Editing Exegesis (section)

==Mesopotamian commentaries==
One of the early examples of exegesis, and one of the larger corpora of text commentaries from the ancient world, comes from [[Mesopotamia]] (modern-day Iraq) in the first millennium BCE. Containing over 860 manuscripts, the majority of which date to 700–100 BCE, these commentaries explore numerous types of texts, including literary works (such as the [[Enûma Eliš|Babylonian Epic of Creation]]), medical treatises, magical texts, ancient dictionaries, and law collections (the [[Code of Hammurabi]]). Most of them, however, comment on divination treatises, in particular treatises that predict the future from the appearance and movement of celestial bodies on the one hand ([[Enūma Anu Enlil]]), and from the appearance of a sacrificed sheep's liver on the other ([[Bārûtu]]).

As with the majority of the thousands of texts from the [[ancient Near East]] that have survived to the present day, Mesopotamian text commentaries are written on clay tablets in [[cuneiform script]]. Text commentaries are written in the East Semitic language of [[Akkadian (language)|Akkadian]], but due to the influence of lexical lists written in [[Sumerian language]] on cuneiform scholarship, they often contain Sumerian words or phrases as well.

Cuneiform commentaries are important because they provide information about Mesopotamian languages and culture that are not available elsewhere in the cuneiform record. To give but one example, the pronunciation of the cryptically written name of Gilgamesh, the hero of the [[Epic of Gilgamesh]], was discovered in a cuneiform commentary on a medical text.<ref>{{multiref|1=BM 54595 ([http://ccp.yale.edu/P461257 ''CCP'' 4.2.R])|2={{cite book|first1=T. G. |last1=Pinches|chapter=Exit Gišṭubar!|title=The Babylonian and Oriental Record|volume= 4|page=264|year=1889}}}}</ref> However, the significance of cuneiform commentaries extends beyond the light they shed on specific details of Mesopotamian civilization. They shed light on what the concerns of the Mesopotamian literate elite were when they read some of the most widely studied texts in the Mesopotamian intellectual tradition, a perspective that is important for "seeing things their way."<ref>{{Cite journal |doi = 10.1086/599594|title = Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World|journal = Critical Inquiry|volume = 35|issue = 4|pages = 931–961|year = 2009|last1 = Pollock|first1 = Sheldon|s2cid = 162350464}}</ref> Finally, cuneiform commentaries are also the earliest examples of textual interpretation. It has been repeatedly argued that they influenced rabbinical exegesis.<ref>See [http://ccp.yale.edu/introduction/akkadian-hebrew-exegesis Akkadian Commentaries and Early Hebrew Exegesis]</ref>

The publication and interpretation of these texts began in the mid-19th century, with the discovery of the royal Assyrian libraries at Nineveh, from which ca. 454 text commentaries have been recovered. The study of cuneiform commentaries is, however, far from complete. It is the subject of on-going research by the small, international community of scholars who specialize in the field of [[Assyriology]].