Seth L. Sanders. From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 167. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017.The essay opens:
Seth L. Sanders’s recent book, From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylonia puts forward a new history of cultural contact between Mesopotamian and Judean scribal cultures that culminated in the Second Temple Period. Sanders revisits the question of the shared features between Judean and Mesopotamian literature (such as ascent to heaven, heavenly visions, in addition to distinctively Babylonian astronomy and metrology), but he also offers two pointed methodological correctives for the study of ancient Near Eastern scribal cultures. The first corrective addresses the question of how to write a history of scribal culture; the second, addresses the question of how to approach religious experience in the ancient world.
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