"Recognized as a saint by both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians alike, Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) produced many narrative poems that have rarely been translated into English. Of his reported 760 metrical homilies, only about half survive. Part of a series of fascicles containing the bilingual Syriac-English editions of Saint Jacob of Sarug's homilies, this volume contains his homilies on Elisha. The Syriac text is fully vocalized, and the translation is annotated with a commentary and biblical references"--Page 4 of cover
This volume collects all of Mar Jacob of Sarug's (d. 521) extant homilies on the prophet Elijah. In these homilies Jacob shows a remarkable sensivity to the human motivations of the biblical characters which was quite rare in ancient biblical exegesis. The volume constitutes a fascicle of The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain the original Syriac text of Jacob's surviving sermons, fully vocalized, alongside an annotated English translation.
In Religious Stories in Transformation: Conflict, Revision and Reception, the editors present a collection of essays that reveal both the many similarities and the poignant differences between ancient myths in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern secular culture and how these stories were incorporated and adapted over time. This rich multidisciplinary research demonstrates not only how stories in different religions and cultures are interesting in their own right, but also that the process of transformation in particular deserves scholarly interest. It is through the changes in the stories that the particular identity of each religion comes to the fore most strikingly.
In honor of Fred M. Donner's distinguished career as an interpreter of early Islam, this volume collects more than a dozen studies by his students. They range over a wide array of sub-fields in Islamic studies, including Islamic history, historiography, Islamic law, Qur'anic studies and Islamic aracheology.
Islam is often seen as a religious tradition in which hell does not play a particularly prominent role. This volume challenges this hackneyed view. Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions is the first book-length analytic study of the Muslim hell. It maps out a broad spectrum of Islamic attitudes toward hell, from the Quranic vision(s) of hell to the pious cultivation of the fear of the afterlife, theological speculations, metaphorical and psychological understandings, and the modern transformations of hell. Contributors: Frederick Colby, Daniel de Smet, Christiane Gruber, Jon Hoover, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Christian Lange, Christopher Melchert, Simon O’Meara, Samuela Pagani, Tommaso Tesei, Roberto Tottoli, Wim Raven, and Richard van Leeuwen.
A Respected Scholar Introduces Students to the Discipline of Old Testament Studies Richard Hess, a trusted scholar of the Old Testament and the ancient Near East, offers a substantial introduction to the Old Testament that is accessibly written and informed by the latest biblical scholarship. Hess summarizes the contents of the Old Testament, introduces the academic study of the discipline, and helps readers understand the complex world of critical and interpretive issues, addressing major concerns in the critical interpretation of each Old Testament book and key texts. This volume provides a fulsome treatment for students preparing for ministry and assumes no prior knowledge of the Old Testament. Readers will learn how each book of the Old Testament was understood by its first readers, how it advances the larger message of the whole Bible, and what its message contributes to Christian belief and the Christian community. Twenty maps, ninety photos, sidebars, and recommendations for further study add to the book's usefulness for students. Resources for professors are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.
It is well documented that one of the primary catalysts of intense language contact is the expansion of empire. This is true not only of recent history, but it is equally applicable to the more remote past. An exemplary case (or better: cases) of this involves Aramaic. Due to the expansions of empires, Aramaic has throughout its long history been in contact with a variety of languages, including Akkadian, Greek, Arabic, and various dialects of Iranian. This books focuses on one particular episode in the long history of Aramaic language contact: the Syriac dialect of Aramaic in contact with Greek. In this book, Butts presents a new analysis of contact-induced changes in Syriac due to Greek. Several chapters analyze the more than eight-hundred Greek loanwords that occur in Syriac texts from Late Antiquity that were not translated from Greek. Butts also dedicates several chapters to a different category of contact-induced change in which Syriac-speakers replicated inherited Aramaic material on the model of Greek. All of the changes discussed in the book are located within their broader Aramaic context and analyzed through a robust contact linguistic framework. By focusing on the Syriac language itself, Butts introduces new – and arguably more reliable – evidence for locating Syriac Christianity within its Greco-Roman context. This book, thus, is especially important for the field of Syriac studies. The book also contributes to the fields of contact linguistics and the study of ancient languages more broadly by analyzing in detail various types of contact-induced change over a relatively long period of time.
Geography, Religion, Gods, and Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean explores the influence of geography on religion and highlights a largely unknown story of religious history in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the Levant, agricultural communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims jointly venerated and largely shared three important saints or holy figures: Jewish Elijah, Christian St. George, and Muslim al-Khiḍr. These figures share ‘peculiar’ characteristics, such as associations with rain, greenness, fertility, and storms. Only in the Eastern Mediterranean are Elijah, St. George, and al-Khiḍr shared between religious communities, or characterized by these same agricultural attributes – attributes that also were shared by regional religious figures from earlier time periods, such as the ancient Near Eastern Storm-god Baal-Hadad, and Levantine Zeus. This book tells the story of how that came to be, and suggests that the figures share specific characteristics, over a very long period of time, because these motifs were shaped by the geography of the region. Ultimately, this book suggests that regional geography has influenced regional religion; that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not, historically or textually speaking, separate religious traditions (even if Jews, Christians, and Muslims are members of distinct religious communities); and that shared religious practices between members of these and other local religious communities are not unusual. Instead, shared practices arose out of a common geographical environment and an interconnected religious heritage, and are a natural historical feature of religion in the Eastern Mediterranean. This volume will be of interest to students of ancient Near Eastern religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, sainthood, agricultural communities in the ancient Near East, Middle Eastern religious and cultural history, and the relationships between geography and religion.
Antigone Samellas examines the modes of reception of Jesus' message of salvation. She explores the Greek and Jewish influence on Christian eschatology and traces the Hellenistic roots of Christian consolation philosophy. The author examines Christianity as a 'total therapy of grief' and highlights the differences that existed between the religious cures and the Hellenistic philosophical therapies. To gain a better understanding of the process of conversion to the new faith Antigone Samellas also investigates which aspects of Christianity were appealing and which repugnant in the eyes of pagans and Jews. Finally, she attempts to convey something of the wisdom of the East, in all its cultural and religious nuances, to the modern reader.
