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A Festschrift can be a difficult book to put together: the book needs to honor the recipient, enlist the right mixture of authors, and still contain enough interesting articles to lead people to buy the book. This Festschrift in honor of Jim Hoffmeier succeeds admirably well at all three levels. This work follows in the footsteps of Hoffmeier by focusing on the intersection of three areas: Egyptology, archaeology, and biblical studies (though a few of the essays drift from these three areas of study, such as an essay on Persian royal ideology). The articles in the Festschrift highlight the wide-ranging nature of his work over the past decades and are strong contributions to the various fields addressed. One of the few critiques I have of the book is that it would have been helpful to group the articles by the topics listed in the subtitle rather than the author’s last names.Since the book contains far too many articles (28) to review each, I will summarize briefly several articles that focus on Egyptology, archaeology, and biblical studies before looking at a few articles that bridge Egyptology and biblical studies in more detail. I will begin with archaeology. Louise Bertini and Salima Ikram study the diet of those living at several Egyptian fortresses in Sinai (including Tell el-Borg, where Hoffmeier excavated). Miller Prosser presents a case for digital archaeology, while Tamasz Herbich argues for the use of the resistivity profiling method. Two essays discuss mud bricks. Working with a local craftsman, Joanna Dębowska-Ludwin and Karolina Rosińska-Balik experimented with making mud bricks using straw (as in Exod 5); readers can expect a full monograph on these experiments in the future. In their article on dating mud bricks, Kei Yamamoto and Pearce Paul Creasman agree that mud bricks can be made with straw but argue that sand works just as well.In the area of Egyptology, Carola Vogel reviews the biographies of various commanders of Egyptian fortresses to show that the larger fortresses had commanders that were higher in rank. One of the more interesting articles is a study of dwarves, pygmies, and exotic animals in Egypt by Gregory Mumford. Reflecting Hoffmeier’s recent attention to Akhenaten, Mark Janzen examines the role of the goddess Maʾat during the reign of the royal worshiper of Aten and finds that she was not entirely expunged. Finally, several articles focus on purely biblical topics. For example, Richard Averbeck looks at the tests of a prophet and Eric Tully argues that Hos 1–3 is the key to the literary structure and message of the entire book of Hosea.In honor of Hoffmeier, I will look at several of the articles that display the most interesting integration of Egyptology with biblical studies. Joshua Berman wrote on the literary features in the Kadesh inscription of Ramesses II that would cause biblical scholars to employ diachronic reasons to explain them. However, since Egyptologists agree that the text does not have any diachronic elements, it must be read synchronically. Therefore, elements such as a change from third to first person are an example of literary technique rather than diachronic change. With examples like this, scholars should be less quick to jump to diachronic explanations of “difficult” texts.Aaron Burke’s article argues that Egyptian scribes were left behind after the retreat of the Egyptian empire from Canaan and played a role in early Israelite literary culture. The scribes were much more than just writing specialists, but were proficient in a variety of important fields: “the scribe served, effectively, as a walking computer, a ‘Spock,’ ‘Data,’ or ‘C3Po’ of sorts, permitting their new masters to navigate the world around them” (p. 60). These scribes could have helped develop literacy and other fields of study among the early Israelites.The debate over the date of the exodus has continued in recent years, with Hoffmeier playing a key role in defending the late date. In his entry in the Festschrift David Falk demonstrates how his project, Groundhog: Chronology Test Laboratory, could be used to analyze different dates of the exodus for internal consistency. Many proposed dates of the exodus shift the dates of various Pharaohs, since Egyptologists continue to debate the chronology of ancient Egypt. However, Falk shows that these dates cannot be moved at will, because it might cause known synchronisms to be synchronous no longer. For example, since Ramses II and Hattusili III made a treaty, they must have reigned at the same time. Falk argues that the early date of the exodus defended by scholars such as Bryant Wood is not correct because of broken synchronisms, but the late date of the exodus fits all of the requirements.In Nili Shupak’s study of the Egyptian background of the Joseph narrative, she argues that the rewarding of Joseph in Gen 41:41–43 is not a reflection of the postexilic time period or derived from Assyrian exemplars but “corresponds to the reward ceremony documented in New Kingdom Egyptian inscriptions and iconography” (p. 346). In addition, the “abomination of Egypt” (Gen 43:32; 46:34; Exod 8:22) can be connected with rigid table manners in Egypt. However, she rejects the hypothesis that the shaving of Joseph’s head (Gen 41:14) and washing of his face (Gen 43:30–31) were specifically Egyptian purification rites.In sum, this book honors James Hoffmeier appropriately and is an excellent example of what a successful Festschrift should look like. I highly recommend it, especially for those interested in the intersection of Egyptology, archaeology, and biblical studies.
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