New Books in Ancient History

On this program, I spoke with Joseph Lam about his book, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford University Press, 2016). Joseph Lam is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in Vetus Testamentum and the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions.Sin, often defined as a violation of divine will, remains a crucial idea in contemporary moral and religious discourse. However, the apparent familiarity of the concept obscures its origins within the history of Western religious thought. Informed by a deep engagement with theoretical perspectives on metaphor coming out of linguistics and the philosophy of language, Lams book identifies four patterns that pervade the biblical texts: sin as burden, sin as an account, sin as path or direction, and sin as stain or impurity.In exploring the permutations of these metaphors and their development within the biblical corpus, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible offers a compelling account of how a religious and theological concept emerges out of the everyday thought-world of ancient Israel, while breaking new ground in its approach to metaphor in ancient texts. Far from being a timeless, stable concept, sin becomes intelligible only when situated in the matrix of ancient Israelite culture. In other words, sin is not as simple as it might seem.Garrett Brown is a book publisher and editor and the host of New Books in Biblical Studies. In addition to several other trade publishers, he worked for almost seven years at the National Geographic Society, where he acquired and developed books on religion and on science. He blogs intermittently at noteandquery.com and can be reached at noteandquery@gmail.com. Twitter: @newbooksbible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen L. Field‘s new translation and study of the Zhouyi offers an inspiring and fresh take that importantly differs from previous translators approaches to the text. The Duke of Zhou Changes: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Zhouyi (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015) serves both scholarly readers who come to it... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it from 1862-1941. The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces the heated and multi-disciplinary debates over the existence of a Pleistocene human antiquity in North America. Meltzer’s book is a thick history that introduces readers not only to the major conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues at stake in the controversy, but also to the figures who debated the nature and scope of human antiquity in America. Anyone with an interest in the history of archaeology or the study of human origins should check it out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), David A. Lambert, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that repentance, as a concept, was read into the Bible by later interpretive communities. He explains, for example, how ancient Israelite rituals, like fasting, prayer, and confession, had a different meaning in the Bible before they later viewed through what he calls the the “Penitential Lens.” Interested in authors as well as readers, Lambert’s approach to Biblical study integrates the critical use of biblical texts with that of post-biblical literature and interpretation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University, puts the Babylonian Talmud in its Persian context. He lays out a research program for Talmud studies that is contextual, rather than literary or exegetical. Analyzing references to Persians and Persian loanwords in the Talmudic text, as well as ancient seals and bowl spells, he argues that we need to understand ancient Iran, as a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, to fully understand rabbinic identity and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart–and was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Bible and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story, the English translation often felt like another book entirely from the one she had grown up with.Kushner’s interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one gradually became an obsession. She began what became a ten-year project of reading different versions of the Hebrew Bible in English and traveling the world in the footsteps of the great biblical translators, trying to understand what compelled them to take on a lifetime project that was often considered heretical and in some cases resulted in their deaths.In The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel and Grau, 2015) Kushner illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture’s most important written work. A fascinating look at language and the beliefs we hold most dear, The Grammar of God is also a moving tale about leaving home and returning to it, both literally and through reading.Aviya Kushner has worked as a travel columnist for The International Jerusalem Post, and her poems and essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, and The Wilson Quarterly. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is a contributing editor at A Public Space and a mentor for the National Yiddish Book Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erica Fox Brindley‘s new book is a powerful study of the history of conceptions of ethnicity in early China that focuses on the Hua-xia and the peoples associated with its southern frontier (Yue/Viet). Informed by a careful accounting of extant textual, linguistic, and archaeological forms of evidence, Ancient China and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the discipline has its roots in the Socratic activity of trying to incite debate and critical reflection among our fellow citizens. That is, we acknowledge that, apart from its existence as a technical discipline, Philosophy is a kind of civic activity that, we hope, can help us to address life’s biggest questions, even when we find ourselves deeply divided over their answers. In Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World (Princeton University Press, 2015), Carlos Fraenkel tells the tale of his attempts to recapture Philosophy’s Socratic dimension. He recounts his adventures in doing philosophy in nonstandard contexts, with atypical interlocutors, and in unfamiliar places. Along the way, we see a hopeful and encouraging vision of philosophy emerge as a collection of rational techniques and intellectual virtues that can, indeed, rescue our individual and collective lives from impending incivility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It quickly sold out in hardback, and then, within a matter of days, sold out in paperback. Available again as a 2nd edition hardback, and soon in the 10th edition paperback with a new Afterword by the author, Eric H. Cline‘s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices