These two volumes introduce the sources of Judaism in late antiquity to scholars in adjacent fields, such as the study of the Old and New Testaments, ancient history of Classical Antiquity, earliest Christianity, the ancient Near East, and the history of religion. Here, in two volumes, leading American, Israeli, and European specialists in the history, literature, theology, and archaeology of Judaism offer factual answers to the two questions that the study of any religion in ancient times must raise. The first is, what are the sources — written and in material culture — that inform us about that religion? The second is, how do we understand those sources in the reconstruction of the history of various Judaic systems in antiquity. The chapters set forth in simple statements, intelligible for non-specialists, the facts the sources provide. Because of the nature of the subject and acute interest in it, we also raise some questions particular to the study of Judaism, those dealing with its historical relationship with nascent Christianity in New Testament times. The work forms the starting point for the study of all the principal questions concerning Judaism in late antiquity and sets forth the most current, critical results of scholarship.
Who were Paul's opponents? Were they one or were they many, depending upon the church concerned? These questions continue to be of interest to Pauline and other New Testament scholars, and are addressed in this volume of collected essays. Some of the essays are on specific books, such as Galatians, the Corinthian letters and Romans, while others treat broader issues in Paul's world.
This book is a study of the parables unique to the Third Gospel, aiming in particular to establish a link between Luke's choice of these parables and his overall purpose in writing. In comparison to the synoptic kingdom parables, one distinguishing feature of the Lukan parables is their more personal portrait of the character and the nature of God himself. Luke's desire is to demonstrate to his readers, whoever they are, that in Christianity the realization of the Jewish hope has occurred. The parables promote this idea by offering both continuity (OT) and contrast (contemporary Judaism) in their portrait of God. Thus, as well as operating in a parenetic sense, the parables also help to legitimize Luke's argument regarding fulfilment.
The writers of the New Testament were largely Jewish and laying the blame for the Holocaust at their feet would be absurd. However, the later cultural origins of anti-semitism means that reading the New Testament after the event calls for a new ethics of interpretation. These essays address this grave issue in detail,
In recent years, a growing number of New Testament scholars have questioned traditional portrayals of the Apostle Paul as a leader of a new religious movement that set faith in Christ in opposition to the Jewish tradition. Instead, they have stressed the need to interpret Paul from within the Judaism of his day, regarding him as a faithful Jew who cherished deeply his Jewish identity and saw observance of the Mosaic law or Torah among Jewish believers in Christ as a good thing. While the present work argues strongly in favor of this latter interpretation of Paul, it also seeks to delve deeper into his thought in order to explore at length the points of continuity and convergence between Paul and the Judaism(s) of his day as well as the beliefs that distinguished him from his fellow Jews who did not share his faith in Christ. Chief among these beliefs was the conviction that the identity and will of God were now to be defined primarily on the basis of his relation to Jesus his Son, through whom he had intended from the start to accomplish his purposes for Israel and the world. Yet rather than bringing Paul to reject his Jewish heritage, this conviction led him to redefine and resignify around Christ his understanding of Judaism and the way of life prescribed in the Torah, thereby filling them with new meaning, though he also continued to value and uphold them for the same reasons he had previously. According to Paul, the purpose for which God had sent his Son and delivered him up to death was not that he might atone for sins or make it possible for God to forgive sins, as later Christian thought came to affirm, but rather that through him he might establish a new community in which Jews and non-Jews would be brought to live together as one in fellowship and solidarity. While Paul expected his fellow Jews to continue to live as Jews and members of Israel within this community, which he called the ekklēsia, his conviction that those non-Jews who lived faithfully as part of the same community yet did not submit fully to the Mosaic law were equally acceptable and righteous in God’s sight led him to oppose all attempts to impose on them the observance of that law. Such attempts implied that the members of the community who observed the law were to be regarded as more righteous or as superior in some way to those who did not and thus threatened to destroy the very fabric of the communities that Paul had worked so hard to establish. Rather than running contrary to Jewish thought, Paul’s teaching that it was a life of faith rather than the observance of works of the law per se that led people to be accepted as righteous by God would have been regarded by most Jews as being fully in accordance with traditional Jewish belief. What they would have found novel was Paul’s claim that faith in the God of Israel was now to be equated with faith in Jesus as his Son or “Christ-faith” and that through such a faith non-Jews who did not observe the law could come to be as fully acceptable to God as those Jews who did. Paul’s redefinition of God and Judaism around Jesus as God’s Son would have led many of his fellow Jews to conclude that he was proclaiming a God who was distinct from the God in whom the people of Israel had believed from time immemorial, since that God was never thought to have such a Son and much less to have intended to exalt him to his right side as Lord of all after handing him over to death on a cross. From the perspective of Paul and his fellow believers in Christ, however, the God of Israel and the God and Father of Jesus Christ were one and the same.
Astronomy and astrology, or the astral sciences, played an enormous, if not a key role in the political and religious life of the Ancient Near East, and, later, of the Greek and Roman world. This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the origins of the astral sciences in the Ancient Near East. Every type of Sumerian or Akkadian text dealing with descriptive or mathematical astronomy, including many individual tablets are thoroughly dealt with. All aspects, such as the history of discovery, reconstruction, and interpretation come to the fore, accompanied by a full bibliography. At that the reader will find descriptions of astronomical contents, an explanation of their scientific meaning and the place a given genre or tablet has in the development of astronomy both within the Mesopotamian culture and outside of it. Because celestial omens are intimately related to astronomy in Mesopotamian science, these are also discussed extensively. The material is arranged both chronologically and thematically, so as to help make Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia a reference work on the subject in its truest sense.
Carefully selected examples from texts and dialects of the whole Phoenician-Punic period bring to life the grammatical description of this language. Included are fully vocalized Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions of Roman Tripolitiana in Latin orthography as well as the literary fragments of Punic drama as found in Plautus' comedy Poenulus. This classical descriptive grammar of the Phoenician-Punic language (1200 BCE - 350 CE) presents the reader with a full picture: its phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and usage. Its history and its various dialects are dealt with in an introduction. Hebraists and Semitists will find the description of the verbal system of particular interest to them, especially that of the literary language, which holds that tense and aspect reference of a given form of the verb is largely a function of syntax, not morphology. Much of this grammatical material is presented here for the first time.
Western Palestine is extremely rich in Arabic inscriptions, whose dates range from as early as CE 150 until modern times. Most of the inscriptions date from the Islamic period, for under Islam the country gained particular religious and strategic importance, even though it made up only part of the larger province of Syria. This historical importance is clearly reflected in the hundreds of inscriptions, the texts of which cover a variety of topics: construction, dedication, religious endowments, epitaphs, Qur'anic texts, prayers and invocations, all now assembled in the Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP). The CIAP follows the method established at the end of the 19th century by Max van Berchem, namely, the studying of the Arabic inscriptions 'in context'. Van Berchem managed to publish two volumes of the inscriptions from Jerusalem: the CIAP covers the entire country. The inscriptions are arranged according to site, and are studied in their respective topographical, historical and cultural context. In this way the CIAP offers more than a survey of inscriptions: it represents the epigraphical angle of the geographical history of the Holy Land. Volume One: (A) was published in 1997, Volume Two: (B-C) in 1999, Volume Three: (D-F) in 2004, Volume Four: (G) in 2008, an Addendum in 2007, Volume Five: (H-I) in 2013, Volume Six: J (1) in 2016 and Volume Seven: J (2) Jerusalem 1 in 2021. All volumes are still available.
The Onomasticon of the Hittite Pantheon by Ben van Gessel was published in 1998. In three years time the work has established itself as the ultimate comprehensive reference work concerning the Hittite pantheon. With the publication of Part Three, the main work will be made accessible to a wider circle of all those interested in the ancient Near East. Moreover, it will prove to be an indispensable key to the abundance of information until now only to be found scattered throughout the Onomasticon. The easy-reference glossaries contain all the (word )forms quoted from Hittite texts in the Onomasticon. A special feature of these glossaries is that they not only give the (English) meaning of the (word) forms, but that they also indicate, where appropriate, in relation to which deities they may appear. Also of importance are the lists of personal and geographical names and festivals included. Part Three further includes additions resulting from new discoveries and corrections of earlier references in the Onomasticon.
Over the past seven decades, the scores of publications on Ugarit in Northern Syria (15th to 11th centuries BCE) are so scattered that a good overall view of the subject is virtually impossible. Wilfred Watson and Nicolas Wyatt, the editors of the present Handbook in the series Handbook of Oriental Studies, have brought together and made accessible this accumulated knowledge on the archives from Ugarit, called 'the foremost literary discovery of the twentieth century' by Cyrus Gordon. In 16 chapters a careful selection of specialists in the field deal with all important aspects of Ugarit, such as the discovery and decipherment of a previously unknown script (alphabetic cuneiform) used to write both the local language (Ugaritic) and Hurrian and its grammar, vocabulary and style; documents in other languages (including Akkadian and Hittite), as well as the literature and letters, culture, economy, social life, religion, history and iconography of the ancient kingdom of Ugarit. A chapter on computer analysis of these documents concludes the work. This first such wide-ranging survey, which includes recent scholarship, an extensive up-to-date bibliography, illustrations and maps, will be of particular use to those studying the history, religion, cultures and languages of the ancient Near East, and also of the Bible and to all those interested in the background to Greek and Phoenician cultures.
