Spiele und Spielzeug im antiken Palastina.

• Author: Meier, Samuel A.

It is a pleasure to read a book that delivers far more than its title suggests. "Ancient Palestine" provides a chronological and geographical focus that stems from the author's culture-historical work elsewhere on childhood and adolescence in Iron Age Israel and Judah. Nevertheless, Hubner incorporates data from the neolithic to the twentieth century, and from Africa to India. When Nietzsche, Pushkin, and Dante are cited, along with the works of Brueghel the Elder and Caravaggio, suspicions arise that the work may be a bit too undefined. One cannot, however, fault the author for attempting to cover too much, for, not only is his focus on ancient Palestine always clear, but precisely this type of comparative cultural and literary work is what students of the ancient Near East require to avoid intellectual isolation.

Hubner devotes separate chapters to individual games that include hide-and-seek and sandbox games, games played by the gods, games played with animals, ball games, astragali, dice, board games, tops, disks with two holes (iunx), dolls, role-playing, and weight-lifting. Although some games are not discussed (such as wagering, word games and riddles, polo, puzzles, or chess), Hubner still provides substantial bibliographies for each (pp. 136-40). Chapters devoted to the athletic metaphor in the New Testament, as well as entertainment in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods, underscore where the interests of the author lie.

The primary shortcoming of the book surfaces in Hubner's too frequent reliance upon classical Greek and Latin sources. It is not their presence that is irksome but the fact that he overlooks more geographically and culturally relevant data, most notably, material from Mesopotamia. Thus, a panoply of classical sources defends the notion that gods such as Hermes, Selene, and Pan are involved with games (pp. 25-26), but there is no mention that melulu "to play" is often used in connection with Ishtar, whose "play is war" (Ernst Michel, "Ein neuent-deckter Annalen-Text Salmanassers III," WO 1 [1952]: 456, i 7). Indeed, the discussion should be balanced with the poignant words of the queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal: "Since I was a young girl, I never knew the play of maidens, I never knew the romping of little girls" (STT 28 V.2'-4'). While Hubner discusses the locus of children's games with abundant documentation from classical sources (pp. 142-43), only one reference to a Mesopotamian text appears, as...