Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Writings from the Ancient World)

This is the first book to gather the available ancient Near Eastern extrabiblical sources containing prophetic words or references to prophetic activities. Among the 140 texts included in this volume are oracles of prophets personal letters formal inscriptions and administrative documents from ancient Mesopotamia and Levant from the second and first millennia B.C.E. By collecting and presenting evidence of the activities of prophets and the phenomenon of prophecy from all over the ancient Near East the volume illumines the cultural background of biblical prophecy and its parallels. It makes these valuable primary source materials accessible to students and general readers in contemporary English along with transcriptions of the original languages indexes and an extensive bibliography.