long-term preservation. It is certainly not by accident that the majority of the prophetic documents come from Mari and Nineveh, which are in general the two most abundant Mesopotamian archives found thus far. On the other hand, the huge process of collecting, editing, and interpreting prophecy that took place as a part of the formation of the Hebrew Bible is virtually without precedent in the rest of the ancient Near East. Only in Assyria do the collections of prophetic oracles to Esarhaddon document