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This book, the first of two volumes, offers a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. It is a part of the Old Testament Library series. The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.
The period of Israel's Babylonian exile is one of the most enthralling eras of biblical history. During this time Israel went through its deepest crisis, and the foundation was laid for its most profound renewal. The crisis provoked the creation of a wealth of literary works such as laments, prophetic books, and historical works, all of which Albertz analyzes in detail through the methods of social history, composition criticism, and redaction criticism. In addition, Albertz draws on extrabiblical and archaeological evidence to illuminate the historical and social changes that affected the various exilic groups. Thirty-five years after Peter Ackroyd's classic Exile and Restoration, Albertz offers a new generation of biblical scholars and students an equally important appraisal of recent scholarship on this period as well as his own innovative and insightful proposals about the social and literary developments that took place and the theological contribution that was made. Includes chronological table, map of the ancient Near East, and passage index. - Publisher.
From its inception at the time of the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century, the historical-critical method constituted the dominant paradigm in Old Testament studies. In this magisterial overview, Niels Peter Lemche surveys the development of the historical-critical method and the way it changed the scholarly perception of the Old Testament. In part 1 he describes the rise and influence of historical-critical approaches, while in part 2 he traces their decline and fall. Then, in part 3, he discusses the identity of the authors of the Old Testament, based on the content of the literature they wrote, demonstrating that the collapse of history does not preclude critical study. Part 4 investigates the theological consequences of this collapse and surveys Old Testament and biblical theology in its various manifestations in the twentieth century. An appendix includes a history of Palestine from the Stone Age to modern times, constructed without recourse to the Old Testament.
How does religion cope with changing situations? Are orthodoxy and liberalism really competing strategies? The essays in this volume argue three views. (1)Orthodoxy is not to be seen as the real and original form of a given religion, but as an idealized original form that should be construed as a construction in reaction to changes in time. (2) Over the ages, liberalism – despite its laudable strive for adaptation – has been less successful than generally assumed. This lesson from history can be quite important in view of the adaptation processes for Muslims in Western Europe. (3) Of great importance for the survival of religion seems to be a clear definition of the boundaries of religiously informed practices and ethics. Their recognisability and authenticity shall – when combined with a due lack of obtrusion – be of great influence for the ongoing acceptance of religion(s) in the public domain.
The formation of the Book of the Twelve is one of the most vigorously debated subjects in Old Testament studies today. This volume assembles twenty-four essays by the world’s leading experts, providing an overview of the present state of scholarship in the field. The book’s contributors focus on questions of method, history, as well as redactional and textual history.
This volume reexamines and reconstructs the relationship between the Deuteronomistic History and the book of Chronicles, building on recent developments such as the Persian -period dating of the Deuteronomistic History, the contribution of oral traditional studies to understanding the production of biblical texts, and the reassessment of Standard Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew. These new perspectives challenge widely held understandings of the relationship between the two scribal works and strongly suggest that they were competing historiographies during the Persian period that nevertheless descended from a common source. This new reconstruction leads to new readings of the literature.
JiSeong James Kwon discusses similar linguistic expressions and themes between Job and Deutero-Isaiah, and attempts to find out a common historical background. He argues that both Job and Deutero-Isaiah significantly reflect common scribal ideas, although each text belongs to wisdom and prophetic genre. - From the back of the book
During the past several decades, family and household religion has become a topic of Old Testament scholarship in its own right, fed by what were initially three distinct approaches: the religious-historical approach, the gender-oriented approach, and the archaeological approach. The first pursues answers to questions of the commonality and difference between varieties of family religion and describes the household and family religions of Mesopotamia, Syria/Ugarit, Israel, Philistia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Gender-oriented approaches also contribute uniquely important insights to family and household religion. Pioneers of this sort of investigation show that, although women in ancient Israe...
Research into the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near East, Philosophy and History have long considered whether thought in the cultural area of the ancient Middle East differs from that in the western Mediterranean. The inclusion of neurobiology, psychology, brain research and evolutionary research will widen this horizon and allow new approaches. This volume provides in depth insides into this Archaeology of Mind in 22 contributions.
Being the first legal corpus in the biblical canon, Exodus 19–24 is a law collection that belonged to a people living under the shadow of empire. Using an integrated approach of postcolonial studies and historical-comparative analysis, this important study analyzes the relationship between the laws given to the Israelites on Mount Sinai and cuneiform law collections. Dr. Anna Lo skillfully integrates postcolonial understandings of the colonized people to explore how the similarities and differences reflect the imperialized authors’ wrestling with the imperial legal metanarrative and subjugation of their time. This investigation into the dynamic of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance invites attention to this selection of Scripture as a work of conservative revolutionists. Dr. Lo’s thorough work provides an important way forward for scholars to consider responses of the imperialized to empires in the past as well as to reflect on their own response to hegemonic domination today.