Epigraphy, philology, and the hebrew bible : methodological perspectives on philological and comparative study of the hebrew bible in honor of Jo Ann Hackett

Introduction: "The present volume comprises a set of contradictions. It is simultaneously a Festschrift—usually conceived as a collection of essays honoring a colleague, teacher, and friend—and a volume designed with the graduate classroom in mind and organized around a few common themes. And whereas a few of the essays are typical exemplars of the genre of “introductory” or “overview” essay and reflecting engagement with the wider approaches to the disciplines at hand, many of the articles herein are specialized papers featuring a theoretical or methodological orientation appropriate to specific modes of study. This format, then, does not fit easily within any of the genres that are common within the fields of Biblical Studies and Northwest Semitic Philology. Yet, the constituent essays of this volume have been composed with two purposes: First, despite their eclectic and broadly-interested diversity of topics, these papers all attempt to grapple with specific problems associated with one of three topics that Professor Jo Ann Hackett has devoted her career to understanding: philological study of the Northwest Semitic languages; the study of epigraphic exemplars of those same languages; and the religious traditions of Israel and its neighbors in the Southern Levant, as reconstructed from the perspective(s) offered in the Hebrew Bible. Secondly, these articles are all oriented towards the educational context of graduate-level students of these same fields of study. These complementary goals are modeled on both the research and pedagogical work of Professor Hackett...