Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol.

• Author: Borowski, Oded
• Position: Book review

Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol. By KENNETH C. WAY. History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant, vol. 2. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2011. Pp. xvi + 272, maps. $49.50.

This book can be considered as "everything you ever wanted to know about donkeys in the ancient Near East." Actually, while treating the topic of donkeys, the author also deals with other equids, such as onagers, horses, and hybrids. The book contains copious textual and archaeological information on the topic and its interpretation. One can say that "no stone is left unturned" when it comes to the subject of this volume.

The book originated as a doctoral dissertation prompted by the 1992 uncovering of an intact donkey burial at the entrance to a Middle Bronze Age temple complex at Tel Haror, Israel. The author examines the vast and diverse corpus of texts from the various ancient cultures: Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite, Ugaritic, Aramaic, and Biblical. He presents related archaeological data from Egypt, Israel-Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.

The information is presented in four chapters followed by a fifth containing a synthesis and by an appendix of "Equid Terminology," a bibliography stretching over fifty-one pages, an index of authors, and an index of scripture. Each chapter is divided into numbered sections and subsections, a system that allows easy cross-reference, especially when the author is making connections between items appearing in this book in different locations.

The first chapter, "Introduction," under the sub-section "Focus and Contribution" (1.1), lays out the purpose of this study: "... to explicate the role of donkeys in the symbolism and ceremonies of the biblical world. This requires an analysis of the relevant archaeological and textual materials from the ancient Near East as well as a fresh look at the biblical passages that may (or may not) depict donkeys in a similar manner." This leads first to a review of "History of Scholarship" (1.2), which is subdivided into a quick review of the Mari texts (1.2.1) and equid burials (1.2.2) from Tell el-Ajjul, Lachish, Jericho, etc. The expected contributions of this book are presented in the next section, "Problems and Prospects" (1.3), where the author lists the type of ancient Near Eastern texts (1.3.1) that will be examined, the archaeological evidence and the methodology of analysis (1.3.2), and the biblical texts to be studied (1.3.3) for examination of "similar beliefs or...