Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing.

• Author: Meltzer, Tova

Dr. Younger's volume can be read with profit by a wide range of scholars: Assyriologists, Hittitologists, Egyptologists, and other ancient Near Eastern specialists; biblical scholars; and all those concerned with historiographic and literary issues. They should also warmly recommend it to their students, for its clarity of exposition and rigorous explanations of fundamental issues, and for the good example it sets. In terms of both control of the data and methodological sophistication, it is one of the most impressive comparative studies in the biblical and Near Eastern area to appear in recent years. It illustrates and reaffirms the shift away from the plethora of "comparative" studies which select extra-biblical Near Eastern materials to "proof-text" particular views of the biblical text or of ancient Israel, a type of study frequently castigated by Younger.

Following the author's preface, there are three major sections comprising six chapters and a brief conclusion. "Introduction: The Underpinnings" consists of a single chapter, "Preliminary Issues"; "Stage One: Ancient Near Eastern Conquest Accounts" comprises chapters on Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian materials, respectively; "Stage Two: The Israelite Conquest Account: Joshua 9-12" again includes one chapter, while "Stage Three: Synthesis" comprises a chapter entitled "Implications and Entailments" and a two-page "Conclusion." The body of the text is followed by a long section of endnotes (more than sixty pages), a very full bibliography, an appendix, "Joshua 9-12, Text, Translation, Notes and Syntagmatic Analysis," and, finally, indices.

In the introduction, Younger reveals the shortcomings of various simplistic but widespread definitions of history and historiography. He shows that key criteria often used to exclude a narrative from the domain of "history-writing" (e.g., divine intervention, direct speech) are arbitrary, and he breaks down the artificial wall sometimes erected between historical and other kinds of narrative. His discussion of ideology and ideological language is most perceptive. He defends the literary nature of historical writing, thus underpinning the basic point that it is amenable to literary analysis. He also champions the comparative (or, after Hallo, "contextual") method and proposes that a combination of that method with semiotics offers increased insights in textual analysis. A semiotic approach is characterized as an attempt "to discern and understand the...