A Commentary: Facing up to Impending Changes in Credentialing Examinations

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In search of Ancient Israel

Why was religion so important for rulers in the pre-modern world? And how did the world come to be dominated by just a handful of religious traditions, especially Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism? Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion and its interaction with political authority. His analysis distinguishes between two quite different forms of religiosity - immanentism, which focused on worldly assistance, and transcendentalism, which centred on salvation from the human condition - and shows how their interaction shaped the course of history. Taking examples drawn from Ancient Rome to the Incas or nineteenth-century Tahiti, a host of phenomena, including sacred kingship, millenarianism, state-church struggles, reformations, iconoclasm, and, above all, conversion are revealed in a new light.

Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History

Homer and the origin of the Greek alphabet: Argument from the material remains: Greek inscriptions from the beginning to c. 650 b.c .

In Intangible Spirits and Graven Images , Michael Shenkar offers a comprehensive treatment of divine iconography in pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia.

Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World

This dissertation explores the role of giants in the narrative and historiographic worlds of symbol, geography, and religion in ancient Israel. The Nephilim, Anaqim, Rephaim, Emim, Zamzumim/Zuzim, some Gibborim, and other individuals (e.g., Goliath) can all be classified as “giants”—not only with respect to their height and other physical properties, but also with respect to the negative moral qualities assigned to giants in antiquity. Previous interpreters have treated giants as merely a fantastical prop against which God’s agents emerge victorious. I argue that giants are a theologically and historiographically generative group, through which we gain insight into central aspects of ancient Israel’s symbolic world. All that is overgrown or physically monstrous represents a connection to the primeval chaos that stands as a barrier to creation and right rule. In this sense, giants represent chaos-fear, and their eradication is a form of chaos maintenance by both human and divine forces. Moreover, I demonstrate a series of affinities between the Bible’s presentation of its giants and aspects of Greek epic tradition (e.g., the Iliad, Catalogue, Works and Days, Cypria, and the Gigantomachy/Titanomachy), as well as other Near Eastern traditions. Both giants and heroes were thought to represent a discrete “race” of beings, both were thought to be larger than contemporary people, and both lived and flourished, in the historical imaginations of later authors, throughout the Bronze Age and largely ceased to exist at the end of this period. The size, strength, and physical excess of heroes and giants

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The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel

Phoenician Aniconism in Its Mediterranean and Ancient Near Eastern Contexts

Introduction (Brian R. Doak and Carolina Lopez-Ruiz) Research Tools (Philip Schmitz) Birth and Prospects of a Discipline (Nicholas Vella) Part One: Histories The East Canaanite Roots and the Proto-Phoenician Period: c. 1300-1000 BCE (Ann E. Killebrew) Phoenicia in the Later Iron Age: Tenth Century BCE to the Assyrian and Babylonian Periods (Guy Bunnens) Tyre and its Colonial Expansion (Maria Eugenia Aubet Semmler) Phoenicia under the Achaemenid Empire (Vadim Jigoulov) The Hellenistic Period and Hellenization in Phoenicia (Corinne Bonnet) Phoenicia in the Roman Empire (Julien Aliquot) The Archaeology of Phoenician Cities (He (c)enn Sader) The West Early Carthage: From its Foundation to the Battle of Himera (ca. 814-480 BCE) (He (c)di Dridi) Classical-Hellenistic Carthage before the Punic Wars (479-265 BCE) (Dexter Hoyos) The Punic Wars (264-146 BCE) (Christopher de Lisle) Carthage after the Punic Wars and the Neo-Punic Legacy (Matthew Hobson) Part Two: Areas of Culture Language and Literature The Language (Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo) Inscriptions (Madadh Richey) The Alphabet and its Legacy (Madadh Richey) Phoenician Literature (Carolina Lo(3)pez-Ruiz) Religion (Paolo Xella) Ritual and the Afterlife (Mireia Lopez-Berta!n) The tophet and Infant Sacrifice (Matthew McCarty) Material Culture Pottery and Trade (Francisco J. NAA+/-ez) Art and Iconography (Eric Gubel) Levantine Art in the Orientalizing Period (Marian Feldman) Coins (John Betlyon) Metallurgy and Other Technologies (Philip Andrew Johnston and Brett Kaufman) Seafaring and Shipwreck Archaeology (Jeffrey P. Emanuel) Residential Architecture (Roald Docter) Agriculture (Carlos Go(3)mez Bellard) Part Three: Regional Studies and Interactions The Levant (Gunnar Lehmann) Cyprus (Sabine Fourrier) The Aegean (Nicholaos Chr. Stampolidis) The Italian Peninsula (Jeremy Hayne) Sardinia (Andrea Roppa) Sicily (Salvatore de Vincenzo) Malta and Gozo (Nicholas Vella and Maxine Anastasi) Ibiza (Benjamin Costa) The Iberian Peninsula (Jose (c) Luis oA(3)pe Castro) Phoenicians in Portugal (Ana Margarida Arruda) The Gadir-Tyre Axis (Manuel Alvarez Marti-Aguilar) North Africa: from the Atlantic to Algeria (Alfredo Mederos) Phoenician Exploration (Duane W. Roller) Part Four: Receptions Phoenicians in the Hebrew Bible (Brian R. Doak) Phoenicians and Carthaginians in Classical Literature (Josephine C. Quinn) Neo-Phoenician Identities in the Roman Empire (Anthony Kaldellis) Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the Western Imagination (Brien Garnand) Phoenician Identity in Modern Lebanon (Claude Doumet-Serhal) Punic Heritage in Tunisia (Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Peter van Dommelen)

The Oxford handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

The bodies of a people encode and continually retell the story of their families, cities, and nations. In the Hebrew Bible, the bodies of notable heroic figures—warriors, kings, and cultural founders—not only communicate values on an individual level but they also bear meaning for the fate of the nation. The patriarch Jacob, who takes on the name of the nation, “Israel,” engages in an intense bodily drama by way of securing the family blessing and passing on his identity to the Tribes of Israel. Judges is a deeply bodily book: left-handed, mutilating and mutilated, long haired, and fractured like the nation itself, its warriors revel in bodies and violence. The David and Saul drama, throughout 1–2 Samuel, repeatedly juxtaposes the bodies of the two kings and sets them on a collision course. Saul’s body continues to act in strange and powerful ways beyond his death, and in the final episodes of Saul’s bone movement and reburial, the last heroic body goes underground. Thus, Israel’s heroic national body rises and falls on the bodies of its heroes, and the Hebrew Bible takes up a profound place in the ancient literary landscape in its treatment of heroic and body themes.

Brian R. Doak

Papers

The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel

Phoenician Aniconism in Its Mediterranean and Ancient Near Eastern Contexts

The Oxford handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

Consider Leviathan: Narratives of Nature and the Self in Job