Awards

• Nominated for BAS Award - Hebrew Bible Category 2026

Overview

The Story of Wenamun is an Egyptian travelogue from the early first millennium BCE that is enlivened by visits to exotic ports of call, piracy, intrigue, and attempted murder. It is also an underappreciated example of the intercultural exchange of theological ideas in the early Iron Age. In Wenamun’s Prophetic Mission, Christopher B. Hays identifies striking similarities between theological rhetoric in the ancient Egyptian Story of Wenamun and that of the Hebrew prophets. Hays challenges scholars of the ancient Mediterranean to reimagine the cultural milieu that gave rise to Iron Age Yahwism and ultimately to “biblical monotheism,” arguing that the Hebrew Bible’s theocratic and monotheizing rhetoric owes more to the influence of Egypt than is often recognized. Along the way, Hays makes Wenamun accessible to biblical scholars and non-Egyptologists with the clarity of presentation that his acclaimed sourcebook, Hidden Riches, brought to other ancient Near Eastern texts. This volume includes a thorough survey of past scholarship on Wenamun as well as an introduction to the historical situation of Egypt, the Levant, and the Mediterranean at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. This provocative new study makes an important contribution to academic discourse on ancient Near Eastern prophecy and will appeal to scholars of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Mediterranean.

Full Product Details

9781646023189

Table of Contents

Reviews

“The Story of Wenamun is an important but underresearched Egyptian text from the tenth century BCE. In this book, the first book-length study of Wenamun in English since 1975, Christopher Hays analyzes Wenamun’s prophetic role and the points of convergence between the divine profiles of Amun and Yhwh. He demonstrates that the significance of the Story of Wenamun for biblical and prophetic studies is broader than has been acknowledged hitherto, giving new stimuli to the scholarly discussion on the cultural connections between ancient Egypt and Israel.” —Martti Nissinen, author of Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East

Author Information

Christopher B. Hays is D. Wilson Moore Professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Chair of Biblical Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary and Research Associate of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Hays is the author of Hidden Riches: A Sourcebook for the Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East, The Origins of Isaiah 24–27, and Death in the Iron Age II and in First Isaiah.

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