You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Chaya T. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual j...
Samson's Cords examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by an explosion of loyalty oaths in Britain before and after 1660.
"In this work, Lyn M. Kidson moves away from the traditional interpretation of 1 Timothy as a church manual and argues that the coordinating purpose of the letter is to command 'certain men (and women)' not to teach an educational program that is being promoted by factional leaders Hymenaeus and Alexander."--
Whether in the courts, Parliament or the pub, to persuade you need proof, be that argument- or evidence-based. But what counts as proof, and as satisfactory proof, varies from culture to culture and from context to context. This volume assembles a range of experts in ancient Greek literature to address the theme of proof from different angles and in the works of different authors and contexts. Much of the focus is on the Athenian orators, who discussed the nature and kinds of proof from at least the fourth century BC and are still the subject of lively debate. But demonstration through evidence and argument and the language of proof are not limited to the lawcourts. They have a place in other literary forms, prose and verse, including drama and historiography, and these too feature in the collection. The book will be of interest to students and professional scholars in the fields of Greek literature and law, and Greek social and political history.
One “apocalyptic” reading of Paul’s letter to the Galatians has been attempted before and is now widely accepted, but that reading is not based on a thorough engagement with Jewish apocalyptic traditions of the Second Temple period. In this book, James M. Scott argues that there is an essential continuity between Galatians and Paul’s Jewish past, and that Paul uses the apocalyptic Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 92–105) as a literary model for his own letter. Scott first contextualizes the Epistle of Enoch using the entire Enochic corpus and explores the extensive similarities (and some significant differences) between the Enochic tradition and early Stoicism. Then he turns to deal specifically with Paul’s letter to the Galatians, showing that, despite their obvious differences, the two apocalyptic letters have some remarkable features in common as well. This approach to the interpretation of Galatians fundamentally stands to change the way biblical scholars understand Paul’s letter and the gospel that he preached. Paul is “within Judaism,” if the net for what is included in “Judaism” is wide enough to encompass the Enochic tradition.
Sharing with the Gods examines one of the most ubiquitous yet little studied aspects of ancient Greek religion, the offering of so-called "first-fruits" (aparchai) and "tithes" (dekatai), from the Archaic period to the Hellenistic. While most existing studies of Greek religion tend to focus on ritual performance, this volume investigates questions of religious belief and mentality: why the Greeks presented these gifts to the gods, and what their behaviour tells us about their religious world-view, presuppositions, and perception of the gods. Exploiting an array of ancient sources, the author assesses the diverse nature of aparchai and dekatai, the complexity of the motivations underlying the...
Incorporating the intellectual history of disciplines from across the humanities, including environmental anthropology, philosophy, ethics, literature, history, science and technology studies, this volume provides a select orientation to the experience of nature from the ancient world to the Anthropocene. Taking its momentum from the emerging environmental humanities, this collection integrates Western, Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist and eco-spiritual perspectives that address pressing environmental concerns and reimagine the place of humans within the natural world. Across thirteen chapters, the contributors discuss the blending of environmental concerns with political and moral questio...
In Argument is War: Relevance-Theoretic Comprehension of the Conceptual Metaphor of War in the Apocalypse, Clifford T. Winters demonstrates that the apparent war in the Apocalypse is rather telling the story of the gospel: how Christ will restore Israel and, through them, the rest of the world. When Revelation is viewed through the corrective lens of cognitive linguistics, its violence becomes victory, its violent characters become Christ, and its bloody end becomes the blessed beginning of the New Jerusalem. Revelation is simply telling the story of the early church (the Gospels and Acts) to the early church, and it is using a conceptual metaphor (‘ARGUMENT IS WAR’) to do it.
First full-length study of the use and perception of deceit in medieval warfare. Deception and trickery are a universal feature of warfare, from the Trojan horse to the inflatable tanks of the Second World War. The wars of the Central Middle Ages (c. 1000-1320) were no exception. This book looks at the various tricks reported in medieval chronicles, from the Normans feigning flight at the battle of Hastings (1066) to draw the English off Senlac Hill, to the Turks who infiltrated the Frankish camp at the Field of Blood (1119) disguised as bird sellers, to the Scottish camp followers descending on the field of Bannockburn (1314) waving laundry as banners to mimic a division of soldiers. This s...
Despite the intensive research carried out in recent years, modality remains an intriguing and challenging issue in linguistics. This book investigates modality from a syntactic viewpoint and with a bottom-up approach. A strong focus of the book is the interaction between the different linguistic tools that build modality (moods, modal verbs, modal adverbs, etc.), taking both the role of syntactic structure and the compositionality of modal meanings into account. The volume comprises corpus-based studies devoted to several syntactic aspects of modality in Ancient Greek, within different theoretical frameworks. The chapters shed new light on different modal categories (e.g. epistemicity, possibility, counterfactuality, evidentiality, subjectivity) and show how these modal meanings arise from the combination of different linguistic devices in specific syntactic contexts (e.g. combinations of modal elements, types of main and dependent clauses, types of illocutionary acts, etc.). By approaching modality from a different perspective and providing an up-to-date discussion of several aspects of modality, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates.