Aren M. Wilson-Wright Livres

Jeremiah's Egypt: Prophetic Reflections on the Saite Period is the first book-length work to highlight the importance of Egypt for understanding the historical context and literary development of the book of Jeremiah. Based on a comprehensive reconstruction of Egyptian-Judahite contact in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, Aren M. Wilson-Wright shows that the numerous references to Egypt in the book of Jeremiah are highly personal reactions to the injustices perpetrated by the Egyptian regime and its self-serving Judahite collaborators, some of which see Babylon as a means of escaping Egyptian domination. Her analysis reveals that the key choice animating the book of Jeremiah is not Judahite autonomy versus Babylonian domination but rather Egyptian domination versus Babylonian domination.

In this book, Aren M. Wilson-Wright proposes a new model for studying gods in the Ancient Near East. The key insight of this model is that the roles, functions, and representations of deities correspond to the daily routines of their worshippers. Soldiers, for example, tend to worship martial gods, while farmers tend to worship agricultural gods. The author then illustrates the utility of this model by applying it to a detailed study of the goddess Athtart at three Late Bronze Age sites: Egypt, Emar, and Ugarit. In the process, he demonstrates that multiple, distinct forms of Athtart existed at all three sites in the Late Bronze Age, each corresponding to the daily routines of different social groups. He also considers the effect of daily routines on the transmission of Athtart.