Martti Nissinen

How Prophecy Became Literature

Prophecy—the transmission of divine messages to human recipients—is essentially an oral phenomenon. However, all knowledge of ancient prophecy is based on written sources. The Hebrew Bible forms a special case, since it includes the only extant collection of prophetic books, a genre otherwise unknown in the ancient Near East. The article investigates the process of the literarization of prophecy, proceeding from the late sociohistorical context of the biblical prophetic literature towards its hypothetical beginnings. It is argued that the literarization of prophecy required the support of the literate circles of any given community in both pre‐ and post‐exilic times.

Propheten in Mari, Assyrien und Israel

English summary: These essays interpret Old Testament prophetic writings and their social criticism in the cultural context of ancient near Eastern prophecy. German description: Die radikale Gesellschaftskritik der alttestamentlichen Propheten in Israel und Juda wird haufig in scharfem Gegensatz zu prophetischen Texten auaerhalb der Bibel gesetzt, besonders zu den herrschaftskonformen Aussagen aus Mari und Assur. Die Beitrager dieses Bandes stellen diese Alternative in Frage: Martti Nissinen, Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Reinhard G. Kratz, Jorg Jeremias, Herbert B. Huffmon und Elisabeth Pongratz-Leisten.

Images and Prophecy in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

This collection of essays examines the interrelationships between text and image particularly the ways in which iconography and/or references to images are used to depict prophetic actions or support prophetic messages. Textual and iconographic remains are examined from Israel and Judah, Egypt, Greece and Persia, often with direct relationship with Israelite and Judean religion and prophetic activity. This volume originated in the Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts session in the 2005 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. This richly-illustrated volume includes images from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean areas, and include Judean rosette seal impressions, representations of Ishtar, Achaemenid royal iconography, Minoan gold rings, cylinder impressions and various reliefs.