Full Description
This volume brings together experts in the study of ancient prayers and divination methods to analyse the variety of means by which human beings sought to communicate with their gods and by which the gods were seen to communicate with their worshippers. In a departure from previous scholarship, the volume brings together the study of prophecy, as an intuitive form of divination, with the study of technical methods of communication and other forms of institutionalised communication such as prayer. Such a format allows divine-human communication to be studied in both directions simultaneously: the means by which the divine communicates to human beings through divination, and the means by which human beings communicate with the divine through prayer. This new perspective on the study of divine-human-divine communication allows scholars to better appreciate the way in which communication and the relationship between heaven and earth was conceived in the ancient near East.
Contents
Introduction" - C.L.Crouch, J.Stokl, Anna Elise Zernecke; "The Diversity of Human Communication with God in the Hebrew Psalter" - Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Philipps-Universitat Marburg; "The Exclusivity of Divine Communication in Ancient Israel" - Herbert Huffmon, Drew University; "'May he last with the sun': Psalm 72 in its Northern Syrian Context" - Jan Dietrich, University of Leipzig; "The Growth of a Prayer. Textual Criticism and Ishtar 2" - Anna Elise Zernecke, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; "Prayers and personal piety" - Margaret Jaques, University of Zurich; "The Curious Case of Ludlul Bel Nemeqi: Divine-Human Communication in the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer" - Alan Lenzi, University of the Pacific; "(Intuitive) Divination, (Ethical) Demands and Diplomacy in the Ancient Near East" - Jonathan Stokl, University College London; "(Technical) Divination and Divine-Human Communication" (title tbc) - Nils Peter Heesel, Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg; "Samaritan inscriptions as votive depositories" - Anne Katrine Gudme, University of Copenhagen.
