Bible Review

A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1964), pp. 191–193.

See Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, “The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Born in Heaven, Made on Earth, ed. Dick (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999).

Siegfried Morenz, Egyptian Religion (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 155. For more detailed information, see Sidney Smith, “The Babylonian Ritual for the Consecration and Induction of a Divine Statue,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (January, 1925), pp. 37–60.

Adele Berlin, Zephaniah, Anchor Bible series 25A (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1994), p. 110.

Liudger Sabottka, Zephanja: Versuch einer Neuübersetzung mit philologischen Kommentar, Biblica et Orientalia 25 (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1972), pp. 90–91.

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 157.

Moshe Garsiel (“Parallels Between the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Psalms” [Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv Univ., 1973], vol. 1, p. 171) noted both the uniqueness and the probable source of the expression, but in a different investigative context. The general, but not unanimous, consensus is that Jeremiah 20:12 is secondary to its context.

On the testing motif, see Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), p. 306f. and literature noted by him on p. 305; also see William Henry Propp, Water in the Wilderness: A Biblical Motif and Its Mythological Background, Harvard Semitic Monographs 40 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 51–93.

See Jerome I. Gellman, The Fear, the Trembling and the Fire: Kierkegaard and the Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994).

The Hebrew word for “thoughts” used here is found also only in Psalm 94:19; the dictionaries consider it to be derived from the root ¹[ (Job 4:13, 20:2) by insertion of the letter r.