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The post-exilic of Persian period showed a transition in the religion in ancient Israel from Yahwism(s) to Judaism(s). The events of exile and return made it impossible to completely fall back on the traditional religious identity. The essays in this volume try to reconstruct the path taken in that transition. The characters of Ezra and Nehemiah are generally seen as playing a formative role in this process. By reading texts from the biblical books supposedly written by Ezra and Nehemiah in a religio-historical context, new light falls on the process of change.
Winner of the 2020 BAJS Book Prize! The book prize initiative was launched by BAJS in 2018 to recognise and promote outstanding scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies. In Scribal Culture in Ben Sira Lindsey A. Askin examines scribal culture as a framework for analysing features of textual referencing throughout the Book of Ben Sira (c.198-175 BCE), revealing new insights into how Ben Sira wrote his book of wisdom. Although the title of “scribe” is regularly applied to Ben Sira, this designation presents certain interpretive challenges. Through comparative analysis, Askin contextualizes the sage’s compositional style across historical, literary, and socio-cultural spheres of operation. New light is shed on Ben Sira’s text and early Jewish textual reuse. Drawing upon physical and material evidence of reading and writing, Askin reveals the dexterity and complexity of Ben Sira’s sustained textual reuse. Ben Sira’s achievement thus demonstrates exemplary, “excellent” writing to a receptive audience.
Living as an alien in one’s native land is a familiar reality to marginalized communities. Cultural, economic, and political shifts can cause people to become alienated by a system of greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and media manipulation. How can Christians persist under a sustained threat within a social order diametrically opposed to them? This question drives Warner Bailey’s investigation of 1 Peter. The mature Christology of 1 Peter yields a profile of Christian identity. This picture is funded by texts from the Book of the Twelve (Hosea-Malachi) and is counter-intuitive, in that it is able to create new initiatives for behavior that offer hope for redemption in the midst of oppression. Bailey explores how 1 Peter has been used in shaping the life of modern “aliens,” such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, living in his own country under the oppression of Nazism, and feminist, black, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ readers. Placing 1 Peter within the crisis in U.S. political and economic life opens up fresh implications for faithful ecclesiastical practice and personal witness.
Feminist biblical interpretation has reached a level of maturity that now makes possible a commentary series on every book of the Bible. It is our hope that Wisdom Commentary, by making the best of current feminist biblical scholarship available in an accessible format ... will aid readers in their advancement toward God's vision of dignity, equality, and justice for all. - Book jacket.
This volume of essays on Ben Sira is a Festschrift on the occasion of the 65th birthday of Prof. Nuria Calduch-Benages. The volume gathers the latest studies on Ben Sira's relationship with other Jewish traditions. With a variety of methods and approaches, the volume explores Ben Sira's interpretation of received traditions, his views on the prevailing issues of his time, and the subsequent reception of his work.
This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa 1:10–17; 43:22–28; and 58:1–14 and concludes that, even though the role of cult and ethics in each p...
The Orion Center Bibliography of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1995-2000) is the fourth official Scrolls bibliography, following bibliographies covering the periods 1948-1957 (W. S. LaSor), 1958-1969 (B. Jongeling), and 1970-1995 (F. García Martínez and D. W. Parry). The current interest in the Scrolls, with at least two journals dedicated to these texts, has led to a proliferation of secondary literature, theses, and electronic publications. The Orion Center Bibliography contains over 3000 entries, including approximately 600 reviews, gathered from the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, from on-line databases, and from the authors themselves. This work is based on the bibliography compiled by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jerusalem, and includes reviews, journal articles, and electronic publications, a text index and a subject index.
In modern literary studies intertextuality is at the centre of interest. Although the relationship between texts has always been an important aspect of Old Testament studies, especially in literary criticism, the scale of comparison has broadened, including for example the interrelationships between the First, Second and Third Isaiah, or the whole Book of the Twelve. These relatively new approaches raise a number of methodical questions which were addressed at the Tenth Joint Meeting of the British Society for Old Testament Study and the Dutch 'Oudtestamentisch Werkgezelschap', held at Oxford, 22nd to 25th July 1997. Did the ancient authors have a well-defined concept of a book? How did they...
The historiography of Ancient Israel is much debated. The various approaches are never void of ideology and some reckon more with the available evidence than others. This volume consists of a set of case-studies that reveal the difficulties that arise when trying to write a history as honestly as possible. This implies that both the archaeology of Ancient Palestine - the finds and their interrogation - as well as the Philosophy of History - their models and their implications - are discussed. The outcome is a variety of approaches that inform the reader of current views on the history of Ancient Israel.
We know that the earliest Christians sang hymns. But are some of these early Christian hymns preserved for us in the New Testament? Matthew Gordley takes a new look at didactic hymns in the Greco-Roman and Jewish world of the early church, considering how they might function in the New Testament and what they could tell us about early Christian worship.