Lecture featuring Professor K. Lawson Younger Jr., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
The Arameans were a remarkable group of linguistically and tribally related entities who played a very significant role in the history and culture of the ancient Near East. They were a highly flexible people who adopted the material culture of the regions in which they found themselves. This lecture will focus on their religion in the small polity of ancient Samʾal (modern site of Zincirli, Turkey). From the abundance of textual and artefactual materials discovered in archaeological excavations, the lecture will investigate their deities, their magic and rituals, especially as seen in the rich evidence of the cult of the dead royal ancestors.
K. Lawson Younger, Jr. is Professor of Old Testament, Semitic Languages, and Ancient Near Eastern History at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School of Trinity International University. A specialist in Assyriology, Aramaic, and Hebrew Bible, Younger has published a number of works involving ancient Near Eastern texts and their relationship to the Hebrew Bible. He is the author of A Political History of the Arameans: From Their Origins to the End of Their Polities (SBL), Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing(Bloomsbury T&T Clark), editor of Ugarit at Seventy-Five (Eisenbrauns), associate editor of the three-volume The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions and Archival Documents from the Biblical World (Brill), editor of volume 4 of The Context of Scripture: Supplements (Brill), and coeditor of Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations (Sheffield).