Books by Timothy Hogue
Cambridge University Press, 2023
The Decalogue, commonly known as the Ten Commandments, is usually analysed as a text. Within th... more The Decalogue, commonly known as the Ten Commandments, is usually analysed as a text. Within the Hebrew Bible, however, it is depicted as a monument– an artifact embedded in rituals that a community uses to define itself. Indeed, the phraseology, visual representations, and ritual practices of contemporary monuments used to describe the Ten Commandments imbue them with authority. In this volume, Timothy Hogue, presents a new translation, commentary, and literary analysis of the Decalogue through a comparative study of the commandments with inscribed monuments in the ancient Levant. Drawing on archaeological and art historical studies of monumentality, he grounds the Decalogue's composition and redaction in the material culture and political history of ancient Israel and ancient West Asia. Presenting a new inner-biblical reception history of the text, Hogue's book also provides a new model for dating biblical texts that is based on archaeological and historical evidence, rather than purely literary critical methods.
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Articles by Timothy Hogue
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2021
The Tel Dan Stele is an essential piece of evidence for reconstructing Iron Age Levantine monumen... more The Tel Dan Stele is an essential piece of evidence for reconstructing Iron Age Levantine monumentality. Not only can we reasonably reconstruct the circumstances of the stele’s production, the circumstances of its discovery also provide important clues as to its later reception. In particular, it is clear from the stele’s broken state and reuse at Dan that it was utilized in counter-monumental practice. The stele was intentionally destroyed when the Israelites conquered Dan and its pieces were reused as building materials in the city’s gateway. Both the stele’s destruction and its reuse in the gate’s reconstruction were patterned performances, allowing the Israelites to perform their defeat of Aram before the Danites. These actions constituted a ritual forgetting of the ideology formerly afforded by the stele: the dominance of Hazael and the kingdom of Aram-Damascus. Thus embedded in counter-monumental practice, the stele was transformed into an ephemeral symbol of Aram-Damascus’ defeat.
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Levant, 2022
territoriality and monuments in the ancient Near East
Performative territoriality in the ... more territoriality and monuments in the ancient Near East
Performative territoriality in the Iron Age Levant
Conclusion: the king takes the stage, the audience takes a bow
Acknowledgements
References
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Abstract
In the 9th century BC, Levantine polities performatively expressed territoriality by strategically utilizing the spatial discourse of royal monuments. Specifically, Levantine rulers erected complementary monuments in both their core cities and frontier cities to transmit a central praxis and perspective to the periphery. This practice drew on earlier Levantine traditions of using monuments to demarcate ceremonial theatres that functioned as zones for political transformation. Most importantly, these 9th century monuments departed from earlier traditions by distributing the presence of both the king and his patron deity to multiple locations within his claimed territory. They thus created relationships between the denizens of diverse settlements and the king and his deity. By creating a shared political and religious experience, the monuments performatively brought forth concepts of a territorial polity centred on a single king, deity and capital city. This allowed these kings to express sovereignty over entire regions as opposed to collections of individual settlements.
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Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2021
This study proposes that monuments are technologies through which communities think. I draw on co... more This study proposes that monuments are technologies through which communities think. I draw on conceptual blending theory as articulated by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier to argue that monuments are material anchors for conceptual integration networks. The network model highlights that monuments are embedded in specific spatial and sociohistorical contexts while also emphasizing that they function relationally by engaging the imaginations of communities. An enactivist understanding of these networks helps to explain the generative power of monuments as well as how they can become dynamic and polysemic. By proposing a cognitive scientific model for such relational qualities, this approach also has the advantage of making them more easily quantifiable. I present a testcase of monumental installations from the Iron Age Levant (the ceremonial plaza of Karkamiš) to develop this approach and demonstrate its explanatory power. I contend that the theory and methods introduced here can make future accounts of monuments more precise while also opening up new avenues of research into monuments as a technology of motivated social cognition that is enacted on a community-scale.
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Manuscript and Text Cultures, 2022
The Bar-Rakib Palace Inscriptions from Zincirli have received relatively little attention from ph... more The Bar-Rakib Palace Inscriptions from Zincirli have received relatively little attention from philologists and archaeologists alike because of their predictable and derivative content. However, these monuments provide an unparalleled insight into the monumentalization of text in the Iron Age Levant. As might be expected, Bar-Rakib’s Aramaic inscriptions and reliefs repeat themes and tropes from other monuments. They also were strategically deployed at the site so as to interact with nearby monuments left by earlier rulers. What has received less attention is the fact that Bar-Rakib’s monuments also shared many artistic tropes with small finds from Zincirli, including letters, incantation plaques, seals, and amulets. These correspondences suggest that monumental texts functioned by appropriating aspects of personal artifacts to be used on a communal scale. By projecting not only prestige but also intimacy, Bar-Rakib’s inscriptions invited their audience to interact with them in imaginative ways. As the audience related to the monumental texts through acts of reading, viewing, and ritual, they would in turn reconfigure their own relationships to other communicative media, places, each other, and the polity as a whole. It was this ability to relate to communities and thus reshape them that made a text monumental in the Iron Age Levant. This was accomplished through the strategic juxtaposition of text with visual and performative media in particular spatial contexts.
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Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 2019
The practice of opening monumental inscriptions with a first-person pronoun was popularized by th... more The practice of opening monumental inscriptions with a first-person pronoun was popularized by the Iron Age Syro-Anatolian polities, who inherited the tradition from the Hittites. The first-person pronoun evoked the commissioner’s voice and even their image, especially in Hieroglyphic Luwian iconography and its adaptations. These monumental texts materialized an imagined encounter with their commissioners that was initiated by the phrase “I am.” The first-person opening thus became the operative element of the text’s monumentality. The text only functioned as a monument in light of the speaker identified by the pronominal opening. This study presents a history of the practice and especially its employment relative to monumental images. This reveals that the formula had an overlapping but ultimately separable function from that of images, allowing it to imbue texts with monumentality in a variety of contexts. This apparently made the formula an attractive object of adaptation during the Iron Age, leading to its diffusion throughout the greater Levant and in Mesopotamia.
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Journal of Biblical Literature, 2019
The Decalogue in Exodus was composed and strategically embedded in its literary context in order ... more The Decalogue in Exodus was composed and strategically embedded in its literary context in order to reflect the discourse of Northwest Semitic monumental inscriptions. Monument making in the ancient Near East involved primarily the materialization and perpetuation of ideologies as well as the proposition of collective identities, and these functions were easily carried out by text objects. Accordingly, the Decalogue’s commandments reveal a YHWH-centered ideology expressed in terms familiar to Northwest Semitic monumental discourse. These commandments were strategically structured to provoke collective interaction with the text that would persuade its users to accept its proposed perspective as their new collective identity. Finally, the Decalogue is inserted at a point in the narrative where the ancient audience could reasonably expect an account of monument erection—immediately following the account of YHWH’s defeat of Egypt, which makes up the first half of the book of Exodus. The Decalogue
thus acts as the text of an imagined victory monument to YHWH, which materialized YHWH’s newly established kingship over Israel and the divine proposition of the people’s collective identity. The Decalogue thereby fulfills the primary function of royal Northwest Semitic monuments by materializing an imagined encounter between a king and his people and establishing a relationship between them. The text’s monumentality thus provides a new means of conceptualizing
its composition and authority.
This article is currently available at the link provided. Alternatively, feel free to contact me for an offprint.
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Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 2019
Previous translations of the Katumuwa inscription have either rendered the first verbal phrase (q... more Previous translations of the Katumuwa inscription have either rendered the first verbal phrase (qnt ly) “I commissioned for myself” or “I acquired for myself.” No scholars have yet defended the possibility that it simply means “I made.” In fact, this is likely the case given the typical monumental rhetoric of Northwest Semitic and Hieroglyphic Luwian monumental inscriptions. A comparison with verbs of monumenting in Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions in particular suggests that the monumenting phrase in the Katumuwa inscription was calqued on a Luwian phrase. This difference is significant because it reveals an important aspect of the inscription’s monumentality and the Syro-Anatolian conception of the stele. The stele that Katumuwa created was not understood merely as the inscribed object. Rather, the monument was the conjunction of material object, ritual engagement, and the resultant manifestation of the monument’s commissioner. There was no monument apart from Katamuwa, whose voice was preserved in the inscription and whose presence could be reactivated through ritual. Therefore, Katumuwa did in fact “create” the stele as he spoke through it to his monument’s users.
This article is available online at the link provided. Alternatively, feel free to contact me for an offprint.
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Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentlische Wissenschaft, 2018
Previous rhetorical analyses of language alternation in Ezra have been limited by their focus on ... more Previous rhetorical analyses of language alternation in Ezra have been limited by their focus on bilingualism. This study will propose a new approach to the poetics of Ezra 1-7 in light of more recent sociolinguistic research concerning diglossia and language ideology. The writer of Ezra used literary code-switching to juxtapose contrasting linguistic variants that suggested particular ideological postures. By alternating between Hebrew, Official Aramaic, and a vernacular variety of Aramaic, the writer created a literary reflection of the diglossia that characterized Achaemenid Judah. He sequenced his code-switching so as to mirror the Judeans’ transition from a diaspora community to a stabilized minority and the ideological negotiations that accompanied that transition. In so doing, he provided linguistic points of reference for the audience to use in projecting themselves into those negotiations. The writer’s code-switching thus reflects the Judeans’ return from exile and invites the audience to accept their new symbolic homeland.
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Chapters in Edited Volumes by Timothy Hogue
New Perspectives on Ritual in the Biblical World. Edited by Laura Quick and Melissa Ramos. The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies (New York: T & T Clark), 2021
Though often translated as though it described a commemorative practice, the command in Exodus 20... more Though often translated as though it described a commemorative practice, the command in Exodus 20:8 to זכור את-יום השבת “remember the day of the Sabbath” actually expresses an ancient ritual of enchantment. Translations of zkwr as “remember” downplay the performative aspects of the verb. The cultures of the ancient Near East viewed ritual practice as actually bringing about new realities rather than merely commemorating or otherwise indicating them. To zkr an entity thus meant more than simply “remembering” as a passive cognitive activity; rather it involved actually making that entity present, conjuring it. This can be borne out through a comparative study of zkr in other ritual texts from the Levant – the Great Zukru Festival of Bronze Age Emar and the monumental inscriptions of Iron Age Zincirli. This comparative study will then revisit the use of this term relating to the Sabbath in the Hebrew Bible. This analysis will be couched within a theoretical consideration of ritual performativity and enchantment. Set against this backdrop, the command to zkwr the Sabbath cannot refer to a representational act of commemoration alone. Rather, this was a command to enchant the Sabbath – to make it into a time when the boundaries between human and divine were vague and the presence of Yahweh could be manifested among his worshippers.
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Book Reviews by Timothy Hogue
Reading Religion, 2019
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Hebrew Higher Education 21, 2019
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Papers by Timothy Hogue
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Books by Timothy Hogue
Articles by Timothy Hogue
Performative territoriality in the Iron Age Levant
Conclusion: the king takes the stage, the audience takes a bow
Acknowledgements
References
Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Licensing Reprints & Permissions View PDF View EPUB
Abstract
In the 9th century BC, Levantine polities performatively expressed territoriality by strategically utilizing the spatial discourse of royal monuments. Specifically, Levantine rulers erected complementary monuments in both their core cities and frontier cities to transmit a central praxis and perspective to the periphery. This practice drew on earlier Levantine traditions of using monuments to demarcate ceremonial theatres that functioned as zones for political transformation. Most importantly, these 9th century monuments departed from earlier traditions by distributing the presence of both the king and his patron deity to multiple locations within his claimed territory. They thus created relationships between the denizens of diverse settlements and the king and his deity. By creating a shared political and religious experience, the monuments performatively brought forth concepts of a territorial polity centred on a single king, deity and capital city. This allowed these kings to express sovereignty over entire regions as opposed to collections of individual settlements.
thus acts as the text of an imagined victory monument to YHWH, which materialized YHWH’s newly established kingship over Israel and the divine proposition of the people’s collective identity. The Decalogue thereby fulfills the primary function of royal Northwest Semitic monuments by materializing an imagined encounter between a king and his people and establishing a relationship between them. The text’s monumentality thus provides a new means of conceptualizing
its composition and authority.
This article is currently available at the link provided. Alternatively, feel free to contact me for an offprint.
This article is available online at the link provided. Alternatively, feel free to contact me for an offprint.
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Timothy Hogue
Book Reviews by Timothy Hogue
Papers by Timothy Hogue
Performative territoriality in the Iron Age Levant
Conclusion: the king takes the stage, the audience takes a bow
Acknowledgements
References
Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Licensing Reprints & Permissions View PDF View EPUB
Abstract
In the 9th century BC, Levantine polities performatively expressed territoriality by strategically utilizing the spatial discourse of royal monuments. Specifically, Levantine rulers erected complementary monuments in both their core cities and frontier cities to transmit a central praxis and perspective to the periphery. This practice drew on earlier Levantine traditions of using monuments to demarcate ceremonial theatres that functioned as zones for political transformation. Most importantly, these 9th century monuments departed from earlier traditions by distributing the presence of both the king and his patron deity to multiple locations within his claimed territory. They thus created relationships between the denizens of diverse settlements and the king and his deity. By creating a shared political and religious experience, the monuments performatively brought forth concepts of a territorial polity centred on a single king, deity and capital city. This allowed these kings to express sovereignty over entire regions as opposed to collections of individual settlements.
thus acts as the text of an imagined victory monument to YHWH, which materialized YHWH’s newly established kingship over Israel and the divine proposition of the people’s collective identity. The Decalogue thereby fulfills the primary function of royal Northwest Semitic monuments by materializing an imagined encounter between a king and his people and establishing a relationship between them. The text’s monumentality thus provides a new means of conceptualizing
its composition and authority.
This article is currently available at the link provided. Alternatively, feel free to contact me for an offprint.
This article is available online at the link provided. Alternatively, feel free to contact me for an offprint.