuman knowledge. The prophetic process of communication involves the prophet, her/his audience, and the deity from whom the message allegedly comes from. Martti Nissinen introduces a wealth of ancient sources documenting the prophetic phenomenon around the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, whether cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, the Hebrew Bible, Greek inscriptions, or ancient historians.
Nissinen provides an up-to-date presentation of textual sources, the number of which has increased substantially in recent times. In addition, the study includes four analytical comparative chapters. The first demonstrates the altered state of consciousness to be one of the central characteristics of the prophets' public behavior. The second discusses the prophets' affiliation with temples, which are the typical venues of the prophetic performance. The third delves into the relationship between prophets and kings, which can be both critical and supportive. The fourth shows gender-inclusiveness to be one of the peculiar features of the prophetic agency, which could be executed by women, men, and genderless persons as well. The ways prophetic divination manifests itself in ancient sources depend not only on the socio-religious position of the prophets in a given society, but also on the genre and purpose of the sources. Nissinen contends that, even though the view of the ancient prophetic landscape is restricted by the fragmentary and secondary nature of the sources, it is possible to reconstruct essential features of prophetic divination at the socio-religious roots of the Western civilization.
With this volume N. has provided the field with an authoritative study of ancient prophecy. It should be in every institutional library...in every scholar's personal library. * Nathan MacDonald, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament * This volume summarizes nearly three decades of Nissinens careful scholar-ship on the topic of ancient Near Eastern prophetism, which in recent years has expanded to include ancient Greece as well. ... This latest work is a comprehensive and fair-minded assess-ment of the state of the question that should serve as the starting point for all future discussions of the subject. * John W. Hilber, Bulletin for Biblical Research * Ancient Prophecy is a dense and well-articulated book. The book is both a competent introducgtion to the modern study on ancient prophecy for the non-specialist reader and a piece of high-standard academic work * Felipe Masotti, Andrews University Seminary Studies 56 * Anyone working broadly in the fields of Mesopotamian and biblical prophecy knows the inestimable debt that scholars owe to Martti Nissinen... Scholars engaged in comparative study will find this volume essential for drawing together theory and the analysis of texts. Ancient Prophecy will instantly serve as the standard work for researching in ancient prophecy generally and prophetic texts from the eastern Mediterranean specifically. Assyriologists and
biblical scholars once again owe Nissinen an inestimable debt for his work in ancient prophecy. * Samuel L. Boyd, Reading Religion *