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Old Testament texts frequently offer a theological view of history. This is very evident in the Books of Chronicles and in the final section of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus). Today there is renewed interest in both these works as significant theological and cultural Jewish documents from the centuries before Jesus. Both Chronicles and Ben Sira aim to recreate a national identity centered on temple piety. Some chapters in this volume consider the portrayal of Israelite kings like David, Hezekiah, and Josiah, while others deal with prophets like Samuel and Elijah.
This monograph contributes to a better understanding of the Book of Chronicles. The past forty years have seen a complete transformation in the study of the Book of Chronicles. The former domination of Chronicles by parallel texts in the Books of Samuel and Kings made way for studying the historical, sociological, literary, theological, and ideological aspects of Chronicles in their own right. This book/document is now increasingly recognized as being of major interest to the Second Temple Period. Reading the book of Chronicles, it appears that the Chronicler is constantly transforming Israel's tradition(s) into a new theological and ideological system. In this study, attention is, therefore, paid both to specific texts, such as 1 Chronicles 17; 21; 2 Chronicles 20; 26, and to particular central themes, such as the special function of Jerusalem, and the peculiar way of how the Chronicler presents prophets, war narratives, and genealogies.
The book investigates Ben Sira’s attitudes toward all matters pertaining to sexuality in the context of family relations and gender issues. The author’s seemingly negative attitude to women, the anxiety expressed in the discussions of marital and extramarital relations, and the disciplining of children can lead to the assumption that the work has a negative attitude toward sexuality. Ben Sira’s book is a combination of carefully composed wisdom poems and of teachings on everyday issues, including marriage, family life, self-control, desires, and sexual promiscuity. The sage dedicates a greater number of passages than other wisdom books to the discussion of social relations especially i...
This work explores the theological and social dimensions of generosity in the book of Sirach and contextualizes them within the culture and thought of Second Temple Judaism. Ben Sira’s understanding of generosity is predicated on the tension between affirming the classic wisdom principle of retributive justice and recognizing its breakdown in the socio-economic circumstances of Seleucid Judea. He forges a new Wisdom-Torah ethic of mercy in which giving generously is an integral part of living “the good life”. While loans and surety are essential practices, almsgiving is the preeminent act of generosity. The fundamental theological logic at work consists in viewing the poor as proxies f...
In the last two decades, research on the Book of the Twelve has shown that this corpus is not just a collection of twelve prophetic books. It is rather a coherent work with a common history of formation and, based upon this, with an overall message and intention. The individual books of the Book of the Twelve are thus part of a larger whole in which they can be interpreted in a fruitful manner. The volume The Book of the Twelve: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation features 30 articles, written by renowned scholars, that explore different aspects regarding the formation, interpretation, and reception of the Book of the Twelve as a literary unity.
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.
Annotation A study of the phenomenon of prophecy as documented in ancient Near Eastern texts and the Hebrew Bible as well as Greek sources, from the twenty-first century BCE to the second century CE.
Previous scholars have largely approached Wisdom and Torah in the Second Temple Period through a type of reception history, whereby the two concepts have been understood as signifiers of independent, earlier “biblical” streams of tradition that later came together in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, largely under the process of a so-called “torahization” of wisdom. Recent studies critiquing the nature of wisdom and wisdom literature as operative categories for understanding scribal cultures in early Judaism, as well as newer approaches to conceptualizing Torah and authorizing-compositional practices related to the Pentateuchal texts, however, have challenged the foundations on which t...
This volume brings together the main contributions to the 20th congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT) held in Helsinki, Finland in August, 2010, focusing on archaeology, textual history, Deuteronomistic texts, and Wisdom and apocalypticism.
Reception history has emerged over the last decades as a rapidly growing domain of research, entertaining a notable methodological diversity. Authoritative Texts and Reception History samples that diversity, offering a collection of essay that discuss various reception-historical issues, from a plurality of perspectives, across several fields: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Pseudepigrapha and the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, early and late-antique Christianity. While furthering specific discussions in their specific fields, the contributions included here—authored by both established and emerging scholars—illustrate just how wide the umbrella of ‘reception history’ can be, and the varied range of topics, concerns and approaches it can accommodate.