Jan Christian Gertz

The project proposes to analyze and summarize the history of literature of ancient Israel in the 8th – 6th centuries B.C.E. The project is part of a multi-volume handbook on ancient Hebrew and early Jewish literary history. The subject of ancient Hebrew and early Jewish literary history are the writings from the 1st millennium B.C.E. collected in the Hebrew Bible. The biblical books originate from different periods of the history of ancient Israel and most of them were composed over a longer period of time. Parts of the texts are based on oral tradition. Like most literature originating in the ancient Near East, ancient Hebrew literature is scribal literature. That means it is the outcome of a long process of tradition; thus the individual text cannot be traced back to specific authors known by name that are historically identifiable. Instead ancient Hebrew literature derives from a largely anonymous process of tradition, in which the production and reception of the texts were closely connected. Transmitted tradition was adopted and adjusted to a new context and the result of such a process of reception became tradition itself. Nevertheless, due to the self-referential character of many of its texts, the Hebrew Bible developed its own history of literature by connecting the emergence of the books to certain historical situations and authorities. However, this self-perception differs considerably from the results of a historical analysis of the respective texts.
Reconstructing the development of the biblical books, scholars usually present their results according to the canonical order of the writings. In contrast, this project proposes to reconstruct the different periods of literary history beyond the borders of individual writings. By doing so, the traditional view of the development of the individual biblical book is expanded in order to survey the synchronic and diachronic networks of the individual phases of development. Additionally the ancient Hebrew literature is compared to the literature of the ancient Syrian-Palestinian world and to that of the various imperial powers.