Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran

Description

This monograph, an expansion of the Nahum and Glatzer Prize-winning doctoral dissertation, compares cuneiform commentary texts from first millennium Mesopotamia with early Jewish pesharim commentaries from Qumran. While Mesopotamian hermeneutics may have influenced Jewish exegesis, the compositional techniques differ significantly. However, textual difficulties in the pesharim can be explained through interpretive accretion practices documented in Mesopotamian commentaries. The work advocates shifting from binary discussions of textual authority to functional descriptions of literary authority in both ancient and modern contexts.

Citation

Brown-deVost, Bronson. Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran. Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplement Series 29. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.

@book{BrowndeVost2019,
author = {Bronson Brown-deVost},
year = {2019},
title = {Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran},
series = {Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplement Series},
number = {29},
publisher = {Vandenhoeck \& Ruprecht},
address = {G\"ottingen}}