Poets Before Homer

Collected Essays on Ancient Literature

Delbert R. Hillers, F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp

• Publisher: Eisenbrauns
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781575063409
• eBook ISBN: 9781575067230
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume collects and reprints many of Delbert R. Hillers's most important published essays and articles, his long out-of-print Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets, and three previously unpublished essays, including the aforementioned "'Poets Before Homer': Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition". Hillers gave the latter as the 1992 William Foxwell Albright Lecture at The Johns Hopkins University and in it uses Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, with its "topological" method, as a model for exploring the connections of the most ancient Near Eastern literatures (including the Bible) to later Western literature. Though one of his latest pieces of writing, "Poets Before Homer" represents, as Hillers himself recognized, a fairly clear statement of what he had been doing in much of his earlier scholarship and the volume collects the best of this earlier scholarship. Most of these essays work themselves out from a particular passage, theme, topos, image, or grammatical issue, and gain their interpretive vantage point by reading said passage, etc. comparatively, whether in light of relevant ancient Near Eastern and/or more recent European literary parallels or with reference to some more theoretical interest, such as modern linguistic theory. Hillers's habit of mind ran toward the particular, toward the individual detail. His genius—if this word may be used—was in his capacity to seize upon one aspect of some larger entity, problem, or topic, to work it through, thoroughly and, as often as not, decisively, all the while resisting the temptation to take up the larger, perhaps un(re)solvable complex of which the detail or problem was but a part. The worked example is the Hillersian trademark—"exemplum followed by moralisatio"—and Poets Before Homer collects all of his best.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: “Poets Before Homer”:Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition
• Chapter 2: A Convention in Hebrew Literature: The Reaction to Bad News
• Chapter 3: “The Roads to Zion Mourn”(Lam 1:4)
• Chapter 4: Homeric Dictated Texts: A Reexamination of Some Near Eastern Evidence
• Chapter 5: A Study of Psalm 148
• Chapter 6: Salamalecchi: Formulas of Greeting and ‘Salute Jerusalem’ (Ps 122:6–9)
• Chapter 7: The Effective Simile in Biblical Literature
• Chapter 8: Dust: Some Aspects of Old Testament Imagery
• Chapter 9: Two Notes on the Decameron (III vii 42–43 and VIII vii 64, IX v 48)
• Chapter 10: Treaty-Cursesand the Old Testament Prophets
• Chapter 11: A Note on Some Treaty Terminology in the Old Testament
• Chapter 12: Rite: Ceremonies of Law and Treaty in the Ancient Near East
• Chapter 13: The Bow of Aqhat: The Meaning of a Mythological Theme
• Chapter 14: A Proposal for a Difficult Line in Keretlm ank ksp
• Chapter 15: Redemption in Letters 6 and 2 from Hermopolis
• Chapter 16: Analyzing the Abominable: Our Understanding of Canaanite Religion
• Chapter 17: Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions and the Old Testament, especially Amos 2:8
• Chapter 18 : Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions and the Bible
• Chapter 19: Observations on Syntax and Meter in Lamentations
• Chapter 20: Delocutive Verbs in Biblical Hebrew
• Chapter 21: Hôy and Hôy-Oracles: A Neglected Syntactic Aspect
• Chapter 22: Some Performative Utterances in the Bible
• Index