Translating Empire

In this volume, C. L. Crouch and Jeremy M. Hutton offer a data-driven approach to translation practice in the Iron Age. The authors build on and reinforce Crouch's conclusions in her former work about Deuteronomy and the Akkadian treaty tradition, employing Hutton's 'Optimal Translation' theory to analyze the Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual inscription from Tell Fekheriyeh. The authors argue that the inscription exhibits an isomorphic style of translation and only the occasional use of dynamic replacement sets. They apply these findings to other proposed instances of Iron Age translation from Akkadian into dialects of Northwest Semitic, including the relationship between Deuteronomy and the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon and the relationship between the treaty of A??ur-nerari V with Mati?ilu and the Sefire treaties. The authors then argue that the lexical and syntactic changes in these cases diverge so significantly from the model established by Tell Fekheriyeh as to exclude the possibility that these treaties constitute translational relationships.

Born 1982; 2004 BA in Religious Studies, Scripps College, CA; 2005 PGDip in Theology, University of Oxford; 2007 MPhil in Theology (Old Testament), University of Oxford; 2008 DPhil in Theology (Old Testament), University of Oxford; 2018-2021 David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, CA; currently Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and Ancient Judaism at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.