Divination, politics, and ancient near eastern empires

Abstract

This volume is the result of a session of the Prophetic Texts in their Ancient Contexts seminar at the 2011 national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco. The session was entitled “Divination, Propaganda, and Empire.” The aim of the session was to clarify the context of prophecy and other forms of divination within their respective political and/or theological empires. The essays by Jeffrey Cooley, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Göran Eidevall, Joseph Blenkinsopp, and Ehud Ben Zvi in the present volume are revised versions of the original presentations in that session. To cover a wider spectrum of cases we invited Casey Strine and Alex Jassen to contribute to the volume, and we both added contributions of our own to the mix. The essays collected in this volume cover a wide scope: from diplomatic correspondence in second millennium BCE Mari to the eschatological hopes expressed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The common goal is to understand how “empire” influenced prophetic and divinatory communication between the divine and human realms and how this was put to use as and influenced by propaganda from those in power.