Ancient Near East Studies?

[SkipB]

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ This is a paste, using chrome.

[mtp1032]

I'm using IE 8 on XP. I think lava lamps will be back en vogue before the unicode issue ever gets solved.

Lava Lamps are out of vogue?

[Adelphos]

Lava Lamps are out of vogue?

Well, yes... everywhere except Mississippi, that is.

Skip, your Hebrew looks fine on my setup, IE 8, XP.

[Dale A. Brueggemann]

I just opened this page in Firefox, IE and Chrome.... In all of them, in Dale's signature, a vowel comes after and not under a doubled consonant.

And in my own browser it all looks perfect, including the holem after the dotted sin of la'asot. I think it goes to show that Scott's worries about Unicode not being quite ready for prime time have some basis in what we're seeing.

[SkipB]

Unicode is a lot closer than we used to be. I remember my Epson MX-80: you could load user defined fonts. It was radical to be able to include Greek and Hebrew printed not hand written, in the actual text of a paper. Now we're quibbling over vowel placement, on the Internet.

The text in my previous post, was a straight copy and paste from BibleWorks, I just enlarged the text size. Very straight forward.

[John Parsons]

Well apart from the digression about Unicode font issues (which is interesting nonetheless), it seems we only had a couple answers to the original topic question. Thanks Scott and Dale! Any other ideas? I think it's interesting that Abraham's father, for example, was a Sumerian priest, and I wonder how that might have affected Abraham's sense of calling... Moreover, the Torah states that until Abraham arrived in Canaan, the ancestors of Israel "served other gods" (Josh. 24:2), and these “gods” were part of ancient Near East mythology that derived from ancient Babel in the land of Shinar (Gen. 10:10). Hence we see Rachel stealing her father’s idols (i.e., “teraphim,” תְּרָפִים) before fleeing Haran (Gen. 31:19), and we see Jacob later commanding his family to “put away the foreign gods among you” (Gen. 35:2). It’s clear, then, that the influence of this ancient religious system extended long before the captivity of the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BC.

Shalom

[John Parsons]

This topic is bumped here

[jthomp]

I am looking for some background information on the Ancient Near East during the time of Abraham (and earlier). I am also interested in ancient Egypt. Does anyone recommend a resource on this subject they have personally found helpful? Ideally I would like a popular - yet accurate - introduction to these ancient cultures.

Thanks for any help you might give!

- John

Don't you just hate it when your original post gets hijacked? Guess that's just the nature of forums... Anyway there's a book by JJM Roberts you might be interested in titled The Bible and the Ancient Near East. I think you will find it of some value.

James

[John Parsons]

Thanks James... It's good not to be overlooked! I will chase down the title you recommended.

[Greg Crawford]

I am looking for some background information on the Ancient Near East during the time of Abraham (and earlier). I am also interested in ancient Egypt. Does anyone recommend a resource on this subject they have personally found helpful? Ideally I would like a popular - yet accurate - introduction to these ancient cultures.

Thanks for any help you might give!

- John

How about:
John H. Walton The Lost World of Genesis One. IVP Academic. 2009
John H. Walton Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. Baker Academic. 2006.