(Biblical Archaeology, 1 Hr. 16 Min): Dr. William Propp, "What is the Exodus"

UCSD EXODUS CONFERENCE


"Out of Egypt: Israel's Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination"


Video: What Was The Exodus?


William Propp discusses history, text, memory and imagination at UCSD's recent Out of Egypt conference. http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/exodus/video-what-was-the-exodus/


University of California, San Diego scholar William Propp delivered the lecture “What Was The Exodus?” at the recent Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination conference hosted by Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.


Watch the full lecture video below or click here for more information on the conference, including dozens of additional video lectures.


)

Ancient Middle Eastern Religions: General Considerations

Epic of Gilgamesh

Several authors. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. “Ancient Middle Eastern Religions.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Pages 60-95.

General Considerations:

"Ecumeme," a term of art, is a cultural-historical community. There are architectural, metallurgical, ceramic reflections/artifacts and other industries associated with the varied communities. Manufacturing and services were governed by guilds.

There were “religious guilds” with personnel specializing in sacrifices, oracles, divinations, and other services of priest-craft. There was a “mobility of guilds through the entire area,” spreading “specific religious ideas” and techniques from the “Indian Ocean to the Aegean Sea, the Nile River to Central Asia” (60).

Homer’s Odyssey notes the mobility of the guildsmen, religious personnel, architects, physicians, singers and minstrels. Guild priests were called kohanim at ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean Sea of northern Syria. Mycenean Greeks had sacrifices akin to the Hebrews.

People moved. They took themselves, their ideas, their beliefs and their skill sets with them.

There was an “archaeological revolution” in the 19th-20th centuries.

• Decipherment of Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts in the 19th century

• New vistas opened up

• Previously, studies had been confined to Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts

• Ancient objects, artifacts of daily life, and architecture were turned up

• The ziggurat at Babylon illustrates the Biblical “Tower of Babel”

• The Flood or Deluge was illustrated in the Gilgamesh Epic. A fragment of this was found at Megiddo, Israel in the 14th century

• The Hittite culture was shown to be a “major power of antiquity” with a “rich source of religious texts” (61)

• Sumerology has emerged as an academic discipline when the Sumerian term and its culture “had vanished without reference in the literatures of the world”

• Ugarit texts of the 15th to 13th centuries afforded insights

Literary Sources:

• Livy (59/64 B.C. – 17 A.D.) described “religious rites of the ancient Middle East”

• Virgil (70 B.C. – 19 B.C.) in the Aeneid and Eclogues described Egyptian, Semitic, Anatolian and Greek religious views and practices

• Plutarch (40/50 A.D. – 120/125 A.D.), the historian and biographer, in his De Iside et Osiride (= Concerning Isis and Osiris) described the Egyptian views and the cult of the dead

• The Greek satirist and rhetorician, Lucian (120-190 A.D.) in his De Dea Syra ( = Concerning the Syrian Goddess) described Canaanite religion

• Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., remains “an indispensable source for cultural history and religion of the ancient Middle East” (61)

• Due to the Ugarit discoveries, the Homeric epics are “now firmly linked to ancient Middle Eastern literature” (61)

• The Hebrew Bible is the “most important source of knowledge of the ancient Middle East, reflecting life from Egypt to Iran” (61)

• The Hebrew Bible reflects similar literary genres: “psalms, hymns, laws, rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types” (61). The Egyptian document, Wisdom of Amenemope, shows significant parallels to Proverbs.

Athena in the Twenty-first Century

http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2012/10/athena-in-the-twenty-first-century/

 

Athena in the Twenty-first Century

By Jean Collier Hurley

Tangents: The Journal of the Master of Liberal Arts program at Stanford University, Vol.7 (2008)
Introduction: In writing The Odyssey, Homer brings to life the characteristics of a twenty-first century professional woman in the form of the goddess Athena. Like many contemporary women, Athena moves in what is primarily a man’s world, striking a balance between male roughness and female tenderness. She attends meetings, collaborates with colleagues, mentors subordinates, plans strategic offensives, and resolves conflict. Her success demands mastery of delegation, persuasion, and motivation. Competence and assertiveness are givens. Athena skillfully integrates these qualities with her extraordinary insight into interpersonal dynamics. In doing so, she advances an agenda tied to home, family, and ultimately peace; objectives as relevant today as they were at the time of Odysseus.

Athena’s persuasive skill is introduced in Book One of The Odyssey during a meeting of the gods when she presents the case for rescuing Odysseus. Her objective is to return him to his home and family. The gods have convened in full assembly at their home on Olympus, like a group of senior executives meeting at corporate headquarters. Zeus, the all powerful creator and the father of Athena, presides over the meeting in the manner of a CEO. Athena masterfully begins her presentation by first showing deference to Zeus and his position, referring to him as “… our high and mighty king …” (1.54) She follows by supporting his argument that Aegisthus deserved to die, agreeing that he paid the price with “…a death he earned in full!” (1.55) Her calculated display of loyalty to Zeus sets the stage for his support of her proposal.

As she lays out her argument on behalf of Odysseus, Athena draws on her talent for persuasion and motivation. First, addressing Zeus’s compassion for her as her father, she pleads that her heart br eaks for Odysseus who is “…far from his loved ones…” (1.59) Appealing to his sense of justice as the CEO, she declares that leaving Odysseus to wander far from home for so long is a gr eat inequity; that he suffers miserably from being trapped by Calypso, who is after all the daughter of a wicked father, and that Odysseus even longs to die.