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Syriac Christianity developed in the first centuries CE in the Middle East, where it continued to flourish throughout Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, while also spreading widely, as far as India and China. Today, Syriac Christians are found in the Middle East, in India, as well in diasporas scattered across the globe. Over this extended time period and across this vast geographic expanse, Syriac Christians have built impressive churches and monasteries, crafted fine pieces of art, and written and transmitted a sizable body of literature. Though often overlooked, neglected, and even persecuted, Syriac Christianity has been – and continues to be – an important part of the humanisti...
Twenty-eight revised and updated essays on the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, the (proto-) Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls originally published between 2010 and 2018 are presented in this fourth volume of the author’s collected essays. These areas have all developed much in modern research, and the author, the past editor-in-chief of the international Dead Sea Scrolls publication project, has been a major speaker in all of them. The topics presented in this volume display some of his emerging interests (the text of the Torah and the proto-MT), including central studies on the development of the text of the Torah, the enigma of the MT, and the Scripture text of the tefillin.
In Proverbs 1–9, we are introduced to stunning, scandalous, and mysterious Lady Wisdom. For millennia interpreters have endeavored to explain, simplify, or domesticate the vaunted and varied personification of this woman. In Wisdom Is a Woman, Lance Rundus illustrates that our difficulties with Lady Wisdom run much deeper than uncertainty about her origins and depiction, but are rooted in inherited assumptions about and definitions of metaphor, as well as a distorted disposition toward right hemisphere modes of knowledge that undercut the very attempt at discovering Wisdom at all. Wisdom Is a Woman invites the reader into the mode of aesthetic perception that opens the way to the beautiful, transcendent intimacy of relational knowledge born from constellations of canonical metaphor in Proverbs 1–9. In “obtaining scale” with Wisdom we discover that this paradoxical wonder is but a faint echo of the wonder and beauty of the Triune God in the person, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
This collection of articles uniquely brings into scholarly dialogue the textual history and criticism of authoritative literatures from diverse cultures: they study Mesopotamian literature, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Homeric epics, the Quran, and Hindu and Buddhist literatures with an interest in all matters of their textual transmission. Contributors address questions such as: What role does textual criticism play in the study of authoritative texts in these fields? How much variation exists in these textual traditions? Can you observe processes of textual standardization? What role does the oral transmission play? How are critical editions prepared? While these questions have produced a wealth of scholarly literature for each individual field, this volume is the first to study them from a comparative perspective.
The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe opened up a new future—for theology, too, not least in Romania, perhaps of all Orthodox nations the most open to the West. Young Romanian Orthodox theologians seized the opportunity to study and research in the West, availing themselves of mentors and resources hitherto denied them; some have settled in the West, others returned home. This welcome volume displays a theological revival as young Romanian theologians draw on tradition and address new problems. We can discern here a welcome confidence in the Orthodox tradition, no longer on the defensive nor concerned to mark itself off from the theology of the ‘West’. It is a ‘generous Orthodoxy’ (a term that has been used of the theological approach of the late Metropolitan Kallistos), ready to share its treasures with other Christians and eager to learn from them and engage with them.
This English translation of Giorgio Buccellati’s ambitious work offers readers an insightful discussion of ancient Mesopotamian religion and spirituality in its relationship to the biblical ethos. Our understanding of ancient Mesopotamian religion, while shaped by a wealth of archaeological, artistic, and epigraphic evidence, remains limited with regard to a proper hermeneutic approach. In this volume, Buccellati sheds light on the spirituality of Mesopotamian polytheism by drawing comparisons with that of biblical monotheism. These comparisons are used to better understand the divine-human relationship in the Mesopotamian context, as both individuals and members of a wider community. In a...
The present volume contains a collection of essays on the Book of Isaiah offered as a tribute to Arie van der Kooij on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, which coincides with his retirement as Professor of Old Testament at Leiden University. The twenty-four contributions, written by leading scholars in the field of Old Testament studies, focus on the Book of Isaiah within the context of Hebrew and ancient near-eastern writings, particularly those from the Neo-Assyrian period, as well as on the book's reception history , particularly in its Greek and Syriac translations. Together these studies offer a rich and original contribution to the study of the Book of Isaiah in its Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Greek, Syriac, and Dutch contexts.
In The Text of the Hebrew Bible and its Editions some of the top world scholars and editors of the Hebrew Bible and its versions present essays on the aims, method, and problems of editing the biblical text(s), taking as a reference the Complutensian Polyglot, first modern edition of the Hebrew text and its versions and whose Fifth Centennial was celebrated in 2014. The main parts of the volume discuss models of editions from the Renaissance and its forerunners to the Digital Age, the challenges offered by the different textual traditions, particular editorial problems of the individual books of the Bible, and the role played by quotations. It thus sets a landmark in the future of biblical editions.
The Bible is one of the books that has aroused the most interest throughout history to the present day. However, there is one topic that has mostly been neglected and which today constitutes one of the most emblematic elements of the visual culture in which we live immersed: the language of colour. Colour is present in the biblical text from its beginning to its end, but it has hardly been studied, and we appear to have forgotten that the detailed study of the colour terms in the Bible is essential to understanding the use and symbolism that the language of colour has acquired in the literature that has forged European culture and art. The objective of the present study is to provide the mod...