David Weisberg became fascinated by Assyriology as an undergraduate at Columbia University. Already endowed with a strong background in Hebraica, he soon came to know that he needed the deeper immersion of a graduate program, and he enrolled at Yale to pursue it. David’s interests soon focused on the Chaldean Dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar and the Achaemenid Dynasty of Cyrus the Great. Weisberg’s thesis succeeded in illuminating the wider significance of some previously unpublished cuneiform texts from this period?as well as earning him the doctorate. The thesis appeared in the recently established Yale Near Eastern Researches (1967) under the somewhat daunting title Guild Structure and Political Allegiance in Early Achaemenid Mesopotamia, and David’s career was launched. Weisberg’s oeuvre, as exemplified by the nearly three dozen essays conveniently assembled in this volume, attest both to his prodigious industriousness and to the loss that the field of Assyriology has suffered in his untimely demise. As is clear from the Table of Contents, he continued to make major contributions to the study of the Neo-Babylonian period (especially regarding political and military history and the doings of ancient royals) but he also offered seminal insights in other areas, including Masoretic studies, rabbinics, social and economic life of the ancient Near East, as well as the interface between modern culture and study of the ancient world. —Based on W. W. Hallo’s “Introduction”

Focused Biblical Scholarship to Teach the Text The Teach the Text Commentary Series utilizes the best of biblical scholarship to provide the information a pastor needs to communicate the text effectively. The carefully selected preaching units and focused commentary allow pastors to quickly grasp the big idea and key themes of each passage of Scripture. Each unit of the commentary includes the big idea and key themes of the passage and sections dedicated to understanding, teaching, and illustrating the text. The newest Old Testament release in this innovative commentary series is Kenneth C. Way's treatment of Judges and Ruth.

"Collection of essays that reassesses history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice "--

The role of human sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world and its implications continue to be topics that fire the popular imagination and engender scholarly discussion and controversy. This volume provides balanced and judicious treatments of the various facets of these topics from a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. It provides nuanced examinations of ancient ritual, exploring the various meanings that human sacrifice held for antiquity, and examines its varied repercussions up into the modern world. The book explores evidence to shed new light on the origins of the rite, to whom these sacrifices were offered, and by whom they were performed. It presents fresh insights into the social and religious meanings of this practice in its varied biblical landscape and ancient contexts, and demonstrates how human sacrifice has captured the imagination of later writers who have employed it in diverse cultural and theological discourses to convey their own views and ideologies. It provides valuable perspectives for understanding key cultural, theological and ideological dimensions, such as the sacrifice of Christ, scapegoating,self-sacrifice and martyrdom in post-biblical and modern times.

Over the course of three centuries, Yale has been actively and seriously engaged in Near Eastern learning, in both senses of the term-training students in the knowledge and skills needed to understand the languages and civilizations of the region, and supporting generations of scholars renowned for their erudition and pathbreaking research. This book traces the history of these endeavors through extensive use of unpublished archival materials, including letters, diaries, and records of institutional decisions. Developments at Yale are set against the wider background of changing American attitudes toward the Near East, as well as evolving ideas about the role of the academy and its curriculum in educating undergraduate and graduate students. In the case of the Near East, this also involves considering how several of its disciplines made the transition from biblically motivated enterprises to secular fields of study. Yale has notable firsts to her credit: the first American professional program in Arabic and Sanskrit; the first American learned society and periodical devoted to Oriental subjects; the first American research institutes in Jerusalem and Baghdad; the first American university to have endowed funds to establish and curate one of the world's largest collections of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals. Yet at the same time, especially over the past half-century, Yale has found it challenging to deal administratively with a small humanities department whose standards and philosophy of teaching and learning seemed increasingly at odds with trends in the university as a whole. This book places these tensions in the context of Yale's responses to post-World War 2 interest in the modern Middle East, the rise of government-supported "area studies," and the consequences of American military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Numerous illustrations, many of them previously unpublished and drawn from a wide range of source material, round out the portrait of three centuries of Near Eastern learning at Yale.