Ebook: The Context of Scripture (3 Vol Set)

The "first half of history" covers the interval between the invention of writing in Sumer and the floruit of classical Greece. During these two and a half millennia (ca. 3000-500 BCE), the Near East is the primary locus of written documentation, and thus the place where the emergence of humanity's achievements can be followed in detail. Two centuries of persistent exploration of the Near East have led to the recovery of much of this documentation, and the recovery continues at an unabated pace. The discoveries made in the field, and their interpretation in the scholarly literature, are brought to the attention of a wide public in three volumes, prepared by leading scholars in all the principal language areas of the ancient Near East. The first volume to be published, "Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World," is devoted to "literary" texts - those responses to the world about them by which the creative minds of antiquity sought to come to terms with their environment, real or i