Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East最新文献

{"title":"World Philology or Philology of the World: Commenting on Enuma Elish","authors":"Sophus Helle","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i2.2833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i2.2833","url":null,"abstract":"The field of world philology relies on the comparability of philological practices across a wide set of periods and cultures. However, cross-cultural similarities in practice may belie radical differences in the underlying assumptions about texts and what it means to interpret them. This disconnection is illustrated by one of the two preserved commentaries on the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, Commentary II, which develops the epic’s already striking notions about the relation between objects, their names, and their cosmic roles in an even more radical direction, challenging our understanding of what we are doing when we do philology.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139212129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Building Digital Projects to Outlive Their Funding","authors":"Christian Casey","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i2.2835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i2.2835","url":null,"abstract":"Sustainability is a well-known issue in the digital humanities, but it is rarely discussed in print. Too many valuable online research tools struggle to secure the funding to remain available indefinitely. This problem is especially pronounced in the case of short-term, grant-funded projects, which face the dual problem of limited development time and a horizon of active support. Yet these projects often produce bodies of knowledge that remain useful long after the project ends. Taking one specific case as a prototypical example, The Zodiac Glossary, this paper examines various strategies for ensuring the longevity of online digital resources. What works in extremis is easier to implement in other circumstances. This paper is, on one hand, an implicit call for better funding for digital projects. On the other, it is a brief guide to navigating the situation as it stands. Those working on digital projects may find strategies here to guide their own decision-making processes.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139210651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Other than Mother","authors":"Katrien De Graef","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2094","url":null,"abstract":"In Old Babylonian society, nadītu and other women who held religious offices were not allowed to bear children. Traditionally, this taboo on childbearing has been explained as a taboo on sex (chastity) or a taboo on blood (cultic impurity). I believe these traditional explanations to be faulty and inadequate, and suggest an alternative approach based on the concepts of alterity and constructed social identity. By not fitting the norm of their social group, viz. women, by definition birth giving beings, they are ‘othered’ as non-birth-giving-beings, which indeed is the literal meaning of nadītu: ‘the fallow (woman).’ However, their ‘otherness’ is not conceived as negative or problematic, on the contrary, it added greatly to their social status as a privileged group within society. As such, their childlessness was an important part of their social identity.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114409493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Tearful and Busy Mother","authors":"Agnès Garcia-Ventura","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2068","url":null,"abstract":"As a way to explore certain aspects related to the construction of motherhood, and by extension of an ideal of femininity in ancient Mesopotamia, in this article we examine a first millennium BCE baby incantation known to us thanks to two duplicates found in the city of Assur. More specifically, we concentrate on the two references to the mother in this text. In the first one the mother herself cries when she sees that she cannot stop her baby’s crying. In the second one the mother is presented as unable to attend to the work she has to do because of the baby’s crying. In our analysis we argue that both references underline important pillars in the construction of femininity. On the one hand we emphasise that the crying of the mother can be read, at least partially, as an empathetic reaction. On the other, we defend that the busy mother in the text embodies the ideal of the industrious woman – in contrast to the negative archetype of the lazy woman, a frequent trope in Sumerian and Akkadian literature.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134451824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wisdom of Israelite Mothers","authors":"Carol Meyers","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i1.1928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i1.1928","url":null,"abstract":"The two major components of motherhood are biological and social reproduction. The former is examined extensively in biblical studies, while the latter is virtually ignored. This essay focuses on the social dimension of motherhood by considering two kinds of wisdom associated with the role of mothers in socializing and educating their offspring. The first is imparting technical knowledge, mainly to daughters, who must learn the technologies of the various household maintenance tasks they will need when they have their own households. Included in these technologies are food-processing and food-preparation activities, textile and crafts production, and also health-care techniques, food-related religious rituals, and certain specialized skills. The second is the socializing component of mothers’ wisdom, which involved instruction in the social and moral values of the household. That instruction was modeled as much as it was explicitly taught. Teaching life skills and inculcating life lessons both contributed to maternal authority in Israelite households.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124317512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hiobs Vaterschaft und die Trauer um seine Kinder","authors":"Anja Marschall","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2028","url":null,"abstract":"Dieser Aufsatz überprüft die These, dass der Protagonist des Hiobbuches als klagender Vater charakterisiert ist. Prolog, Dialog und Epilog zeigen Hiob als trauernden und liebenden Vater, der sich mit Gesprächspartnern auseinandersetzt, die wiederum auf die Art seiner Trauer Bezug nehmen. Nach einer Untersuchung der Verwendung typischer Trauerverben und -riten wendet sich die Untersuchung Hiobs körperlicher, emotionaler und kognitiver Reaktion auf den Tod seiner Kinder zu. Durch den Abgleich mit anderen alttestamentlichen und altorientalischen Texten sowie mit der aktuellen exegetischen und kulturanthropologischen Forschung zeigt sich, dass Hiobs Morbidität und Todeswunsch Teil einer kulturtypischen, aber besonders verstärkten Trauerreaktion sind. Hiobs kognitive Verarbeitung bildet hingegen eine im Alten Israel unübliche Art der Trauerbewältigung ab. Gleichwohl zeigt sie große Übereinstimmungen mit bekannten Trauermustern wie der komplizierten Trauer und Disenfranchised grief. Die Parallelen zu Ergebnissen der zeitgenössischen Psychologie ermöglichen es, Hiobs Trauer als treibende Kraft der Klage und als Anstoß des Streits unter Freunden wahrzunehmen. Die negative Reaktion der Freunde auf Hiobs Trauer bestätigt, dass Hiob als trauernder Vater klagt und protestiert und als solcher Gottes Weltordnung in Frage stellt. Im Epilog des Hiobbuches erweist sich schließlich die Vaterschaft Hiobs als das überdauernde und stabilisierende Element im Narrativ des Lebens Hiobs.\u0000 \u0000This paper verifies the thesis that the protagonist of the Book of Job is delineated as a grieving father. The prologue, dialogue and epilogue show Job as a mourning and loving father engaging in dialogue with friends and God who themselves relate to Job’s grief. After examining the use of typical mourning verbs and rites, the study turns to Job’s physical, emotional, and cognitive reaction to the death of his children. By comparing Job’s expressions with other Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern texts as well as with current exegetical and cultural anthropological scholarship, Job’s morbidity and death wish can be seen as a culturally typical but particularly intensified grief response. In contrast, Job’s cognitive processing represents a coping mechanism unusual in Ancient Israel. However, there are parallels to typical patterns of mourning known to contemporary psychology, such as complicated and disenfranchised grief. These allow to identify Job’s grief as the driving force of the lament and as the impetus of a dispute among friends. Their negative reaction to Job’s mourning confirms that Job laments and protests as a grieving father. Finally, in the epilogue of the book, Job’s fatherhood emerges as the enduring and stabilizing feature of the story.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127830634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Discourse and Intercourse","authors":"Sarah Fein","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2059","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I consider three narratives, Genesis 38, 2 Samuel 13, and Judges 19, in which biblical authors deploy women’s speech at moments of crisis in the plot. These moments are caused by women’s precarious location in the bêt ʾāb, which I theorize using the framework of the Patrimonial Household Model (PHM). I assess the women characters’ speech through the lens of Laura Mary Elizabeth Hare’s sociolinguistic analysis of gendered speech in biblical narrative.  While Tamar in Gen 38 uses manipulation and “masculine” speech to successfully re-insert herself into the bêt ʾāb, Tamar in 2 Sam 13 is the victim of men’s manipulation and her “feminine” speech fails to protect her. The secondary wife in Judges 19 has no verbal speech, only speech-acts, which leaves her almost but not entirely at the mercy of men’s discourse. I argue that the biblical authors understood women characters as able to exercise some amount of agency through their leveraging of normatively masculine speech, but only for the purpose of re-establishing the social order of the PHM.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128890201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“No me desobedezcas, ¡solo ve! La política matrimonial de Zimri-Lim de Mari o de la disposición masculina sobre los cuerpos femeninos.","authors":"L. Urbano","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v2i1.2070","url":null,"abstract":"El objetivo del artículo será abordar las alianzas matrimoniales del último rey de Mari, Zimri-Lim (1775-1762 a.n.e.), haciendo hincapié en la relación entre este rey/padre/hermano y sus hijas y hermanas. Toda sociedad posee reglas de filiación, un sistema de parentesco y normas que definen las modalidades de las alianzas matrimoniales. Estas últimas son prácticas usuales en el interior de la sociedad en su conjunto, pero adquieren un cariz particular cuando el Estado las utiliza para llevar adelante sus planes, transformando su concreción en una verdadera política matrimonial. En el marco de ésta y desde una perspectiva teórica que recupera los aportes de la perspectiva de género nos preguntamos ¿Cómo experimentaron la violencia las hijas y hermanas de Zimri-Lim? ¿Fueron agentes pasivos, casi fichas de ajedrez en un juego político que les era ajeno? ¿O pudieron desarrollar formas de conciencia (de género, de elite) que les permitieron poner límites a la violencia y de alguna manera resistir? ¿Es esto factible en las sociedades antiguas? En las dinámicas de este campo de poder, ¿el rey y padre/hermano limitó/ejerció/habilitó la violencia física y simbólica sobre las mujeres de su familia?","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114673863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Case of Joseph’s Coat: Giving Gifts to Children in the Hebrew Bible","authors":"Kristine Henriksen Garroway","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v1i2.1452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v1i2.1452","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph’s coat is one of the most recognizable garments in the Hebrew Bible. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss theorizes that a gift contains part of the giver’s social persona, thus requiring a counter-gift to be given. Drawing on Mauss’s work as a heuristic category, this study investigates the economy of gifts and counter-gifts in the Hebrew Bible using Joseph’s coat as a case study. Joseph’s age at the time he receives the gift and the seeming lack of a counter-gift form the two main questions that this study investigates. To answer these questions requires determining who made the coat, a question best answered through an archaeological analysis of how textiles were created in ancient Israel. The paper concludes that an ancient audience would have understood both Jacob and Rachel to be makers of the gift, and therefore the (expected) recipients of a counter-gift. The end of the Joseph Novella suggests that this expectation was met after a period of delay, during which time Joseph grew into adulthood and rose to a position where he could properly return a gift on par with the special coat.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134316631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Domestic Religion in the Southern Levant: A Material Religion Approach","authors":"Jeremy D. Smoak","doi":"10.33182/aijls.v1i2.1652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33182/aijls.v1i2.1652","url":null,"abstract":"The present study examines how a material religion approach might be applied meaningfully to the study of domestic religion in the southern Levant. Despite the abundant material evidence from the archaeological record, locating religion in the house continues to pose certain challenges, in terms of both definition and visibility. We see in past studies that much of the larger effort of studying the material culture rests in attempts to explain how materials reflect religious belief or to determine functional meanings. This is particularly the case in the study of those remains from domestic contexts, which are often interpreted as a way to understand how the beliefs and practices of non-official religion differed from that of the picture of belief in the textual evidence. A material religions approach, however, challenges this tendency by arguing that materials should not be interpreted primarily as reflections or expressions of beliefs or ideas. For this reason, the present study gives priority of focus to the many things of religion that have been uncovered in domestic spaces and spaces connected to the lifecycle of the household. This approach also challenges a picture of domestic religion that overemphasizes the walls as boundaries of the house since an emphasis upon food, drink, incense, etc. points to the house’s relationship with and the household’s dependence upon the family field, the natural landscape, and larger networks of sustenance and exchange.","PeriodicalId":222227,"journal":{"name":"Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121061433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}