Robert B. Coote is internationally renowned for work on the Bible and the ancient Near East that crosses the usual disciplinary boundaries. Whether re-examining arcane inscriptions, conventional views of the Pentateuch, Israel's early history, the composition of a particular book of the Bible, or the making of the Bible in the broader sense, his question has been not whether some texts are tendentious and others not, but rather how each biblical composition or re-composition takes on the flavour of its contexts. Coote's skill in explicating the subtle interplay between contextual foil and...