KRZYSZTOF BARANOWSKI

HISTORIA PISMA KLINOWEGO W POŁUDNIOWYM KANAANIE

 

THE HISTORY OF CUNEIFORM WRITING IN SOUTHERN CANAAN

 

An overview of artefacts with cuneiform inscriptions from the Land of Israel shows that the use of cuneiform script in this regions falls into two neatly distinguishable periods, each having own characteristics. The cuneiform tradition of southern Canaan originated from contacts between Hazor and Mari. Writing was adopted in the Old Babylonian period and used for administration and epistolary exchange. From the beginning, cuneiform script was taught locally and transmitted in families, from one generation to another, as was the case with other professions. In the Late Bronze Age, the local practice of writing expanded and participated in a larger western peripheral stream of cuneiform tradition. Its demise was the result of political and cultural changes which occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Cuneiform writing appeared again in the Land of Israel with Assyrian occupation at the end of the eight cent. B.C.E. In contrast to the Late Bronze Age, in the Neo-Assyrian period cuneiform writing was not adopted by the indigenous population nor taught locally, as the lack of scholarly texts indicates. From this period, only two categories of documents survive: royal stele and administrative tablets. Several cuneiform artefacts from the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods are difficult to interpret. Some of them had to be brought from abroad; others may testify to occasional use of cuneiform writing.

 

FILIP TATERKA

SPISKI HAREMOWE W STAROŻYTNYM EGIPCIE

 

HAREM CONSPIRACIES IN ANCIENT EGYPT

 

The article discusses the harem conspiracies that took place at the ancient Egyptian court. The analysis of the now available textual as well as the iconographical material permits us to identify five harem conspiracies, which are the following: three under the 6 th Dynasty (one in the reign of Teti and two others in the reign of Pepy I), one in the reign of Amenemhat I of the 12th Dynasty, and the best known harem conspiracy in the reign of Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty. The author argues that the harem conspiracies were created usually at the very beginning of the rule of a given Dynasty, while its position on the throne was not yet firmly established. Each conspiracy has been, however, made by the members of the closed circle of persons with a direct and unlimited access to the king and their purpose was to replace the successor chosen by the king with another royal son. But the harem conspiracies were never an expression of the common rebellion against the ruling king. The article is followed by the first complete Polish translation of the documents related to the harem conspiracy in the reign of Ramesses III.

 

WITOLD TYBOROWSKI

PRAWO O BODĄCYM WOLE W BIBLII I W STAROŻYTNEJ MEZOPOTAMII

 

THE LAW ON THE GORING OX IN THE HEBREW BIBLE AND ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

 

Regulations concerning the goring ox can be found in three law collections from the Ancient Near East, the Laws of Eshnunna, Laws of Hammurabi and the Code of Covenant in the Bible (Ex 20:22-23:33). The paragraphs which speak of this issue appear in two groups, those which describe accidental or expected injury or death of a man or another ox. One should mention that the smallest concern in the matter is revealed by the famous Laws of Hammurabi which speak only about the threat which might be faced exclusively by a man. The other two collections contain regulations concerning injures of both men and animals.
What is important, the regulations of all the three legal monuments show common features, although it is surprising that the closest similarity in the matter in question can be found between the Laws of Eshnunna and the Code of Covenant. This is so in spite of the fact that the two collections were drafted in areas distant from each other and one came into existence more than a thousand years earlier than the other. Both laws treat the damage done by the dangerous beast in very similar way and the only difference is that that in case of homicide ‘guilty’ animal is the be stoned in the Code of Covenant, which was a religious penalty not found in Mesopotamia. In both collections (LE par. 53, Ex 21:35) the difference does not appear in the case of a damage of another ox by the gorer and so they do not differ at all from each other in this respect. This is quite surprising since there is no proof that the Laws of Eshnunna were known in the first millennium BC and so any direct influence of the Mesopotamian law on Biblical regulations does not seem possible.
On the other hand it is thus quite noteworthy that the Code of Covenant shows little similarities with the regulations of the Laws of Hammurabi which were well known in the first millennium which is proved by numerous copies unearthed in modern Babylonia (Iraq). One should notice that in contradiction to the Laws of Eshnunna and the Code of Covenant the Babylonian Laws do not speak of damage of an animal by the dangerous ox. This fact and a philological analysis testify that the Biblical regulations were not drafted under direct inspiration of the Laws of Hammurabi, but they could be composed in the way to show similarities to the Babylonian collection, although we do not find paragraphs which might have been exact pattern for them. This is proved in particular by the fact that the Bible uses notions which are loaned from Akkadian which the Biblical author must have known himself.
The conclusion expressed above proves that the transfer of some legal and literary traditions from Mesopotamia to Ancient Israel was not done by anonymous traditions or simple shift of patterns, but it appeared along the will of the authors of biblical text who used important compositions which belonged to other cultural traditions because they wanted to make their own collection more prominent.

 

EDWARD LIPIŃSKI

TARSZISZ NAD ATLANTYKIEM

 

TARSHISH ON THE ATLANTIC

 

Tarshish is a country mentioned ca. 800 B.C. in the Phoenician Nora inscription, then in the Annals of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, and often in the Bible. It must be identified with Tartessos, known from Greek sources, and localized in the area of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. Huelva is built on a strip of land between the Odiel and the Tinto which both fall into the Atlantic by navigable estuaries. The great local industry from the Late Bronze age on is the mining of copper manganese and iron. The well-known Riotinto mines, near the sources of the Tinto, were exploited by local people from early times and from the 9 th century B.C. also by Phoenicians who were cupelling large amounts of silver from the base metals and shipping the silver, as well as other goods, from the seaport of Huelva to the Levant. This rich area on the Atlantic was known to biblical writers, who record the Phoenician trading vessels, called “ships of Tarshish”, and mention “silver, iron, tin, and lead” shipped by them and traded in the fairs of Tyre (Ez. 27:12). Modern search for Tarshish-Tarsis-Tartessos managed to identify this area and to date the beginning of the Phoenician activity around Huelva to the 9 th century B.C., showing thus that its biblical dating in the time of Solomon is too high. This profitable trade suffered a back-clash in the 6 th -5 th centuries B.C., and in Hellenistic times the location of Tarshish was no longer known in the Levant. The Septuagint sometimes identifies Tarshish with Carthage and Josephus Flavius most often confuses it with Tarsus in Cilicia. Various opinions were expressed in later times.

 

MAREK PIELA

O NAJNOWSZYM, „DYNAMICZNYM” PRZEKŁADZIE PSALMÓW

 

ON A RECENT, “DYNAMIC” TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS

 

The recent Polish translation of the Psalms, entitled Księga Psalmów. Nowy Przekład Dynamiczny (The Book of Psalms. A New Dynamic Translation ) was published in 2013. According to the editor’s preface the translation was made in compliance with the rules of dynamic equivalence. If we assume that the dynamic equivalence amounts to the similarity of receptor’s responses to the original and to its translation, then the reviewed translation turns out to be rather formal than dynamic equivalent of the source, because it translates poetry into prose. It seems that the editors accepted a narrowed and simplified notion of dynamic equivalence, which confines it to the faithful expression of the original meaning in contemporary, easy-to-understand language. The translators did not gain even this result to the full, because they rendered many constructions and idioms literally, distorting the meaning or the style of the source text. On the other hand the reviewed translation gives proper dynamic equivalents of some grammatical constructions (for example sentences with names of body parts whose Polish version contains possessive dative). In accordance with the rules of dynamic equivalence, male-oriented expressions are often translated in a  gender-inclusive way. The language used in the translation is a mixture of old and modern elements (contemporary vocabulary of the translation clashes into few grammatical archaisms).

 

 

JAKUB SLAWIK

NAJLEPSZY ZE ŚWIATÓW? STAROTESTAMENTOWA KRYTYKA ŚWIATA I LUDZKIEGO ŻYCIA

 

THE BEST WORLD? CRITICISM OF THE WORLD AND HUMAN LIFE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

 

Against a  broad opinion in biblical theology that the Old Testament views the world and social life in a very positive way this paper shows that its texts are far more critical of the human life. The social criticism of the prophets, disappointment for the lack of any moral order in the world in the wisdom’s traditions and first of all reflections in both stories of the creation of the world (Gen 1-3) read in their context prove that people’s life pictured in the Old Testament is very hard in every dimension of the life: religious, social and in respect of the nature. Reading the stories of the creation not as historical reports but as a sort of literature according to their form we can not claim that once in the beginning the world was perfect.

 

 

EDWARD LIPIŃSKI

POUCZENIE PANA DLA POGAN

 

LORD’S TEACHING FOR GENTILES

 

The “Didache” or “Teaching of the Apostles” I-VI and the “Epistle of Barnabas” XVIII-XX reproduce an earlier document entitled “The Two Ways”, which seems to have been a Jewish manual of moral precepts redacted for Gentiles. It was an independent work, attested as such in a Latin version and in the Arabic translation of a Coptic biography of Shenute, in which “The Two Ways” are quoted among Shenute’s teachings for his monks. The manual has indeed been carried out into the use of the Christian Church. Its original language was probably Hebrew or Aramaic and it must have been written at the time of the Hasmonean kingdom of Judah, which included territories with a large Gentile population. The latter was not forcibly Judaized, as stated by Josephus Flavius, but it was obliged to observe the Noachide Laws, expressing the moral duties enjoined on all men and explained in the manual. The “Damascus Document” IX, 1 seems to refer to this “Lord’s teaching for Gentiles”, as well as do the “Sentences” or Γνῶμαι of Pseudo-Phocylides, a Jewish gnomic poet of Alexandria who lived around the 1 st century B.C. The article reproduces the Latin version published by J. Schlecht from the Munich 11th-century manuscript 6264 and provides a Polish translation.