I write this preface on a sunny afternoon in beautifully forested Grunewald, a western suburb of Berlin, on der Tag der deutschen Einheit, the Day of German Unity, which celebrates the country's reunification, sixteen years after the wall came down. A scant hundred and fifty yards down Königsallee, the street where I live, lies the spot where Walter Rathenau, then serving as foreign minister, was machine-gunned to death in his car on June 24, 1922. A gray stone memorial, erected in 1946, marks the location; this week a large wreath of flowers suddenly appeared there, placed by students and teachers from the local school named in his memory.

This volume, like this location, has a long history, and it embodies its intellectual project in several ways. I have long been concerned about the gap that divides academic Biblical Studies from the larger humanities, the more so because it was through the study of literature and intellectual history that I first became interested in the study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. As I worked hard in graduate school to acquire the necessary philological competence, this perception of distance—“Mind the gap!”—between the fields seemed to increase rather than to narrow.

The gap remains a concern. For all the clamor about scientific illiteracy, there is an equal degree of unfamiliarity with the perspectives, insights, and changed way of reading Scripture provided by academic Biblical Studies and Near Eastern studies. This has implications for matters of public policy.