Invention of Hebrew

By: Seth L. Sanders

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Hardcover | 14 May 2010

At a Glance

Hardcover
280 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3

Hardcover

RRP $239.00

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The Invention of Hebrew is the first book to approach the Bible in light of recent epigraphic discoveries on the extreme antiquity of the alphabet and its use as a deliberate and meaningful choice. Hebrew was more than just a way of transmitting information; it was a vehicle of political symbolism and self-representation.

Seth L. Sanders connects the Bible's distinctive linguistic form--writing down a local spoken language--to a cultural desire to speak directly to people, summoning them to join a new community that the text itself helped call into being. Addressing the people of Israel through a vernacular literature, Hebrew texts reimagined their audience as a public. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book shows Hebrew's distinctiveness as a self-conscious political language. Illuminating the enduring stakes of Biblical writing, Sanders demonstrates how Hebrew assumed and promoted a source of power previously unknown in written literature: "the people" as the protagonist of religion and politics.

Industry Reviews

''An absolutely innovative way of reading the use of ancient Hebrew for generating political identity and for understanding the Hebrew Bible itself. It is refreshing to see such profound insight and analyses come out of material that has otherwise not received substantial recognition of its cultural and political importance.'' Mark S. Smith, author of God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World ''S. Brings anthropology and epigraphy together in an original and stimulating way, seeking to discern the roots of biblical texts by exploring the contexts and development of writing in the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages...This wide-ranging, extensively annotated book deserves careful study and offers much of value to OT scholars.'' A. R. Millard Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

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