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Title: 鈥淢ore than Resistance Literature: Historical Geography, Cultural Hybridity, and the Aftermath of Sargon鈥檚 720 Campaigns.鈥�

Abstract: In recent years, Assyriologists and biblicists alike have expressed a growing interest in reading the Hebrew Bible as resistance literature. Studies tend to frame biblical texts as subversive responses that oppose Assyrian imperialism. While opposition is one response attested in the Bible, it also contains a broad spectrum of engagement with Assyria that sheds light on military praxis and propaganda from a non-imperial perspective. In this talk, I consider how Isaiah 10:5鈥�11 addresses Sargon鈥檚 720 quelling of the Hamath-led rebellion. I argue that the passage preserves historical details about the Hamath coalition and contains a response to the Assyrian practice of godnapping. Given the poor preservation of Sargon鈥檚 annals, the biblical account of the events surrounding the Hamath rebellion becomes even more significant. Isaiah 10:8鈥�10 lists Kullania (Tell Tayinat) alongside other conspirators in the 720 rebellion. This reference can be considered alongside the recent discovery of a Sargon stele at Tell Tayinat and the broader historical connections between Hamath, Arpad, and Kullania. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Kullania was among the cities that joined the ill-fated Hamath rebellion. In addition to providing granular historical details, Isaiah 10:5鈥�11 also furnishes scholars with one of the only local responses to the practice and propaganda surrounding godnapping. In the second half of the talk, I will consider how Isaiah 10:10鈥�11 reflects Sargon鈥檚 despoiling of divine images from Samaria in 720 BCE. I argue that the passage introduces a subtle critique of cultic statues 听due to their vulnerability to capture and political manipulation. We can thus conceptualize aniconism not as a feature of native Israelite or Judean religion marshaled in opposition to Assyria but rather as a discourse born of cultural hybridity and imperial entanglement.

Title: 鈥淎ssyria Through the Looking-Glass: The Hebrew Bible as Opposition Literature.鈥�

Abstract: The political history of the Neo-Assyrian empire is known to us primarily through cuneiform texts from eighth and seventh century BCE Assyria itself, most notably the Assyrian Eponym Chronicles, Assyrian royal inscriptions, and Assyrian and Babylonian letters from Assyria鈥檚 鈥淪tate Archives鈥� at Calah and Nineveh. Because of the skeletal nature of the Eponym Chronicles and the difficulties and limited chronological range of the letters, modern historians have often based their accounts of Assyrian history on the convenient narratives found in the royal inscriptions. These texts do provide a lot of reliable data, but their one-sided, regicentric viewpoint means that scholars exclusively relying on them are very much at risk of doing little more than replicating a biased historical record written by the winners. To counter such narratives, some Assyriologists have started in recent years to pay more attention to inner-Assyrian discourses critical of individual Assyrian kings and their agendas, and to study more closely the small corpus of Babylonian texts written from an anti-Assyrian perspective. But our understanding of how disenfranchised subjects, especially in the beleaguered or conquered imperial periphery, saw the Assyrian empire still remains inadequate. In this presentation, it will be asked to what extent the Hebrew Bible can help fill this gap. While the Bible as a whole displays a great deal of ambivalence vis-脿-vis Assyria, certain portions of the Book of Isaiah, and the whole of Nahum, are extremely critical of the empire. Since these texts, like so many others, have been modified and reedited in post-Assyrian times to reflect newly emerging theological agendas, it would be methodologically na茂ve to consider them without further examination as 鈥渙pposition literature鈥� composed in direct response to the Assyrian expansion; but it will be argued that they can still tell us something about how such opposition literature might have originally looked like.

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Title: 鈥淏iblical Studies and Assyriology in the Galleries: Avenues for Museum and Public Engagement.鈥�

Abstract: As a discipline, Assyriology has been connected with museums from its earliest days: museums were responsible for many of the excavations of the mid nineteenth century, and their finds received great public and popular attention and appeal. Of course, this focus was also the result of Assyriology's early connections to the Bible, a link which only intensified as the cuneiform material, newly translated, began to depict events paralleling those known from the Bible. George Smith was so excited by his initial identification of the flood story on K.3375, the British Museum's famous Flood Tablet, that he reportedly jumped up, rushing about in frantic state right in the Museum. As Assyriology developed as a more independent discipline, it began to grow apart from its early ties to Biblical Studies, but museums remained an important resource for both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The early connections between Assyriology and the Bible provide a point of access and connection for visitors and public audiences, and remain a potential avenue for greater current engagement. Although ancient Near Eastern museum collections are often used by tour groups who approach the material from the perspective of the Bible, with the intent of showing how such collections explain or explore the Biblical material, the reverse approach 鈥� of Assyriological scholars presenting an approachable public synthesis of Biblical and ancient Near Eastern material 鈥� remains less common, particularly in the museum sphere. This paper focuses on the ways in which Biblical studies, with its broader connection to the public and wider popular knowledge, can serve as another avenue for public and museum engagement with Assyriological material and ancient Near Eastern collections.

Title: 鈥淎shur, Babel, and Bibel: Reflections on the History of Biblical-Mesopotamian Scholarship.鈥�

Abstract: By way of introducing the panel, this paper looks back over comparative studies of the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia since the nineteenth century, in which period the field of Mesopotamia, or Assyriology, became established. Among the topics: George Smith in the 1860s and 鈥�70s and his work on Assyrian royal inscriptions and Mesopotamian mythology; the Babel-Bibel proposals of Friedrich Delitzsch; Benno Landsberger on Eigenbegrifflichkeit and its consequences, biblical and Mesopotamian law as provoked by the discovery of the Hammurapi laws, and Assyrian imperialism and the biblical reactions. Through this review, selective as it must be, our purpose will be not only to relate some piquant stories about the scholars involved, but to consider, through their studies, something of the impact of Mesopotamian culture on ancient Israel and its Bible, as well as the reverse, and on the comparative discipline itself.

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Title: 鈥淩emodeling Albright鈥檚 House: What Can Biblical Studies in the 21^st Century Do for Assyriology?鈥�

Abstract: Overzealous use of the comparative method by Albright and his students has faced criticism in Assyriology. A key critique concerns the use of cuneiform comparanda to tie the Pentateuch to a second millennium BCE setting (e.g., the Albright-Abraham-Amorite hypothesis). The ideological structure of Albright鈥檚 house has also been questioned internally by scholars of the Levant. At the end of the 20^th century, Albright鈥檚 house underwent a major renovation project. Today, biblical studies programs in the US are being redesigned in a different aesthetic鈥攐ne that is open concept.

So what is left of Albright鈥檚 legacy in biblical studies and what can it do for Assyriology? Albright鈥檚 greatest and most enduring legacy was the high standard and breadth of training that he required from his students. His academic offspring were encouraged to be conversant in archaeology and material culture, comparative Semitics, the broader scripts and written languages of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, historical geography, and textual and 鈥渉igher鈥� criticism. This extensive training is what enabled them to move the field forward, and to eventually deconstruct and remodel his own 鈥渉ouse.鈥�

Today, the study of the southern Levant crosses academic boundaries and seems impervious to the 鈥渟low death of the Humanities.鈥� The Bible is increasingly approached as a response to the Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Processual and post-processual approaches in archaeology has transformed the dating of the biblical text and our understanding of the history of southern Levantine scribalism and religion. Biblical scholars also increasingly engage with post-colonial and social identity theory to understand Israel鈥檚 political and religious evolution as a response to empire. Perhaps this more interdisciplinary model of scholarship is what can both save and revitalize the study of Assyriology in higher education, moving forward into the next century.

Title: 鈥淐hanging Identities in Mesopotamia: The Case of the Book of Ezekiel.鈥�

Abstract: Assyria and Babylonia appear as societies comprising a great variety of people with more or less identifiable geographical and cultural backgrounds. The diversity of people of different origins is acknowledged in the sources which, however, are for the most part authored from the perspective of the dominant group, that is, the royal court and local administration. There are no cuneiform texts that would consciously and programmatically represent the point of view of a self-defined minority group. Such groups in Mesopotamia have not left behind self-produced written evidence about themselves and their identity strategies. A notable exception to this rule, however, can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Especially the book of Ezekiel reflects a change of identity explicitly localized in Babylonia, providing itself as a document of an explicit identity strategy of a minority group, unique among written sources from any part of Mesopotamia. The book can be read as minority literature, demonstrating the identity construction of a group that actively recreates itself in diaspora circumstances brought about by imperial policy. The identity of the in-group of the book of Ezekiel is origin-based, indicating a strictly defined 鈥渆thnicity鈥� based on common God, ancestry and geographical origin rather than a nation-state. However, it cannot be used as evidence of a fixed, stable, and universally shared identity of the Judeans. On the contrary, it creates and constructs a deep inner-Judean antagonism between Ezekiel鈥檚 in-group in Babylonia and the delegitimized out-group, whether in Babylonia or in the Old Country. The book of Ezekiel, therefore, does not tell a lot about the status and integration of the Judean minority in the Babylonian society but all the more about conflicts within Judeans themselves.