Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East ─ The Texts / Text, Notes and Chromograms / Overall Historical Survey

Approximately 106 documents in 10 languages (in Romanized transcription with English translation) are presented in the first volume, which is about three times as big as the other two volumes. The focus is on documents pertaining to the maintenance of orderly societies from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC through the three succeeding millennia. The second volume contains notes, maps, and charts; and the third, a historical survey of the interrelations of documents and societies. Work on this opus began in the mid-1950s, when G.E. Mendenhall proposed affinities between 14th-13th century Hittite treaties and the covenant of early Hebrews in the book of Exodus. Intrigued, Kitchen decided to survey the entire Ancient Near Eastern corpus and, about 50 years later, was able to bring on Lawrence, who took over the editing of the entire Akkadian corpus while Kitchen dealt with the non-Semitic texts plus Eblaite and Ugaritic. Each text is analyzed in terms of up to 15 components, among them: the body of laws, witnesses, blessings, curses, and sanctions. Distribution in North America is by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)