Jonathan S. Greer, John W. Hilber, and John H. Walton, Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts (Baker Academic, 2018), 615pp.
A new handbook, if I may call it that, is now available from Baker Academic (2018), detailing the cultural and historical background of the Old Testament. Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts is a large work in three parts and ten sections. Part 1, “Elements of the Drama,” covers historical geography, archaeology, the scripts of ANE literature, and ANE iconography. Part 2, “Acts and Scenes of the Drama,” cover major periods (Acts) as well as important events (scenes). Part 3, “Themes of the Drama,” cover important topics such as religion, family, economics, and governance.
I’m currently preparing a course on the ancient Near East, so I thank Baker Academic for sending me a review copy of this useful work, and I’ll review it insofar as it suits my own purposes. First, it’s highly visual in many of the chapters, with many charts, figures, maps, and illustrations. Not only is this helpful for me in preparing to lecture on historical events and geographical regions, but some of these figures and illustrations could be helpfully reproduced to display to students during lecture.
Second, the book is wide ranging. My course will begin with a historical axis, running from pre-history to the decline of the Persian empire. It will then shift to themes across the various ANE cultures, including Israel’s. This book provides geographical essays that has helped me better understand migratory and settling patterns in the ANE. It also contains six essays on ANE archaeology, which I know little about, and which functioned as a brief primer to get me up to speed. Most helpful for historical issues was Part 2, which has a broad overview of the historical periods that I will be lecturing on, and to which I am able to look for the most up-to-date research to compare with the slightly dated textbooks I have read and am reading. The ten essays zooming in on specific events could be perfect resources for discerning which events I should focus on during the historical overviews.
When I shift to the thematic portion of the course, this book is equally as helpful. With eight essays on God and religion (covering the typical topics such as monotheism in Israel, the temple, priests in the ANE, worship and rituals, prophecy, etc.), one can quickly skim through for the latest research and any primary sources that might be helpful to look up or review. The three essays on family provide some good material for integrating social history into my lectures, that is, history that considers the normal people affected by the larger events that we typically focus on. The nine essays on economics (farming, slavery, Israel’s economy, metallurgy, etc.) are somewhat unique in a volume like this, but again provide good material for social history. The more we can bring alive the ancient world for our students, the more they will latch on to and retain the material. And of course there are five essays on governance, wisdom, and warfare, all unavoidable topics.
The essays are on the shorter end, necessarily so considering the number of essays in the volume. For example, the essay on The Northern Kingdom of the Divided Monarchy is only six (large) pages. Interestingly, essays such as “Eighth-Century Levantine Earthquakes and Natural Disasters” are the same length. Again, “Hebrew Inscriptions” is six pages. Most of the essays are around this length. I find the brevity helpful for the topics I know little about, such as eighth-century Levantine earthquakes, but lamentable for the topics with more interpretive pay-off (at least from my perspective), such as Hebrew inscriptions and the Ancestral period, to pick only two.
Among many other books of this type, there are two newer ones to which I may compare it. In 2016, Princeton University Press published The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Companion, ed. John Barton. It falls into four parts: the Hebrew Bible in Its Historical and Social Context; Major Genres of Biblical Literature; Major Religious Themes; and the Study and Reception of the Hebrew Bible. This volume differs in two major ways from Behind the Scenes: the essays are fewer and much longer (25-30 pages each), providing more detail on each topic, and it contains a section on reception history and on genres of literature (Behind the Scenes focuses on literature from different cultures, but not on the different genres). The two volumes are therefore complementary and both useful in their own right. Another volume from Baker Academic is The World around the Old Testament: The People and Places of the Ancient Near East, eds. Arnold and Strawn (2016, paperback 2019). Its focus, as the subtitle suggests, is on the different cultures and nations in the ANE, with only 13 chapters at around 30 pages each. Again, this volume is complementary to the other two, but is more in-depth. If you want the variety of topics and more survey level entries, Behind the Scenes will do the trick. If you want more substantive overviews of fewer topics, the other two volumes will be useful. If you have the money for all three, they would be a dynamic trio sitting beside your Old Testament introductions.
Overall, Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament is an up-to-date, quite comprehensive resource for getting brief overviews on a variety of topics that help to better inform us about the cultural, social, and historical contexts of the Old Testament. The binding is sturdy and ready for constant use. The contributors are all well-known in their field. At only ~$32 for the hardback, I highly recommend adding a copy to your library for OT study, sermon preparation, or academic research. It fits the bill for all kinds of use.
