This interdisciplinary study integrates textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible and comparable ancient Near Eastern material with social theory and archaeology in order to articulate the ancient Israelites' taken-for-granted understandings of natural disasters, their intellectual and theological challenges to those understandings, and their intellectual and theological reconstructions thereof.

This book examines the development of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of the Jewish people and Judaism. Formulating a typological association between the biblical figure of Cain and the Jews, he crafts a highly intricate theology that justifies and even demands the continuing presence of Jews and their religious practices in a Christian society. Such a theology emerges out of his highly original interpretation of Genesis 4:1–15 and yet mirrors and theologically justifies the reality of Jews and Judaism in the late Roman Empire.

A collection of articles by Richard E. Mitchell presenting all the major historiographical problems scholars encounter in reconstructing the early Republic. Mitchell was one of the first scholars to question the practice of taking the broad outlines of the accounts handed down by Roman historians (writing hundreds of years later) at face value in writing modern accounts of the period.

Historical syntax has long been neglected in the study of the Semitic languages, although it holds great value for the subgrouping of this diverse language family. Focusing on the development of adverbial subordination, nominal modifiers and direct speech marking, as well as reviewing changes through language contact and drift, this book is the first step in the syntactic reconstruction of the Aramaic dialect group, the longest-attested branch of the Semitic language family.

The United States’ standing in the Middle East eroded as a result of its policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1947 to 1967, with Eisenhower’s “immediate deterrence” proving the lone exception. This period was especially critical as it introduced dynamics into the Middle Eastern balance of power that have proved particularly difficult to address. While the responsibility for seeking an end to conflict ultimately lies with the belligerents, the United States bears a heavy historical responsibility for the course of events and must now constitute the driving force behind a peaceful resolution of the dispute.

The present volume contains a collection of papers on different aspects of Aramaic linguistics, history and culture. These diverse papers are specifically intended for an informed Aramaic readership interested in raising awareness of their own culture. A fresh range of topics is therefore presented in this flagship volume of the series, offering a renewed vision of Aramaic and Syriac studies even for the specialists in the field.