Assyria in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

This chapter discusses the historical references to Assyria that found in the Hebrew Bible and the question of Assyria's impact on the Bible's legal, theological, and ideological positions. The Bible criticizes the hubris of the Assyrian conquerors and uses Assyria as a foil to highlight the specific identity of Israel and Judah. This is in marked contrast to the far more “cosmopolitan” Aramaic literature featuring Assyrian kings, for example, the Ahiqar story or Papyrus Amherst 63, which fully endorse the imperial spirit of the age. The areas where scholars have sought to establish an Assyrian influence on the Bible are political ideology and law. Machinist (1983) and more recently Aster and van der Kooij have argued that especially in the book of Isaiah, but also elsewhere in the Bible, there is a pronounced awareness of Assyrian royal ideology, an ideology most elaborately articulated in Assyrian royal inscriptions.

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