Introduction: Limitations in Understanding

The Late Bronze Age collapse is one of the most complex and pivotal periods in the history of the ancient Near East. This prolonged decline arguably occurred over at least three and a half centuries.

The Bronze Age Collapse was shaped by numerous factors such as widespread warfare, shifting political alliances, rising taxation, plague, drought, bandits, and growing social unrest. Understanding this era requires careful examination of archaeological remains, textual records, and the opinion of scholars. Much of primary sources are fragmentary, ambiguous, or subject to competing interpretations.

Chronological accuracy is also a challenge. There are few absolute dates that can be firmly established before the solar eclipse recorded in the Assyrian eponym canon during the reign of Ashur-dan III. This solar eclipse has been dated to June 15, 763 BCE [1] and is the earliest widely accepted historical benchmark in the region. Prior to this, scholars rely on relative chronology which is constructed from royal inscriptions, king lists, synchronisms, diplomatic correspondences, and stratified archaeological evidence [2].  The deeper one goes into the second millennium BCE, the greater the margin of error becomes. Compounding this is the political nature of many ancient records that are usually written to glorify rulers or legitimize power. This further complicates efforts to construct a coherent historical timeline. This means the dates offered in this examination have a margin of error.

As a result, it is not always possible to determine with confidence when a king rose to power or when a city-state fell to foreign conquest. Even well-known figures are sometimes shrouded in mystery. Was it Amenhotep III or Amenhotep IV who ruled during a given campaign? Dynastic gaps, relative chronology and missing documentation make these questions difficult to answer. Who was the mother of Tutankhamun? That mystery remained unsolved until 2010, over 3,000 years after his death. Genetic testing revealed that his mother was also his paternal aunt. Her name remains unknown, but the same study confirmed that Tutankhamun had two stillborn daughters with her [3].  We don’t know the background of Abdi-Ashirta. All we know his he was a warlord. Pharaoh Ay was a royal vizier and may have usurped the throne of Egypt but his background is obscure, maybe she is related to Queen Tiye’s family.  The Assyrian dynastic record before Aššur-uballiṭ I is mostly legendary or broken.

With these limitations in mind, this examination offers a focused analysis of the key developments and major powers in the centuries leading up to the Late Bronze Age Collapse in mostly chronological order. We will explore the shifting balance of power among the great empires of Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Kassite Babylonia, and Assyria. It will also highlight the impact these superpowers had on the smaller states and peoples of the Levant, who were caught in the crossfire. By tracing the slow disintegration of this international system, this exploration seeks to shed light on the conditions that led to the end of the Bronze Age and the rise of a new nation during the Iron I period, known to us as Israel.

This examination will be drawing on both primary sources along with the the secondary sources of modern scholarship. But because of the previously mentioned limitations, some conclusions will necessarily be speculative.

What are these Sources?

A primary source is the original document or artifact created at the time of the events or by the people involved. In ancient studies, this includes inscriptions, letters, treaties, annals, legal codes, myths, and administrative records written by ancient scribes. In this case, the sources can be clay tablets, papyri, or monuments. As per the American University in Washington DC the common elements for a primary source are original, direct and unaltered. This includes official or authorized translations.

Secondary sources interpret the primary source, such as this essay. A secondary source is one step removed. This includes text books, commentaries, encyclopedias, dictionaries, documentaries and scholarly journals among others [4].

As for the primary sources regarding the Late Bronze Age collapse, we will be chiefly, but not exclusively, calling on three.

El-Amarna, Egypt

The discovery of the first of these three primary sources occurred at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt. According to one story, a local woman was looking for dust from the ruins, for “top-dressing, or fertilizer. Another tells of a merchant woman looking for antiquities [5]. However, the conflicting stories and the early appearance of some clay tablets in the Cairo Museum and on the antiquities market casts doubt on both of these stories. Several tablets were sold through private dealers, and some likely ended up on the black market. Some may have been either accidentally or deliberately destroyed. As a result, the original number of tablets discovered is unknown, and some may never be recovered.

The tablets were mostly written in Akkadian cuneiform which was the diplomatic lingua franca of the Late Bronze Age although there are a few exceptions. Akkadian had already been deciphered by the mid-19th century and Scholars recognized references to figures such as Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, along with kings of foreign powers like Babylonia, Mitanni, and Hatti. Even more interesting were names of previously unknown rulers such as mayors and kings of the Canaanite city-states. This would shed light on Egypt’s imperial network in the Levant.

Because the pharaohs mentioned were known historical figures, the chronology of the letters could be set to the mid-14th century BCE. It seems when the British investigated, the location was already known as a result of previous private, likely illegal, digs. Later excavations uncovered additional fragments in their original home of the Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh, in the capital city Akhetaten, founded by Akhenaten. These correspondences came to be known as theAmarnaLetters and are designated with the letters EA for el-Amarna [6].

The letters are organized into two parts. The first is the corresponded with the Greak Kings and is organized geographically, not chronologically. They start with Babylonia and move counterclockwise to Assyria, Mitanni, Arzawa, Cyprus and Hatti. The second set is the leaders of the various city states in the Levant. These letters move from north to south starting with central Syria moving to southern Canaan. At this time, there are 382 known tablets, some of them fragmentary. They contain myth, syllabaries, lexical text, and god-lists. But the majority of, and most interesting are the letters and inventories [7].

Boğazkale, Turkey

The second major discovery took place at Boğazkale, in modern-day Turkey. Archaeological work at this site began as early as 1834, with the aim to locate ancient Roman ruins. This predates the discovery of the Amarna Letters. Excavators did find ruins but they were not Roman.

Over the course of the 19th century, additional discoveries related to the site followed. Inscriptions and rock reliefs at Yazılıkaya, a nearby sanctuary. This sparked interest in the region’s unknown ancient culture. Meanwhile, inscribed stones bearing mysterious hieroglyphic-like symbols were found in Syria, eventually shown to be part of the same tradition seen in central Anatolia. British scholar A.H. Sayce and missionary William Wright proposed that these monuments were connected to the biblical Hittites, an idea later confirmed through references to Ḫatti in Egyptian and Akkadian texts.

A major breakthrough came in 1887 with the discovery of the Amarna Letters as they included correspondence with Hittite kings. Then in 1893, excavations at Boğazköy uncovered tablets written in a previously unknown language.

Large-scale excavations began in 1906, and over 10,000 clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform script were uncovered. Ultimately the site was identified as Ḫattuša, the capital of the Hittite Empire.

Although early excavation techniques were somewhat destructive, the discoveries transformed our understanding of the Hittites and reviled them as a major Bronze Age superpower with its own system of law, diplomacy, mythology, and bureaucracy.

While the tablets were written in cuneiform, the primary language was Hittite and a member of the Indo-European language family, and in fact, the earliest known Indo-European language attested in writing. The archives included royal annals, legal codes, treaties (including the Treaty of Kadesh), myths, rituals, and international correspondence. Other languages represented in the archive include Hurrian, Akkadian, Hattic, Luwian, and even Sumerian, reflecting the multilingual and multicultural nature of the Hittite state.

The significance of this discovery cannot be overstated. Until then, knowledge of the Hittites came mainly from the Hebrew Bible and a handful of Egyptian inscriptions, which typically portrayed them as obscure adversaries. The Hittites had seemed almost legendary. But with the discovery of their own written records, the Hittites were finally able to speak for themselves.

Today, these documents are cataloged as the Corpus of Hittite Texts (CTH) and form the foundation of modern Hittitology [8].

Ras Shamra, Syria

The third discovery occurred in 1928 when a Syrian farmer plowing his field near the Mediterranean coast struck a Mycenaean grave. French archaeologists were called in and began excavations in 1929. They soon uncovered an ancient tell, a mound made up of layers of ruined cities. They quickly realized they had found a major Bronze Age city.

The site revealed five major strata from the Neolithic to about 1100 BCE, with the most significant texts found dating to 1500–1100 BCE. These clay tablets were written in a previously unknown alphabetic cuneiform script and the city was identified as Ugarit. This identification was confirmed through references in the Amarna Letters and other Near Eastern archives.

Ugarit was a thriving cosmopolitan port with strong connections to Egypt, the Hittites, Hurrians, and other ancient powers. Its wealth and literacy were evident in large homes, temples, a royal palace, and an extensive library and archive of mythological, legal, and diplomatic texts. The city reached its height in the mid-2nd millennium BCE but was destroyed around 1200 BCE, likely by the Sea Peoples.

The texts discovered were written in Ugaritic, Akkadian, Hurrian, and other languages and contained mythologies (such as Baal and Anat), ritual practices, and everyday administrative records. The discovery of this script allowed for new insights into Canaanite religion and literature, which heavily influenced biblical traditions.

By the early 1930s, the Ugaritic script had been deciphered by scholars and the tablets showed that Ugarit used a 30-letter alphabetic script. This was an important step in the history of writing. Excavations uncovered religious, commercial, and funerary architecture, including family tombs and cult objects tied to fertility rituals. Temples to Baal and Dagan mirrored structures later seen in the biblical world.

The Ras Shamra discoveries remain one of the most imp Illuyanka theserpent-like ortant archaeological finds in the Near East, offering a rich and detailed look at Late Bronze Age religion, politics, and international relations [9].

They are typically referred to as Canaanites. The term is imprecise, but not inaccurate. In the biblical texts, Canaanite functions as a broad, catch-all designation for both pre-Israelite and non-Israelite inhabitants of the land, often without clear ethnic or cultural distinctions.

In the Late Bronze Age, two major writing traditions emerged from a shared ancestor from the early alphabet developed in the Sinai Peninsula around 1900 BCE. It is often called Proto-Sinaitic. This script, was linear in form and introduced a revolutionary idea of writing with a small set of signs representing consonants.

From this early script came two branches. One was Proto-Canaanite, a linear alphabet using ink or incised on stone. This evolved into Phoenician and later gave rise to Greek and Latin. The other was Ugaritic, which adapted the same consonantal system but applied to the wedge-based medium of cuneiform clay tablets. Ugaritic looks like Mesopotamian writing but it’s structurally alphabetic [10]. Clay tablets were better suited to wedge-shaped impressions than to linear strokes, likely prompting scribes at Ugarit to adapt the Semitic alphabet into a cuneiform-style abjad.

Unlike most other Semitic scripts, Ugaritic was written left to right [11]. The structure of Ugaritic cuneiform inscriptions—particularly the way signs were separated—was distinctly Semitic, which aided in their decipherment. By December 1930, the texts had been successfully decoded. The language was found to be closely related to Phoenician, Aramaic, and Biblical Hebrew, but it represents an earlier stage in the development of the Northwest Semitic language family [12].

Ugaritic began as a consonant-based abjad, a type of script that records only consonants and omits vowels [13]. However, Ugaritic scribes adapted the system to mark certain vowels, particularly those that followed a glottal stop. They also introduced an additional sibilant sign whose exact pronunciation remains uncertain [14].

In contrast, Akkadian cuneiform used a syllabic system, where each sign typically represented a consonant-vowel combination. This structure preserved the full pronunciation of words, which greatly aids modern interpretation [15]. The comparison between Ugaritic and Akkadian scripts highlights a major shift in the ancient Near East from syllabic to alphabetic writing.

The Ugaritic script was unique to the city of Ugarit and did not evolve into later alphabets. Its use ceased around 1200 BCE with the city’s destruction during the Late Bronze Age Collapse [16].

This reduction in sign inventory simplified the Ugaritic script. Fewer signs made the system easier to learn and faster to write, but it also introduced ambiguity, especially for modern readers. This challenge is similar to what scholars face with Biblical Hebrew, which was also written in an abjad. Ancient Hebrew texts—including the Bible—originally lacked vowels, punctuation, or even word spacing. A string of consonants could be interpreted in multiple ways, depending entirely on context.

To address this, Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes developed a system of vowel markings (niqqud) between the 6th and 10th centuries CE to preserve pronunciation. But by that time, centuries had passed, and some vocalizations had likely been lost, obscured, or reshaped by interpretive tradition. This is one reason interpreting Biblical Hebrew can be so difficult: the text is often rich with double meanings, poetic ambiguity, and grammatical uncertainty, which modern translators must reconstruct using comparative Semitic linguistics and careful contextual analysis.

The Ugaritic texts are designated RS (for Ras Shamra) and were a groundbreaking discovery. Over the decades, thousands of tablets have been recovered from palace archives, private homes, scribal schools, and temple libraries. Their contents include royal correspondence, economic records, legal texts, religious rituals, and mythological epics—most famously the Baal Cycle, which has deep implications for understanding the background of later Israelite religion.

Some Ugaritic texts date to the eve of the city’s destruction, offering a vivid picture of life at the end of a cosmopolitan Canaanite city-state, positioned between empires and on the brink of collapse.

Other Material Evidence

These three discoveries are by no means the only ones as there have been other textual discoveries however the details are very extensive and beyond the scope of this exploration. There is of course other material evidence besides letters. These would be steles, reliefs, monuments, temples, pottery, food stuffs, tools, habitation, ancient deserted cities such as Hazor, ancient inhabited cities such as Jerusalem, jewelry, human remains and more. All of these pieces of material evidence help us piece together the complex puzzle that is the ancient past.

On Religious Worldviews

Interpretation requires intellectual empathy, the ability to understand and appreciate another person’s perspective, thought processes, and reasoning. But this does not imply acceptance or ideological commitment. If it did, studying multiple, often contradictory worldviews would force one to hold a logically incoherent belief. Holding the view of acceptance or commitment through engagement is self-contradictory and undermines the very premise asserted, since engaging with and comprehending this very point requires accepting the view you claim to disagree with.

A modern example of the necessity of intellectual empathy is found in A Clockwork Orange. In this novel by Anthony Burgess that was later adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick, the story is told from the perspective of the villain, Alex. He speaks in his own invented slang forcing the reader or viewer to experience the world through his perspective, as disturbing as it may be. To modern audiences, Alex is a violent delinquent, leading his gang of “Droogs” in brutal narcotic fed acts of senseless violence. In the words of Alex regarding the influence of narcotics, this “would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence”. When he is imprisoned for murder, he volunteers for an experimental treatment designed to “make him good.” Without spoiling the ending, this story wrestles with questions such as

• Is goodness meaningful if it’s imposed externally rather than chosen freely?
• Can a person be “good” if they lack the freedom to do otherwise
• And What role do free will, morality, and conscience play in authentic goodness?

You may conclude there is no free will in your worldview and that may or may or may not be correct however the exercise is to see it through someone else’s worldview. Let’s just say that, ironically, if you are an atheist, you may find yourself agreeing with the prison chaplain and there was no pulling the wool over the eyes of the Chief Guard.

In a biblical sense, the Binding of Isaac presents the same need to see it through the lens of the author. Some modern readers interpret the story as a polemic against child sacrifice. This reading helps make the text more morally palatable and casts the Bible in a more favorable light but it is not without problems. In some cases, as in the story of the Binding of Issac, by seeing it through the eyes of others you may conclude there is no interpretive rescue [17], especially when viewed in the light of almost certain Neo-Assyrian influence. The story may simply reflect a worldview that is alien and understandably uncomfortable to us. It’s a matter of reading the text for what it actually says, not what we want it to say.

In another case is 1 Samuel 18:1. It is said “that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”. In 2 Samuel 1:26, David laments Jonathan’s death, saying, “You were most dear to me. Your love was wonderful to me More than the love of women.” To modern readers, this might suggest emotional or even romantic intimacy. But this type of reading risks placing modern assumptions on ancient expressions of affection. The Amarna Letters, for example, show that Late Bronze Age elites often used exaggerated language, declaring love and loyalty in diplomatic correspondence. These expressions in the Amarna Letters were ritualized rather than emotional. Recognizing cultural context helps us interpret ancient texts and modern movies on their own terms.

Because this focus is currently on the Late Bronze Age Collapse, we will be considering the worldview of the Ancient Near East.

The Religious Worldview of the Late Bronze Age

Ancient Near East thought was shaped by two core concepts: cyclical time and chaoskampf as discussed in the introductory essay.

In Egyptian cosmology, Maat was a foundational concept that embodying cosmic order, justice, truth, and social harmony. It was both a societal ideal and a divine principle embedded in the fabric of the universe from creation onward. Its anthesis was Isfet, the chaotic disorder that threatens to unravel the world [18]. The eternal conflict between Maat and Isfet was mythologically reenacted each night when the sun god Ra battled the serpent Apep in the underworld to ensure the sun would rise and order would be maintained [19].

In famous Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish tells of the primordial goddess Tiamat, who represents the chaotic saltwater deep. Her association with chaos seems to emerge after she becomes a threat in response to the killing of her consort Apsu and the rebellion of the younger gods. If interpreted through a modern lens as purely destructive force, we might misread the text. This is the importance of entering the worldview. Chaos is not always an active force, sometimes it is a passive state without form, sometimes referred to as “unformed and void”. This nuance can be lost and will be explored later in Genesis Chapter 1. The god Marduk defeats her in combat, splits her body in two, and uses it to create the heavens and the earth. In doing so, he imposes order upon the cosmos and establishes his divine kingship [20].

In Canaanite myth, the storm god Baal defeats Yam, the god of the sea and chaos, to become king. The victory over Yam allows Baal to build his palace and rule, symbolizing the triumph of order over watery, chaotic forces [21].

The Hittites also preserved a version of this mythic pattern in the The Illuyanka Myth. Illuyanka, a serpentine-like dragon, a symbol of chaos and cosmic disorder, crawls up from his subterranean home to do battle with the storm god Tarḫunna. In one version of the myth, Tarḫunna initially fails but later defeats Illuyanka with the help of the trickery of the goddess Inara and a mortal man. Order and balance are restored.[22]. Like the myths of Marduk and Baal, the storm god’s victory is necessary for kingship, stability, and the proper functioning of the world.

In the earthly realm, the king was seen as the representative of the gods, charged with maintaining order by subduing chaos. Foreigners, outsiders, or anyone outside the religious and cultusion.  Foreignral framework of the kingdom were often associated with this chaos.  In Egypt, the enemies of the state were personified as the Nine Bows, a symbolic representation of all who threatened the land and its divine order. As a result, conquest and subjugation could be portrayed as divinely mandated acts to restore or preserve order. This worldview helps explain, at least in part, the Egyptian response to the Hyksos. In today’s environment the Hyksos would be seen as a political disruption, but to the Egyptians they were a cosmic inversion. Foreign rule was seen as the triumph of Isfet over Maat, necessitating divine and military restoration of order.

In Genesis 1 modern religious tradition often asserts creation from nothing (ex nihilo), but when these religious sensibilities are set aside, and the framework of ancient Near East mythology is invoked, creation is formed from the formless, watery deep (tehom), a Hebrew word etymologically linked to Tiamat. God imposes order through speech rather than conflict: “Let there be light”, in this case subverting the motif of Chaoskampf but this subversion will be covered in detail in a later essay. Even through this subversion the underlying imagery remains consistent. Chaos is present at the beginning, or more precisely, when God begins to create, and creation is the act of subduing and structuring that chaos into an ordered world.

Not all ancient Near Eastern creation myths revolve around a chaoskampf. Texts such as the Atraḫasis Epic, the Sumerian Eridu Genesis, and the Egyptian Memphite Theology depict creation without a cosmic battle. In the Memphite Theology, creation unfolds through the power of divine speech which is an idea that closely parallels the account in Genesis 1. Both the Memphite Theology and Genesis 1 predate the development of the Greek philosophical concept of the Logos. The notion of Logos as a metaphysical principle was introduced by thinkers such as Heraclitus and later expanded by Stoic philosophers. It entered Jewish thought much later, during the Hellenistic period, especially through figures like Philo of Alexandria. This chronology conflicts with claims made by individuals, who retroject the concept of Logos into the Hebrew Bible despite its later origins.

In many cases, it is difficult to discern whether mythological chaoskampf motifs genuinely drive political actions or if politicIn the next episodeal motives simply appropriate these myths for their own ends. Myth and politics were not necessarily separate domains. The king was suppressing rebellion but he was also reenacting the cosmic struggle between order and chaos in human form. At times, myth serves politics; at others, politics enacts myth. More often than not, the two are inseparable, especially considering, as noted in the introductory, that there was no separation between church and state.

Conclusion

The Amarana Letters, Hittite text and Ras Shamra letters recorded events occurring just before the Late Bronze Age Collapse and are indispensable for understanding the world that was lost. Together, they reveal the diplomacy, literature, language, law, and myth from Egypt to Anatolia. No reconstruction of the Late Bronze Age collapse can be complete without them but even with them we still do not have the full picture.

While most people today in Western societies no longer subscribe to these ancient cosmologies, understandably so, the outright dismissal of them as mere fairy tales, myths, or primitive fiction obscures more rather than reveals. When modern assumptions, especially those rooted in scientific rationalism, are projected onto these texts, it risks distorting their original meaning and context. These dismissals are often less about genuine critique and more about asserting one’s own intellectual superiority.  So, of equal importance to the material evidence is a sense humility, tempered imagination, and a willingness to enter a worldview very different from our own.

In the next essay, we will not be starting “in the beginning”. We will be starting “at the end”, of the reign of the Hyksos.

References

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[1] I. E. S. Edwards et al., eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd ed., vol. 1, pt. 1, Prolegomena and Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 202.

[2] Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC, 3rd ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 138.

[3] Zahi Hawass, PhD, Yehia Z. Gad, MD, Somaia Ismail, PhD, et al., “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family,” Journal of the American Medical Association 303, no. 7 (2010): 638–647, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/185393.

[4] American University Library. “Primary vs. Secondary Sources.” Primary Research Tutorial. Accessed July 20, 2025. https://subjectguides.library.american.edu/primaryresearchtutorial.

[5] Jana Mynářová, Language of Amarna, Language of diplomacy, Perspectives on Amarna Letters 13-15.

[6] Anson F. Rainey, The El-Amarna Correspondence: A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets, ed. William Schniedewind and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 37–46.

[7] William L. Moran, The Amarana Letters, xv-xvii.

[8] Billie Jean Collins, Hittites and Their World (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 1–6.

[9] Arvid S. Kapelrud, The Ras Shamra Discoveries and the Old Testament, trans. G. W. Anderson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 1–14.

[10] Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8, 25, 29, 82, 88–96, 261, 297, 487.

[11] Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 90–92.

[12] John C. L. Gibson, Canaanite Myths and Legends, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1978), 1–2.

[13] Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.

[14] Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 92.

[15] Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 46–47.

[16] Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 89.

[17] Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 43n.

[18] Stuart Tyson Smith and Boyo G. Ockinga, “Religion and Ritual” and “Kingship, Power, and Legitimacy,” in The Egyptian World, ed. Toby Wilkinson (London: Routledge, 2007), 239, 263–64.

[19] Geraldine Pinch, Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 105.

[20] Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 233–273.

[21] J. C. L. Gibson, Canaanite Myths and Legends, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1978), 2–6.

[22] Hallo, William W., and K. Lawson Younger Jr., eds. The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World. Volume 1. Leiden: Brill, 1997. pp. 150–151.