About

Jessie DeGrado is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in 2018. Her research focuses on the history and religions of the ancient Middle East, with particular attention to categories such as gender and empire. She studies how modern history and politics influence the reconstruction of the past, including the legacy of Orientalism in Assyriology and biblical studies. Her current work engages postcolonial theory to explore the relationship between the Neo-Assyrian empire and its client states. DeGrado's scholarly contributions include an analysis of the representation of foreigners in Assyrian art and a co-authored study on the wanderings of the Mesopotamian demon Lamashtu. Her first book, 'Assyria’s Plunder: From Ancient Empire to Modern Loot,' offers a new history of Assyrian cultural interaction with its client states, focusing on ancient Israel and Judah as primary examples. She examines texts preserved in the Hebrew Bible to understand the experiences of an Assyrian client state and how images of Assyria have been remade in the context of modern empire. Her research also explores Assyrian policy and its engagement with texts from Judah, revealing diverse motivations and experiences of human actors on both sides of imperial encounters. Currently, DeGrado is working on a project about gender and religious authority in Mesopotamia, investigating how assumptions about gender influence our understanding of Mesopotamian religion and society. She aims to develop new models for exploring gender in antiquity by identifying groups within Mesopotamian religious institutions whose experiences of gender did not necessarily align with societal expectations. Her teaching interests include ancient Middle Eastern history and religion, the history of empire, archaeology, gender in antiquity, the Hebrew Bible, and early Judaism.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• History
• Art
• Classics
• Philosophy
• Theology
• Sociology
• Literature
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Religious studies
• Art history
• Statistics
• Archaeology
• Aesthetics
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law by Sara J. Milstein

  AJS Review The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law by Sara J. Milstein Jessie DeGrado Sara J. Milstein. Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 216 pp. Sara Milstein’s new book provides a stimulating challenge to the hypothesis that the non-Priestly laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy were directly inspired by Mesopotamian law collections such as the Laws of Hammurabi (LH). Milstein argues instead that the laws preserved in Exodus 21–22 and Deuteronomy 12–23 reflect a complex process of adapting and expanding materials produced for scribal education in Israel and Judah during the Iron II–III periods (roughly 850–586 BCE). The introduction surveys Mesopotamian law collections and legal pedagogical texts from the third and second millennia BCE. Over the past fifty years, scholars have increasingly recognized that law collections, once referred to as law codes, neither record specific verdicts nor provide binding precedent. Rather, they both express an idealized form of justice that might indirectly inform decisions and, equally significant, function as political propaganda for the king who promulgated them. In addition to the scholarship cited by Milstein (6–12), interested readers can consult Pamela Barmash’s recently released monograph, The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions (Oxford: OUP, 2020). Chapter 1 further sketches the contents of the Mesopotamian scribal curriculum in the Old Babylonian period. This includes legal phrasebooks containing lists of contractual clauses, which students copied to gain facility with common legal phraseology, and model contracts. Also included in school curricula were fictional court cases (sometimes called model cases), which Milstein argues were used to teach legal formulations and phraseology in a livelier and more playful form. Finally, scribes in training often copied lists of casuistic laws, which were often excerpted from longer law collections but could also be innovated around a specific topic, such as rented oxen. The bulk of the work is devoted to identifying pentateuchal texts that embed pedagogical genres like those found in the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum. In chapter 2, Milstein identifies several clusters of laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy that exhibit features like the Mesopotamian fictional cases. Special attention is given to what Milstein terms the “slandered bride cluster” (Deut 22:13–19), the “manslaughter cluster” (Deut 19:4–13), and the “illicit intercourse cluster” (Deut 22:23–29). Each example embeds a longer base case featuring an innocent party, followed by several more laconic casuistic laws that cover guilty verdicts. Milstein terms the base cases Hebrew legal fictions (HLFs), which she considers an “analogous group to the Mesopotamian fictional cases” (72). These longer laws would have been independently drawn from scribal exercises and supplemented with short laws exploring guilty outcomes. Milstein identifies several potential indicators of an original pedagogical function for the base cases, including the use of dialogue, [End Page 176] colorful scenarios, and contract language. The latter point is fleshed out in more detail in chapter 3, which compares language from the HLFs to phrases attested in contracts from the Late Bronze Age city of Emar. Chapter 4 presents an ambitious reappraisal of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the legal material in Exodus 21:18–22:16 and Mesopotamian law collections. Milstein advances two separate lines of argument in this chapter. First, she observes that the compilation of laws in Exodus is both shorter than Mesopotamian law collections and covers a more restricted set of topics. In this respect, Exodus 21:18–22:16 resembles the extracts or lists of laws used in Mesopotamian scribal training more than the lengthier compositions we refer to as law collections. This leads Milstein to a second argument, which is that discontinuities and errors constitute further evidence of dependence on scribal pedagogical texts. These include a case concerning self-defense and home burglary that interrupts a law concerning stolen animals (Exod 21:37–22:3) and the placement of general talionic principles immediately after the law of accidental miscarriage (Exod 21:22–25). Overall, Milstein’s book provides an important critique of atomistic comparison between Exodus 21:1–23:5 and the Laws of Hammurabi. Namely, even if one postulates that Judean scribes accessed...

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• Aramaic: A History of the First World Language by Holger Gzella

  ˜The œCatholic Biblical quarterly · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Classics
  • Literature

  Reviewed by: Aramaic: A History of the First World Language by Holger Gzella Jessie Degrado holger gzella, Aramaic: A History of the First World Language (trans. Benjamin D. Suchard; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Pp. xii + 359. $70. Aramaic: A History of the First World Language is the recent translation with updated bibliography of a volume first published in Dutch in 2017. In the work, Gzella sets himself a monumental task: to present the history of Aramaic over three thousand years without presuming prior knowledge of any Semitic language. Since the work is a popularization of G.'s A Cultural Atlas of Aramaic (HdO 111; Leiden: Brill, 2015), readers with a background in Semitic languages may prefer to consult that volume and, especially, important reviews by Charles Häberl (JAOS 139 [2019] 714–17) and Steven Kaufman ("Notes on A Cultural History of Aramaic" [Aramaic Studies Today, 2017, https://blog.huc.edu/cal/a-culturalhistory-of-aramaic/]). Given the popular focus of the work, this review will focus primarily on its conceptual and historical claims. In chap. 1, G. provides an overview of the history of academic Aramaic studies and some basic features of early Aramaic. In this section, the difficulty of writing a popular history of Aramaic becomes clear: readers with no background in Aramaic will likely struggle to parse the technical details. On the other hand, more experienced readers may be frustrated by the lack of support for several claims, such as the assertion that the lowering of the short vowel i to e obtains in all Aramaic dialects. In fact, the Aramaic name Māti'-'il is consistently written as {ma-ti-' -dingir} (with ti rather than te) in a ninth-century treaty (SAA 2 2), indicating that this phonological process likely postdates Old Aramaic. The next two chapters trace the development and uses of Aramaic in the first millennium b.c.e. Chapter 2 covers the initial phases of the written language, Old Aramaic (OA)—first attested in monumental inscriptions from Syrian kingdoms in the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e. Chapter 3 outlines the use of Aramaic by first-millennium empires, from its role as a lingua franca in the Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian periods to the development of Imperial Aramaic, a standardized dialect with its own orthographic conventions, employed as the administrative language of the Achaemenid empire. These two chapters highlight an important trend in the history of Aramaic, namely, processes that lead to standardization of dialects in writing. G. gives the impression that this was a highly organized and agentive process, attributable to the reign of a single ruler or even a specific year. For OA, G.'s reconstruction requires sidelining texts that do not adhere to the alleged standardization (Neirab stelae, Deir Alla, and Tell Fekheriye). In addition, Sam'alian, a dialect from Zincirli, is not considered Aramaic (cf. the more recent treatment in Federico Giusfredi and Valerio Pisaniello, "The Population, the Language and the History of Yadiya/Sam'al," in Beyond All Boundaries: Anatolia in the 1st Millennium BC [OBO 295; Leuven: Peeters, 2021] 189–223). In other words, OA appears homogeneous only when all texts attesting to its heterogeneity have been dismissed as anomalous or reclassified as not Aramaic. The next two chapters on Aramaic in late antiquity illustrate the reverse process of linguistic standardization, that is, the movement toward recording the diversity of vernacular speech. G. covers the use of Aramaic in the southern Levant (biblical texts and Qumran), and the development of distinct dialects including Palmyrene, Hatran, and Arascid Aramaic. A substantial portion of chap. 4 is devoted to the assertion that Hebrew was no longer spoken as a vernacular after 400 b.c.e. and had lost all communicative function by the second [End Page 337] century c.e. This requires special pleading, given corpora such as the Bar Kokhba letters and tomb inscriptions from Bet Shearim and Jaffa, which indicate that Hebrew was likely spoken through the second century and used in inscriptions through the fourth century (see Y. Elitzur, "Epigraphic Hebrew: Roman and Byzantine Period," in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics [ed. Geoffrey Khan; 4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2003] 1:843–51). More significantly...

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• Faust, Avraham. <i>The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and Its Consequences</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi+362 pp. $115.00 (cloth).

  The Journal of Religion · 2022-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• An Aramaic Ritual for Burning Straw in Sefire IA:36–37

  Aramaic Studies · 2022-12-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The Old Aramaic inscription Sefire I ( KAI 222) includes, in a series of mimetic curses, a debated clause that has been read by most previous scholars to involve a mysterious {gnbʾ} gannābaʾ (?) ‘thief’, which (or who?) is symbolically burned (Sefire I A:36–37). The present article argues that there are lexicographic (cognates in later Aramaic dialects) and phonological (geminate prenasalization) grounds for understanding {gnbʾ} to encode instead ganbaʾ (&lt; * gabbaʾ ) ‘straw’. The burning of this straw to symbolize consequences should a treaty partner renege has clear parallels in Mesopotamian and Syro-Anatolian magical and ritual language, including treaty curses, and produces a more typical image in a list of mimetic curses involving materials (wax), objects (a bow and arrow), and animals (a calf).

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• Commensality and Kinship: Exodus 24 and the Emar Zukru Festival

  2022-04-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This paper explores one way in which the ritual texts from Emar can contribute to our understanding of the Hebrew Bible, a fitting subject to honor Dan Fleming. Equally important, the paper explores the relationship between commensality and kinship. This, too, is an area of Dan’s expertise, and I dedicate my contribution to him in thanks for the bond formed over many years of shared meals. In Exodus 24: 3–8 + 11bβ, the Israelites ratify divine legislation from Horeb through a covenantal ceremony. Enacted before twelve standing stones representing the tribes of Israel, the rite includes an unusual step: the application of sacrificial blood to the assembled community. William Robertson Smith saw the peculiarities of this rite as emblematic of early Israelite worship—a primitive past in which kinship was constituted through bloody sacrifice. In the past century, scholarship has moved away from the evolutionary assumptions undergirding Smith’s work. Nonetheless, the application of blood to the people in Exodus 24 remains a puzzle. This paper analyzes the covenantal ceremony of Exodus 24: 3–8 + 11bβ in the light of an overlooked parallel in the zukru festival at Emar (Emar 373:34–37). The Emar ritual shares three significant features with the story of Exodus 24: (1) the establishment of standing stones; (2) sacrifice and blood-manipulation performed outside the confines of city structures; (3) a concluding communal feast. Drawing on additional data from Mari (A.981 and A.2226), I argue that the biblical text reflects details that conform to known ritual praxis from the ancient Levant. These rites, unknown to Smith in the late 19th-century, do, in fact, constitute and strengthen kinship ties through commensality and the manipulation of blood. Such practices are not, however, restricted to non-monarchic societies, as the texts from Mari and Emar amply demonstrate. Rather than reflecting details from a hoary past, Exodus 24: 3–8 + 11bβ combines elements from disparate rituals that operate at multiple levels of society (both royal and kin- based) in order to imagine Israel at the moment of its founding.

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• Discovering Early Syrian Magic

  Near Eastern Archaeology · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • Art
  • Archaeology

  Scholars of magic in the Iron Age Levant have had to grapple with a dearth of sources between the fall of Late Bronze Age cities (ca. 1200 BCE) and the proliferation of magic bowls over a millennium later (ca. 400 CE). Three recently published early Aramaic inscriptions help fill this lacuna: a recently excavated inscribed cosmetic container from Zincirli, a Lamaštu amulet from the same site held by the Vorderasiatisches Museum (S.3604), and an Aramaic-inscribed statuette of Lamaštu’s nemesis, Pazuzu, currently in the holdings of the Ashmolean Museum (AN1892.43). These texts, dated paleographically to the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, afford a window into local magical traditions in the Levant. They also show how communities on the imperial periphery adopted and adapted elements of Mesopotamian magic. Finally, the inscriptions provide an impetus for a new analysis of the infamous Arslan Tash amulets, offering further context for their texts and iconography.

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• Syrian Fashion, Assyrian Style: Clothing Syro-Anatolia in Ninth-Century BCE Assyrian Art

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2021-09-13

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The residents of Syro-Anatolia appear in heterogeneous costumes in ninth-century BCE Assyrian representations. People from the same city may don different accoutrements that include caps, hairbands, sandals, and shoes with upturned toes. A similar diversity characterizes contemporaneous self-representation of elites at Zincirli in the Outer Citadel Gate and comes to proliferate in eighth-century monuments from sites including Karatepe and Marash. I argue that Assyrian artists recognized heterogeneous costume as a culturally salient feature of Syro-Anatolian art and adapted it in their own representations of the region. This observation has implications for our understanding of Ashurnasirpal II's well-known procession on the courtyard facade of his throne room. When the entire scene is viewed, the combination of accoutrements evokes Syro-Anatolia. However, because Assyrian representations of Syro-Anatolian fashion combine disparate elements that are otherwise characteristic of other regions, the figures can also be viewed individually as representatives from any number of kingdoms. The artists were thus able to harness the diversity of one area to create figures comprehensible to visitors from across the empire. This representational strategy encouraged individuals from different kingdoms to see themselves reflected on the palace walls, forever frozen in a posture of reverent submission.1

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• Excavating the myth of sacred prostitution

  Orientalia · 2021-01-01

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• Text- and Source-Criticism of 1 Samuel 17–18: A Complete Account

  Vetus Testamentum · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • History

  Abstract This article contributes to the debate about the two versions of 1 Samuel 17–18, the shorter one in the Greek Bible and the longer one in the Hebrew. The majority opinion holds that Vaticanus represents the earlier stage and the MT pluses comprise a second version of the main episode, along with harmonizations and additional material. Several of the pluses in chapter 18, however, have been overlooked in previous studies. Accounting for each plus through the end of chapter 18, this study recovers a complete and independent second story that concludes with David’s successful marriage to Saul’s daughter as the reward promised; it identifies and explains all harmonizing additions; and it categorizes an unusual set of unnecessary interpolations made to enrich the story. The study confirms that parallel stories existed and circulated in written form outside “biblical” scrolls; that scribes meticulously spliced written sources to incorporate perceived parallels; and that scribes inserted material to enrich plot-lines, apart from solving narrative problems.

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• An Infelicitous Feast: Ritualized Consumption and Divine Rejection in Amos 6.1–7

  Journal for the Study of the Old Testament · 2020 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Theology
  • Philosophy

  Previous studies of the marzeaḥ in Amos 6.1-7 have tended to put forth one of two opposing views. Scholars who focus on the religious or ritual aspects of the banquet have claimed that the marzeaḥ was lewd, ‘pagan’, and ‘syncretistic’. Calling into question the assumptions of Israelite exceptionalism underlying this approach, a second group argues that the prophetic critique is economic rather than religious in nature. Both approaches are potentially reductive. This paper analyzes the marzeaḥ of Amos 6 in the context of ancient Middle Eastern banquets, with a focus on commensality as a means for human-divine communication. I conclude that the marzeaḥ functioned as an offertory event, in which participants focalized divine presence through ritualized consumption in honor of a patron deity. Banqueters could hope to accrue divine favor through their own feasting. Amos 6.1–7 condemns the affluent for believing that they can give Yahweh their cake and eat it too.

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Frequent coauthors

• Madadh Richey

  University of Chicago

  3 shared

• Simeon Chavel

  1 shared

• M. F. Richey

  1 shared