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(More customer reviews)Why has everyone from Haile Selassie to Martin Luther felt the bible was speaking to them, and why do we continue to find it powerful today? In this book, Seth Sanders combines anthropology and biblical studies to describe how Hebrew came to be used so widely, and to explain the unique status of the bible as a written document. According to Sanders, the bible was the first document to combine local Hebrew traditions of history telling and prophecy with imported Assyrian practices of addressing conquered people -- as a result the bible put a people, rather than a king, at the center of history. Because it was one of the first books ever to speak directly to its readers, it makes anyone who reads it feels it is directed to them.
This book is extremely clearly written for an academic book, and even has a certain flair to it. It is also extremely short -- 170 pages without the footnotes. Although at times it gets pretty technical, readers can easily skip the heavily epigraphic or theoretical bits and still keep up with the main argument because of the book's clarity and structure. While over-educated Jews will realize that this book is actually a gigantic drosh on the shema, it will appeal to many, many other audiences as well: biblical scholars could read it, as could anthropologists -- but the book is also perfectly approachable by anyone who studies the ancient near east or the bible seriously (not a little, but seriously) as a hobby. If it were available in softcover, or if you taught only certain chapters, it could be used in upper-level undergraduate courses in history, ancient near east, sociolinguistics, religion, political science, sociology -- the list goes on and on.
In my opinion, this book is great. It combines so many fields that have been kept separate, compares ancient Israel with so many others cultures and societies. Reading Sanders's book, you feel as if your eyes have been opened and the fog has lifted on a lot of ancient history. If you study the bible or the ancient near east, the book is a must-read. And if you do not, now is your chance to start: Sanders's vision of the relation between politics and language is too good for anyone to pass up.
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The Invention of Hebrew is the first book to approach the Bible in light of recent findings on the use of the Hebrew alphabet as a deliberate and meaningful choice. Seth L. Sanders connects the Bible's distinctive linguistic form--writing down a local spoken language--to a cultural desire to speak directly to people, summoning them to join a new community that the text itself helped call into being. Addressing the people of Israel through a vernacular literature, Hebrew texts gained the ability to address their audience as a public. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book details distinct ways in which Hebrew was a powerfully self-conscious political language. Revealing the enduring political stakes of Biblical writing, The Invention of Hebrew demonstrates how Hebrew assumed and promoted a source of power previously unknown in written literature: "the people" as the protagonist of religion and politics.
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