I've been thumbing through the Old Testament recently and I thought this might give a little local colour, which it certainly does. You have texts and excerpts of texts from across the ancient world from cuneiform tablets, scraps of papyrus, stone inscriptions etc, all with excellent notes and introductions. I learnt loads. The documents relate to the OT either historically (mostly events in the Books of Kings) or by placing Israelite literature in it's context with things like the epic of Gilgamesh.

One thing I found particularly interesting were the texts about Baal from Ras Shamra. Baal is a fertility God who dies and rises in the Spring and after his death a Goddess goes and looks for his body. I believe a similar thing happens to Osiris. It reminded me of another local God who is searched for by a female after his death. I think they call him Jesus Christ.

But one thing is so astounding it literally blew my lips off. This is the Enuma Elish, the creation myth of Babylonia. It recounts the exploits of one Marduk who has gob-smacking similarities to God in Genesis chapter one and makes clear a number of things like how he can create with a word, what the Spirit of God is, what the Deep is, what it means to create man in his image and who the hell God is talking to in Genesis 1:26. These similarities must have been immediately apparent to the people who read Genesis when it was first written. Once I'd got over my shock it was the differences between the two stories that began to stand out and for the first time I began to interpret the story in Genesis rather than just enjoying it. In the Enuma Elish man is created as a slave “that the gods may then have rest” but in Genesis man is created that he might “have dominion over the fish of the sea” etc. In other words we have the ground-breaking concept that man is important. ( )

Very useful collection of background material in translation. ( )

A neat reference, though dates. Useful. ( )

Documents translated from original languages