The Society of Biblical Literature is the oldest and largest international scholarly membership organization in the field of biblical studies. Founded in 1880, the Society has grown to over 8,500 international members including teachers, students, religious leaders and individuals from all walks of life who share a mutual interest in the critical investigation of the Bible.

Website>> The Society of Biblical Literature.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature is based at the University of Oxford. Its aim is to make accessible, via the World Wide Web, over 400 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennia BC.

At this site you will find a catalogue of these works, together with a Sumerian text, English prose translation and bibliographical information for each composition. New material and new user facilities are added to the site regularly.

ETCSL Home, ETCSL How-To, ETCSL Complete Catalogue

Zainab Bahrani’s book Women of Babylon. Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. (2001) is an elegantly formulated and provocative introduction to postmodernist theory and methodology, and their possible application to Ancient Near East Studies.

One doesn’t have to agree with her analysis in detail to be dazzled and delighted by the possibilities and new insights her approach offers.  I take as an example the chapter on “Ishtar: The embodiment of tropes” (p. 141). Bahrani states: “In this chapter, I shall focus on the goddess Ishtar in order to explore her place within Mesopotamia’s cultural order. In doing so I shall diverge from the traditional reading of mythology as narrative tales, and a literary reading of hymns and prayers as poetry. Instead, I shall consider the cultural meanings and values embodied in the figure of Ishtar. Because mythology is an important aspect of cultural signifying systems, I shall analyse Ishtar as a part of this system of signs. […] The methods I rely upon here derive from poststructuralist semiotic and reception theory.”

Her analysis of Ishtar as „truly all woman“, as seductress or femme fatale (p. 144) and her arguments against the goddess being androgynous, bisexual or hermaphrodite I find attractive, and they seem to be not implausible.  It should be, however, checked against and substantiated with contemporary documents and archaeological artefacts. Is the “femme fatale” a notion that would translate into Ancient Near Eastern thought patterns, cultural concepts and models, gender roles? Totally implausible, on the other hand, I find her conclusion that: „ As the goddess that represents all that is unruly, unpredictable, and marginal in Mesopotamian society she stands for what is unstable or outside the accepted forms of behaviour. She is Mesopotamian culture’s figure of the chaotic and marginal and as such is a figure of the chaotic and marginal and as such is a figure of alterity or otherness, an otherness that stands for what is different from the norm: civilised man.” Surely, “civilised woman” would be a norm too? Moreover, “Mesopotamian society” is a very vague and large description. The thousand-year-long evolution of the figure of Inana/Ishtar – with marked character changes and different emphasis on contradictory aspects of her character – and the likewise long history of Ancient Mesopotamia are being ignored here, just as the fact that the position of women in different historical phases and/or places was vastly different.
This seems to me to be going too far in applying – without substantiation – modern western values and especially 20th Century feminist concepts to the Mesopotamian world and culture. The esoteric Lacanian analysis that follows does nothing to clarify this position.

Women of Babylon is a splendid and inspiring introduction to feminist theory & other modern theoretical and methodological debates, and how they could be applied to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. The application and detailed analysis is and will be an important task for ANE scholars.

Zainab Bahrani is Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, Director of Graduate Studies.

“Das geht zu weit!” ist die hetzerische Überschrift des Heute-Forums zur “umstrittenen” atheistischen Kampagne. Die überwiegend zivilisierten, rationalistischen, gutargumentierten und respektvollen Argumente pro der Atheisten-Kampagne können Sie im Heute-Forum nachlesen: “Das geht zu weit!”

From Philip Davies, via Jack Sasson’s Agade mailing list.

Whose Bible? Anyone’s?
By Emeritus Professor Philip Davies
University Of Sheffield, England
July 2009

I once wrote a book called Whose Bible Is It Anyway? which opened with
an attack on confessional biblical scholarship and suggested some
lines of explicitly non-religious exegesis. I suppose I was
particularly annoyed by the claims of certain eminent scholars that
the Bible “belonged to the Church” and that explicitly faith-based
exegesis was an integral (indeed, even the only correct) approach.

The world and I were younger then. But even non-religious scholars
like me were sharply conscious of the irony of our situation: without
the affection and interest of religious people, we would be out of a
job. More recently, Hector Avalos, the only non-religious scholar I
know of that actually seems to hate the Bible, has suggested that the
Bible and its academic followers should go the way of all flesh—not
his phrase, nor of course mine either.

Avalos may have his way before long if the
confessional/non-confessional argument persists. I think it’s time for
some cooperation. As with numerous political conflicts (Northern
Ireland, Palestine/Israel) the real battle is between moderate and
extreme, not between those in the centre but on either side of the
perceived issue. On one extreme are those who believe that the Bible
is literally true, in defiance of all common sense: but scholars
already spend enough of their time trying to counter this nonsense,
and in any case, fundamentalists don’t care about the future of the
Bible, because the future is God’s business. The real battle is with
the other extreme, the biblically illiterate—whose ignorance is not
even their own fault!

How bad are things? A recent National Biblical Literacy Survey in the
UK carried out by the Centre for Biblical Literacy Communication at St
John’s College, Durham (http://www.dur.ac.uk/codec/about/cblc/) found
that as few as 10 per cent of people understood the main characters in
the Bible and their relevance. Figures such as Abraham and Joseph were
unknown: hardly anyone could name even a few of the Ten Commandments.
Some 60 per cent were ignorant of the story of the Good Samaritan, and
of these not all knew the full story. This despite 60% of those
surveyed being in favor of the Church! In the US, the Bible Literacy
Report (http://www.bibleliteracy.org/Secure/Documents/BibleLiteracyReport2005.pdf)
surveyed high school teens and their teachers, concluding that “forty
of the 41 teachers interviewed agreed that Bible literacy is a
significant educational advantage.” But “the majority of high school
English teachers estimated that fewer than a fourth of their current
students were biblically literate.”

The recommendations of the report propose improvements in Bible
education and its resources. Its remit did not include what churches
ought to be doing. Many comments from church people I have read are
more concerned with Bible knowledge inside their churches. Yet
ignorance of the Bible outside churches will make their task of
spreading the Gospel even more difficult.

I know a lot of secular Jews (actually, as a group, among my favorite
people). Very few of them can demonstrate the degree of ignorance of
the Bible that Christians do. For them, being Jewish means knowing the
Bible, even if not accepting its religious authority. Secular Jews are
nearly all proud to be Jewish and know that their Jewish identity is
defined by the Bible. There is no equivalent commitment among
Christians because they share no ethnic identity. But they do share a
cultural identity that is perhaps too pervasive for them to recognize.
Imagine a national art gallery without any biblical scenes. The
history of Western culture collapses without the biblical backbone
that keeps it erect. And that is not to mention the political shape of
Europe, gouged out of religious warfare and rescued by a secular ethic
that still respects Christianity.

Maybe we do need to put this biblical culture behind us, move on. But
what we can we put in its place? Jews will not lose the Bible: Muslims
have the Qur’an—full of stories found in the Bible, though with little
of the Bible’s cultural afterlife in art and literature. Maybe we
don’t need this kind of cultural baggage? But I’d rather we biblical
scholars forget about whether we believe the Bible or not (or how) and
occupy ourselves with the more urgent task of helping to preserve
something that we can argue about (and here’s a good start:
http://juliamobrien.net/).

Or, believers and non-believers alike, we can join together in waiting
for Godot.

Agnosticism is the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims — particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of deities, spiritual beings, or even ultimate reality — is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently impossible to prove or disprove. It is often put forth as a middle ground between theism and atheism, though it is not a religious declaration in itself and the terms are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism refers to knowledge, while atheism and theism refer to belief.