Die Ägyptenworte im Ezechielbuch

Meike J. Röhrig examines the oracles concerning Egypt in Ezekiel 29-32 from a literary-historical and religious-historical perspective.
The literary-historical analysis combines text-critical and redaction-critical observations. It results in a redaction-historical reconstruction that ranges from earliest tradita from the 7th-6th centuries to comprehensive scribal additions in the Hellenistic period, thereby taking into account the connections of the seven texts with the surrounding Book of Ezekiel.
The religious-historical analysis focuses on potential Egyptian influences in the texts, paying particular attention to sources from Late Period Egypt. It uncovers the authors' and editors' increasing familiarity with genuinely Egyptian religious ideas and traditions. In addition to this increased "Egyptization" of the Egypt oracles, another parallel trend can be identified in the later levels of the text: an increasing "Israelization" of Egypt, which is increasingly seen as an other counterpart to YHWH, similar to Israel.
From a methodological perspective, the work highlights the great theological potential that still lies in the diachronic analysis of this corpus of oracles, which in the recent past has been examined almost exclusively "synchronically," and emphasizes the importance of the methodological intertwining of text criticism, redaction criticism, and religious-historical methods.