Context of Scripture, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2004 by Howard, David M Jr

The Context of Scripture. Edited by William W. Hallo. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997-2002. Vol. 1: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, xxviii + 599 pp., $129.00; Vol. 2: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World, xxvi + 438 pp., $131.00; Vol. 3: Archival Documents from the Biblical World, liv + 406 pp., $129.00.

William Hallo's monumental work, The Context of Scripture (COS), is the logical successor to James Pritchard's equally ambitious (for its time) Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET), which has served as the standard for English readers since 1950 (3rd ed., 1969). Their aims are very similar. ANETs goal was "to make available to students of the ancient Near East-serious students of the Old Testament, we believe, are necessarily such-the most important extrabiblical texts in translations which represent the best understanding which present-day scholarship has achieved" (p. xix). COS's purpose is "to assemble the existing renderings [of ancient Near Eastern texts], update them where necessary, and indicate their relevance for biblical scholarship" (l:xxv).

Beyond this, COS's aims are more ambitious and nuanced, even if a bit confused in their expression. They are to bring together a "combination of an intertextual and a contextual approach to biblical literature [that] holds out the promise that this millennial corpus will continue to yield new meanings on all levels: the meaning that it holds for ourselves in our contemporary context[;] the meanings it has held for readers, worshippers, artists and others in the two millennia and more since the close of the canon; the meaning that it held for its own authors and the audiences of their times; and finally the meanings that it held when it was part of an earlier literary corpus. It is to the clarification of that oldest level of meaning that The Context of Scripture is dedicated" (l:xxviii). (The ambiguity in this statement lies in the antecedent for "it" in the first sentence: grammatically, it most naturally should be "this millennial corpus," but in the context of the statement, it appears to be "biblical literature.")

COS's expanded goals reflect a half-century's worth of discussion on the place of ancient Near Eastern texts in the study of the Bible (and also the reverse question). No longer are biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts simply to be lined up and "compared," on a one-to-one basis, as many did in the first part of the 20th century. Now, scholars of a "contextual" approach-of whom Hallo is the leading spokesman-speak of understanding the Bible's context in both a vertical and a horizontal dimension, and Hallo highlights this as one of the major differences between COS and ANET (l:xxv-xxvi). The horizontal dimension is roughly the synchronie one-i.e. the geographical, historical, religious, political, and literary setting in which a given text was created and disseminated (l.xxv)-whereas the vertical dimension is roughly the diachronic (or "intertextual") one-i.e. "a vertical axis between the earlier texts that helped inspire it and later texts that reacted to it" (l:xxvi). This diachronic dimension functions on the text-critical level (where there are multiple copies and editions of the same text) as well as for purposes of comparison of different texts that are related genre-wise.

ANET accounted very well for the horizontal dimension, but not as self-consciously as COS for the vertical one. Thus, for example (to illustrate the text-critical principle), in ANET, Theophile J. Meek's translation of Hammurapi's law code is done from the Louvre stela, supplemented in a few eases by one tablet from Nippur, and large gaps nevertheless remain in the resulting text, whereas in COS, Martha Roth's translation takes into account some 50 different versions, and almost no gaps remain. In addition (to illustrate the genre principle), COS comments much more in its introductions about relations among the various law codes from different time periods-Lipit-Ishtar, Eshnunna, Hammurapi, Middle Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and others-than docs ANET.

The geographical breadth of coverage in ANET and COS is similar. Each volume in COS covers Egyptian, Hittite, West Semitic, Akkadian, and Sumerian texts, in that order. In ANET, the first organizing principle was genre, not geography, but its geographical reach was roughly the same.

COS is a larger project than ANET, containing more texts and a greater number and variety of contributors. ANET began with 11 contributors in 1950 and grew to all of 18 by 1969. By contrast, COS includes a total of 63 contributors, 37 in volume 1, 33 in volume 2 (22 of these new), and 17 in volume 3 (4 new). Several of COS's contributors are recognized evangelicals-including the project's associate editor, K. Lawson Younger, Jr., whose role was more akin to a co-editor-whereas no evangelicals were represented in ANET. ANETs three editions came to a total of 735 folio-sized pages, while COS's three volumes come to 1,551 equally large-sized pages. Both works contain the standard apparatus for aid in reading, such as introductions for each text by the translators, bibliographies, explanatory notes, scriptural cross-references, and extensive indexes of Scripture and topics, although COS's indexes are significantly more extensive. Another difference between the two projects is that ANET's translations were all done specifically for that work, whereas COS uses some translations that have appeared previously in addition to its original translations.