Delbert R. Hillers

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published essays and articles, his long out-of-print Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets, and three previously unpublished essays, including the aforementioned “‘Poets Before Homer’: Archaeology and the Western Literary Tradition”.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.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, old arguments about what constituted true Christianity resumed with the newly refined tools and methods of linguistics, history, and comparative literature. The most sensitive questions sought to probe through the centuries and discover the original Jesus. Why, scholars asked, is the New Testament silent about most of Jesus's life? Why didn't Paul say more about the life of Jesus? To what extent was Jesus Jewish? How significant were the differences among the Gospels? What evidence could be trusted and what views justified? As scholars sought to discover and describe what they thought the "true"Jesus might be, they proved that Jesus could be many things. In this broad survey of the efforts to establish, amend, or deny the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer presents the history of a debate about what mattered most to millions of people: If God had entered human history, what could history tell about it? Throughout the course of this heated and prolonged dispute, one retelling of the life of Jesus followed another, enjoying -- in Schweitzer's phrase -- "the immortality of revised editions". Lesser writers might consider differences of opinion as signs of a hopeless enterprise, but Schweitzer instead finds immense value in the differences. Approaches and conclusions may differ, he concludes, but the quest for the historical Jesus has provided ample testimony to the importance of the effort and the rewards of the experience.

The poetry found in the Book of Lamentations is an eloquent expression of one man’s, and one nation’s, despair. The poet is deep in mourning as a result of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in the sixth century b.c.e. He looks to Israel’s own sins to explain the catastrophe, and yet he recites poignant examples of Israel’s suffering in wondering aloud if God has abandoned his people altogether. Thus his lament is both a confession and a prayer for hope in spite of the horrible defeat. Lamentations is traditionally thought to have been written by the prophet Jeremiah; today the question is whether one man wrote it or many. In his Introduction, Delbert Hillers gives the evidence against Jeremiah’s authorship and suggests that the poems should be treated as an intelligible unity, most likely written by an eyewitness to the events described. The Book of Lamentations has been taken up through history both as poetry and as an expression of boundless grief. It has become part of the Jewish and Christian liturgies, as well as a source of comfort far beyond the time in which it was written. This commentary fills in the book’s literary and historical background, and we emerge with a fresh respect for the artistry with which it was composed. The poetry itself demands this respect, with a translation here that carries the emotion and heartbreak of the original Hebrew. This new edition by Delbert R. Hillers is a thorough revision of his earlier Anchor Bible commentary, incorporating new literary theories and textual discoveries connected with the very latest Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.

The familiar idea of a covenant between God and His people is central to much of the literature of the Old Testament. Through analyses of the style, content, and language of biblical and extra-biblical documents, Dr. Hillers renders the complex idea of covenant comprehensible to the layman as he provides insights into such ideas as the love of God and the knowledge of God--both of which are intimately connected with Israel's concept of covenant. (Biblical Studies)