SOURCE: Anbar, Moshe. “‘Thou Shalt Make No Covenant with Them’ (Exodus 23.32).” In Politics and Theopolitics in the Bible and Postbiblical Literature, edited by Henning Graf Reventlow, Yair Hoffman, and Benjamin Uffenheimer, pp. 41-48. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Anbar uses Exodus 23.32 to illustrate how prophecy figured into politics.

The Mari texts cover a highly eventful period of numerous political upheavals in which a role was played by monarchs of powerful kingdoms and rulers of small city-states. Political events of worldwide impact, as well as the everyday life of the ruling classes and the common people, are reflected in the texts.

The Mari archive contains some fifty ‘prophetic texts’. Since 1947, the time when Georges Dossin presented Adolphe Lods with the first Mari prophetic text, Mari prophecy and its relation to biblical prophecy has become an essential part of the discussion of the origins of Near Eastern...