Martti Nissinen

Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen’s research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East. The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section. The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.

Julius Wellhausen hat maßgeblich zum Verständnis der biblischen Prophetie beigetragen und gilt als einer der Erzväter des Prophetenbildes des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zusammen mit seinen Zeitgenossen rechnete er mit der evolutionären Entwicklung der israelitischen Religion, wobei die großen biblischen Propheten eine entscheidende Rolle spielten, indem sie die alte, der altorientalischen Umgebung ähnelnde Volksreligion “zu etwas anderem” machten. Zur Zeit Wellhausens waren die Quellen der außerbiblischen altorientalischen Prophetie schlecht bekannt, heute sind wir besser in der Lage, die biblische Prophetie gegen ihre altorientalische Hintergrund betrachten. Anhand der uns heute bekanntenTexten sind die „Reste altorientalischen Prophetentums“, d.h., die der altorientalisch-ostmediterranen Prophetie typischen Eigenschaften im Alten und sogar im Neuen Testament deutlich zu sehen. Unter solchen Merkmalen werden sowohl der Wort-Gottes-Begriff, die Verschriftlichung der Prophetie und die politische Bedeutung der Prophetie als auch der Tempel als die „geistige Heimat“ der Propheten, die Genderinklusivität und die prophetische Ekstase betrachtet.

Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen’s research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East. The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section. The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.

This volume brings together a representative sample of ancient Near Eastern written documents of prophecy from the second and first millennia BCE and provides nonspecialist readers translations, transliterations, and discussions of oracle reports and collections, quotations of prophetic messages in letters and literature, and texts that reference persons with prophetic titles. This second edition includes thirty-four new texts.

This volume brings together a representative sample of ancient Near Eastern written documents of prophecy from the second and first millennia BCE and provides nonspecialist readers translations, transliterations, and discussions of oracle reports and collections, quotations of prophetic messages in letters and literature, and texts that reference persons with prophetic titles. This second edition includes thirty-four new texts.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives is the first monograph-length comparative study on prophetic divination in ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and Greek sources. Prophecy is one of the ways humans have believed to become conversant with what is believed to be superhuman knowledge. The prophetic process of communication involves the prophet, her/his audience, and the deity from whom the message allegedly comes from. Martti Nissinen introduces a wealth of ancient sources documenting the prophetic phenomenon around the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, whether cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, the Hebrew Bible, Greek inscriptions, or ancient historians. Nissinen provides an up-to-date presentation of textual sources, the number of which has increased substantially in recent times. In addition, the study includes four analytical comparative chapters. The first demonstrates the altered state of consciousness to be one of the central characteristics of the prophets' public behavior. The second discusses the prophets' affiliation with temples, which are the typical venues of the prophetic performance. The third delves into the relationship between prophets and kings, which can be both critical and supportive. The fourth shows gender-inclusiveness to be one of the peculiar features of the prophetic agency, which could be executed by women, men, and genderless persons as well. The ways prophetic divination manifests itself in ancient sources depend not only on the socio-religious position of the prophets in a given society, but also on the genre and purpose of the sources. Nissinen contends that, even though the view of the ancient prophetic landscape is restricted by the fragmentary and secondary nature of the sources, it is possible to reconstruct essential features of prophetic divination at the socio-religious roots of the Western civilization.

Nissinen's award-winning book surveys attitudes in the ancient world toward homoeroticism, that is, erotic same-sex relations. Focusing on the Bible and its cultural environment-Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Israel-Nissinen concisely and readably introduces the relevant sources and their historical contexts in a readable way. Homoeroticism is examined as a part of gender identity, i.e., the interplay of sexual orientation, gender identification, gender roles, and sexual practice. In the patriarchal cultures of the biblical world, Nissinen shows, homoerotic practices were regarded as a role construction between the active and passive partners rather than as expressions of an orientation moderns call "homosexuality." Nissinen shows how this applies to the limited acceptance of homoerotic relationships in Greek and Roman culture, as well as to Israel's and the early church's condemnation of any same-sex erotic activity. For readers interested in the ancient world or contemporary debates, Nissinen's fascinating study shows why the ancient texts - both biblical and nonbiblical - are not appropriate for use as sources of direct analogy or argument in today's discussion.

This book is a companion volume to SAA 9, Assyrian Prophecies, by Simo Parpola. While SAA 9 presents and discusses the corpus of Neo-Assyrian prophetic texts, SAAS 7 collects, analyzes, and discusses the references to prophecy in other genres of Neo-Assyrian texts: royal inscriptions, treaties, letters, and even an administrative text. Nissinen's work is not a comparison of Assyrian prophecy with biblical prophecy, but rather an attempt to define Assyrian prophecy as it was viewed in its own culture, the uses that were made of it, and how it was related to other methods of determining the divine will.