Description:
★ Winner of the 2025 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for Best Book on the Hebrew Bible
★ Winner of the 2025 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise
★ Honorable Mention at the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize
Deuteronomy and the inscribed texts depicted within it are often called "books." Moreover, its treatment of writing has earned it a prominent place in historical accounts of the religion of ancient Israel and Judah. Neither Deuteronomy nor its text-artifacts, however, are books in any conventional sense of the term. This interdisciplinary study reorients the analysis of Deuteronomic textuality around the materiality, visuality, and rhetoric of ancient rather than modern media. It argues that the Deuteronomic composition adapts the media aesthetics of ancient treaty tablets and monumental inscriptions to a story that is itself transformed into an artifact of the past.
Brief description: Mark Lester, Ph.D. (2020), Yale University, is currently Instructor in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Chicago.
Review Quotes: "With meticulous research on the written culture across the ancient Near East, Mark Lester scrutinizes the Deuteronomy not simply as a Biblical composition but as the adaptation and appropriation of media aesthetics of the whole region. Problematizing books as both a material object and an idea, Lester's study expands the geographical and material scope of book history by situating the ancient Judean sense of literariness at the crossroads of transmedia exchange. This groundbreaking work will shift the ways we understand and teach book history." - Honorable mention from the award committee of the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize.