Ancient Near Eastern texts, by Geoffrey Russell, 12 August, 2021.
February 19, 2022
You’ve no doubt heard of the pyramids and other huge monuments of ancient Egypt. Many inscriptions are chiselled on to these monuments and people have been fascinated by them for centuries. Once the hieroglyphic script was decoded in the modern era, our understanding of the stories, religion, history, and laws of ancient Egypt has greatly expanded.
More recently, over the past 100 years or so, a huge number of texts from other ancient nearby cultures – Sumerian, Babylonian, etc., have been discovered and decoded. This has similarly added hugely to our understanding of these ancient cultures.
The Bible, widely available and read by westerners over the past 2 millennia, includes the stories, religion, history, and laws of the ancient Hebrew people, who existed in the same general area as those other ancient peoples.
So how do the texts from these different cultures relate? In particular,
- How do the non-Biblical texts from various cultures relate to the Bible texts?
- Are they related?
- To what extent and in what way do the non-Biblical texts help us to understand the Bible texts?
Geoff’s presentation can be viewed on YouTube.
