Basic Background
Babylon’s Ever-Shifting Past
Scholarship is always changing the past.
Ur and Har(r)an in Bible and History
Narratives of Genesis are tied up with historical places that carried specific meanings we will miss without some background on those ancient places.
Books Cited
Babylon by Kriwaczek
Paul Kriwaczek. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2010)
Everyday Life
Contenau, Georges. Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria (NY: The Norton Library, 1966).
Babylon Complex
Babylon is a surprisingly multivalent symbol in U.S. culture and politics. Erin Runions devotes 300 pages to unpacking…
Israel in Exile (Albertz)
Oft-cited “biblical, historical, literary, and theological masterpiece” exploring the Babylonian Captivity through bible and history.
Song of Exile
Stowe explores Psalm 137 in three parts: History (“…there we sat and wept…”), Memory (“If I forget thee, Jerusalem…”), and Forgetting (“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed…”) with a strong emphasis on the psalm in music and popular culture.
Israel’s Resistance Poetry
“Israel’s earliest responses to earth-shaking changes were cast in the powerfully expressive language of poetry…”
The Hebrew Bible (Greenspan)
The Hebrew Bible: New Insights and Scholarship. Jewish Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Greenspan, Frederick E., ed. (NY: NYU Press, 2008) “There has been aContinue Reading
Tanakh: An Owner’s Manual
Tanakh: An Owner’s Manual: Authorship, Canonization, Masoretic Text, Exegesis, Modern Scholarship, and Pedagogy. Moshe Sokolow. (NY: Ktav, 2015). Moshe Sokolow, a professor at Yeshiva University,Continue Reading
Diaspora Model and Black Theology
In 1973, Charles Shelby Rooks floated the “untested suggestion about a possible new image” for Black Theology: that of an African Diaspora based on theContinue Reading
Related Music
More Resources
Oriental Institute
Oriental Institute sponsors excavations and surveys, operates a museum, publishes many resources, and shares materials on-line.
Bible Readers’ Inventories
Many factors influence how we read any document, including — perhaps, especially — the Bible. Spending some time exploring factors that influence our own readingContinue Reading
