Ancient Orient and Old Testament - BiblicalStudies.org.uk

K.A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament. London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1966. Hbk. pp.191.
crops of grain (Gn. 26:12; 37:7), their activities there would best fit the Middle Bronze Age I period,
c. 2100-1800 BC, 72 considering their need of assured water sup-
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plies and pasture or fodder for their livestock (especially as sojourners and not just passing
straight through the area).
4. Freedom and wide scope of travel is particularly evident in the Old Babylonian period. 73 In
the Mari archives, envoys and others cross-cross the whole Near East from Hazor in Palestine
to Elam in the far south-east, 74 while earlier still we have record not only of innumerable
merchant caravans but also of detailed ‘itineraries’ all the way from Babylon or Assur into the
heart of Asia Minor. 75 And as Abraham in Palestine was prepared to send all the way for his
son’s wife to North Mesopotamian Harran, so similarly we find Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria
sending to the King of Qatna in Syria for the same purpose. 76 Semi-nomadic tribes ranged far
and wide 77 , and sometimes took to crop-cultivation and more settled life. 78
5. The religion of the Patriarchs included prominently the concept of the ‘God of the fathers’,
first stressed by Alt. 79 However, the best parallels for this come not from his Nabataean
examples (about 2,000 years later) but, as Albright and Cross have pointed out, 80 from the Old
Assyrian tablets of the nine-
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teenth century BC from Cappadocia as noted by Lewy. 81 There is no evidence that the different
designations, ‘the God of Abraham’, ‘the Fear 82 of Isaac’, ‘the Mighty One of Jacob’, were
72 On the date, see Albright, BASOR 163 (1961), pp. 38-40 (in agreement with Glueck, e.g. in BASOR 152
(1958), p. 20, or Rivers in the Desert, 1959, p. 68). Noth’s date of the twenty-first-twentieth centuries BC (VTS,
VII, p. 266) thus ends a century too early, and hence he exaggerates unwittingly the supposed divergence
between this and other data, e.g. Nuzi.
73 Cf. latterly the remark by A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 1964, p. 120, top.
74 ARMT, I-VI, passim; e.g., ARMT, VI, Letters 14, 15, 23, 78, ARMT, XIII, Letter 46, On Elam and the West,
cf. pp. 45 f. and note 51, above, plus ARMT, XIII, Letters 31, 32.
75 For the itineraries, see A. Goetze, JCS 7 (1953), PP . 51-72; M. Falkner, AfO 18 (1957-8), pp. 1-37; W. W.
Hallo and Goetze, JCS 18 (1964), pp. 57-88 114-119; P. Garelli, Les Assyriens en Cappadoce, 1963, pp. 81-
125. Cf. also E. Weidner, AfO 21 (1966), 42-46, for later such data.
76 See Albright, BASOR 78 (1940), p. 25, being Letter 77 in G. Dossin, ARMT, I, 1950. For other inter-dynastic
marriages of Shamshi-Adad’s social level, cf. J. M. Munn-Rankin, Iraq 18 (1956), pp. 94-95.
77 Cf. Kupper, Les Nomades en Mésopotamie au temps des Rois de Mari, 1957, passim, e.g. pp. 47 ff., 71, 74
f., 78-81, 90 f., 96 f.
78 E.g., Kupper, op. cit., p. 31; cf. G. Posener in CAH 2 , I:21 (Syria and Palestine), 1965, pp. 24-29.
79 A . Alt, Der Gott der Väter, 1929; now in KS, I, 1953, pp. 1-78.
80 Albright, BASOR 163 (1961), pp. 48 - 49, and F. M. Cross, HTR 55 (1962) PP. 225-259- Cf. H. Hirsch, AfO 21
(1966), 56-58.
81 J . Lewy, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 110 (1934), pp. 50-55, 64-65 A similar reference occurs in
ARMT, V, Letter 20, line 16, in the eighteenth century BC, as noted by J. P. Hyatt, VT 5 (1955), p. 131 and n. 4
(note that the eighth-century Hittite Hieroglyphic example from Topada (after Del Medico) is illusory; cf. my
Hittite Hieroglyphs, Aramaeans and Hebrew Traditions, forthcoming).
82 Or possibly ‘Kinsman’? So Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, 1957 ed., p. 248 and n. 71.