Books by Brian R. Doak
The ancient Israelites who produced the Hebrew Bible lived within a rich context of geography, la... more The ancient Israelites who produced the Hebrew Bible lived within a rich context of geography, language, politics, religion, and culture. This context profoundly shaped Israel, and indeed it was through the influence of the neighboring people of West Asia along the Mediterranean Sea that Israel defined its own identity. Thus, these neighbors helped forge the very shape of Biblical religion. Though larger nations like Egypt and various Mesopotamian empires loom large in the narratives, Israel’s close neighbors in the Levant appear more frequently in the Bible and prove decisive at crucial moments. The Bible casts the Edomites to the southeast as the “brother” of Israel in the form of the Jacob and Esau narrative. The Philistines are presented as Israel’s first true national political enemy, stealing the ark and battling kings Saul and David. The Moabites violently confront the escaped Hebrew slaves on their way out of Egypt, yet also provide the great-grandmother of King David in the person of Ruth, a Moabite refugee. Though the Bible’s presentation of these neighbors has profoundly shaped our imagination of them, the Bible’s story is but one perspective.
To complicate matters further, though the Bible casts many of these neighbors as villains, its story about them is actually more intricate. Even the Edomites, reviled in the Bible as participators in the sacking of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, have familial ties with Israel in the book of Genesis, and the Aramaeans, political enemies of Israel in the book of Kings, occupy a mysterious place near the heart of Israel’s own journey in Deuteronomy 26:5: “A wandering Aramaean was my ancestor…”
Moreover, the biblical story never presents the identity of these groups as pure “history,” but rather as a complex mix of legend, storytelling, political invective, and memory. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have distorted our thinking about these people as historical groups, and who they actually were.
In this book, I will explore both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel—the Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Arameans—and what we can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. Learning what we can about who these various peoples were in their own right can deepen our awareness of Israel’s close neighbors. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, we can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and we can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others. Through its overview of these surrounding groups, this book will demonstrate in a direct and accessible manner the extent to which ancient Israelite identity was fluid and forged both within and against the identities of its close neighbors. Animated by the latest and best research, yet written for students, this book will invite readers to embark on a journey of scholarly discovery to reveal the unfamiliar world of Israel’s place among its neighbors.
The characteristics of individuals deemed heroes occupy a prominent place for representing cultur... more The characteristics of individuals deemed heroes occupy a prominent place for representing cultural ideals across diverse genres—ranging from ancient Near Eastern myth and classical Greek epic all the way to contemporary film studies, propaganda, art history, athletic competition, and beyond. In this book I examine the heroic world of ancient Israel within the Hebrew Bible, and show that ancient Israelite literature operated within and against a much broader world of heroic ideals in its ancient context. As evidence of this heroic interaction, I show that the Hebrew Bible’s focus on the heroic body indicates traces of heroic ideologies that were popular in the eighth–fifth century Mediterranean world, and to that extent the Bible shares a place in the discussion of heroic themes parallel to archaic and classical Greece. Even the Bible’s ambivalence toward heroic tropes mirrors Greek literature that may be read to call into question the value of “strong bodies” as the ultimate or only solution to political problems.
Although the muted presentation of the bodily characteristics of heroes in the Bible does comport with the muted terms of physical character description from ancient literature—at least relative to what contemporary audiences often expect—the Bible’s heroic bodies are markedly more muted, even paradoxical. When those physical properties are given, however, they provide crucial insights. Samson’s hair, for example, gives him power (perhaps both physical and sexual) through its linkage to his nazirite status but turns into the source of his undoing once the power-secret is uncovered. Absalom’s hair plays a similar role. The remarkably lavish description of David’s physical attractiveness cannot be disentangled from his own lust for beauty, and thus his own undoing, after he becomes king. Saul’s handsomeness and notable height, “a head taller” than his contemporaries, gives him a charismatic status but also proves a source of military and even spiritual humiliation—he cannot face the giant Goliath, and he emerges as the false choice of the people, based only on appearance and false charisma. In each of these examples, the efficacy of the heroic body is clear, yet in each case the hero’s downfall seems connected to the body.
On other fronts, the heroic body communicated the “code” of hero cult, a motif frequent in Aegean literatures and reflected in the Bible as well. Positively, Saul’s bones and the contest to secure those bones demonstrate the continued power of Saul as a signal of leadership and legitimacy; negatively, the prophet Ezekiel ridicules the bodies of ignominious foreign warriors in a manner that seems to acknowledge and mock the power of heroic bodies from beyond death. The heroic body in each case tells a story, of Israel’s remembered history in the making and of the eventual “end” of monarchic, heroic history in Israel and toward a new kind of individual power. To this end, exilic- and post-exilic-era compositions transform or displace the heroic body with new descriptions of readers, lamenters, interpreters, and administrators, parallel in key ways to the Platonic transformation of heroic tropes into the life of the philosopher (e.g., in the Apology and the Phaedo) and also the overarching transformation of national and monarchic themes in the Hebrew Bible into more local terms. Still, the heroic body could remain a point of inspiration and focus, or even a signal of hubris and danger, for audiences in an ongoing manner.
Did the Phoenicians avoid representing their deities in anthropomorphic form for ideological or r... more Did the Phoenicians avoid representing their deities in anthropomorphic form for ideological or religious reasons? The question of whether Phoenicians employed aniconic (as opposed to iconic) representational techniques has significance not only for the many under-explored aspects of Phoenician religion generally, but also for the question of whether aniconism can be considered a broader trend among the Semitic populations of the ancient Near East. Indeed, past research on aniconic phenomena is often motivated by a desire to understand the larger context of the Hebrew Bible’s proscription of divine images. Does this most famous of image-prohibitions represent a kind of religious or intellectual parthenogenesis, or is it one vigorous form of a broader West Semitic trend toward aniconic cultic expressions? In this book, which focuses on Iron Age and Achaemenid period materials from mainland Phoenicia and the Mediterranean colonies, I argue that that the Phoenicians did participate in an iconographic program that moved toward divine symbols, abstract forms, and even purely aniconic expressions. However, I argue that previous treatments of Phoenician iconography have inappropriately downplayed many examples of native Phoenician anthropomorphic depiction, and a careful examination of the material record shows hitherto unappreciated nuances of Phoenician divine imagery. As pioneering colonizers and traders, the Phoenicians exerted influence in a wide range of contexts, beginning in Egypt and the Near East and extending to Greece, Italy, and the far Western Mediterranean worlds of Spain and Northwest Africa. This monograph is the first of its kind to explore the important question of Phoenician aniconism as a significant topic in its own right, and elevates the complexity of Phoenician divine representation to its proper place alongside other iconographic movements in the ancient world.
Theologians and philosophers are turning again to questions of the meaning, or non-meaning, of th... more Theologians and philosophers are turning again to questions of the meaning, or non-meaning, of the natural world for human self-understanding. Brian R. Doak observes that the book of Job, more than any other book in the Bible, uses metaphors drawn from the natural world, especially plants and animals, as raw material for thinking about human suffering. Doak argues that Job should be viewed as an anthropological “ground zero” for the traumatic definition of the post-exilic human self in ancient Israel. Furthermore, the battered shape of the Joban experience should provide a starting point for reconfiguring our thinking about “natural theology” as a category of intellectual history in the ancient world. Doak examines how the development of the human subject is portrayed in the biblical text in either radical continuity or discontinuity with plants and animals. Consider Leviathan explores the text at the intersection of anthropology, theology, and ecology, opening up new possibilities for charting the view of nature in the Hebrew Bible.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066731
The figure of the giant has haunted... more http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066731
The figure of the giant has haunted the literatures of the ancient Mediterranean world, from the Greek Gigantomachy and other Aegean epic literatures to the biblical contexts of the ancient Near East. In this volume, Brian Doak argues that the giants of the Hebrew Bible are a politically, theologically, and historiographically generative group, and through their oversized bodies readers gain insight into central aspects of Israel’s symbolic universe. All that is overgrown or physically monstrous represents a connection to primeval chaos, and stands as a barrier to creation and right rule. Giants thus represent chaos-fear, and their eradication is a form of chaos maintenance by both human and divine agents. Doak argues that these biblical traditions participate in a broader Mediterranean conversation regarding giants and the end of the heroic age—a conversation that inevitably draws the biblical corpus into a discussion of the function of myth and epic in the ancient world, with profound implications for the politics of monotheism and monarchy in ancient Israel.
Reviews of My Books by Brian R. Doak
"For those seeking a brief overview of these peoples mentioned in the Scriptures in relation to I... more "For those seeking a brief overview of these peoples mentioned in the Scriptures in relation to Israel, Ancient Israel’s Neighbors is a good resource. For a deeper engagement with the ancient sources, one needs to look elsewhere, in books such as the Peoples of the Old Testament World, edited by Alfred J. Hoerth, Gerald L. Mattingly, and Edwin M. Yamauchi (Baker, 1998). I highly recommend Doak’s book to students looking for an outline of ancient Israel from ancient Near Eastern texts and archaeology that takes into consideration its neighbors."
"When I first received this volume for review, I wondered how Brian R. Doak, an Associate Profess... more "When I first received this volume for review, I wondered how Brian R. Doak, an Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at George Fox University in Oregon who has written in the past about the Phoenicians, could have the audacity to even attempt to cover all of ancient Israel’s neighbors in one short volume. In most volumes of this sort, such as The World around the Old Testament: The People and Places of the Ancient Near East (ed. Bill T. Arnold and Brent A. Strawn; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), each chapter is written by an expert on that particular group or region, and I assumed that no single author would be able to cover so many different topics successfully.
Doak proved me wrong. While the volume does have its deficiencies, in the end it can serve as a reasonably good introduction for the beginning student to the world of the Iron Age Levant, perhaps as a complement to Victor H. Matthew’s The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), also in the Essentials of Biblical Studies series. In fact, as I read through the introductory chapter on “Israel’s Neighbors and the Problem of the Past” (1–21), I found that its explanations of such subjects as “Nations and Identity in the Ancient World” and “How Do We Know Anything about the Past?” echo many of my own experiences in teaching these subjects in undergraduate settings. Doak manages to lay out the main issues about the study of the biblical world, especially of the problems involved in using the Bible as a source of historical information, in a way that is easy to understand without being overly didactic." 
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Books by Brian R. Doak
To complicate matters further, though the Bible casts many of these neighbors as villains, its story about them is actually more intricate. Even the Edomites, reviled in the Bible as participators in the sacking of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, have familial ties with Israel in the book of Genesis, and the Aramaeans, political enemies of Israel in the book of Kings, occupy a mysterious place near the heart of Israel’s own journey in Deuteronomy 26:5: “A wandering Aramaean was my ancestor…”
Moreover, the biblical story never presents the identity of these groups as pure “history,” but rather as a complex mix of legend, storytelling, political invective, and memory. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have distorted our thinking about these people as historical groups, and who they actually were.
In this book, I will explore both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel—the Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Arameans—and what we can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. Learning what we can about who these various peoples were in their own right can deepen our awareness of Israel’s close neighbors. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, we can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and we can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others. Through its overview of these surrounding groups, this book will demonstrate in a direct and accessible manner the extent to which ancient Israelite identity was fluid and forged both within and against the identities of its close neighbors. Animated by the latest and best research, yet written for students, this book will invite readers to embark on a journey of scholarly discovery to reveal the unfamiliar world of Israel’s place among its neighbors.
Although the muted presentation of the bodily characteristics of heroes in the Bible does comport with the muted terms of physical character description from ancient literature—at least relative to what contemporary audiences often expect—the Bible’s heroic bodies are markedly more muted, even paradoxical. When those physical properties are given, however, they provide crucial insights. Samson’s hair, for example, gives him power (perhaps both physical and sexual) through its linkage to his nazirite status but turns into the source of his undoing once the power-secret is uncovered. Absalom’s hair plays a similar role. The remarkably lavish description of David’s physical attractiveness cannot be disentangled from his own lust for beauty, and thus his own undoing, after he becomes king. Saul’s handsomeness and notable height, “a head taller” than his contemporaries, gives him a charismatic status but also proves a source of military and even spiritual humiliation—he cannot face the giant Goliath, and he emerges as the false choice of the people, based only on appearance and false charisma. In each of these examples, the efficacy of the heroic body is clear, yet in each case the hero’s downfall seems connected to the body.
On other fronts, the heroic body communicated the “code” of hero cult, a motif frequent in Aegean literatures and reflected in the Bible as well. Positively, Saul’s bones and the contest to secure those bones demonstrate the continued power of Saul as a signal of leadership and legitimacy; negatively, the prophet Ezekiel ridicules the bodies of ignominious foreign warriors in a manner that seems to acknowledge and mock the power of heroic bodies from beyond death. The heroic body in each case tells a story, of Israel’s remembered history in the making and of the eventual “end” of monarchic, heroic history in Israel and toward a new kind of individual power. To this end, exilic- and post-exilic-era compositions transform or displace the heroic body with new descriptions of readers, lamenters, interpreters, and administrators, parallel in key ways to the Platonic transformation of heroic tropes into the life of the philosopher (e.g., in the Apology and the Phaedo) and also the overarching transformation of national and monarchic themes in the Hebrew Bible into more local terms. Still, the heroic body could remain a point of inspiration and focus, or even a signal of hubris and danger, for audiences in an ongoing manner.
The figure of the giant has haunted the literatures of the ancient Mediterranean world, from the Greek Gigantomachy and other Aegean epic literatures to the biblical contexts of the ancient Near East. In this volume, Brian Doak argues that the giants of the Hebrew Bible are a politically, theologically, and historiographically generative group, and through their oversized bodies readers gain insight into central aspects of Israel’s symbolic universe. All that is overgrown or physically monstrous represents a connection to primeval chaos, and stands as a barrier to creation and right rule. Giants thus represent chaos-fear, and their eradication is a form of chaos maintenance by both human and divine agents. Doak argues that these biblical traditions participate in a broader Mediterranean conversation regarding giants and the end of the heroic age—a conversation that inevitably draws the biblical corpus into a discussion of the function of myth and epic in the ancient world, with profound implications for the politics of monotheism and monarchy in ancient Israel.
Reviews of My Books by Brian R. Doak
Doak proved me wrong. While the volume does have its deficiencies, in the end it can serve as a reasonably good introduction for the beginning student to the world of the Iron Age Levant, perhaps as a complement to Victor H. Matthew’s The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), also in the Essentials of Biblical Studies series. In fact, as I read through the introductory chapter on “Israel’s Neighbors and the Problem of the Past” (1–21), I found that its explanations of such subjects as “Nations and Identity in the Ancient World” and “How Do We Know Anything about the Past?” echo many of my own experiences in teaching these subjects in undergraduate settings. Doak manages to lay out the main issues about the study of the biblical world, especially of the problems involved in using the Bible as a source of historical information, in a way that is easy to understand without being overly didactic."