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Did the ancient Israelites perform rituals expressive of the belief in the supernaturalbeneficent power of the dead? Contrary to long held notions of primitive society and the euhemeristic origin of the divine, various factors indicate that the ancestor cult, that is, ancestor veneration or worship, was not observed in the Iron Age Levant. The Israelites did not adopt an ancient Canaanite ancestor cult that became the object of biblical scorn. Yet, a variety of mortuary rituals and cults were performed in Levantine society; mourning and funerary rites and longer-term rituals such as the care for the dead and commemoration. Rituals and monuments in or at burial sites, and especially the recit...
"Were there countervailing cosmic realms ruled by Yahweh and Asherah in late pre-exilic Israel? Brian B. Schmidt presents five case studies corroborating the existence of a daimonic realm replete with intermediary protecticve spirits and a pandemonium that wreaked havoc upon both the living and dead. Having converged with Egypt's protective deities Bes and Beset, YHWH and Asherah also possessed the enhanced powers to govern a counteractive apotropaic realm from which Asherah mediated divine portections for humanity." -- bck cover
This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The strength of the present volume lies in the breadth of scholarly approaches represented. The book begins with several papyrological studies presenting important new texts in Greek and Coptic, continuing with essays focussing on taxonomy and definition. The concluding essays apply contemporary theories to analyses of specific test cases in a broad variety of ancient Mediterranean cultures. Paul Mirecki, Th.D. (1986) in Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Marvin Meyer, Ph.D. (1979) in Religion, Claremont Graduate School, is Professor of Religion at Chapman University, Orange, California, and Director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity.
Thirteen foremost scholars describe the views of death, life after death, resurrection, and the world-to-come set forth in Scripture as a whole; distinct parts of Scripture such as Psalms and the Wisdom literature; apocalyptic and the non-apocalyptic pseudepigraphic literature, Philo; Josephus; the Dead Sea Scrolls; earliest Christianity (the Gospels in particular); the Rabbinic sources; the Palestinian Targums to the Pentateuch; and the inscriptional evidence.
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible spark discussions that last for centuries. From the creation stories in Genesis through the delineation of the law in Deuteronomy, these five books - the Pentateuch - contain deep troves of historical and spiritual treasures. In The Bible's Foundation: An Introduction to the Pentateuch, Charles Aaron Jr. looks at each book through several perspectives: ancient near-Eastern background, literary analysis, structure, important theological concepts, and compositional history. The Bible's Foundation: An Introduction to the Pentateuch accounts the academic significance of each book and the issues of faith that have marked these books as important, sacred texts. Each chapter summarizes the content of an individual book, provides careful analysis for selected representative passages, and discusses in a critical way the faith issues raised from the text.
An engaging series of essays, originally given at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. The aim of the colloquium was to make available the results of recent archaeological work to a wider interested public, and specifically to bring science to bear on the early history of the Jewish people.
This collection of essays focuses on divination across the Ancient World from early Mesopotamia to late antiquity. The authors deal with the forms, theory and poetics of this important and still poorly understood ancient phenomenon.
Write That They May Read is a collection of essays written in honor of our mentor, friend, and fellow scholar, Professor Alan R. Millard. Respectful of his contribution to our understanding of writing and literacy in the ancient biblical world, all the essays deal with some aspect of this issue, ranging in scope from archeological artifacts that need to be "read," to early evidence of writing in Israel's world, to the significance of reading and writing in the Bible, including God's own literacy, to the production of books in the ancient world, and the significance of metaphorical branding of God's people with his name. The contributors are distributed among Professor Millard's peers and col...
One of the enduring problems in biblical studies is how the Bible came to be written. Clearly, scribes were involved. But our knowledge of scribal training in ancient Israel is limited. William Schniedewind explores the unexpected cache of inscriptions discovered at a remote, Iron Age military post called Kuntillet 'Ajrud to assess the question of how scribes might have been taught to write. Here, far from such urban centers as Jerusalem or Samaria, plaster walls and storage pithoi were littered with inscriptions. Apart from the sensational nature of some of the contents-perhaps suggesting Yahweh had a consort-these inscriptions also reflect actual writing practices among soldiers stationed near the frontier. What emerges is a very different picture of how writing might have been taught, as opposed to the standard view of scribal schools in the main population centers.
This book provides an authoritative account of the controversy about the first great debate in the field of International Relations. Of all the self-images of International Relations, none is as pervasive and enduring as the notion that a great debate pitting idealists against realists took place in the 1940s. The story of the first great debate continues to structure the contemporary identity of International Relations, yet in recent years revisionist historians have challenged the conventional wisdom that the field experienced such a debate. Drawing on expert contributors working in Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this book includes key participants in the historiographical controversy. The book assembles the existing scholarship and provides a thorough analysis of the status of the first great debate in the history of International Relations. It is an invaluable examination of the causes and future direction of idealist and realist arguments. International Relations and the First Great Debate will be of interest to students and scholars concerned with the foundations of International Relations.