Overview

In Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel, Boyd addresses a long-standing critical issue in biblical scholarship: how does the production of the Bible relate to its larger historical, linguistic, and cultural settings in the ancient Near East? Using theoretical advances in the study of language contact, he examines in detail the sociolinguistic landscape during the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid periods. Boyd then places the language and literature of Ezekiel and Isaiah in this sociolinguistic landscape. Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel offers the first book-length incorporation of language contact theory with data from the Bible. As a result, it allows for a reexamination of the nature of contact between biblical authors and a series of Mesopotamian empires beginning with Assyria. The Harvard Semitic Monographs series publishes volumes from the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Other series offered by Brill that publish volumes from the Museum include Harvard Semitic Studies and Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, https://hmane.harvard.edu/publications.

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Reviews

B. has produced fine scholarship, engaging in careful, detailed comparative methods. The footnotes are rich in content, encouraging contemplation of the evidence provided. Readers may find the two-tier footnotes in the explanation of Akkadian loans in Ezekiel and Isaiah and the morphological interference from Aramaic in the respective biblical books gratifying. The list of subjects helps enquirers easily find definitions for the not-so-familiar terminologies. - Hedy Hung, in The Society of Old Testament Study Book List, 2022. Boyd's book offers an exceptional perspective on the socio-historical functioning of multiple languages in Ancient Israel. As a doctoral dissertation, his work tackled the very complex problem of relating language contact, colonial administration, and the construction of ancient Israelite identity to one another - an ambitious undertaking, indeed. (...) Boyd has done the study of ancient language environments in general, and of biblical texts in particular, a huge favour with this multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach. The book is therefore strongly recommended to all those scholars with an interest in these fields. - Louis C Jonker, Stellenbosch University, in Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages (2021)

"""B. has produced fine scholarship, engaging in careful, detailed comparative methods. The footnotes are rich in content, encouraging contemplation of the evidence provided. Readers may find the two-tier footnotes in the explanation of Akkadian loans in Ezekiel and Isaiah and the morphological interference from Aramaic in the respective biblical books gratifying. The list of subjects helps enquirers easily find definitions for the not-so-familiar terminologies."" - Hedy Hung, in The Society of Old Testament Study Book List, 2022. “Boyd’s book offers an exceptional perspective on the socio-historical functioning of multiple languages in Ancient Israel. As a doctoral dissertation, his work tackled the very complex problem of relating language contact, colonial administration, and the construction of ancient Israelite identity to one another – an ambitious undertaking, indeed. (…) Boyd has done the study of ancient language environments in general, and of biblical texts in particular, a huge favour with this multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach. The book is therefore strongly recommended to all those scholars with an interest in these fields.” - Louis C Jonker, Stellenbosch University, in Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages (2021)"

Author Information

Samuel L. Boyd, Ph.D. (Chicago, 2014) is assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published articles relating to source criticism, Semitic philology, and the reception history of biblical texts.

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