Northwest Semitic Inscriptions and the Bible

Catalog description

This course surveys the inscriptions, mostly royal and mostly monumental, of the cultures surrounding the Bible, mostly in the period 1000-600 BCE. We will read the texts in Phoenician, Old Aramaic, and Moabite, and also look backwards in time to the Sinai inscriptions of the second millennium BCE, always with an eye towards how these texts illuminate the Hebrew Bible, as well. Besides the texts themselves, topics covered will include: royal ideology, Northwest Semitic grammar, historical and literary approaches to reading inscriptions.