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Between Rome and Babylon includes over thirty papers by Aharon Oppenheimer about Jewish life in Palestine and Babylonia in the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud (1st-4th centuries), dealing with leadership and society, political and military activity, relations with the authorities and historical geography. The collection is organized around three inter-connected themes: 1 Roman Palestine and its Environs; 2 The Bar Kokhba Revolt; 3 Babylonia Judaica. About two-thirds of the papers were originally published in Hebrew. They have been selected and edited for this collection, and translated for the first time into English or German. The rest of the papers originally appeared in various diffe...
Herzog has written an introduction for seminary and college students to the discussion about the historical Jesus. He reports on the findings of the Jesus Seminar and also traces other scholarly work in Jesus studies, but with an eye to the theological.
In fulfilling the long-awaited need for a constructive and critical rethinking of Dalit theology this book offers and explores the synoptic healing stories as a relevant biblical paradigm for Dalit theology in order to help redress the lacuna between Dalit theology and the social practice of the Indian Church. Peniel Rajkumar's starting point is that the growing influence of Dalit theology in academic circles is incompatible with the praxis of the Indian Church which continues to be passive in its attitude towards the oppression of the Dalits both within and outside the Church. The theological reasons for this lacuna between Dalit theology and the Church's praxis, Rajkumar suggests, lie in the content of Dalit theology, especially the biblical paradigms explored, which do not offer adequate scope for engagement in praxis.
The Hebrew scriptures, called Tanakh or simply Bible by Jews and the Old Testament by Christians, contain the original sources of western religious traditions. This book describes their growth beginning with the traditions that grew up among Israelite tribes in Canaan and the Israelite and Judean monarchies that followed. Part I treats the formation of oral rituals and traditions which came to be the contents of the written books. Part II deals with the formation of the literature contained in the Hebrew Scriptures. Part III describes the development of the canons of Hebrew and Greek scriptures.
Drawing on recent insights from postcolonial theory and social psychology, Travis B. Williams seeks to diagnose the social strategy of good works in 1 Peter by examining how the persistent admonition to "do good" is intended to be an appropriate response to social conflict. Challenging the modern consensus, which interprets the epistle's good works language as an attempt to accommodate Greco-Roman society and thereby to lessen social hostility, the author demonstrates that the exhortation to "do good" envisages a pattern of conduct which stands opposed to popular values. The Petrine author appropriates terminology that was commonly associated with wealth and social privilege and reinscribes it with a new meaning in order to provide his marginalized readers with an alternative vision of reality, one in which the honor and approval so valued in society is finally available to them. The good works theme thus articulates a competing discourse which challenges dominant social structures and the hegemonic ideology which underlies them.
With contributions from many noted scholars in a wide range of fields, this is a multidisciplinary study of one of the world's great cities that is of enormous, historical, religious and political significance.
This book introduces the Age of Justinian, the last Roman century and the first flowering of Byzantine culture. Dominated by the policies and personality of emperor Justinian I (527–565), this period of grand achievements and far-reaching failures witnessed the transformation of the Mediterranean world. In this volume, twenty specialists explore the most important aspects of the age including the mechanics and theory of empire, warfare, urbanism, and economy. It also discusses the impact of the great plague, the codification of Roman law, and the many religious upheavals taking place at the time. Consideration is given to imperial relations with the papacy, northern barbarians, the Persians, and other eastern peoples, shedding new light on a dramatic and highly significant historical period.
Ilie Bădescu and Joseph Livni follow the footsteps of two giants who pioneered the field: H. H. Stahl of Romania, who studied the sociology of communal societies, and D. J. Elazar of the United States, who studied the political science of covenantal societies. This collection sheds light on obscure corners of the field, gathering up thoughts and concepts of many other sources of past and contemporary research in the field. In this volume, the reader will find answers to difficult questions like: How did acephalous societies penetrate civilization? How did they manage to preserve their egalitarian ethos? Why did powerful hierarchies work in partnership with them? And, most importantly, how did covenantal societies work around the constraints of a civilized reality? The history of civilization consists of various degrees of stratified configurations ranging from oligarchic city states to powerful pyramidal empires.
Jeffrey Stackert explores literary correspondences among the pentateuchal legal corpora and especially the relationships between similar laws in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation (Lev 17-26, the so-called "Holiness Code," as well as significant parts of the Priestly source elsewhere in the Pentateuch). Resemblances between these law collections range from broad structure to fine detail and include treatments of similar legal topics, correlations with regard to sequence of laws, and precise grammatical and lexical correspondences. Yet the nature and basis of these resemblances persist as debated points among biblical scholars. Through an analysis of the pentateuchal laws on asylum, sev...
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history. Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conqu...