Poets before Homer : collected essays on ancient literature / by Delbert R. Hillers ; edited by F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp.

"The present volume collects and reprints ... along with three previously unpublished manuscripts"--Foreword.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

English.

Front Cover ; Contents; Abbreviations; Foreword; "Poets Before Homer": Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition; A Convention in Hebrew Literature: The Reaction to Bad News; "The Roads to Zion Mourn" (Lam 1:4); Homeric Dictated Texts: A Reexamination of Some Near Eastern Evidence; A Study of Psalm 148; Formulas of Greeting and 'Salute Jerusalem' (Ps 122:6-9); The Effective Simile in Biblical Literature; Dust: Some Aspects of Old Testament Imagery; Two Notes on the Decameron (III vii 42-43 and VIII vii 64, IX v 48); Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets.

A Note on Some Treaty Terminology in the Old TestamentCeremonies of Law and Treaty in the Ancient Near East; The Bow of Aqhat: The Meaning of a Mythological Theme; A Proposal for a Difficult Line in Keret; Redemption in Letters 6 and 2 from Hermopolis; Analyzing the Abominable: Our Understanding of Canaanite Religion; Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions and the Old Testament, especially Amos 2:8; Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions and the Bible; Observations on Syntax and Meter in Lamentations; Delocutive Verbs in Biblical Hebrew; Oracles: A Neglected Syntactic Aspect.

Some Performative Utterances in the BibleList of Publications by Delbert R. Hillers; Doctoral Dissertations Directed at the Johns Hopkins University; Index of Scripture.

This volume collects and reprints many of Delbert R. Hillers's most important published essays and articles, his long out-of-print Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets, and three previously unpublished essays, including the aforementioned "'Poets Before Homer': Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition". Hillers gave the latter as the 1992 William Foxwell Albright Lecture at The Johns Hopkins University and in it uses Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, with its "topological" method, as a model for exploring the connections of the most ancient Near Eastern literatures (including the Bible) to later Western literature. Though one of his latest pieces of writing, "Poets Before Homer" represents, as Hillers himself recognized, a fairly clear statement of what he had been doing in much of his earlier scholarship and the volume collects the best of this earlier scholarship. Most of these essays work themselves out from a particular passage, theme, topos, image, or grammatical issue, and gain their interpretive vantage point by reading said passage, etc. comparatively, whether in light of relevant ancient Near Eastern and/or more recent European literary parallels or with reference to some more theoretical interest, such as modern linguistic theory. Hillers's habit of mind ran toward the particular, toward the individual detail. His genius--if this word may be used--was in his capacity to seize upon one aspect of some larger entity, problem, or topic, to work it through, thoroughly and, as often as not, decisively, all the while resisting the temptation to take up the larger, perhaps un(re)solvable complex of which the detail or problem was but a part. The worked example is the Hillersian trademark--"exemplum followed by moralisatio"--and Poets Before Homer collects all of his best.

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