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In this volume, Dan Avnon analyzes and reconstructs Buber's corpus of mature writings, revealing the radical nature of Buber's response to the most fundamental questions of human existence. The book invites the reader to reexamine conventional notions of the role of language, thought, and writing in communicating impressions of reality. An essential introduction to Buber's work and his unique approach to writing.
According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance...
In this Festschrift, James Kugel's creative scholarship in biblical interpretation provides the inspiration for a wide-ranging collection of essays that treat the history of Jewish and Christian scriptural interpretation from antiquity to the present
The last decade has seen a surge of scholarly interest in these religious professionals and a good number of high quality publications. Our volume, however, with its unique intercultural character and its explicit focus on appropriation and contestation of religious expertise in the Imperial Era is substantially different. Unlike the rather narrow focus of earlier studies of civic priests, the papers presented here examine a wider range of religious professionals, their dynamic interaction with established religious authorities and institutions, and their contributions to religious innovation in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the late Hellenistic period through to Late Antiquity, from...
Ancient Jewish sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Some find in sacrifice the key to the mysterious and violent origins of human culture. Others see these cultic rituals as merely the fossilized vestiges of primitive superstition. Some believe that ancient Jewish sacrifice was doomed from the start, destined to be replaced by the Christian eucharist. Others think that the temple was fated to be superseded by the synagogue. In Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple Jonathan Klawans demonstrates that these supersessionist ideologies have prevented scholars from recognizing the Jerusalem temple as a powerful source of meaning and symbolism to the ancient Jews who worshiped there. Klawans exposes ...
No ancient writer is more important for the study of the New Testament than Flavius Josephus, a Jew who was born shortly after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His works discuss many of the people who walk across the pages of the New Testament (such as Herod, Agrippa, John the Baptist, and even Jesus), outline institutions important to the understanding of the New Testament (such as the Pharisees, Sadduccees, Zealots, and Roman army), and describe in great detail events predicted in the New Testament (the Jewish war, especially the destruction of Jerusalem). In this book, Dr. Rogers has summarized the massive bulk of Josephus's writings in a vivid and delightful manner, arranging the data topically for easy access. He also draws attention to specific words in the Gospels, Acts, and the letters of the New Testament that take on enriched meanings when viewed in light of Josephus's use of them.
In The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls Ken M. Penner determines whether Qumran Hebrew finite verbs are primarily temporal, aspectual, or modal. Standard grammars claim Hebrew was aspect-prominent in the Bible, and tense-prominent in the Mishnah. But the semantic value of the verb forms in the intervening period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were written has remained controversial. Penner answers the question of Qumran Hebrew verb form semantics using an empirical method: a database calculating the correlation between each form and each function, establishing that the ancient author’s selection of verb form is determined not by aspect, but by tense or modality. Penner then applies these findings to controversial interpretations of three Qumran texts.
Mark’s genius lies, not in telling a story about Jesus, but in creating conditions under which the reader may experience the peculiar quality of God’s good news. The Evangelist hurries one along breathlessly, “immediately,” making sure that the reader lurches with the characters into one pothole after another. “What is this new teaching” that consorts with the flagrantly sinful, turning the pious homicidal, intimates into strangers, and mustard seeds into “the greatest of all ... shrubs”? Jesus’ closest adherents, the Twelve, are among the most muddled. Who can blame them? They ask for an obscure parable’s interpretation and receive an answer even more confounding. They a...
Herod, King of Judea from 44 to 4 BC, was a major figure in the politics of the Roman east during the emperor Augustus's ascension to power.