Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Revisiting Contracts in Classic Semitic Civilizations, October 15, 2005
Admonition And Curse: The Ancient Near Eastern Treaty/Covenant Form as a Problem in Inter-Cultural Relationships by Noel Weeks (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series: T. & T. Clark Publishers)Excerpt: In the history of scholarship focus changes from decade to decade. Topics become popular: topics fade from popularity. The reasons for such changes are complex and outside of the main interests of this work. What is significant is that they may fade from view before there has been a definitive resolution, or the resolution reached may be faulty. Yet who wants to return to an old, tired and exhausted topic?
A number of arguments can he raised in defense of revisiting the no ¬longer-fashionable. Often it is only in retrospect that the unexamined assumptions which prevented resolution become clear. While the topic may have been dropped those very assumptions may linger on to influence other debates which may also end without proper resolution. It may even be that the old topic needs to be revisited, not so much for the original topic's sake. hut so that the lurking assumptions might become the focus.
As the bibliography of this work illustrates, the topic of treaty and covenant was a major concern of Ancient Near Eastern scholarship in the 1950s, 1960s. After that it virtually disappears. While some primary texts continue to emerge and to undermine older claims, the topic is sufficiently dead that corrected versions of older theses fail to appear.
The reasons for the changing fashions are complex. Two may he mentioned here but many more might be conjectured. First, the increasing specialization of the field discourages explorations which of' their very nature are comparative. Second, as will emerge clearly, much of the interest stemmed from attempts to resolve certain issues in the biblical field. When these issues appeared to he resolved in other ways. the topic lost its immediate relevance.
The focus of the older investigation was not just on treaties as such: it was on treaties of a definite and fixed form. For it is not hard to argue that treaty making could well arise independently in different cultures. If there was independent origin, then similarities are more psychologically significant than historically significant. They point to the tendency of the human mind to create similar solutions to similar problems.
Only towards the end of the period of discussion did the suggestion of independent origin arise. The failure to investigate this possibility initially was probably connected to the history of the discussion. It began with the observation of significant similarities between biblical covenants and Hittite treaties on the one side and Assyrian treaties on the other. These similarities were seen as sufficient in each case to postulate a real historical link. From there it was a short step to the belief that there was a common treaty covenant pattern throughout the Ancient Near East. That the links were real and historical did not need to he argued because the discovery of commonness was the starting point of the whole investigation.
However there was a question which might have been posed at the beginning. Is not the commonness with respect to treaty form in itself surprising? What is the historical explanation for it? In many other respects the cultures of the area show diverse forms. Why is this element common over such an expanse of space and time?
One may suggest various reasons for the non-asking of the obvious question but the most likely reasons are that answers already existed or were perceived to exist in commonly accepted positions. There was a general tendency to suggest Mesopotamia as the origin of culture in the region. If the treaty form was common and if some of our earliest attested examples came from Mesopotamia, then the obvious solution was that it had originated in Mesopotamia and spread from there, that treaties from different areas showed differences was not an obstacle to this explanation because those differences could be ascribed to development over time. The fact that the large collections of relatively securely dated treaties came from two distinct locations in time and space made such an explanation plausible. They were the second-millennium Hittite treaties and the first-millennium Assyrian treaties. Similarities between these two groups and between each group and biblical covenants could he ascribed to the common origin of the treaty form. Differences were seen as a consequence of development over time so that one would expect second-millennium treaties to differ from first-millennium ones. Such differences could then be used to date the biblical covenants whose dating was controversial. Thus the similarities of treaties became not a problem to be investigated in its own right but a given which was assumed to be uncontroversial. The controversial aspect of the debate became the way in which arguments from treaties were inserted into controversies regarding the dating of portions of the biblical text.
Returning to the topic after a hiatus, what are the questions which must he posed? The obvious one is whether the similarity of form is of such a nature that a common origin, of some sort, must be postulated - that is, a historical common origin as opposed to similarities which might be ascribed to similar situations. Immediately we confront the problem that there is no objective answer to such questions. Does X look similar enough to Y to exclude accidental resemblance and prove historical connection? Whether we ask the question for a literary form or an artistic style we confront the same difficulty. Convincing similarity is in the eye of the beholder.
It is my conviction that there is enough similarity between treaty/ covenant forms from different cultures that one is justified in asking historical questions about that similarity. The attempts to argue to the contrary will be dealt with in the appropriate place later.
Taking the similarity as real, two questions follow. One concerns the original source. Yet asking the question in that simple form might lead to a misleading answer. It is tempting to find the earliest attested reference to a treaty and to make that the source. Given the origin and dating of extant written texts, that narrows the options to a few civilizations.
This problem interconnects with another. While the similarities in treaty forms are real, there are also differences. How are the differences to be explained? Obvious models spring to mind: transformations imposed by the different cultures which took over the treaty form concept; the process of change through time; the invention of forms unrelated to the original form. When these possibilities are combined with the question of the ultimate origin of treaties they generate a further set of quandaries. Are our oldest extant treaties close to the original source or are they already significant transformations of the original? Our oldest treaties or references to treaties are in written form. Was there an earlier oral stage?
What balances similarity and difference? It will be argued below that there are styles of treaty which are characteristic for a particular civilization and that these styles change over time. And yet the underlying similarity is not destroyed. Something is operating to keep changes within limits.
The subsequent chapters will treat the data for treaties and their development in more detail. For the moment my concern is to give a panoramic view of the evidence and the problems.
If we take the three cultural units of Mesopotamia. the Hittites and Israel, we find in each extensive evidence of treaties. Nevertheless each presents distinctive problems and puzzles.
In Mesopotamia we have attestation of the use of treaties from the Sumerian Early Dynastic Period to the Neo-Babylonian Period. Yet the attestation is sporadic with tendencies to the clumping of evidence in certain periods. In the early period it clusters around Lagash. From then it is sporadic until the late Old Babylonian Assyrian Periods. Due to the larger amount of documentation from Assyria. in subsequent periods we can follow the development better in Assyria than in Babylonia. If we take the evidence at face value, treaties go in and out of fashion in Assyria.
Outside of Mesopotamia. treaties seem closely connected to a use of history to persuade - that is, the attempt to use the previous history of relationship as an argument for preserving the relationship being formalized in the treaty. This use of history appears periodically in Mesopotamia. Yet it is not as pervasive there as it is in other places.
After a gap in attestation that follows the end of the Old Babylonian Assyrian Periods, treaties appear to re-emerge in Mesopotamia in the Kassite Period. The royal land grant or kudurru appears at the same time. Formally and conceptually there are resemblances between treaties and grants. For example, both treaties and grants make use of divine sanctions. This similarity raises two separate issues. Should we see royal grants as a sub-variety of treaties? The second question concerns the interrelationship between national internal and external policies. Generally speaking. land grants belong to internal policies and treaties to external. If grants and treaties are formally and conceptually linked, is it because there are connections between what a state does internally and what it does externally? is that likely to be the case anyway. irrespective of whether treaties come into the picture? This question will arise repeatedly because there are many other cases where a study of treaties and related forms forces us to consider the relationship of internal and external government policies.
There is clear but sporadic attestation of treaties throughout the history of imperial Assyria. Towards the end of...
Read more ›
|
|
|
|
