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Essays explaining diverse methods and reading strategies, providing a dependable guide to understanding the Book of Genesis.
Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.
A revised view of the Pentateuch with consequences for the broader literary history of the Bible This collection of thirty-one studies on the Pentateuch represents more than twenty years of Konrad Schmid’s research and publications advocating for a new view of the Pentateuch’s formation. Schmid’s essays present the case for a Persian period Priestly document that provided a basic narrative thread to the Torah, which included separate, pre-Priestly components of narratives in Genesis and the Moses story. Schmid’s open discussion includes evidence from various fields, such as literary history, comparative cultural history, historical linguistics, epigraphy, and archaeology. The essays are divided into eight sections usefully structured around the themes of the Pentateuch in the Enneateuch, the history of scholarship, the formation of the Torah, Genesis, the Moses story, the Priestly document, legal texts, and the Pentateuch in the history of ancient Israel’s religion.
Visions of the Holy is a collection of essays by Marvin A. Sweeney on the study of biblical and postbiblical theology and literature. The volume includes previously published and unpublished essays related to the developing field of Jewish biblical theology; historical, comparative, and reception-critical studies; and the reading of texts from the Pentateuch, Former Prophets, Latter Prophets, and Ketuvim. Additional essays examine Asian biblical theology, the understanding of Shabbat, intertextuality in Exodus–Numbers, Samuel, Isaiah, and the Twelve in intertextual perspective, and the democratization of messianism in modern Jewish thought. The volume is an excellent resource for scholars, students, and clergy interested in theological readings of the Hebrew Bible.
Drawing on the latest in Genesis scholarship, this volume offers twenty-nine essays on a wide range of topics related to Genesis, written by leading experts in the field. Topics include its formation, reception, textual history and translation, themes, theologies, and place within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Rather than viewing inconsistencies in the Torah as signs of revision, this book identifies precursors for these phenomena in ancient Near Eastern writings. It claims that Enlightenment and German historicist influences corrupted critical study of the Bible, and calls for a return to the more modest agenda set out by Spinoza.
Exegesis has long been characterized by a broad disciplinary diversity, but also ambiguity – combining biblical studies, exegesis, early Jewish studies, early Christian studies, Ancient Near Eastern studies, Greco-Roman, and classical studies in various ways. This is to say nothing of the more recent development of contextual and engaged exegesis as reflected in feminist, liberation, postcolonial and queer Biblical exegesis. Furthermore, how and why scholars study the Bible varies, not only across confessional or cultural contexts, but across institutional-academic contexts. The book engages these complex methodological questions about the interrelations of context, institutions, and knowl...
Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people.
"Christian Frevel brings the Book of Numbers' regularly misunderstood interplay between narrative and legislative material into a new light, examining its texts equally as inner-biblical interpretations and tradition-bound innovations. The studies of this volume reveal the thematic diversity of the book against a backdrop of its literary emergence within the Penta- and Hexateuch." --provided by publisher, book jacket back cover.
Major innovations have occurred in the study of biblical law in recent decades. The legal material of the Pentateuch has received new interest with detailed studies of specific biblical passages. The comparison of biblical practice to ancient Near Eastern customs has received a new impetus with the concentration on texts from actual ancient legal transactions. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law provides a state of the art analysis of the major questions, principles, and texts pertinent to biblical law. The thirty-three chapters, written by an international team of experts, deal with the concepts, significant texts, institutions, and procedures of biblical law; the intersection of law with religion, socio-economic circumstances, and politics; and the reinterpretation of biblical law in the emerging Jewish and Christian communities. The volume is intended to introduce non-specialists to the field as well as to stimulate new thinking among scholars working in biblical law.