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Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives

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Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives ANCIENT PROPHECY Ancient Prophecy Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives MARTTI NISSINEN 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Martti Nissinen 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941120 ISBN 978–0–19–880855–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. In memory of my teachers Ilmari Soisalon-Soininen (1917–2002) Timo Veijola (1947–2005) Oswald Loretz (1928–2014) Heikki Räisänen (1941–2015) Preface and Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to write a preface to a book that has been in the making for a long time. Any reader somewhat familiar with my earlier publications will find out that the book at hand is the result of decades of interpretation and reinterpretation, contextualization and recontextualization, redaction and Fortschreibung—almost like a biblical prophetic book, with the exception that this book demonstrably has only one author. Ever since the late 1980s when I was doctoral student in Old Testament studies it has been my conviction that prophecy was a phenomenon common to the ancient Near Eastern cultural sphere. Thanks to Simo Parpola who taught me Neo-Assyrian using prophetic oracles as teaching material, I became acquainted with the Assyrian prophecies which I could use already in my 1991 doctoral thesis. At that time, these texts were still unpublished and had been studied by just a few scholars such as Manfred Weippert and Herbert Huffmon. It was only much later that I began to recognize the Greek side to the picture. It is no secret that I am not a classicist, but the lack of exchange between biblical, Near Eastern, and classical scholarship started to bother me to the extent that I ventured into studying Greek sources myself, hopefully not with all too flawed results. This book is written in favor of the following ideas resulting from my research over the past decades. First, the word “prophecy” refers to the category of non- inductive kind of divination that can be found in different parts of ancient Eastern Mediterranean. It is always based on the notion of divine–human communication; however, it is organized differently in different historically contingent divinatory systems. Secondly, ancient prophetic performances are unreachable, and knowledge of them is available only through secondary inter- pretation in written sources which yield only a partial view of the historical phenomenon. Thirdly, prophecy is socio-religious agency, serving the purposes of human communities and their religious and political structures and author- ities. Prophets are a class of diviners with patterned public behavior recognizable to the communities witnessing their performances. My book is divided into three parts, the first of which discusses the theoretical premises of constructing prophetic divination, the second gives an overview of the sources, and the third consists of comparative essays on a few crucial topics. Each of the nine chapters can be read as a self-sustaining unit; I hope the reader will tolerate some overlaps in the content of the chapters caused by this structure. The presentation of the threefold source materials including biblical, Near Eastern, and Greek texts attempts a comprehensive view of prophetic divination in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean sources. However, this book is still far viii Preface and Acknowledgments from being a full compendium of the subject. The reader will easily notice important sources that my book does not discuss properly, such as apocalyptic writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and early Christian sources. I can only apologize for this failure and refer to some earlier publications that may compensate these shortcomings in a small part (Nissinen 2003c, 2008b, 2009b, 2010a, 2015). The book itself contains partially rewritten and expanded text of four articles published earlier: Nissinen 2000b, 2010c, 2012, and 2013a. I thank the pub- lishers of the original articles, Eisenbrauns, Labor et Fides, and the Society of Biblical Literature, for permission to republish this content. In addition, frag- ments of several prior publications can be found in different parts of the book. This book is essentially the product of the academic environment of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki. The inquisitive and open- minded atmosphere of the Department of Biblical Studies, represented by colleagues such as Raija Sollamo, Outi Lehtipuu, Ismo Dunderberg, Risto Uro, Antti Marjanen, and Petri Luomanen, has had a formative influence on my own work. In particular, the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence “Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions” (CSTT) has provided an unpreju- diced international meeting place for different theoretical approaches and methodologies. It has been a pleasure to work together with the team leaders Anneli Aejmelaeus, Jutta Jokiranta, and Juha Pakkala, members of my own team (Tero Alstola, Izaak de Hulster, Helen Dixon, Sanae Ito, Raz Kletter, Raija Mattila, Katri Saarelainen, Sanna Saari, Jason Silverman, Saana Svärd, Emilia Tapiola, Joanna Töyräänvuori, Tuula Tynjä, Kirsi Valkama), as well as many other CSTT members who have worked on topics related to prophecy (Katri Antin, Reinhard Müller, Urmas Nõmmik, Mika Pajunen, Hanna Tervanotko, Elisa Uusimäki, Hanne von Weissenberg). Another institution I owe a great debt of gratitude to is the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where I have had the privilege of doing my research in 2008–9, 2011, and 2016. I have greatly enjoyed the scholarly ambiance at the Institute, as well as the support of colleagues in Classics such as Michael Flower (Princeton University), Angelos Chaniotis, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Christopher Jones. I also had the opportunity of visiting the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2015, for which I thank Bernd Ulrich Schipper. Inspiring scholarly exchange on prophecy with Ehud Ben Zvi, Dominique Charpin, Lester Grabbe, Esther Hamori, Reinhard Kratz, Christoph Levin, Simo Parpola, and Jonathan Stökl has contributed decisively to the develop- ment of my own image of prophecy. Some of my colleagues have become close friends with whom I have shared much more than just scholarly ideas: Terje Stordalen, David Carr and Colleen Conway, Mark Smith and Elizabeth Bloch- Smith, Kirsi Stjerna and Brooks Schramm, and Peggy Day. A significant number of colleagues deserve thanks for their support and critiques. I want to mention the following scholars from whom, among many Preface and Acknowledgments ix others, I have learned over the years: Hans Barstad, Bob Becking, Angelika Berlejung, George Brooke, David Clines, John Collins, Walter Dietrich, Chip Dobbs-Allsopp, Göran Eidevall, Daniel Fleming, Christian Frevel, Erhard Gerstenberger, Jan Gertz, Jean-Georges Heintz, Else Holt, Herbert Huffmon, Axel Knauf, Antti Laato, Armin Lange, Mark Leuchter, Ted Lewis, Peter Machinist, Sara Milstein, Hindy Najman, Herbert Niehr, Beate Pongratz- Leisten, Jack Sasson, Leong Seow, Rudolf Smend, Hermann Spieckermann, Marvin Sweeney, Karel van der Toorn, Josef Tropper, and Manfred Weippert. Finally, I would like to thank people who have contributed to the production of the volume: Maarit Kolsi for the cover image inspired by one of my source texts (SAA 9 1 rev.); Nina Nikki for preparing the indexes; the anonymous readers and the staff of Oxford University Press: Tom Perridge and Karen Raith; and Gayathri Manoharan, Michael Janes, and Brian North. The loyal support of my wife Leena has been unfailing, and my daughters Elina and Kaisa have been my source of constant delight. I offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone mentioned above. I dedicate this book to the memory of my teachers: Ilmari Soisalon-Soininen whose seminar on the historical background of the biblical prophets was the starting point of my occupation with prophecy; Timo Veijola who taught me to take theology and scholarship seriously; Oswald Loretz who always reminded me that every scholar should have a method; and Heikki Räisänen who programma- tically transgressed imaginary boundaries, whether those of scholarship or biblical canon. Note to the reader: Throughout the text and notes in this volume, reference is made to original sources of Ancient Near Eastern Documents of Prophecy, by the use of a number preceded by * (e.g. *26; **51–3, *118f). A complete catalogue of sources is given in Appendix 2. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/9/2017, SPi Contents List of Abbreviations xiii PART I. THEORY 1. Constructing Prophetic Divination 3 Prophecy as a Construct 3 Prophecy as Divination 10 Prophets as Intermediaries 19 On Comparative Studies 43 Sources, Genre, and Purpose 51 PART II.
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