This collection brings together a variety of methodological, historical, and theological responses to biblical history.

The letters edited in this volume represent the correspondence of various priests and high temple officials in the Assyrian realm during the third through fifth decades of the seventh century BC. They consist chiefly of reports to Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal about cultic concerns and matters connected with the construction and renovation of temple edifices in the major cities of the Assyrian empire, both in the heartland and in the provinces. These fascinating letters throw light on the buildings, refurbishment, and maintenance of temples, the fashioning and installation of statues of the king, the provisioning of the cult, the performance of sacrifices, the rite of sacred marriage, and the processions of divine images.

The title, Marbeh Ḥokmah, meaning “increases wisdom,� reflects the fact that Victor Avigdor Hurowitz was a scholar who increased wisdom and who continues to increase the wisdom of scholars throughout the world even after his untimely death at the age of 64. The book was edited by five of Professor Hurowitz’s colleagues: Profs. Shamir Yona and Mayer I. Gruber of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Edward L. Greenstein of Bar-Ilan University, Peter Machinist of Harvard University, and Shalom M. Paul of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The two-volume collection contains 49 groundbreaking essays written by 53 distinguished authors from various institutions of higher learning in Israel and around the world. The authors include Victor’s teachers, colleagues, and students, and the essays deal with a great variety of subjects. The breadth of subject matter featured in Marbeh Ḥokmah is a most appropriate tribute to Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, whose published scholarship encompassed a wide variety of fields of interest pertaining to the study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East: Wisdom Literature, Psalmody, prophecy and prophets, the priesthood, eschatology, historiography, ancient inscriptions, medieval Hebrew biblical exegesis, religious rites, building and architecture, temples, the art of warfare, Semitic philology, Sumerian proverbs, epigraphy, rhetoric and stylistics, poetry, lamentations, the interconnections between Hebrew Scripture and the ancient Near East, the cultures of ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, innerbiblical parallels, and many other subjects.