The Ten Commandments
Monuments of Memory, Belief, and InterpretationAUTHOR: Timothy S. Hogue, University of Pennsylvania
DATE PUBLISHED: September 2023
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: Hardback
ISBN: 9781009366892Description
The Decalogue, commonly known as the Ten Commandments, is usually analysed as a text. Within the Hebrew Bible, however, it is depicted as a monument– an artifact embedded in rituals that a community uses to define itself. Indeed, the phraseology, visual representations, and ritual practices of contemporary monuments used to describe the Ten Commandments imbue them with authority. In this volume, Timothy Hogue, presents a new translation, commentary, and literary analysis of the Decalogue through a comparative study of the commandments with inscribed monuments in the ancient Levant. Drawing on archaeological and art historical studies of monumentality, he grounds the Decalogue's composition and redaction in the material culture and political history of ancient Israel and ancient West Asia. Presenting a new inner-biblical reception history of the text, Hogue's book also provides a new model for dating biblical texts that is based on archaeological and historical evidence, rather than purely literary critical methods.
- Provides a fresh look at one of the Bible's most famous texts and introduces scholars to a corpus of ancient West Asian texts that has yet to be fully appreciated in biblical studies
- Develops a new approach to the comparative method in biblical studies that is grounded in archaeology, art history, and material culture studies
- Provides scholars with a new model for dating biblical texts that is based on concrete archaeological and historical evidence as opposed to purely literary critical methods, as well as a new approach to analyzing the reception history of biblical texts
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