The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

The book of Isaiah reflects many of the population movements that took place in the period of its formation. Much biblical scholarship focuses on “the (Babylonian) Exile,” but as C. L. Crouch points out in “Isaiah and Migration,” mass population movements were carried out in the sphere of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians long before the Babylonians overthrew Jerusalem. She also calls attention to the migrations experienced by other nations, and to forces of displacement other than deportation, such as warfare, famine, and natural disasters. She analyzes the literary reception of these numerous involuntary migrations, and the ways in which the prophet and his audiences made sense of them.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

This chapter examines the religious role of Alexander as king and military commander in the Greek world and the territory of the Achaemenid empire. It explores how he used sanctuaries of the gods to develop his relationship with the Greek cities, as locations for the meetings of associations of Greek cities, and as sites for making dedications. It considers the honours offered to Alexander by the Greek cities, arguing that these were offered spontaneously, and were not a response to any request from Alexander. It discusses his use of diviners and other religious experts while on campaign. It considers the extent to which Alexander engaged with the religious practices and expectations of the territories he conquered, including in particular Egypt and Babylon. It discusses the evidence that Alexander consciously attempted to emulate Heracles and Dionysus, and suggests that this is unlikely to reflect any historical reality. It then explores the story of Alexander’s visit to the oracle of Ammon/Amun at the Siwah oasis, suggesting that while Alexander was aware of the significance of his pharaonic titulary, including the phrase ‘son of Amun’, this did not lead to claims of divine filiation beyond Egypt.

This chapter focuses on Babylon and Egypt and offers a systematic comparison of the role of the local elites in the temple administration within the Seleucid and Ptolemaic governmental structures. While in both regions temples were the “centers of public life” before the Macedonian conquest, the traditional religious role of the king offered to the Ptolemies in Egyptian temples granted them a unique position that was not paralleled by the Seleucids in Babylonia. Moreover, the authors emphasize that the temple’s elite were representative of the local elite in Egypt, but that it was not the case in Babylonia. Therefore, these different traditions, notably the conception of the Egyptian king as a high priest superior to all the other priests, may explain why the administrative functions of the temples in Egypt, as well as the priestly elites, were largely integrated into the state structures of power, and why this did not happen in Babylonia. There, Seleucid kings could not play this role through the existing temple institutions and instead founded poleis as tools of governance of local communities.

This chapter presents some results of the author’s long-term research on an important source for several papers in this volume, the Babylonian creation-epic Enūma eliš, with a focus on its complex relationship with Babylon’s New Year festival as well as on its scholarly exegesis in Babylonian academic treatises. Both aspects, ritual and scholarly, provide important historical contextualisation for Hellenists interested in the affinities between the battle of Marduk and Tiʾamat and Greek theomachies.

The only surviving Byzantine image of the horseman inhabits an ominous and foreboding landscape. The unique image appears in an illustrated version of the Book of Job. The horseman presides over a darkly emotional and philosophically rich scene (Vat. Gr. 751, fol. 26r). The artist who created this image transported the horseman back in time to have it preside over the darkest moment in the trials of virtuous Job caught up in a contest between forces far greater than himself. Given that the motif of fall permeates the Book of Job, our image metaphorically envisions a bitter estrangement from the Queen of Cities. In this unique image of Job, Justinian’s column is multivalent. It is both triumphal and tragic. If it were not juxtaposed with Job’s suffering it would seem celebratory. However, the juxtaposition is central. The horseman is poised to witness how the righteous suffer as a result of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Either the manuscript’s creator was very prescient in forecasting Job-like tribulations for Constantinople or he was operating with hindsight at some point after the Crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204.

The Egyptian and Mesopotamian speculative worlds are explored through their extant literature and assessed as scholarship, speculation, or philosophy. Though metaphysically and epistemologically complex, the lack of a speculative tradition with prescribed philosophy helps to explain why Assyriologists and Egyptologists often put Israel in league with the Greeks rather than the ANE world.

This chapter explores the dynamics of ancient cross-cultural interactions via a case study from the Severan period. Aelian’s brief narrative of the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamos is a story that connects four cultural traditions: Chaldean, Persian, Greek, and Roman. Included in Book 12 of the De natura animalium, the story tells how the Babylonian king’s fear of being usurped led him to imprison his daughter, who secretly gave birth to a son, Gilgamos, by a man of no distinction. Palace guards threw the baby from the acropolis of Babylon, whereupon the infant Gilgamos was rescued by an eagle. Ostensibly the story celebrates the eagle’s capacity for philanthropia, or devotion to humans, but Aelian is up to much more, as the Gilgamos tale opens up questions of cultural legitimacy, the need for evidentiary proof of belonging, and even the role of writing in the complex processes of cultural transformation. Aelian ultimately rejects legitimacy conferred by nature and opts instead for the adoption even of what is illegitimate, untrue, or unverifiable if it represents a valuable medium of cultural interconnectivity.

Warfare and violence were central to the identity and experience of early states in the ancient Near East. This chapter focuses on the earliest historical records documenting the rise of kingdoms in early Mesopotamia and their relationship with violence and warfare. It argues that a rhetoric of state-sponsored violence developed in Mesopotamia that guided countless generations of behaviour. The only violence that was legitimate was state sponsored and divinely sanctioned. Kings promised to banish violence at home, except when performed under their auspices, and they pledged to bring the outside world to battle in a muscular extension of power over that world. The chapter is divided into three basic parts: first it introduces a series of related topics about how violence and warfare were imagined and understood in early Mesopotamia; second, it discusses violence in its early historical context by examining cycles of violence related to the growth of the state; and finally it will briefly examine the later development of these kingdoms of violence and the royal rhetoric that accompanied their creation and expansion.