What are some contemporary works to the bible?

by MrFuffin

In other words, what else was being written at that time in history?

Or, what would it have shared shelf space with in an ancient bookstore?

jindianajonz

Which part of the bible? Between the Old and New testaments, the Bible was created over many centuries.

farquier

Quite a bit! There's an enormous corpus of cuneiform texts from the ancient near east that were being copied and read during the time of the writing of the bible. You may have heard for example of Gilgamesh, which predates the likely writing of the Hebrew bible but was being recopied and recopied down to the reign of Assurbanipal. An enormous volume of prayers, poems, epics, letters, ritual texts, historical accounts, and even some satirical literature has survived; there's a wonderful anthology of Akkadian literature by Benjamin Foster called Before The Muses. If you want to read texts online, there are several excellent web portals that provide access to parts of this corpus in translation alongside background material and context (warning: Extremely erratic websites; they seem to work better on firefox than chrome): http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cams/gkab http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/ http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap

Another popular anthology of texts relating to the Hebrew Bible is Pritchard's Anthology Of Near Eastern Texts Related to The Old Testament(ANET). However, there are two caveats that should be given about this: Pritchard's work is a classic and a good collection of sources for a first look at the range of ancient Near Eastern writings but unlike Foster's work it was produced 50-odd years ago and the translations have in many cases been superseded-for example, the State Archives of Assyria project has produced an astonishing stream of new publications of Neo-Assyrian texts.EDIT: Also, in many cases additional fragments of Cuneiform texts have been found since ANET was published; thus for example our text of Gilgamesh is substantially more complete than it was 50-odd years ago. In addition, recent popular printings of the text omit many notes that give places where there are questioned or variant readings. I would therefore be extremely wary of using it for anything other than quick reference purposes, and even then a more recent publication is always to be preferred. The Society of Biblical Literature's Writings from The Ancient World series in particular is well worth your time.

EDIT: For comparative literary study of the Hebrew Bible Dennis Pardee's Ritual and Cult at Ugarit and Mark E. Smith's Ugaritic Narrative Poetry are good resources.