Abstract
Thompson’s monograph is a revised version of his Harvard PhD thesis (2011) in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations supervised by Jo Ann Hackett. In it, he seeks to demonstrate that the Deuteronomistic History (DH) hypothesized by Noth (1943)—which Thompson accepts as ‘a coherent corpus of writing with a consistent message’—‘depicts an imperial, military covenant’ with its precedents in the imperial ideology of the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the first millennium BCE (p. 1).
Chapter one presents Noth’s hypothesis and a survey of subsequent scholarship on it. Thompson describes the numerous adjustments made to the original DH theory, while noting that scholars have overlooked a number of important presuppositions underlying it. These are the nature of the Torah, the breaking of which warranted national death and exile; the nature of the deity YHWH presented in the DH; and the authority of the nebi’im—his spokespersons (Thompson deliberately refrains from translating this term with the more usual prophets, p. 44). It is the investigation of these particular presuppositions that form the core of Thompson’s work.
Chapter two offers a close reading of the DH, seeking to identify its ‘motivating principles and presuppositions’ (p. 24). Thompson then presents a number of new hypotheses on the elements of the DH, its presuppositions, the nature of law and Torah, the nebi’im, and the chronology and context of the DH.
In Chapter three, Thompson looks at the DH in the cultural context of Jerusalem’s location in the Levant, with particular emphasis on Ugarit. However, he does not regard this Levantine cultural environment as the immediate source of the covenant ideology of the DH. In Chapter four, Thompson turns his attention to the possible relationship between the DH and Hittite imperial treaty ideology. Despite sharing some common features, he ultimately rejects this Hittite link. Chapter five focuses on the ‘Neo Assyrian (NA) imperial ideology, policy and law of the first millennium B.C.E. during its hegemony over the Levant’ (p. 113) and includes a close reading of a number of Neo-Assyrian inscriptions. Chapter six addresses the question of how small Levantine city-states reacted to their subjugation by the Neo-Assyrian empire and posits a consequent transformation in their rulers’ self-understanding. Thompson concludes the work with Chapter seven, in which he addresses the question asked in the previous chapter to the authors of the DH.
Like many doctoral dissertations revised for publication, this is an extremely dense piece of very closely argued scholarly writing. However—and these are cosmetic points only—the layout of the book does little to serve Thompson’s writing (which is good) and his ideas (which are interesting). The pages are very closely packed and the chapter headings and sub-headings are sometimes easy to pass over. The inclusion of long transliterated extracts from Hittite and Akkadian texts (as well as their necessary translations) within the chapters of the book seemed a little unnecessary: they might have been better placed in an appendix. Also, the transliterated Hebrew became quite tedious to read after a short while. One can understand the need to give texts originally written in cuneiform scripts in transliteration—but most computers can quite easily handle Hebrew.
As to Thompson’s scholarship, it is a good example of contemporary historical-critical research that is both solid and thorough in its methodological approach. He is very clearly in command of both the primary sources and the extensive secondary literature. However, as is often the case with works in this particular genre, one sometimes feels a little overpowered by the extremely detailed conversation with previous scholarship. Although the influence of ancient Near Eastern treaty texts on the DH has been presented before, Thompson’s refinements and his ultimate hypothesis that the ‘DH and the Deuteronomistic covenant mark the historical transformation of a local Phoenician and Canaanite god and state into a military imperial god and state modelled after the image of the god Aššur and the Neo-Assyrian empire’ (p. 234) represent an interesting contribution to the field. This work should be of particular interest to historians of the religions of the ancient Near East and its imperial politics.