War and Ethics is out in paperback! Just 19,95 € / $19.95 / £14.99—bargain.
Check it out here.
14 Sunday Aug 2016
Posted Assyriology, Ethics, Prophets, Warfare
inWar and Ethics is out in paperback! Just 19,95 € / $19.95 / £14.99—bargain.
Check it out here.
10 Wednesday Feb 2016
Posted Assyriology, Deuteronomy, Reviews, Treaties
inOut this week in the Review of Biblical Literature, Robert B. Coote’s (Senior Research Professor of Hebrew Exegesis and Old Testament at the Graduate Theological Union) review of Israel and the Assyrians:
‘Crouch’s overall argument is judicious, refreshingly disputatious, and convincing… Besides fulfilling its purpose of rebuttal, the book is useful as an excellent and up-to-date advanced introduction to the literature on ancient Near Eastern treaty and oath forms as these relate to the Bible. Its value is immense.’
09 Tuesday Feb 2016
Posted Assyriology, Deuteronomy, Ethics, Prophets, Warfare
inWar and Ethics in the Ancient Near East (or War and Ethics to its friends) is the result of my doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where I studied for both my M.Phil. and my D.Phil. with John Barton, then Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture (a title that never, ever fit on an application form).
In good fledgling doctoral student fashion, I set out with grand ambitions, intending to undertake a comparative study of the ethics of ancient Israel and Judah and those of the rest of the ancient Near East. Having been raised in the United States, where the public discourse surrounding religion and ethics usually presumed that the interaction of ‘biblical’ ethics with the moral considerations of contemporary American culture meant their deterioration or degradation, I was interested in the relationship of these biblical ethics to their own contemporary culture, in the form of the wider ancient Near East. Whilst there is now a small cottage industry in study of the ethics of the Hebrew Bible from an historical perspective, with monographs appearing at the rate of a few a year, at the time this was still quite unusual.
Having decided to focus (somewhat) on violence, with the idea of doing a series of case studies at the familial, local and international levels, I began with the last of these, in the form of ethical ideas about the conduct of warfare. It soon became clear, however, that a dissection of the military ethics of the ancient Near East was not going to happen in the space of a chapter; having sat down one weekend to bash out a few thousand words on the Assyrian royal inscriptions for some application or other, I came up on Monday with 14,000—without having gone anywhere near the rest of the Assyrian sources, not to mention the biblical material. The dissertation, it seemed, was destined for war.
That the dissertation—and ultimately the book—became something other than a mere catalogue of gruesome practices owes its inspiration to a book by Klaus-Peter Adam, Der Königliche Held, which drew attention to the parallel presentation of the human and divine kings in Psalm 18, and an article by Elnathan Weissert, which noted something similar occurring in the accounts of Sennacherib’s battle at Halule, with particular attention to the use of language stemming from Enuma elish. With my antennae up, I realised that this language—the language of the creation accounts—was all over the military accounts of the Assyrian kings, as well as being visible in the biblical material.
This use of specific phrases and imagery drawn from the creation accounts had two significant implications for our understanding of the ethics of ancient Near Eastern warfare. First, the use of the same language to describe both the human king and the divine king had the effect of mirroring their activities, creating an image of the human king as the divine king’s earthly counterpart, who acted on his behalf in the terrestrial realm.
At the same time, the origins of this language in the accounts of creation imbued the human king’s actions with cosmological significance. If the human king was fighting on behalf of the creator god, his enemies were allied with the destructive forces of chaos which threatened that creation (and are indeed described as such). The violence involved in the conduct of warfare was thus justified as necessary for the preservation of creation.
War and Ethics is in use in courses in Europe, North America, the UK and Australia and continues to be available in hardback from de Gruyter. In fact, it’s been so successful that they’ve brought it out as one of the first books in their new paperback editions. Of course, if you prefer to try before you buy, it is also available in preview mode from Google Books.
23 Saturday Jan 2016
Posted Assyriology, Deuteronomy, Treaties
inTags
Israel and the Assyrians was born of musings on the curses in Deuteronomy 28—a sideline of sorts whilst I was in the midst of my work on The Making of Israel. What started as a seminar paper soon turned out to involve such a complex combination of questions that it required a full-blown monograph to address.
The book revisits the question of Deuteronomy’s relationship to the ancient Near Eastern treaty tradition. Since the discovery and publication of Assyrian treaties in the middle of the twentieth century, this relationship has been widely understood as subversive, with Deuteronomy’s author(s) pirating the Assyrian treaty form in order to undermine Assyrian imperial authority, by placing YHWH in place of the Assyrian king as the one figure to whom loyalty is due.
My suspicions were first raised when I compared Deuteronomy 28 to the Assyrian texts it was meant to be cribbing. I had the advantage of reading these texts side by side—and I still had to squint to see their supposed similarities. Did we really think that Deuteronomy’s ancient audience would have recognised them?
Rather than comparing the texts of Deuteronomy and the Assyrian treaties in the rarefied atmosphere of a scholarly office, I wanted to test the idea of Deuteronomy’s subversive intent against the social context in which that it would have actually functioned—subversion in real life, in other words. What would it take for Deuteronomy to have worked as a subversive text? To answer my question I turned to literary and contemporary film studies, whose theoretical work on adaptation and allusion provided the foundation for a discussion of subversion and its detection. I then went hunting through Deuteronomy, especially chapters 13 and 28, in search of clues that it had been written in order to subvert Assyrian imperial power. No dice.
By thinking through Deuteronomy’s relation to other ancient Near Eastern curse and treaty traditions in the historical context of its author(s) and its audience, the book undermines the popular interpretation of Deuteronomy as an anti-imperial, subversive tract—and problematises our assumptions about the Israelites’ relationship with the Assyrian Empire more generally. In the process it also challenges one of the major touchstones for the pre-exilic dating of Deuteronomy; if we want to argue that some form of Deuteronomy existed before 586, it will have to be on other grounds.
As part of the SBL’s open-access Ancient Near East Monographs series, the book is available to download for free from the SBL website. If (like me) you prefer to read your books in hard copy, it’s also available in paperback and in hardback.