List of Abbreviations
aBc anchor yale Bible commentaries
AfO Archiv für Orientforschung
ane ancient near east
anem ancient near east monographs
aoat alter orient und altes testament
aos american oriental series
aotc apollos old testament commentary
AJA American Journal of Archaeology as assyriological studies
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BBR Bulletin for Biblical Research
BBrs Bulletin for Biblical research supplements
BCSMS Bulletin of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies
BDB F. Brown, s.r. Driver, and c.a. Briggs, Brown–Driver–Briggs
Hebrew and English Lexicon: with an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic (repr.; Peabody, ma: hendrickson, 2005 [2007])
BeataJ Beiträge zur erforschung des alten testaments und des antiken Judentums
BhK3 r. Kittel, Biblica Hebraica (3rd edn; stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937)
BhQ 5 c mccarthy, Deuteronomy, BHQ, vol. 5 (stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007)
Bhs K. elliger and W. rudolph, Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia (stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1987)
BMB Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth
BO Bibliotheca Orientalis
Bts Beiruter texte und studien
BWant Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom alten und neuen testament
BZar Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für altorientalische und Biblische rechtsgeschichte
BZaW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
caD m.t. roth, The Assyrian Dictionary. 21 vols (chicago, iL: The oriental institute of the university of chicago, 1956–2010)
cBc cambridge Bible commentaries
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CBR Currents in Biblical Research
List of Abbreviations
cc covenant code
cos W.W. hallo and K.L. younger Jr, The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions, and Archival Documents from the Biblical World. 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2003)
CRAI Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres
CSMS Journal of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies
cth catalog der texte der hethiter
EI Eretz Israel
est The succession treaties of esarhaddon
Fat Forschungen zum alten testament
Fes Publications of the Finnish exegetical society
hanem history of the ancient near east monographs
hBs herders Biblische studien
HS Hebrew Studies
hsK handbücher zur sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft
hThK.at herders Theologischer Kommentar zum alten testament
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
int. interpretation: a Bible commentary for teaching and Preaching
itc international Theological commentary
JAJ Journal of Ancient Judaism
JANER Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JCSMS Journal for the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JPs Jewish Publication society
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Jsotsup Journal for the study of the old testament supplement series
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
Jsssup Journal of semitic studies supplement series
Kai h. Donner and W. röllig, Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften 1 (Wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2002)
KaLi Keilschrifttexte aus assur literaischen inhalts
LhBots Library of hebrew Bible/old testament studies
Lss Leipziger semitische studien
LXX a. rahlfs and r. hanhart, Septuaginta (Peabody, ma: hendrickson, 2007)
maL-a middle assyrian Laws, tablet a
MDOG Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft
MPAIBL Mémoires présentes à l’ Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres
List of Abbreviations
ms t esarhaddon’s succession treaties at tell tayinat
mt masoretic text
MUSJ Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph
NABU Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires
ncB new century Bible
niBc new international Bible commentary
nicot new international commentary on the old testament
oBo orbis biblicus et orientalis
oiP oriental institute Publications
ois oriental institute seminars
oLa orientalia Lovaniensia analecta
otL old testament Library
OtSt Oudtestamentische Studiën
ÖBs Österreichische Biblische studien
RA Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale
RB Revue Biblique
rima The royal inscriptions of mesopotamia, assyrian Periods
rima, i a.K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia bc (to 1115 BC) (rima, i; toronto: university of toronto Press, 1987)
rima, ii a.K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium, I (1114–859 bc) (rima, ii; toronto: toronto university Press, 1991)
rima, iii a.K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium II (858–754 bc) (rima, iii; toronto: toronto university Press, 1996)
RlA e. ebeling and m. Bruno, Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie. 14 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993–2016)
saa state archives of assyria
saa ii s. Parpola and K. Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (saa, ii; helsinki: helsinki university Press, 1988)
saa Vi t. Kwasman and s. Parpola, Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, Part i: Tiglath-Pileser III through Esarhaddon (saa, Vi; helsinki: helsinki university Press, 1991)
saa X s. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (saa, X; helsinki: helsinki university Press, 1993)
SAAB State Archives of Assyria Bulletin
saas state archives of assyria studies
saner studies in ancient near eastern records
sBL society of Biblical Literature
sBLms society of Biblical Literature monograph series
SEA Svensk Exegetisk Arsbok
SEL Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici
List of Abbreviations
sJsJ supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism
stor studia orientalia
SZ Stimmen der Zeit
TA Tel Aviv
totc tyndale old testament commentaries
UF Ugarit-Forschungen
VT Vetus Testamentum
Vte D.J. Wiseman, ‘The Vassal-treaties of esarhaddon’, Iraq 20 (1958), 1–99
Vtsup supplements to Vetus testamentum
Wmant Wissenschaftliche monographien zum alten und neuen testament
WVDoG Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung der Deutschen orientGesellschaft
ZABR Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte
ZAvA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie
ZAW Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDPV Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins
Introduction
15If you do not obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all His commandments and laws which I enjoin upon you this day, all these curses shall come upon you and take effect:
16Cursed shall you be in the city and cursed shall you be in the country.
17Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
18Cursed shall be the issue of your womb and the produce of your soil, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock.
19Cursed shall you be in your comings and cursed shall you be in your goings.
20The Lord will let loose against you calamity, panic, and frustration in all the enterprises you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of your evildoing in forsaking Me.
21The Lord will make pestilence cling to you, until He has put an end to you in the land that you are entering to possess. 22The Lord will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew; they shall hound you until you perish. 23The skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you iron. 24The Lord will make the rain of your land dust, and sand shall drop on you from the sky, until you are wiped out.
25The Lord will put you to rout before your enemies; you shall march out against them by a single road, but flee from them by many roads; and you shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26Your carcasses shall become food for all the birds of the sky and all the beasts of the earth, with none to frighten them off.
27The Lord will strike you with the Egyptian inflammation, with haemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch, from which you shall never recover.
28The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and dismay. 29You shall grope at noon as a blind man gropes in the dark; you shall not prosper in your ventures, but shall be constantly abused and robbed, with none to give help.
30If you pay the bride-price for a wife, another man shall enjoy her. If you build a house, you shall not live in it. If you plant a vineyard, you shall not harvest it. 31Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it; your ass shall be seized in front of you, and it shall not be returned to you; your flock shall be delivered to your enemies, with none to help you.
32Your sons and daughters shall be delivered to another people, while you look on; and your eyes shall strain for them constantly, but you shall be helpless. 33A people you do not know shall eat up the produce of your soil and all your gains; you shall be abused and downtrodden continually, 34until you are driven mad by what your eyes behold. 35The Lord will afflict you at the knees and thighs with a severe inflammation, from which you shall never recover—from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head.
36The Lord will drive you, and the king you have set over you, to a nation unknown to you or your fathers, where you shall serve other gods, of wood and stone. 37You shall be a consternation, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples to which the Lord will drive you.
38Though you take much seed out to the field, you shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it. 39Though you plant vineyards and till them, you shall have no wine to drink or store, for the worm shall devour them. 40Though you have olive trees throughout your territory, you shall have no oil for anointment, for your olives shall drop off. 41Though you beget sons and daughters, they shall not remain with you, for they shall go into captivity. 42The cricket shall take over all the trees and produce of your land.
43The stranger in your midst shall rise above you higher and higher, while you sink lower and lower: 44he shall be your creditor, but you shall not be his; he shall be the head and you the tail.
45All these curses shall befall you; they shall pursue you and overtake you, until you are wiped out, because you did not heed the Lord your God and keep the commandments and laws that He enjoined upon you. 46They shall serve as signs and proofs against you and your offspring for all time. 47Because you would not serve the Lord your God in joy and gladness over the abundance
of everything, 48you shall have to serve—in hunger and thirst, naked and lacking everything—the enemies whom the Lord will let loose against you. He will put an iron yoke upon your neck until He has wiped you out.
49The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like the eagle—a nation whose language you do not understand, 50a ruthless nation, that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy. 51It shall devour the offspring of your cattle and the produce of your soil, until you have been wiped out, leaving you nothing of new grain, wine, or oil, of the calving of your herds and the lambing of your flocks, until it has brought you to ruin. 52It shall shut you up in all your towns throughout your land until every mighty, towering wall in which you trust has come down. And when you are shut up in all your towns throughout your land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, 53you shall eat your own issue, the flesh of your sons and daughters that the Lord your God has assigned to you, because of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you. 54He who is most tender and fastidious among you shall be too mean to his brother and the wife of his bosom and the children he has spared 55to share with any of them the flesh of the children that he eats, because he has nothing else left as a result of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in all your towns. 56And she who is most tender and dainty among you, so tender and dainty that she would never venture to set a foot on the ground, shall begrudge the husband of her bosom, and her son and her daughter, 57the afterbirth that issues from between her legs and the babies she bears; she shall eat them secretly, because of utter want, in the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in your towns.
58If you fail to observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching that are written in this book, to reverence this honoured and awesome Name, the Lord your God, 59the Lord will inflict extraordinary plagues upon you and your offspring, strange and lasting plagues, malignant and chronic diseases. 60He will bring back upon you all the sicknesses of Egypt that you dreaded so, and they shall cling to you. 61Moreover, the Lord will bring upon you all the other diseases and plagues that are not mentioned in this book of Teaching, until you are wiped out. 62You shall be left a scant few, after having been as numerous as the stars in the skies, because you did not heed the command of the Lord your God. 63And as the Lord once delighted in making you prosperous and many, so will the Lord now delight in causing you to
perish and in wiping you out; you shall be torn from the land that you are about to enter and possess.
64The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, whom neither you nor your ancestors have experienced. 65Yet even among those nations you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest. The Lord will give you there an anguished heart and eyes that pine and a despondent spirit. 66The life you face shall be precarious; you shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival. 67In the morning you shall say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening you shall say, “If only it were morning!”—because of what your heart shall dread and your eyes shall see. 68The Lord will send you back to Egypt in galleys, by a route which I told you you should not see again. There you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but none will buy.
69These are the terms of the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to conclude with the Israelites in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant which He had made with them at Horeb.
(Deut. 28:15–69).
The law code of the book of Deuteronomy is capped with a series of curses that threaten harm upon the individual subject to the legislation, should they fail to keep the Deuteronomic laws. While this method of divine encouragement to keep the commandments of God might seem surprising from a theological point of view, curses were an integral part of the legal, political, and religious life of the ancient Near East. Indeed, scholarship has been quick to note the parallels that exist between the structure of the book of Deuteronomy, with its historical prologue, legal core, and string of blessings and curses, with other literary forms from the ancient Near East. The treaty was a characteristic feature of international relations in both the second and first millenniums bce, first of all among the Hittite Empire, and then again in the eighth and seventh centuries bce, as the Neo-Assyrians began to incorporate other states into their empire as they expanded westward. Like the book of Deuteronomy, these treaty texts also threaten future harm in the form of curses to any individual who breaks the terms of the treaty. These texts show significant commonalities to the book of Deuteronomy, both structurally and, more strikingly, in the content of their curses. Thus the book of Deuteronomy has been compared to
treaties from both the Hittite and the Neo-Assyrian worlds. From a phenomenological point of view, this comparative endeavour provides insights into the biblical conception of the covenantal relationship between Israel and her God, in which the relation is defined in terms akin to a treaty. Yet some scholars have pushed the relationship between these treaty texts and the book of Deuteronomy even further, referring the curses of Deuteronomy 28 to a particular Neo-Assyrian treaty in terms of a direct literary relationship. Thus it has been argued that some of the curses of Deuteronomy 28 seem to parallel, or even to translate, portions of a Neo-Assyrian treaty, ‘The Succession Treaties of Esarhaddon’, known as EST.
This Neo-Assyrian context has often been used to provide an interpretative matrix for understanding Deuteronomy 28. This matrix has been important not just in terms of literary and cultural context, but also because the discernment of parallels between Deuteronomy and the Succession Treaties—which were occasioned during the reign of King Esarhaddon in the seventh century bce—may provide an external reference point for the dating of the book of Deuteronomy. While dating the composition of Deuteronomy to the late eighth and seventh centuries, during the reigns of King Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18:3–6, 22; 727/715–698/687 bce) and, especially, of King Josiah (2 Kgs 22–23; 640–609 bce), was at one point something of a linchpin in biblical scholarship, in recent years this has become a far more controversial topic. The tendency of some critics has been to situate this book within the exilic, or even the post-exilic period, instead—and it seems that there will be no resolution to the problem. An external, datable point of reference is an attractive prospect to many scholars.
However, while there are undeniably points of similarity between Deuteronomy 28 and Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties, the exact nature of the relationship between the texts is not clear-cut. Though some scholars propose that Deuteronomy’s authors drew upon the Succession Treaties as a direct source-text, others have been quick to point out that the affinities shared between the two are also found in other treaty texts. They argue that the treaty-like parts of Deuteronomy do not stem solely from the Succession Treaties, but rather are symptomatic of the genre of the treaty in the ancient Near East in more general terms. Thus parts of Deuteronomy apparently mirror treaty texts not because they were directly copied from a sole precursor such as Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties, but rather because the scribes who wrote the biblical book were able to call upon a koine of treaty
and curse terminology that was current at that time. This debate has reached something of a stalemate in recent years.
The past few decades have brought to light additional inscriptions that also provide parallel phenomena to the curses in Deuteronomy 28. Unlike the Hittite and Neo-Assyrian treaty texts—written in Hittite, an Indo-European language written with cuneiform signs current in the second millennium, or in Akkadian, an East Semitic cuneiform language—these new inscriptions are written in Old Aramaic, a Northwest Semitic language used in Syria during the first millennium bce. Thus these inscriptions are both geographically and linguistically closer to the biblical world than any of the Hittite and Neo-Assyrian texts previously referred to Deuteronomy 28. The particular curses common to both the Old Aramaic inscriptions and Deuteronomy 28 can be described as curses of futility, with a characteristic syntactical form and commonalities in both vocabulary and ideation. We might typify this curse as a threat of maximum effort, but minimal gain. As well as in the Old Aramaic epigraphs and in Deuteronomy 28, there are actually multiple examples of this type of curse in biblical literature, occurring with particular regularity in prophetic texts. Deuteronomy 28 provides several characteristic examples:
If you pay the bride-price for a wife, another man shall enjoy her. If you build a house, you shall not live in it. If you plant a vineyard, you shall not harvest it.
(Deut. 28:30).
Though you take much seed out to the field, you shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it. Though you plant vineyards and till them, you shall have no wine to drink or store, for the worm shall devour them. Though you have olive trees throughout your territory, you shall have no oil for anointment, for your olives shall drop off. Though you beget sons and daughters, they shall not remain with you, for they shall go into captivity.
(Deut. 28:38–41).
In this study I attempt to show the value of these Northwest Semitic inscriptions as primary sources to reorient our view of an ancient world usually seen through a biblical or Mesopotamian lens. Instead, I aim to show the importance of the futility curse as a Northwest Semitic literary trope by exploring manifestations of the curse in Old Aramaic inscriptions and in the Hebrew Bible. By studying these inscriptions
alongside the biblical text, I aim to increase our knowledge of the early history and function of the curses in Deuteronomy 28.
T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF THE Pr ESENT S TUDY
The significance of the present study lies in several areas. To begin with, I provide an analysis and description of all of the examples of the futility curse from the ancient Near East, encompassing the Old Aramaic inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible, as well as considering the possibility of this form in Hittite and Mesopotamian texts. In so doing, I show that the syntactical, lexical, and ideational regularity of these manifestations of the futility curse shows that it was a standard literary form which was utilized by Northwest Semitic scribes in the first millennium bce. The implications of this will be important for understanding both the book of Deuteronomy, and for another Northwest Semitic text which has also been typically referred to a Mesopotamian horizon, the Tell Fakhariyah inscription. However, I will show that both Deuteronomy 28 and this inscription cannot be understood according to Mesopotamian conceptions alone. rather, both texts mediate between the traditions of the East and West, featuring characteristic examples of the Northwest Semitic futility curse, as well as curses more common to Akkadian texts. In this way, the cultural context which informed Deuteronomy 28 will be elucidated.
The implications of this for our understanding of Deuteronomy 28 are significant. Dating to the ninth, eighth and seventh centuries bce, the Old Aramaic inscriptions from Tell Fakhariyah, Sefire, and Bukān provide an important witness to the antiquity of this particular tradition of cursing in the ancient Levant. In this context, I will reaffirm the traditional dating for Deuteronomy 28 in the late monarchic period. As a corollary to this, I will reconsider the aim of the composition of Deuteronomy 28 in the context of the expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, couching my concern as to whether Deuteronomy 28 makes use of these prior literary traditions in order to subvert the Neo-Assyrian hegemonic regime. Finally, I will make use of the inscriptional evidence to provide new insights into the background and function of the curses in Deuteronomy 28, arguing that curses typically have a performative aspect. This observation will be used to provide insights
into the ritual world inherent to the formalization of treaties and the pronouncement of curses in the biblical world.
Along the way, I consider the methodological underpinnings of the comparative approach, arguing that scholarship which has previously concerned itself with Deuteronomy 28 in the light of Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties (or indeed, the Hittite treaties) has done so heedless of the implications of this for the linguistic and literary competence of the Israelite and Judaean scribes. To rephrase this as a question: would a version of the Succession Treaties have been available to the authors of Deuteronomy? And if so, would the Hebrew scribes who wrote Deuteronomy have been able to read and to translate a cuneiform, Akkadian document such as these treaties? A negative answer would similarly negate the argument that Deuteronomy 28 borrows specifically from the Succession Treaties, yet no proponent or critic of the theory has yet considered this crucial issue of bilingualism in ancient Israel. This recognition sets the stage for a new examination of what I would deem to be the crux of the issue: the linguistic means of the transmission of Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties to Deuteronomy. This step is the prerequisite to a re-examination of the parallels between Deuteronomy 28 and the ancient Near Eastern curse traditions, including the evidence from the Old Aramaic epigraphs. But rather than couching this study as a search for literary texts which are genetically related to one another via a process of transmission that is able to be reconstructed from the documentary evidence and according to the traditional understanding of influence in literary studies, I will instead operate on the basis of intertextuality as a model for understanding the associations between these traditions. By utilizing intertextuality in comparative perspective, this study is thus sensitive to the diverse means by which traditions can be related: connections can stem from the written sphere, but may also have been transmitted orally, reflecting the social, ritual, and religious world of the scribe and his cultural backdrop. The ritual context of treaty and curse traditions in the ancient Near East is essential to understanding their social-functional task and therefore cannot be discounted from investigations into Deuteronomy 28, even if it cannot be fully reconstructed. Against this background, the importance of the Northwest Semitic literary tradition of cursing and treaties as preserved in inscriptions written across the Levant during the first millennium bce will be proposed as an important alternative witness to the ritual world which informed the composition of the Hebrew Bible.
The study is divided into six chapters. I begin in chapter 1 by reviewing previous scholarship pertaining to the composition of Deuteronomy 28 in light of the ancient Near Eastern curse and treaty tradition (and in particular Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties). This scholarship has typically seen the reuse of the Succession Treaties in Deuteronomy 28 as a subversive endeavour on the part of the biblical scribes. Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties were written to subjugate the vassals of Assyria under the heir apparent, Assurbanipal—including Judah. Thus scribes working in the court of King Josiah wrote a new treaty text, in which the covenant with Yahweh was written as a substitution for the earlier treaty made with the king of Assyria, expressing vassalship to Yahweh instead of vassalship to the Assyrian king. In this context, the curses of the Succession Treaties, it is argued, were re-appropriated in an act of literary subversion. On the other hand, several important studies reject the plausibility of this reconstruction, either denying the existence of the parallels altogether or by contesting that the appropriation of the Succession Treaties by Deuteronomy 28 operates in the realm of subversion. In order to move the debate beyond these polar positions, I suggest that our model for understanding parallel phenomena between texts which stem from different literary and linguistic traditions must be reconsidered. I propose that the problems that these reconstructions have failed to account for, and which have resulted in the current scholarly stalemate, are methodological, concerning the problem of transmission itself.
This will be developed in chapter 2 by an analysis of the dispute which has crystallized between three of the leading voices in the debate, Jacob Berman and, working together, Bernard M. Levinson and Jeffrey Stackert. The latter have accused Berman of providing no plausible vector of transmission for the parallels which he discerns between the book of Deuteronomy and the Hittite treaty texts. On the other hand, Levinson and Stackert themselves have failed to provide sufficient corroboration for the existence of Akkadian literacy among the biblical scribes that the relation between Deuteronomy 28 and Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties requires. This recognition sets the stage for a new examination of the means of the transmission of the Succession Treaties to Deuteronomy, with a study of cuneiform culture in Iron II Judah. By showing that the evidence for the existence of such a tradition is essentially lacking, it will be proposed that Aramaic may have served an intermediary function between the literatures of East and West, given that the language functioned as a lingua franca during this period. Thus we
can observe two streams of Aramaic influence upon Hebrew literature during the late monarchic period: the Assyro-Aramaean culture through which the Hebrew scribes encountered Neo-Assyrian traditions; and the native Northwest Semitic literary tradition expressed in Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, and other Northwest Semitic dialects. It is this latter literary phenomenon which will we explore in the following chapters.
Thus chapter 3 considers the possibility that a Northwest Semitic tradition of curses circulated in the Levant in the first millennium, with a description and analysis of examples of the futility curse from the Old Aramaic inscriptions, encompassing the Tell Fakhariyah bilingual inscription, the Sefire Treaties, and the Bukān inscription. This has implications for the reconstruction of a putative Aramaic literary tradition, something often hypothesized but little attested due to the scant material finds which have survived antiquity. Ultimately, it is shown that a tradition of cursing expressed in terms of lexical, ideational, and syntactic consistency was shared between these Old Aramaic epigraphs.
The problem of a West Semitic tradition of curses is then further problematized in chapter 4 by recourse to the futility curses of the Hebrew Bible, showing that these examples conform tightly to the examples in Old Aramaic. The most strikingly similar biblical examples stem from the pre-exilic prophets, while later texts of the exilic and post-exilic period tend to deviate from the normal syntax and vocabulary, instead providing clauses suggestive of general menace and commination, rather than threatening a specific future curse. On the one hand, the curses of Deuteronomy 28 also utilize the typical language and syntactical structure of the futility curses from the Old Aramaic and pre-exilic Hebrew texts. Yet on the other, the clauses that they develop are noticeably more sophisticated and complex than the earlier examples. This is suggestive of the literary quality of the futility curses from the book of Deuteronomy: the scribes have couched traditional ideas and metaphors in a highly literary style, appropriate to their endeavour to reformulate Israelite and Judaean law in the late monarchic period.
The compositional process behind Deuteronomy 28 is then further explored in chapter 5, noting an additional parallel to the Tell Fakhariyah bilingual inscription. Scholars have typically developed a complicated textual history for the Tell Fakhariyah inscription, reconstructing a complex compositional process based upon the division of this inscription into parts which stem from a West Semitic hand and parts which are
East Semitic in origin. Instead, by exploring the translation technique that governed the production of this bilingual inscription, this chapter demonstrates that the inscription stems from a single hand who could mediate between traditions of East and West. This new understanding of the compositional process which informed the Tell Fakhariyah inscription is then proposed as a useful model for understanding the composition of Deuteronomy 28, which also seems to reflect a complex interplay between Mesopotamian and Levantine traditions. Deuteronomy 28 makes use of the futility curse as a culturally Levantine product, but juxtaposes this with curses drawn from the East Semitic world, typified by the curses of Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaties. While in Tell Fakhariyah this juxtaposition of traditions worked to create a text perfectly appropriate to its location in a formerly Aramaean NeoAssyrian province, in Deuteronomy this served a different function: by opposing the Neo-Assyrian literary tradition with native Northwest Semitic literary forms, Deuteronomy 28 confronts the encroaching Neo-Assyrian world, in a subversive endeavour far more subtle and sophisticated than scholars have hitherto recognized. Nevertheless, we cannot consider this interplay of Eastern and Western literary forms to have stemmed from the influence of any one Old Aramaic or Mesopotamian text such as the Succession Treaties in terms of a direct literary connection. r ather, as putative Aramaic vectors of mediation must be posited between the Mesopotamian tradition and Deuteronomy due to the linguistic competences of the Judaean scribes, we must understand this as a relationship of intertextuality. The implications of this distinction for the process of the transmission of these traditions is then considered in chapter 6, where I argue that ritual behaviours might be just as good a source as literary texts for the diffusion of this traditional material. The additional insights which recognition of this ritual context provides for the comparative method, the dating and authorship of Deuteronomy 28, and the subversive impetus thought to have stood behind its composition, are then reconsidered. Ultimately, the function of the written word in a largely oral world will be shown to be fundamental to understanding both the composition and the function of the curses in the book of Deuteronomy.
