Ancient near eastern literature and the pentateuch

Abstract

Modern academic biblical scholarship has observed a range of correlations between biblical texts and other texts from the larger ancient Near Eastern world. The observed correspondences have been used phenomenologically and interpretively to raise questions for investigation and offer insights for understanding the biblical texts, especially by contrasts between the texts. A more dynamic and controversial mode of comparative analysis, the focus of this survey, is to ask whether similarities point to a genetic relationship between cultures with the goal of historical reconstruction and placing the Hebrew biblical texts and ideas in their Near Eastern context.