A University of Winchester academic has assembled a prestigious group of contributors for a new book looking at the influences of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian learning on the Hebrew scribes who wrote the Bible.
‘The Bible and Ancient Mesopotamia’, edited by Robin Baker, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, contains essays by 11 distinguished scholars from different disciplines including archaeology, art history, philology and literary criticism as well as theology.
This is a vibrant field of current biblical research but that hasn’t always been the case.
At the turn of the 20th century, several scholars argued that everything valuable in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament came from Mesopotamia. This was seen as an attack on Judaism and Christianity, sparking a backlash from the public and academics alike.
As a result, for several decades scholars were wary of being associated with “Pan‑Babylonianism” - the idea that Mesopotamia was the source of all biblical traditions.
However, from the 1980s onwards these attitudes began to change. The impact of the Judean exile to Babylonia in the sixth century BCE on many biblical texts and the intellectual traditions that informed them attracted renewed interest from biblical studies researchers.
The new book also looks at the impact of Mesopotamian theological concepts and rhetorical devices on the writers of the New Testament. Scholars now recognise that substantial portions of the New Testament display an imprint of ideas that originated beyond the Roman Empire’s eastern borders.
The collection of essays started life as a special issue of the online journal Religions published by MDPI. Each contributor was invited to showcase fresh research in their areas of study and, as the work was of such high quality, MDPI decided to publish it as a book.
Contributors include academics from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCL, the University of Vienna, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The online version will remain freely available.
Robin Baker is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Winchester. He is a Fellow of University College London and of the Royal Historical Society. He researches ancient Israel (up to and including the first Christian centuries), Assyria, and Babylon, and focuses on the religions of these civilizations and the literary forms in which their beliefs were expressed.
Robin’s latest monograph, Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. His commentary on the Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah for the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series is due to be published in 2028.
Back to media centre