Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts
This series contains volumes dealing with the study of the Hebrew Bible, ancient Israelite society and related ancient societies, Biblical Hebrew and cognate languages, the reception of biblical texts through the centuries, and the history of the discipline. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and the printed version of the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.
Does God take into account only the physical act, or does He also consider intention? Does inward motivation truly matter in the areas of criminal or cultic law? Were there differences between the biblical, hellenistic and rabbinic views on intention? This book explores what the Old Testament, Philo, and the early Rabbis thought about human intentionality in a legal context.
A volume of collected essays that explores what we can learn about the producers and readers of biblical books by looking into matters of language, rhetoric, style, and ideology. What do they teach us about these literati’s world of knowledge and imagination, about the issues they had in mind and the ways they came to deal with them through authoritative literature? The book includes essays on such issues as whether linguistic theories can solve literary-critical problems, on what is “late biblical Hebrew,” on parallelism and noun groups in biblical poetry, and the communicative meaning of some linguistic choices.
The Hebrew Bible discusses difficult and often ineffable subjects such as life, God, heaven and earth and frequently relies upon metaphor to do so. This volume of collected essays offers a new methodological approach to understanding metaphors as conceptualizing aspects of life. Articles provide close analysis of metaphors in various biblical books such as Psalms, Job, Judges, Chronicles, Isaiah, and Hosea.
Authors of the Hebrew Bible had at least 17 different verbs which they could use to represent “leading” or “guiding” in the Hebrew Bible. What are these “verbs of leading” and how are they related to one another? Why did an author choose the particular “leading” verb he chose in a particular context? Every occurrence of a verb of leading in the Hebrew Bible is examined through the lens of semantic-role theory by assigning roles to each of the phrases typically used with the verbs. This study resolves some problem passages and supplements traditional lexicographical research.
This book explores the role of the biblical patriarch Abraham in the formation and use of authoritative texts in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. It reflects a conference session in 2009 focusing on Abraham as a figure of cultural memory in the literature of these periods. Cultural memory is the shared reproduction and recalling of what has been learned and retained. It also involves transformation and innovation. As a figure of memory, stories of Abraham served as guidelines for identity-formation and authoritative illustration of behaviour for the emerging Jewish communities.
Ancient Egyptian leaders sought to preserve the status quo by using not only their military might, but also enlisting magical rituals to help control any perceived threats to their way of life. Biblical leaders also sought to control their respective peoples by means of divine authority, brute force, and/or ritual actions. Examples of ritual actions by Moses and Jeremiah mimic those used by the ancient Egyptians in order to preserve or restore order to their given societies.
The dating of some Archaic Biblical Hebrew poems to the late second millennium – early first millennium BCE on the basis of a handful of linguistic forms in common with second millennium Ugaritic and Amarna-Canaanite texts is brought into question. This critique highlights the problems with the arguments and hypotheses presented in the literature, and concludes that there is no compelling evidence to support the use of linguistic data for dating purposes.
Previous generations of scholars believed that prophecy was unique to ancient Israel. However, recent archaeological discoveries reveal that numerous societies in the ancient Near East practiced prophecy. This study examines the similarities and differences between Neo-Assyrian and biblical prophecy, particularly focusing on the 7th c. BCE prophets Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, and discusses what implications these differences may have for our understanding of these prophets.
The foundational period of Hebrew Bible scholarship promulgated the assumption that the original “authors” were incapable of the sophisticated literary technique displayed in that work. Complexity was ascribed to a later stage. Yet in that later stage the supposedly more sophisticated redactors were unable to see blatant contradictions and redundancies. This work investigates Genesis, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles looking at how the message conveyed has been misunderstood through assumptions about the capacities and intentions of original writers. It shows how retaining the assumptions about the inability of early writers inevitably leads to conclusions of a late provenance.
This book examines the Old Testament language about Israel’s relationship with God in the light of Assyrian royal propaganda. Unpacking this language’s meaning in both Assyrian and biblical contexts, it shows Israel borrowed language from Assyrian vassal treaties to describe its covenant with God, and this book reveals what “covenant” meant, and that it is not “covenant” at all, but “grace.” The broader theological implications of this discovery are explored in dialogue with contemporary theologians. The book takes seriously the study of text in its ancient context in order to highlight the theological content and its modern relevance.
This eclectic collection contains 16 articles on a variety of topics within Qumran Studies from a conference held in memory of the late Professor Alan Crown. Essays cover the impact of the Qumran discoveries on the study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to the study of the scrolls themselves and the community organizations presupposed in them, focusing as well on topics as diverse as sexuality, scribal practice and the attitude to the Temple in the scrolls.
Cultural memory is the shared reproduction and recollection of what has been learned and retained, normally treated as “the cultural heritage”. The purpose of this book, the first product of the research program Cultural Memory in Biblical Exegesis, is to study how memory is inscribed and embodied in biblical culture and its surrounding area. The essays in this volume seek to open new investigations into cultural memory in biblical and cognate studies, and to include a plethora of methods and perspectives such as the relationship between cultural memory approach and post-colonialism, globalism and epistemology.
This volume contains twelve articles that shed new light on the Book of Isaiah, covering a wide array of historical, linguistic and theological topics. The various aspects of God’s intervention at different points of human history is a main focus of the studies. The collection is marked by a broad diversity in approaches and theological background, and is a useful tool especially for scholars, students and pastors.
This volume explores themes at the intersection of the Bible and science fiction. In the genre of science fiction in film, books, comic books, or fan fiction, we find portrayals of possible futures, altered pasts, supernatural or beyond-human beings. Just as in biblical literature, science fiction can contain metaphysical speculation. Departing from this intersection, the authors engage with biblical texts 'as' science fiction, asking different questions of their sources: can science fiction theory and practice yield new approaches to the discussion of biblical texts? The authors reflect on methodology and offer case studies that include, among others, superhuman biblical kings and uncanny divine intermediaries.
Divine and Human Hate in the Ancient Near East studies lexemes for ‘hate’ in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Akkadian. Riley conducts a lexical study of three ‘hate’ terms, along with comparative analysis of divine and human hate in biblical, Ugaritic, and Mesopotamian literature.