Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 68:4 (Dec 2025)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JETS 68:4 (December 2025) p. 779

Book Reviews

The Amarna Letters: The Syro-Levantine Correspondence. Transcribed and translated by Jacob Lauinger and Tyler R. Voder. Columbus, GA: Lockwood, 2025, xii + 577 pp., $125.00 paper.

One of the more illuminating extrabiblical witnesses to the period of Israelite history soon after the conquest of Canaan under Joshua is the Amarna Letters: correspondence that mainly consists of explanations of difficult circumstances and complaints that petty rulers in Canaan were registering to Egypt’s king, who was their overlord. In The Amarna Letters, Lauinger and Voder provide a fresh and modernized English translation of these letters, with accompanying transliteration. Lauinger is professor of Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University and one of the foremost authorities on the Akkadian language and its peripheral dialects.

The book consists of three parts: (1) an introduction, (2) a transliteration and translation of the letters, and (3) a concluding section with references cited and an index with page numbers for the letters. The introduction includes an explanation of what the Amarna Letters are, an answer as to why a new edition is warranted, a summary of how this edition was formulated, a discussion of the discovery of the letters, a recounting of the historical context of the letters, a treatment of the languages used to compose the letters, a rationale for the translational practice adopted, and a detailing of how they arranged the letters and what conventions they used.

Regarding the transliteration and translation of the letters, the section that comprises the vast majority of the volume, the authors followed a modified version of Jørgen Knudtzon’s sequence for the numbering of the letters (e.g. EA [El Amarna] 68). Their arrangement departs from the traditional sequence in two ways. First, their organizing of the letters brings together those sent from a single site and/or a single ruler, meaning that the sequence appears to be numerically random, rather than consecutively ordered. Second, they begin with the letters sent by the Egyptians to the Levantine city-rulers (p. 19). The translators omitted EA 1–44 (some of which were composed in languages other than Akkadian) from their volume, apparently because these diplomatic letters were sent to Egypt by non-Levantine “Great Powers.”

Regarding the section with references cited and the index, the authors offer a relative goldmine on the relevant literature related to the Amarna Letters, as their up-to-date bibliography enables anyone interested in this topic to know what resources exist. The index is necessary for using the volume as a reference tool, because the translators do not follow Knudtzon’s numbering system consecutively, such as EA 45, EA 46, and so forth...