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In The Metaphor of the Divine as Planter of the People Jennifer Metten Pantoja traces the emergence of the conceptual metaphor YHWH IS THE PLANTER OF THE PEOPLE in ancient Hebrew poetry and follows its development throughout biblical history and Second Temple literature, in order to illustrate how the deep connection to the land shaped ancient thought and belief. Within this broader, primary metaphor, the complex metaphor YHWH IS THE VINTNER OF ISRAEL is also analyzed as an image predominant in the pre-exilic prophetic literature. Recent advances in cognitive linguistics, coupled with traditional historical-critical methods, as well as a survey of the material culture, work in tandem to illuminate one snapshot of ancient Israel’s conception of the divine.
This exploration of the Judean priesthood’s role in agricultural cultivation demonstrates that the institutional reach of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE–70 CE) went far beyond the confines of its houses of worship, while exposing an unfamiliar aspect of sacred place-making in the ancient Jewish experience. Temples of the ancient world regularly held assets in land, often naming a patron deity as landowner and affording the land sanctity protections. Such arrangements can provide essential background to the Hebrew Bible’s assertion that God is the owner of the land of Israel. They can also shed light on references in early Jewish literature to the sacred landholdings of the priesthood or the temple.
The Achaemenid period (550-330 BCE) is rightly seen as one of the most formative periods in Judaism. It is the period in which large portions of the Bible were edited and redacted and others were authored--yet no dedicated interdisciplinary study has been undertaken to present a consistent picture of this decisive time period. This book is dedicated to the study of the touchpoints between Yahwistic communities throughout the Achaemenid empire and the Iranian attributes of the empire that ruled over them for about two centuries. Its approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It brings together scholars of Achaemenid history, literature and religion, Iranian linguistics, historians of the Ancient Near East, archeologists, biblical scholars and Semiticists. The goal is to better understand the interchange of ideas, expressions and concepts as well as the experience of historical events between Yahwists and the empire that ruled over them for over two centuries. The book will open up a holisitic perspective on this important era to scholars of a wide variety of fields in the study of Judaism in the Ancient Near East.
David Carr rethinks both the methods and historical orientation points for research into the growth of the Hebrew Bible into its present form.
Lester Grabbe is probably the most distinguished, and certainly the most prolific of historians of ancient Judaism, the author of several standard treatments and the founder of the European Seminar on Historical methodology. He has continued to set the bar for Hebrew Bible scholarship. In this collection some thirty of his distinguished colleagues and friends offer their reflections on the practice and theory of history writing, on the current controversies and topics of major interest. This collection provides an opportunity for scholars of high caliber to consider groundbreaking ideas in light of Grabbe's scholarship and influence. This festschrift offers the reader a unique volume of essays to explore and consider the far-reaching influence of Grabbe on the field of Biblical studies as a whole.
Drawing on the insights of lyric poetic theory, this book offers a fresh reading of Second Isaiah. This approach advances an argument that the tensive and conflicted divine voice is primary unifying factor in the sequence of poems.
Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the United States. Especially since the 1990s, readings by Asian American biblical scholars have been increasing to meet the particular theological and pastoral concerns of their Christian racial/ethnic seminarians, clergy, and churches. Gale A. Yee is one of their major interpreters, becoming the first Asian American and first woman of color president of the oldest professional guild devoted to the critical study of the Bible, the Society of Biblical Literature. This book is an anthology of her major, ground-breaking essays on Asian American theorizing and analysis of the biblical text. It is a retrospective of her growth of over almost three decades in wrestling with questions like "What is Asian American biblical hermeneutics and how does one undertake it?"
This engaging and informative introduction to the the Babylonians were important not only because of their many historical contacts with ancient Israel but because they and their predecessors, the Sumerians, established the philosophical and social infrastructure for most of Western Asia for nearly two millennia. Beginning and advanced students as well as biblical scholars and interested nonspecialists will read this introduction to the history and culture of the Babylonians with interest and profit.
An essential resource for scholars and students Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.
Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even a...