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I have a couple of items on topics that have appeared more than once on this blog: writing and the Hebrew Bible's use of code-names for nations.
1. On page 155-156 of Prelude to Israel's Past, Niels Peter Lemche says that third-second millennium Syria and Palestine "concerned themselves mainly with the vicissitudes of everyday life", meaning that "few people could afford the luxury of literature", and "traditions were transmitted primarily in oral form". That is why "third and second millennia Syria and Palestine have yielded no specimens of the official literary genres comparable to those unearthed throughout Mesopotamia: state treaties, royal decrees, or inscriptions that related grand tales of mighty kings and their heroism." Moreover, on page 166, Lemche states that "both Syria and Palestine lacked an extensive, educated middle class that would have paid for written literary works."
But Lemche does acknowledge the existence of Bronze Age Syrian writings, such as the Idrimi Inscription and Ugaritic poetry about Aqhat, Kirta, and Baal---writings that are incomplete. Why were these thing written down? On page 177, Lemche talks about the settings of written literature in Mesopotamia and Greece:
"The Mesopotamians developed their literature in scribal academies under the direction of trained scholars. The Greeks also used written literature for two purposes: as school textbooks and---as in the case of the Homeric epics---to safeguard the correct wording from changes made during oral recitation."
But Lemche appears to be baffled about why there are written Ugaritic works. On pages 173-174, he says that societies like Ugarit composed and passed on their epics orally. Lemche does not think that Ugaritic society wrote down their epics because there was danger and they wanted to "preserve them for posterity", for "the reign of Niqmaddu II was relatively uneventful." And so he settles on the idea that, as in Mesopotamia, the poems were "teaching models in scribal academies", which would explain the mistakes in them: a student was making errors!
2. One more item (in this post) on writing, before I talk a little about code-names! On page 227 of A History of Prophecy in Israel, Joseph Blenkinsopp states: "Once prophecies delivered in an earlier epoch were available in writing, the emphasis would tend to be less on direct inspired utterance and more on the inspired interpretation of past prophecy." The implication here is that there was a time gap between the prophecies being spoken and the prophecies being written. I'm not sure what to do with that, but it looks like something important to note.
On pages 232 and 238, Blenkinsopp says that, in Zechariah and Isaiah 27, Assyria and Egypt are code-words for the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, respectively. That makes sense for Zechariah, which obviously has a post-exilic setting (that refers to Zerubbabel), and Assyria (as far as I know) was not a major power then. Also, Egypt was where the Ptolemies were. But I wonder how to distinguish code-names from real names. When, say, Isaiah mentions Assyria, how can I know that the passage is referring to Assyria, and is thus pre-exilic, or that it's a code-name for a nation during Israel's exilic or post-exilic periods?
