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This volume is offered as a tribute to George Brooke to mark his sixty-fifth birthday. It has been conceived as a coherent contribution to the question of textuality in the Dead Sea Scrolls explored from a wide range of perspectives. These include material aspects of the texts, performance, reception, classification, scribal culture, composition, reworking, form and genre, and the issue of the extent to which any of the texts relate (to) social realities in the Second Temple period. Almost every contribution engages with Brooke’s own remarkably wide-ranging, incisive, and innovative research on the Scrolls. The twenty-eight contributors are colleagues and students of the honouree and include leading scholars alongside promising new voices from across the field.
In the spring of 1852, Layard was obliged to close his excavations for want of funds, and he returned to England with Rassam, leaving all the northern half of the great mound of Kuyûnjik unexcavated. He resigned his position as Director of Excavations to the British Museum's Trustees, and Colonel (later Sir) H. C. Rawlinson, Consul-General of Baghdâd, undertook to direct any further excavations that might be possible to carry out later on. During the summer, the Trustees received a further grant from Parliament for excavations in Assyria, and they dispatched Rassam to finish the exploration of Kuyûnjik, knowing that the lease of the mound of Kuyûnjik for excavation purposes which he had ...
An essential guide to wisdom texts, and the major changes in the approach to different biblical and non-biblical wisdom books.
Genesis, Isaiah and Psalms are three key texts in the Hebrew Bible and represent the lifelong interests of Professor John Emerton, Emeritus Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, for whom this volume is written on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. The contributors have all enjoyed academic relationships with John over the years and represent a truly international group. The contributions include comparison of biblical texts with ancient Near Eastern counterparts and evaluation of them in the light of archaeology. They include intertextual work on a literary level, and traditional literary-historical approaches to texts. Many move beyond the Hebrew Bible itself to consider other texts and versions or to draw out interpretations of texts by scholars ancient and modern - and even by novelists. The result is a refreshing group of articles that indicate the broad range of approaches that characterize the discipline of Old Testament study in the present day.
Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts argues that the creation of the world in Genesis 1 and the story of the first humans in Genesis 2-3 both draw directly on Plato’s famous account of the origins of the universe, mortal life and evil containing equal parts science, theology and myth. This book is the first to systematically compare biblical, Ancient Near Eastern and Greek creation accounts and to show that Genesis 1-3 is heavily indebted to Plato’s Timaeus and other cosmogonies by Greek natural philosophers. It argues that the idea of a monotheistic cosmic god was first introduced in Genesis 1 under the influence of Plato’s philosophy, and that this cosmic Creator was ...
Essential reading for scholars and students in wisdom studies This collection of essays explores questions that challenge the traditional notion of a wisdom tradition among the Israelite literati, such as: Is the wisdom literature a genre or mode of literature or do we need new terminology? Who were the tradents? Is there such a thing as a “wisdom scribe” and what would that look like? Did the scribes who composed wisdom literature also have a hand in producing the other “traditions,” such as the priestly, prophetic, and apocalyptic, as well as other non-sapiential works? Were Israelite sages open to non-sapiential forms of knowledge in their conceptualization of wisdom? Features: Recent genre theory in distinction from traditional form criticism Ancient Near Eastern comparative material A balanced collection that includes essays that seriously challenge and affirm the consensus view, as well as those that reconfigure it
This handbook provides an important resource for the serious study of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible. It addresses historical and literary contexts as well as its roles as scripture and canon in Judaism and Christianity. The volume provides creative presentations of the messages and import of the books and the canonical division as a whole.
How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourishing or even enchantment. The standard narrative of a 'crisis of faith' does not do justice to the fissured, uncertain quality of Victorian visions of secularisation. Precisely because it had the status of a confusing hypothesis rather than a self-evident reality, it provoked not only dread and melancholia, but also forms of fantasy. Within this context Lyons gives a fundamentally new account of the aims and nature of Victorian aestheticism, taking as a focus its deceptively simple claim that art is for art's sake first of all.