Bible Review

James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET), 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 488. The translated term for the troops is “Nubian,” but William F. Albright explains in ANET that these troops should be identified with Cush.

John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 136, 138.

Eugen Strouhal, Life of the Ancient Egyptians (Norman, Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1992), p. 203.

The models are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Taylor, Egypt and Nubia, p. 24.

John H. Taylor, Egypt and Nubia, British Museum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), p. 5. It is also possible, however, that the name “Land of the Bow” refers to the shape of the land. The Nile River is relatively straight in its course through Egypt. In Cush, however, due to the cataracts, the Nile makes a dramatic 180 degree bend, resembling the shape of a bow.

J. Daniel Hays, “The Cushites: A Black Nation in Ancient History,” Bibliotheca Sacra 153 (July–September 1996), pp. 270–280.

See Ladislas Bugner, ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 1, From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: William Morrow, 1976). Note especially Jean Vercoutter, “The Iconography of the Black in Ancient Egypt: From the Beginnings to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty”; Jean Leclant, “Kushites and Meroïtes: Iconography of the African Rulers in Ancient Upper Egypt”; and Frank M. Snowden, “Iconographic Evidence on the Black Populations in Greco-Roman Antiquity.”

A preliminary attempt is in my book, The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

The edition used most commonly by biblical scholars, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, reproduces a single Masoretic manuscript and includes an unsystematic collection of textual variants at the bottom of each page. The massive Hebrew University Bible (of which only Isaiah and Jeremiah are completed) includes a fuller collection of textual variants. Neither edition attempts to note consistently which variant readings are preferable and which are secondary.