The Invention of Hebrew 1st Edition by Seth L Sanders ISBN‎ 0252078357 978-0252078354

The Invention of Hebrew is the first book to approach the Bible in light of recent epigraphic discoveries on the extreme antiquity of the alphabet and its use as a deliberate and meaningful choice. Hebrew was more than just a way of transmitting information; it was a vehicle of political symbolism and self-representation.

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 reimagined their audience as a public. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book shows Hebrew’s distinctiveness as a self-conscious political language. Illuminating the enduring stakes of Biblical writing, Sanders demonstrates how Hebrew assumed and promoted a source of power previously unknown in written literature: “the people” as the protagonist of religion and politics.

Table of contents: 

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Modernity’s Ghosts: The Bible as Political Communication
• 2. What Was the Alphabet For?
• 3. Empires and Alphabets in Late Bronze Age Canaan
• 4. The Invention of Hebrew in Iron Age Israel
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index