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Tractate Avot of the Mishnah is generally dated in the third century and is considered the basic text of rabbinic Judaism. The present commentary proposes a critical re-evaluation of this position.

The commentary obviously tries to interpret the individual sayings of Avot as to their literary characteristics, their cultural context and their original meaning. But above all it tries to contextualize the tractate within rabbinic literature, to analyse its language/phraseology and to trace its earliest evidence and its use in later rabbinic literature. This approach will demonstrate that some sayings are well known even outside Avot already in the earliest rabbinic tradition, but that many other sayings do not reflect general rabbinic theology and seem to be almost unknown in rabbinic tradition before the late eighth century. This leads to the conclusion that only a kernel of the text existed already in the time of the Mishnah; its greater part grew in the following centuries. Only in the eighth century the tractate as we know it, reached its nearly final form and became soon popular due to the introduction of its text into the reading of the synagogue.

In this refreshing exploration of Judah’s identity formation, the emphasis is placed on the psychological underpinnings of Judah’s sentiments towards Israel, aiming to illuminate the significance of Judah's appropriation of Israel. Richly contextual, this book draws parallels observed in Asian contexts, notably those of North and South Korea, and China with its marginal Others. Central to the thesis is that Judah’s perceived inferiority to Israel played a crucial role in its quest to appropriate Israel’s legacy and identity.

Adopting a functionalist lens, Judah’s rewriting of Israel’s ancestral past is examined. The Abraham and Jacob traditions are understood as competing "identity narratives," serving as critical discursive tools to construct their pasts. The study scrutinizes how the southern Abraham tradition fundamentally reoriented the Jacob tradition, North Israel’s standalone ancestral myth. Set against the broader canvas of continued efforts to redefine and embody "Israel" within the history of Judeo-Christian religions, this exploration underscores how Judah's pivotal appropriation of Israel has established a paradigm for all future endeavors of "becoming Israel."

This volume contains contributions to Pentateuch research from the past twenty years, arranged according to thematic criteria, which are further explained in the introductions to the five sections and placed within the broader context of Pentateuch analysis: the literary problem of the Pentateuch; ancient history and patriarchs; the law between exodus and Canaan; the Torah and former prophets; the reception of the Torah in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

How is law established in the Hebrew Bible? This volume carries out text-historical and literary studies investigations to show how law and narrative are interwoven in the Pentateuch and mutually enrich each other’s meaning. It looks at individual text witnesses to illustrate how the contexts of the law’s establishment are refined within the scope of various Torah concepts.

The polymath theologian and orientalist Gustaf Dalman founded the institute that today bears his name in 1920 at Greifswald University. This book documents the collection of papers that were presented at an international and interreligious conference held at the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Studies at Greifswald to celebrate the Gustaf Dalman Institute’s 100^th anniversary–after two years of yearning. While, and precisely because, the cultural and religious heritage of the Southern Levant can no longer be researched as it was in the institute’s early days, this centenary offers a welcome opportunity to acknowledge, and critically assess, Dalman’s groundbreaking studies. Different contributions in this volume, written by internationally renowned experts in the field, provide an encyclopedic overview of Dalman’s interests and diverse and comprehensive fields of scholarship. Generally speaking, the proceedings present five thematic threads to navigate through Dalman’s fields: Epigraphic, archaeological and architectural investigations to Jerusalem, Dalman’s examination of the natural world in the Southern Levant, scripture and language studies, Dalman’s idea of photographing the "Holy Land" and Dalman’s legacy.

This volume opens up new perspectives on the developing methodological diversity of Old Testament exegesis. It sets out how it must become radically historical and therefore radically canonical, while revealing the wide-ranging significance of myth, history, and reason in Old Testament writing. Examples of methodological hybridity and exegesis as a transparent, open game flank the concluding sketch of a hermeneutical theory of practice.

This study reconstructs the genesis of the story of the temple dedication to trace its historical development. To do so, Part I closes gaps in the basic text-critical research (especially LXX). This is the foundation on which Part II investigates its literary history. The findings show that the historical origins of the story lie not to the age of kings but in the age of the Second Temple.

The second volume of History and Theology contains 23 articles by Rainer Albertz on the history of Israel, on literary and religious history, and on the anthropology and theology of the Old Testament. These articles demonstrate the Münster-based scholar’s project to explain the development, diversity, and societal, political, and theological relevance of Old Testament transmissions.

This book offers a fresh look at the status of the scribe in society, his training, practices, and work in the biblical world.

What was the scribe’s role in these societies? Were there rival scribal schools? What was their role in daily life? How many scripts and languages did they grasp? Did they master political and religious rhetoric? Did they travel or share foreign traditions, cultures, and beliefs? Were scribes redactors, or simply copyists? What was their influence on the redaction of the Bible? How did they relate to the political and religious powers of their day? Did they possess any authority themselves?

These are the questions that were tackled during an international conference held at the University of Strasbourg on June 17–19, 2019. The conference served as the basis for this publication, which includes fifteen articles covering a wide geographical and chronological range, from Late Bronze Age royal scribes to refugees in Masada at the end of the Second Temple period.

In an interplay of analyses, relevant biblical texts (esp. Hag.; Zech. 1–8; Ezra 1–6, Gen. 14; Ps. 110) and extra-biblical sources, this study reconstructs the development of the politically influential office of the high priest in Jerusalem. Countering a widespread research trend, this study draws the conclusion that the politicization of the Jerusalem office of the high priest did not begin before the Seleucid age.

Lautenschlaeger Award 2023.

The Book of Esther tells the story of a plot to exterminate the Persian Jews and their great struggle against their enemies. This study locates these portrayals of violence in the Hellenistic epoch, in the Hasmonean period (second century BCE). It compares the Hebrew text with the two Greek Books of Esther, thus providing insights into a dynamic discourse of violence in Hellenistic and Roman literature.

This volume analyzes Wellhausen’s Göttingen licentiate doctorate for a wider audience. Alongside the original Latin text, it includes German and English translations and a transcription of the doctoral file with a German translation of the Latin sections. Moreover, it places Wellhausen’s dissertation in the context of earlier and more recent research on the Chronicles and the Genealogies, and provides an extensive literary analysis of it.

The book of Kings repeatedly refers to the despoliation of the treasures of the Jerusalem temple and royal palace. These short notices recounting a foreign invasion and the loss of "national wealth" have been explored only briefly among scholars applying their expertise to the analysis of the book of Kings or the study of the Jerusalem temple and royal palace, from both literary and historical perspectives.

This monograph aims to fill this lacuna. Adopting an approach that combines a more traditional form of literary criticism with a thorough analysis of the narrative role and intertextual connections giving shape to the texts (Sitz in der Literatur), the book offers a more complex and nuanced appreciation of the literary development and ideological profile of the despoliation notices. In addition, it weighs the use of the underlying literary motif in the biblical writings against other Ancient Near Eastern sources.

This study not only provides new perspectives on the role of motifs in biblical historiography but has far-reaching implications for the reconstruction of the process of production and transmission of Kings as part of the Deuteronomistic History.

Biblical proverbial wisdom frequently addresses humans’ verbal actions. It is often about how communication works in the social context. This volume examines the aphoristic wealth of Old Testament reflections on language, inquires into points of comparison with modern models of communication theory by taking into account text and interpretative history, and develops the metaphoric concepts used in the process.

This monograph studies ancient tefillin (also known as phylacteries) and mezuzot found in the Caves of Qumran. Most of these miniature texts were published by the end of 1970s and thus have long been available to scholars. And yet in several respects, these tiny fragments remain an unfinished business.

A close scrutiny of their editions reveals a presence of texts that have not been fully accounted for. These fall into three categories. First, there are multiple tefillin and mezuzot that contain legible fragments which their editors were unable to identify. Second, several tefillin and mezuzot feature imprints of letters that have not been deciphered. Third, there are texts which were provisionally classified as tefillin and mezuzot yet left unread.

This monograph offers a detailed study of these unidentified and undeciphered texts. It thus sheds new light on the contents of ancient tefillin and mezuzot and on the scribal practices involved in their preparation.

This volume presents twenty essays by the Old Testament scholar Hans-Christoph Schmitt (1941–2020) on topics pertaining to the tradition history and redaction criticism of the Pentateuch. It makes a contribution to the interpretation of central texts from the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy, as well as to fundamental methodological questions in current Pentateuch research and the theological history of Israel and early Judaism.

The first twenty-four chapters of the book of Ezekiel are characterised by vehement declarations of judgement. This observation leaves the impression that Ezekiel 1–7 is devoid of references to hope and restoration. However, there is a redactional stratum in this section that supplemented the texts with material that conveys restoration and hope for the future.

In Ezekiel 1–7, many of these additions focus on priestly topics. The motif of restoration in the redactional material of Ezekiel 3–5 is expressed by the reinstatement of Ezekiel in his priestly role. This editorial emphasis on Ezekiel as priest in the redactional material suggests that the redaction was influenced by Zechariah 3, a text that depicts the reinstitution of the exiled Zadokite priesthood. Moreover, the redactional material of Ezekiel 6-7 drew inspiration from the Law of the Temple in Ezekiel 43-46, as the redactors sought to enhance Ezekiel’s priestly role.

The study provides new insights into how redactors, who may have been associated with the Zadokite priesthood, inserted the message of hope and restoration into the literary unit Ezekiel 1-7 during the post-exilic period.

This volume brings together essays written by the author in the fields of comparative Semitic studies and northwest Semitic epigraphy / the religious history of Palestine. Alongside two comparative linguistic studies, its main focus is the contribution that Hebrew epigraphy can make to the profane and religious history of Syria-Palestine (theological statements from everyday religiosity, monolatry, writing, and literature).

This volume takes a new, comprehensive look at Enoch’s vision of the two houses (1En 14:8–25), which previous research has frequently interpreted as the vision of a temple and throne room. But a closer look shows that this vision is one of the most radical temple-critical texts of ancient Judaism and picks up on numerous traditional ideas while presenting them in an innovative and unusual way.

The study of the Books of Chronicles has focused in the past mainly on its literary relationship to Historical Books such as Samuel and Kings. Less attention was payed to its possible relationships to the priestly literature. Against this backdrop, this volume aims to examine the literary and socio-historical relationship between the Books of Chronicles and the priestly literature (in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel).

Since Chronicles and Pentateuch (and also Ezekiel) studies have been regarded as separate fields of study, we invited experts from both fields in order to open a space for fruitful discussions with each other. The contributions deal with connections and interactions between specific texts, ideas, and socio-historical contexts of the literary works, as well as with broad observations of the relationship between them.

Die Frage der Beziehung zwischen dem Jesajabuch und dem Buch der Zwölf Propheten ist angesichts vielfältiger Berührungen sprachlicher und motivischer Art zentral, jedoch hinsichtlich der damit verbundenen möglichen Implikationen bislang nur ungenügend bearbeitet.

Im Rahmen eines internationalen Kongresses, der vom 31.Mai bis 3.Juni 2018 an der Katholischen Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt stattfand, suchten Fachleute des Zwölfprophetenbuches bzw. des Jesajabuches mit unterschiedlichen methodischen Ansätzen ein umfassenderes Bild der verschiedenen Arten von Beziehungen oder thematischen Berührungen zu erarbeiten, die entweder für die beiden Corpora als ganze oder für spezifische Teile beider charakteristisch sind, um daraus entsprechende Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen. Das Ergebnis ist ein Überblick zur Vielfalt der semantischen, intertextuellen, literarischen, redaktionellen, historischen und theologischen Aspekte der Beziehungen zwischen dem Jesajabuch und dem Zwölfprophetenbuch, die einlinigen Lösungsvorschlägen zur Erklärung des Zustandekommens dieser Bezüge widerstreiten.

The Books of Chronicles are generally considered the works of a single author, who attempts a canonical synthesis of the Hebrew Bible. This study examines the history of King Judas (2 Chr 10–36) to reach a different conclusion. The Chronicles were revised across the books. The texts of the Chronicles should now be understood as historically evolved documents, which document a historical transformation of theology.

This monograph discusses the question of political theology with regard to the ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Esther story. Each of the five versions appears as a separate attempt at early Jewish identity formation in the period between the 4th century BCE and the end of the 1st century CE. This study makes a major contribution to scholarship, especially with regard to the Old Latin version of the Book of Esther, published in an appendix for the first time in German translation.

This volume contributes to the growing interest in understanding the phenomenon of prayer and praying in the Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism, and nascent Christianity. Papers by the leading scholars in these fields revisit long-standing questions and chart new paths of inquiry into the nature, form, and practice of addressing the divine in the ancient world.

The essays in this volume deal with particular texts of and about prayer, practices of prayer, as well as figures and locations (historical and literary) that are associated with prayer and praying. These studies apply a range of methods and theoretical approaches to prayer and the language of prayer in literatures of Early Judaism and Christianity. Some studies apply the classical methods of biblical studies to Second Temple texts of prayer, including form critical and text critical approaches; others engage in literary and narrative analysis of ancient works that recount discourse directed to the divine. Still other studies draw on anthropological and sociological analyses of prayer or marshal particular theories of discourse, ethics, and moral agency to offer fresh interpretations of address to God in the literature of Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity.

As a leading proponent of the History of Religions School, Hugo Greßman (1877–1927) brought the history of religions method to prominence. The biographical, academic, historical study describe Greßmann’s history of religions program, situates it in the context of the history of science, and reveals its importance for the later study of the history of science.

Where can we find the origins of biblical covenant theology? Perhaps in the Book of Hosea, where the word ברית appears five times? In interdisciplinary dialogue with Roman legal history, development and social psychology, literary studies, and ancient Near East studies, this edited volume sets off on an exciting and inspiring search for clues, with the goal of "ploughing new ground" (Hos 10:12).

The final chapter of the Book of Zechariah (Zech 9:14) has long been marginalized as an originally separate appendage to the Book of Zechariah. This study subjects the text for the first time to a detailed examination from the perspective of editorial history, considering its place as a composition between Zechariah 1:8 and the Book of Malachi at the end of the Books of Twelve.

The volume gives an overview of current research on the Book of Ezekiel with historical-editorial commentary about key texts in this prophetic book. In addition to questions about its textual, traditional, and reception history, the authors also examine central theological themes in the Book of Ezekiel in the context of Jewish-Hebraic and early Christian literary and religious history.

The Hebrew Bible is a product of ancient editing, but to what degree can this editing be uncovered? “Uncovering Ancient Editing” argues that divergent textual witnesses of the same text, so-called documented evidence, should be the starting point for such an endeavor.

The book presents a fresh analysis of Josh 24 and related texts as a test case for refining our knowledge of how scribes edited texts. Josh 24 is envisioned as a gradually growing Persian period text, whose editorial history can be reconstructed with the help of documented evidence preserved in the MT, LXX, and other ancient sources.

This study has major implications for both the study of the book of Joshua and text-historical methodology in general.

The character of the list of returnees in Ezra 2 has been a subject of ongoing scholarly controversy. This study offers a thorough examination of the list in terms of form and content and of its placement and function in the narrative context of Ezra 1-3. The list itself gives insight to the continuities and discontinuities in the construction of post-Exile Jewish identity.

Despite considerable scholarly efforts for many years, the last two decades of the Kingdom of Israel are still beneath the veil of history. What was the status of the Kingdom after its annexation by Assyria in 732 BCE? Who conquered Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom? When did it happen? One of the primary reasons for this situation lies in the discrepancies found in the historical sources, namely the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian texts.

Since biblical studies and Assyriology are two distinct disciplines, the gaps in the sources are not easy to bridge. Moreover, recent great progress in the archaeological research in the Southern Levant provides now crucial new data, independent of these textual sources.

This volume, a collection of papers by leading scholars from different fields of research, aims to bring together, for the first time, all the available data and to discuss these conundrums from various perspectives in order to reach a better and deeper understanding of this crucial period, which possibly triggered in the following decades the birth of "new Israel" in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and eventually led to the formation of the Hebrew Bible and its underlying theology.

Lire le livre d’Amos comme une œuvre cohérente est le défi majeur de l’exégèse contemporaine.

Cette étude montre que les exégètes sont parvenus à la conviction que lire le livre d’Amos comme un tout est la voie la mieux indiquée pour entrer dans son processus d’interprétation. Le premier chapitre est consacré aux approches diachroniques qui tentent de reconstituer les ipsissima verba du prophète Amos. Ces travaux conduisent au morcellement du livre en de petits fragments et à la dévalorisation des passages perçus comme secondaires. Le second chapitre révèle que les études synchroniques ne s’accordent pas sur la structure du livre. Les trois derniers chapitres consacrés à l’analyse des textes souvent tenus pour secondaires cherchent à montrer que, loin d’être des éléments inopportuns, ces passages sont accordés à leurs contextes et que leur présence est essentielle à l’équilibre littéraire et théologique du livre. En révélant la place primordiale de ces neuf passages, cette monographie dévoile que le sacrifice d’un seul de ces éléments désarticulerait son unité littéraire et théologique.

Cet ouvrage présente un état de recherche exhaustive sur le livre d’Amos et ouvre de nouvelles pistes de lecture de ce texte prophétique.

Cette monographie est consacrée à l’étude des passages supposés tardifs du livre d’Amos. Les deux premiers chapitres font le point sur l’histoire de son exégèse à partir du XIXe siècle. Les trois chapitres suivants ont le but de démontrer, à travers une lecture synchronique, que les passages souvent attribués à des rédactions postérieures ne sapent pas la cohérence du livre mais qu’ils sont essentiels pour son équilibre littéraire et théologique.

The study spotlights the importance of ethical discourse on icons in the Book of Wisdom. Using structural, semantic, and topological analyses, it shows that parenesis about false and true images of God is an overarching theme, and contextualizes it in terms of tradition and cultural history. The text makes a unique contribution to the ancient debate on images by positing that they fulfill the imago dei invested in human beings.

The study is a religious historical examination of the beginnings of the Prophetic Books and examines Jeremiah’s role as lamenter and intercessor. The key texts in Jer 4–10 and 7; 11; 14–15 are analyzed with editorial critique alongside a comparative exploration of non-biblical, ancient Near Eastern literature lamentation and prophecy. This approach yields a new perspective on the stages in the literary development of the protagonist.

Psalms 146-150, sometimes called “Final Hallel” or “Minor Hallel”, are often argued to have been written as a literary end of the Psalter. However, if sources other than the Hebrew Masoretic Text are taken into account, such an original unit of Psalms 146-150 has to be questioned.

“The End of the Psalter” presents new interpretations of Psalms 146-150 based on the oldest extant evidence: the Hebrew Masoretic Text, the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Greek Septuagint. Each Psalm is analysed separately in all three sources, complete with a translation and detailed comments on form, intertextuality, content, genre, and date. Comparisons of the individual Psalms and their intertextual references in the ancient sources highlight substantial differences between the transmitted texts.

The book concludes that Psalms 146-150 were at first separate texts which only in the Masoretic Text form the end of the Psalter. It thus stresses the importance of Psalms Exegesis before Psalter Exegesis, and argues for the inclusion of ancient sources beyond to the Masoretic Text to further our understanding of the Psalms.

This collection of essays explores aspects of civil and criminal law in ancient Judaea. Whereas the majority of studies on Judaean law focus on biblical law codes (and, therefore, on laws related to sacrifice, cultic purity, and personal piety) this volume focus on laws related to the social and economic dealings of Judaeans in the Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and Greco-Roman periods and on the contribution of epigraphic and archival sources and to the study of this material.

The volume presents studies by the Marburg Old Testament scholar Otto Kaiser on the works of the Jewish religious philosopher Philo of Alexandria in the context of intellectual and cultural history. They examine issues of Jewish Biblical exegesis along with Philo’s anthropology and cosmology, his understanding of ritual and prayer, and his ideas about living a virtuous life and overcoming death.

During a moment of exponential growth and change in the fields of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, it is an opportune time to take stock of the state wisdom and wisdom literature with twenty-three essays honoring the consummate Weisheitslehrer, Professor Choon Leong Seow, Vanderbilt, Buffington, Cupples Chair in Divinity and Distinguished Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University.

This Festschrift is tightly focused around wisdom themes, and all of the essays are written by senior scholars in the field. They represent not only the great diversity of approaches in the field of wisdom and wisdom literature, but also the remarkable range of interests and methods that have characterized Professor Seow's own work throughout the decades, including the theology of the wisdom literature, the social world of Ecclesiastes, the history of consequences of the book of Job, the poetry of the Psalms, and Northwest Semitic Inscriptions, just to name a few.

This volume brings together twenty-four articles of Prof. Calduch-Benages' work on the book of Ben Sira over the last two decades. Some were written originally in English and others have been translated from Spanish and Italian originals. They are divided in three groups: introductory, thematic, and exegetical essays.

The exegetical articles offer a detail study of several passages of the book, some of them pivotal in the structure of the book (Sir 2,1; 4,11-19; 6,22; 22,27–23,6; 23,27; 24,22; 27,30–28,7; 34,1-8; 34,9-12; 42,15–43,33; 43,27-33).

The thematic essays deal with important theological issues such as canon and inspiration, wisdom, fear of the lord, trial, cult, prayer, forgiveness, and creation. Other no less important issues such as power and authority, dreams, travels, perfumes, animals and garments are discussed as well. Special attention is given to topics related with women, for instance, Ben Sira’s classification of wives, divorce, polygamy, and the absence of named women in the Praise of the Ancestors (Sir 44–50).

In his articles Stefan Reif deas with Jewish biblical exegesis and the close analysis of the evolution of Jewish prayer texts. Some fourteen of these that appeared in various collective volumes are here made more easily available, together with a major new study of Numbers 13, an introduction and extensive indexes. Reif attempts to establish whether there is any linguistic, literary and exegetical value in the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible for the modern scientific approach to such texts and whether such an approach itself is always free of theological bias. He demonstrates how Jewish liturgical texts may illuminate religious teachings about wisdom, history, peace, forgiveness, and divine metaphors. Also clarified in these essays are notions of David, Greek and Hebrew, divine metaphors, and the liturgical use of the Hebrew Bible.

Scholars of the Hebrew Bible used to look at „Prophecy" and „Wisdom" as clearly distinct realms represented by antagonistic and mutually exclusive roles of their central characters: the loyal sage, the pillar of administration, on the one side and the rebellious prophet, criticizing the establishment, on the other. While the influence of wisdom thought on prophetic texts has been a topic in the scholarly debate, the complementary question of the influence of prophetic thought on wisdom texts has rarely been asked.

The contributions in this volume look at both questions: They start from the assumption that texts from the Hebrew Bible and the cultures surrounding Ancient Israel all originated from a social stratum of educated scribes, who authored and transmitted these texts. It then seems plausible that wisdom texts might show similar traces of prophetic influence to those of wisdom thoughts found in prophetic texts. The essays give a multifaceted picture concerning the mutual perception of prophets and sages and thus provide a deeper understanding of both wisdom literature and prophecy.

Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen’s research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East.

The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section.

The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.

The story of Massah-Meribah is a pluriform tradition within the Hebrew Bible. Part One of this book uses redaction analysis to assess diachronically the six reminiscences of this tradition within Deuteronomy (Deut 6:16; 8:15; 9:22; 32:13, 52; 33:8). The relative chronological relationship of these texts, and the tradition components they preserve, reveals a framework of five formative stages of this story's tradition-history from the perspective of the tradents responsible for the production of Deuteronomy. Part Two is a redactional study of the tradition's narratives in Exod 17:1-7 and Num 20:1-13. Special attention is devoted to the texts that anchor the Massah-Meribah narratives into the Pentateuch. In the end, Part Two not only corroborates the framework detected in Deuteronomy for the formative stages of the Massah-Meribah tradition, but it also carries broad implications for the formation of the Pentateuch in general and the Wilderness Narrative in particular.

The study investigates Psalm 145 and the Psalms of Hallel (Psalms 146–150). For the first time, it reveals the intertextual character of these psalms and shows them as highly reflective theological texts. These psalms can thus be characterized as scribal hymns in which scribal theology is presented as the praise of God. The study develops the historical hypothesis that the editions of the Psalms of Hallel were the results of successive growth.

The controversy between Wellhausen and Kaufmann concerning the history of ancient Israel and the question of historical reconstruction has prompted this study. While Wellhausen’s hypothesis introduces a synthesis of the religious development of ancient Israel, Kaufmann’s work emphasizes the singularity of the Israelite religion. Their respective works, which represent the methodologies, presuppositions and the ideologies of their times, remain an impetus to further inquiry into the history of ancient Israel and its religion.
Both Wellhausen and Kaufmann applied the historical-critical method, but were divided as to its results. They agree that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is the primary source on which to base writing about the history of ancient Israel, but differ concerning the authority of its text. This book illustrates the real clash between Wellhausen and Kaufmann, with the aim of providing some basis for reaching a middle ground between these two poles.
As becomes clear in this study, Wellhausen reconstructed the religion of Israel in the framework of its history. Kaufmann, by contrast, proposed that monotheism emerged in Israel as a new creation of the spirit of Israel.

Alfred Rahlfs (1865–1935) is among the most important textual philologists of the 20^th century. His wide-ranging works in researching and editing the Greek Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, are still regarded as groundbreaking today. For the first time, this monograph comprehensively presents Rahlfs’s writings in their biographical and historical context.

What was Judaean religion in the Persian period like? Is it necessary to use the Bible to give an answer to the question? Among other things the study argues that

• the religion practiced in the 5th c. BCE Elephantine community and which is reflected in the so-called Elephantine documents represent a well-attested manifestation of lived Persian period Yahwism,
• as religio-historical sources, the Elephantine documents reveal more about the actual religious practice of the Elephantine Judaeans than what the highly edited and canonised texts of the Bible reveal about the religious practice of the contemporary Yahwistic coreligionists in Judah, and
• the image of the Elephantine Judaism emerging from the Elephantine documents can revise the canonised image of Judaean religion in the Persian period (cf. A. Assmann).

The Elephantine Yahwism should not be interpreted within a framework dependent upon theological, conceptual and spatial concepts alien to it, such as biblical ones. The study proposes an alternative framework by approaching the Elephantine documents on the basis of N. Smart’s multidimensional model of religion. Elephantine should not be exotified but brought to the very centre of any discussion of the history of Judaism.

This study offers a reconstruction of Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah and Jerusalem in 701 BC. It contrasts and compares various, partly contradictious readings of this event and challenges established narratives. By giving equal weight to a great variety of different sources, whether literary or archaeological, the author comes to a new and profound understanding of this complex military conflict.

When thinking about psalms and prayers in the Second Temple period, the Masoretic Psalter and its reception is often given priority because of modern academic or theological interests. This emphasis tends to skew our understanding of the corpus we call psalms and prayers and often dampens or mutes the lived context within which these texts were composed and used. This volume is comprised of a collection of articles that explore the diverse settings in which psalms and prayers were used and circulated in the late Second Temple period.

The book includes essays by experts in the Hebrew bible, the Dead Sea scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament, in which a wide variety of topics, approaches, and methods both old and new are utilized to explore the many functions of psalms and prayers in the late Second Temple period. Included in this volume are essays examining how psalms were read as prophecy, as history, as liturgy, and as literature. A variety methodologies are employed, and include the use of cognitive sciences and poetics, linguistic theory, psychology, redaction criticism, and literary theory.

Using the methodology of redaction criticism, the study reconstructs the origins of the Joseph narrative. It reveals that the story only gradually developed into its present form. Even in its most ancient version (Gen 37–41*), it can be regarded in the context of the history of the Patriarchs, whereas its connection to the Exodus took place secondarily – but still prior to the Priestly scriptures – with Israel’s departure from Egypt.

This compendium examines the origins of the God Yahweh, his place in the Syrian-Palestinian and Northern Arabian pantheon during the bronze and iron ages, and the beginnings of the cultic veneration of Yahweh. Contributors analyze the epigraphic and archeological evidence, apply fundamental considerations from the cultural and religious sciences, and analyze the relevant Old Testament texts.

In this historical-critical examination of the Book of Micah, the author seeks to redefine the work’s textual legacy, which can be traced back to the historical prophets. While previous researchers have generally considered Micah 1–3 as original, this study suggests that a poem about the calamity of Shefela is the true origin of the tradition. It thus presents a new perspective on the history of the Book of Micah.

This volume is a collection of the author’s studies on themes in Deuteronomic history, the lamentations, monotheism, and the prohibition of images. Besides methodological and hermeneutic elements, the essays explore issues related to reception history and theology. The book includes Frevel’s papers about all parts of the canon, including Gen. 34, Exod. 18, Deut. 34, Josh. 23, 2 Kings 17, Ps. 8, 95, 104, Lam. 1 and Lam. 3.

Using Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Latin textual references, this study develops a model for the origins of 1 Kings 11–14. Its methodological innovation is to consider multiple traditions and combine them in the analysis. The stories of the end of the great kingdom and the founding of the northern kingdom are shown to be a reservoir of narratives that critically address various aspects of political and religious life.

Insights from modern translation studies have found little application until now in research on the Septuagint. This study applies the functionalist (skopos) theory of translation to the Greek Book of Numbers as a way of determining the translation's "position in life." The Greek Book of Numbers is shown to be a document from the Alexandrine diaspora, whose skopos is located between historicization and modernization.

This volume contains 24 essays on the history and language of the Old Testament and on the transmission of the Hebrew and Greek texts. In terms of chronology, the essays extend from the mid 2nd millennium BCE (archeology and texts of the Tanakh; religious reforms under Pharaoh Akhenaten), through the period of the Old Kingdom (Saul and David) and up to the Maccabean period and the oldest transmission of the Old Testament text.

Many books of the Hebrew Bible were either composed in some form or edited during the Exilic and post-Exilic periods among a community that was to identify itself as returning from Babylonian captivity. At the same time, a dearth of contemporary written evidence from Judah/Yehud and its environs renders any particular understanding of the process within its social, cultural and political context virtually impossible. This has led some to label the period a dark age or black box – as obscure as it is essential for understanding the history of Judaism. In recent years, however, archaeologists and historians have stepped up their effort to look for and study material remains from the period and integrate the local history of Yehud, the return from Exile, and the restoration of Jerusalem’s temple more firmly within the regional, and indeed global, developments of the time. At the same time, Assyriologists have also been introducing a wide range of cuneiform material that illuminates the economy, literary traditions, practices of literacy and the ideologies of the Babylonian host society – factors that affected those taken into Exile in variable, changing and multiple ways. This volume of essays seeks to exploit these various advances.

There has been little previous exegetical examination of the so-called appendices to the Book of Judges (Judg. 17–21). Using a meticulous edition historical approach, the study casts new light on the composition of these chapters and on the Book of Judges as a whole.

Whilst prophetic oracles in late prophetic books evidence tensions about the Jerusalem temple and its priesthood, MacDonald demonstrates that the relationships between prophetic oracles have been incorrectly appraised. Employing an interpretative method attentive to issues of redaction and inner-biblical interpretation, MacDonald show that Ezekiel 44 is a polemical response to Isaiah 56, and not the reverse as is typically assumed. This has significant consequences for the dating of Ezekiel 44 and for its relationship to other biblical texts, especially Pentateuchal texts from Leviticus and Numbers. Since Ezekiel 44 has been a crucial chapter in understanding the historical development of the priesthood, MacDonald's arguments affect our understanding of the origins of the distinction between Levites and priests, and the claims that a Zadokite priestly sept dominated the Second Temple hierarchy.

Ezekiel is one of the best-structured books in the Old Testament. It is commonly recognized that the strongly interrelated vision accounts (Ez 1:1–3:15; 8–11; 37:1–14; 40–48) contribute greatly to this impression of unity. However, there is a marked lacuna in publications focusing on the vision accounts in Ezekiel as an interconnected text corpus.
The present study combines redaction-critical analysis with literary methods that are typically used in a synchronic approach. Drawing on the paradigm of Fortschreibung, it is the first to present a united redaction history that takes into account the growing interconnections and dependencies between the vision accounts. Building on these results, the second part follows the development of selected themes, such as the relationships between characters, the roles of intermediate figures and anthropological and theological implications, throughout the stages of redaction.
The study thus represents an important step towards an understanding of the complex redaction history of the book of Ezekiel, and indeed of its theology. The combination of diachronic and synchronic methods makes it relevant for scholars of both directions and is itself a methodological statement.

This monograph examines for the first time the momentous biblical theme of the peoples’ pilgrimage to Zion in the end of days. The study includes an exegesis of the texts, which extend from the second to the final chapter of the Book of Isaiah, along with an extensive theological reflection. It elucidates the prophetic prediction of universal salvation and the relationship between Israel and the non-Jewish nations.

This interpretation of the opening of the Book of Isaiah proposes a typology of prophetic superscriptions, challenges the existence of the genre of a prophetic lawsuit, and interprets Israel’s offenses against the socially vulnerable as a resistance to the just rule of JHWH with calamitous consequences. Seen in the light of Isa.1, Isaiah’s speech (Isa.6) is directed against a people whose tyrannical behavior recalls that of the Egyptian Pharaoh.

We present a comparative epistemological analysis of the wisdom motifs in Psalms 1, 73, 90, and 107. These texts were selected on the basis of their epistemological content (each confronts the relationship between virtue and prosperity), and their canonical placement within the Psalter (each begins one of the Psalter’s five “Books”). We explore the implications of their respective epistemological features for our understanding of the canonical structure of the Psalter.
After developing a diagnostic method for the identification and analysis of the epistemological features within a biblical text, we apply it to each of the four psalms, and discuss their epistemological qualities with respect to their canonical placement in the Psalter.
We find that an epistemic progression develops across the canonical ordering of the four psalms. While the psalmists are increasingly forthright in acknowledging the moral paradox that the righteous often suffer, while the wicked can prosper, they engage this paradox with ever more sophisticated responses. Although Yhwh is ultimately the source of all wisdom, human beings can facilitate their acquisition of knowledge by seeking him out intentionally, by questioning him directly, and by observing him with a heart focused on learning.

This study examines the statements about strangers, foreign peoples, and gods in Deuteronomy. It shows that representations of the stranger were closely tied to differently nuanced constructions of the authors’ own Israelite identities during different eras. The approach combines literary historical analysis with sociological insights regarding the construction of the identities of self and other.

While recent decades have seen a plethora of studies exploring the complex processes that shaped biblical books traditionally designated as Prophets, much remains to be done in order to uncover the rich history of their interpretation throughout the ages. This collection of essays aims at filling this gap by exploring different aspects of the exegesis of the Former and Latter Prophets in contexts both ancient and modern, Jewish and Christian. From the inner-biblical interpretation of the Prophets to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, Patristic writings, and contemporary rhetoric, this volume sheds light on how key figures in those books were read and understood by both ancient and not so-ancient readers.

Long neglected by scholars, the Dead Sea scrolls rewriting Samuel-Kings shed precious light on the ancient Jewish interpretation of these books. This volume brings all these texts together for the first time under one cover. Improved editions of the fragments, up-to-date commentary, and detailed discussions of the exegetical traditions embedded in these scrolls will be of interest to both scholars and students of Second Temple Jewish literature.

Are the rituals in the Hebrew Bible of great antiquity, practiced unchanged from earliest times, or are they the products of later innovators? The canonical text is clear: ritual innovation is repudiated as when Jeroboam I of Israel inaugurate a novel cult at Bethel and Dan. Most rituals are traced back to Moses. From Julius Wellhausen to Jacob Milgrom, this issue has divided critical scholarship. With the rich documentation from the late Second Temple period, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is apparent that rituals were changed. Were such rituals practiced, or were they forms of textual imagination? How do rituals change and how are such changes authorized? Do textual innovation and ritual innovation relate? What light might ritual changes between the Hebrew Bible and late Second Temple texts shed on the history of ritual in the Hebrew Bible?

The essays in this volume engage the various issues that arise when rituals are considered as practices that may be invented and subject to change. A number of essays examine how biblical texts show evidence of changing ritual practices, some use textual change to discuss related changes in ritual practice, while others discuss evidence for ritual change from material culture.

This volume explores a hermeneutical question. The secret of Malachi can be found in a new understanding of the prophet within the narrative as told in the Book of the Twelve. Prophecy is biblical interpretation. Malachi is not a literary figure. As he takes form, he is fallible. As a revelatory communicator, he interprets the situation of God’s people with the story of Jacob from Genesis, but this story, too, needs updating and reinterpretation.

Old Testament polemics against other gods, mocking them as powerless images, are often viewed as lacking great theological import. Drawing on Isa: 40–48, Jer. 10, Ps. 135, EpJer and SapSal, this study examines the history of such polemics and shows their connection to the wisdom tradition. The analysis of links between polemics against pagan gods and wisdom provides a historical context for the polemical strategy of these texts.

Elischa ist neben Elia der wichtigste „vorklassische Prophet“ im Korpus der erzählenden Bücher des Alten Testaments. Die vorliegende Untersuchung rekonstruiert konsequent literar- und redaktionsgeschichtlich alle Elischa-Erzählungen und gelangt zu einer neuen Stratifizierung der Texte. Zugleich liefert die Arbeit für den Textbereich 1Kön 19 – 2Kön 13 einen neuen Beitrag zur aktuellen Diskussion um die Entstehungsgeschichte des sog. Deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerkes.

Der zweite Teil der Arbeit widmet sich der Typologie des wundertätigen Propheten Elischa und fragt nach dem Ursprung und der Wirkung dieser Typologie. Dabei reicht das herangezogene Vergleichsmaterial von den altorientalischen Prophetentexten aus Mari über neuassyrische und neubabylonische Texte bis in die Literatur der griechischen Antike, des tannaitisch-rabbinischen Judentums und ins Neue Testament. So konnte u.a. die enorme wirkungsgeschichtliche Bedeutung der Wunder Elischas für die Wunderdarstellung der Evangelien sowie der Apostelgeschichte gezeigt werden. Weiterhin überprüft und erläutert die Arbeit die in der existierenden Forschung bisher nur angedeuteten religionsphänomenologischen Analogien zu Wundertäter-Gestalten des islamischen Sufismus.

The humanitarian concerns of the biblical slave laws and their rhetorical techniques rarely receive scholarly attention, especially the two slave laws in Deuteronomy. Previous studies that compared the biblical and the ANE laws focused primarily on their similarities and developed theories of direct borrowing. This ignored the fact that legal transplants were common in ancient societies. This study, in contrast, aims to identify similarities and dissimilarities in order to pursue an understanding of the underlying values promoted within these slave laws and the interests they protected. To do so, certain innovative methodologies were applied. The biblical laws examined present two diverse legal concepts that contrast to the ANE concepts: (1) all agents are regarded as persons and should be treated accordingly, and (2) all legal subjects are seen as free, dignified, and self-determining human beings. In addition, the biblical laws often distinguish an offender’s “criminal intent,” by which a criminal’s rights are also considered. Based on these features, the biblical laws are able to articulate YHWH’s humanitarian concerns and the basic concepts of human rights presented in Deuteronomy.

The Book of Ruth cannot be understood simply in terms of an emancipatory impetus or a history of integration. Its substantive and structural form is shaped by literary references and poetic allusions that interpret earlier narratives and lend it theological poignancy. As a history of hope in the gestalt of a family story, the Book of Ruth is a variant of wisdom theology in which human and divine actions are inseparably bound together.

The extent of the so-called History of David’s Rise has been indecisive, and as a result, various issues around the document have been left extremely flexible. This comprehensive monograph sees the root of the problem in inadequate methodological reflection, and seeks to provide sensible answers to the source-critical question on the basis of hermeneutic and literary reflection.

Water is a vital resource and is widely acknowledged as such. Thus it often serves as an ideological and linguistic symbol that stands for and evokes concepts central within a community. This volume explores ‘thinking of water’ and concepts expressed through references to water within the symbolic system of the late Persian/early Hellenistic period and as it does so it sheds light on the social mindscape of the early Second Temple community.

In the Hebrew Bible, war is a prominent topic which is dealt with in both legal and narrative texts. So far, the interplay between the two areas has received only little attention. This volume explores the impact of biblical war legislation on war accounts in the Hebrew Bible and in Early Jewish Literature. It provides case studies which show the importance of the topic and shed new light on redaction- and reception-historical developments.

A significant part of Biblical literature is the result of a process involving the reception and revision of earlier texts and traditions contained in the Bible itself, among them the historical psalms. An analysis of the intertextuality present in these psalms sheds light not only on their meaning and compositional purpose, but also on the redaction and composition of the Pentateuch.

Western biblical studies have tended to follow either faith-based theological approaches or value-free historical-critical methods. This monograph challenges the two extremes by pursuing the middle path of philosophical hermeneutics. While drawing on Eastern and Western philosophical writings from ancient to modern times, the author proposes original interpretive solutions to a wide range of important biblical texts, including the Akedah, Second Isaiah, the Decalogue, Qohelet, Job, and Jeremiah. Yet, this is not a collection of antiquarian studies. Readers will also gain fresh and stimulating perspectives concerning monotheism, religious faith and identity, suffering and salvation, and modern and postmodern ethics. Finally, in a supplementary essay, the author introduces readers to the history of Old Testament studies in Japan, and he outlines prospects for the future.

The central theme of the book is the relationship between a hero or cultural icon and the cultures in which he or she is venerated. On one hand, a hero cannot remain a static character if he or she is to appeal to diverse and dynamic communities. On the other hand, a traditional icon should retain some basic features in order to remain recognizable. Joshua son of Nun is an iconic figure of Israelite cultural memory described at length in the Hebrew Bible and venerated in numerous religious traditions. This book uses Joshua as a test case. It tackles reception and redaction history, focusing on the use and development of Joshua’s character and the deployment of his various images in the narratives and texts of several religious traditions. I look for continuities and discontinuities between traditions, as well as cross-pollination and polemic. The first two chapters look at Joshua’s portrayal in biblical literature, using both synchronic (literary analysis) as well as diachronic (Überlieferungsgeschichte and redaction/source criticism) methodologies. The other four chapters focus on the reception history of Joshua in Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish literature, in the medieval (Arabic) Samaritan Book of Joshua, in the New Testament and Church Fathers, and in Rabbinic literature.

This book employs cognitive linguistics to determine the foundational elements of the ancient Israelites’ concept of teaching as reflected in the text of the Hebrew Bible and Ben Sira. It analyzes four prominent lexemes that comprise a lexical set referring to the act of teaching: ירה-H, למד-D, ידע-H, and יסר-D. The study concludes that, in its most basic form, the concept of teaching in ancient Israel was that a teacher creates the conditions in which learning can occur.
The methodology employed in this project is built on a premise of cognitive studies, namely, that because teaching is a universal human activity, there is a universal concept of teaching: one person A recognizes that another person B lacks knowledge, belief, skills, and the like (or has incomplete or distorted knowledge, etc.), and person A attempts to bring about a changed state of knowledge, belief, or skill in person B. This universal concept provides the starting place for understanding the concept of teaching that Biblical Hebrew reflects, and it also forms the conceptual base against which the individual lexemes are profiled.
The study incorporates a micro-level analysis and a macro-level analysis. At the micro-level, each lexeme is examined with respect to its linguistic forms (the linguistic analysis) and the contexts in which the lexeme occurs (the conceptual analysis). The linguistic analysis considers the clausal constructions of each instantiation and determines what transitivity, ditransitivity, or intransitivity contributes to the meaning. Collocations of the lexeme, including prepositional phrases, adverbial adjuncts, and parallel verbs, are evaluated for their contribution to meaning. The conceptual analysis of each lexeme identifies the meaning potential of each word, as well as what aspect of the meaning potential each instantiation activates. The study then determines the lexeme’s prototypical meaning, which is profiled on the base of the universal concept of teaching. This step of profiling represents an important adaptation of the cognitive linguistics tool of profiling to meet the special requirements of working with ancient texts in that it profiles prototype meanings, not instantiations.
In the macro-analysis, the data of all four lexemes in the lexical set are synthesized. The relationships among the lexemes are assessed in order to identify the basic level lexeme and consider whether the lexemes form a folk taxonomy. Finally, the profiles of the four prototype meanings are collated and compared in order to describe the ancient Israelite concept of teaching.
The study finds that the basic level item of the lexical set is למד-D based on frequency of use and distribution. In its prototypical definition, למד-D means to intentionally put another person in a state in which s/he can acquire a skill or expertise through experience and practice. In contrast to this sustained kind of teaching, the prototypical meaning of ירה-H is situational in nature: a person of authority or expertise gives specific, situational instruction to someone who lacks knowledge about what to do. The lexemes יסר-D and ידע-H represent the most restricted and the most expansive lexemes, respectively: the prototypical meaning of יסר-D is to attempt to bring about changed behavior in another person through verbal or physical means, often to the point of causing pain; the prototypical meaning of ידע-H is that a person of authority causes another person to be in a state of knowing something from the divine realm or related to experiences with the divine realm. The study determines that while the four lexemes of the Biblical Hebrew lexical set “to teach” have significant semantic overlap, they cannot be construed in a folk taxonomy because the words are not related in a hierarchical way.

The volume contains eight original studies, each of which focuses on a different chapter or central passage in Daniel and offers a new interpretation or reading of the passage in question. The studies span the Danielic tales and apocalypses, offering innovative analyses that often challenge the scholarly consensus regarding the exegesis of this book. The eight chapters relate to Daniel 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, Susanna, and the conception of angelology in Daniel.
The studies are all based on careful textual analysis, including comparison between the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek versions (especially regarding Daniel 4–6), and, in each case, the larger arguments are built upon solid philological foundations. Many of the insights proposed in this volume are based upon the realization that the authors of Daniel were frequently interpreters of earlier biblical books, and that the identification of these intertextual clues can be the key to unlocking the meaning of these texts. In this sense, Daniel is similar to other contemporaneous works, such as Jubilees and Qumran literature, but the extent of this phenomenon has not been fully appreciated by scholars of the book. This volume therefore contributes to the appreciation of Daniel as both the latest book in the Hebrew Bible, and a significant work in the landscape of Second Temple Judaism.

This study synthesizes academic research on the monologues of Elihu in Job: 32–27, and presents a literary critique that views the complex as a theological compendium ranging from poetical dialogue to divine speech. The genre analysis of the introductory chapter, which is regarded at many points as an ironization of Elihu and a deconstruction of his overall argumentation, allows us to recognize the theological status of the monologues.

Gender in the Book of Ben Sira is a semantic analysis and, also, an investigation of hermeneutical pathways for performing such an analysis. A comparison of possible Greek and Hebrew gender taxonomies precedes the extensive delineation of the target-category, gender. The delineation includes invisible influences in the Book of Ben Sira such as the author’s choices of genre and his situation as a member of a colonized group within a Hellenistic empire. When the Book of Ben Sira’s genre-constrained invectives against women and male fools are excluded, the remaining expectations for women and for men are mostly equivalent, in terms of a pious life lived according to Torah. However, Ben Sira says nothing about distinctions at the level of how “living according to Torah” would differ for the two groups. His book presents an Edenic ideal of marriage through allusions to Genesis 1 to 4, and a substantial overlap of erotic discourse for the female figures of Wisdom and the “intelligent wife” creates tropes similar to those of the Song of Songs. In addition, Ben Sira’s colonial status affects what he says and how he says it; by writing in Hebrew, he could craft the Greek genres of encomium and invective to carry multiple levels of meaning that subvert Hellenistic/Greek claims to cultural superiority.

There is no disagreement that the Christian understanding of faith has its roots in the Old Testament. Yet these roots have not been the subjects of extensive research until now; the present study attempts to fill this gap. Its point of departure is the Old Testament concept of faith as ’mn in Hif‘il. Beyond the literal meaning of this term, the study focuses on the ways it was reshaped during the Persian period and continued to evolve through history. In her historical exploration, the author documents the continuity between Old and New Testament discourses on faith. Thus, the book offers ways to think about the Old Testament foundations for the Christian doctrine of faith.

Although prayer is not regarded as one of the basic forms of prophetic tradition, prayer does arise at critical theological junctures in the prophetic books. In this work, Alexa F. Wilke explores the literary and theological functions of prayer and examines the images of self and God communicated in prayer. Her analysis contributes to our understanding of the history of the reception and perpetuation of the prophetic books as well as the nature of the theology of prayer.

Welche Zeitvorstellungen lassen die Schriften des Alten Testaments erkennen? Das ist das Thema dieses Bandes, der Ernst-Joachim Waschke zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet ist. Zunächst werden die grundsätzlichen Fragen nach Zeitverständnis, Zeitbewusstsein und Zeitbegriffen untersucht, im Anschluss daran die wichtigsten konkreten chronologischen Strukturierungen des Alten Testaments, von der Tora über das Könige- und das Jeremiabuch bis hin zu Esra–Nehemia. In einem dritten Teil wird der Frage nachgegangen, was es, in Abwandlung des Mottozitats aus Koh 1,9, Neues über die Sonne im Alten Testament zu sagen gibt, während die Beiträge des vierten und letzten Teils dem berühmten „Alles hat seine Zeit“ (Koh 3,1) bis in die Rezeptionsgeschichte und die biblische Archäologie nachgehen.

Defining the relationship between Priests and Levites is a critical element in reconstructing the history of religious leadership in the Old Testament, and is regarded as a key element for understanding the literary history of the Hebrew Bible. The present study undertakes a critical literary comparison of the relevant passages from the Pentateuch and the Early Prophets in order to develop a secure foundation of sources for historical inquiry.

Daniel in the Lion’s Den: the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible each bear witness to the idiosyncratic transmission of Daniel 6 in different cultural areas. Using comparative narrative analysis, the present study shows the specific profile of each text and their divergent classification in literary history. The analysis develops new perspectives for understanding translation processes.

The Old Testament is integrally bound to the history and culture of Ancient Israel and the Ancient Middle East. This collection of essays primarily employs approaches from the fields of literary history and archeology. It makes an important contribution to cultural and religious historical aspects of kingship and prophecy. It also casts a new light on questions regarding institutional education and worship practices, on the possibilities and limitations of religious historical comparison, and on Biblical interpretation in a Judeo-Christian context.

Lexicography, together with grammatical studies and textual criticism, forms the basis of biblical exegesis. Recent decades have seen much progress in this field, yet increasing specialization also tends to have the paradoxical effect of turning exegesis into an independent discipline, while leaving lexicography to the experts. The present volume seeks to renew and intensify the exchange between the study of words and the study of texts. This is done in reference to both the Hebrew source text and the earliest Greek translation, the Septuagint. Questions addressed in the contributions to this volume are how linguistic meaning is effected, how it relates to words, and how words may be translated into another language, in Antiquity and today. Etymology, semantic fields, syntagmatic relations, word history, neologisms and other subthemes are discussed. The main current and prospective projects of biblical lexicology or lexicography are presented, thus giving an idea of the state of the art. Some of the papers also open up wider perspectives of interpretation.

This volume is a compilation of 16 essays by the Munich-based Old Testament Catholic scholar Hermann-Josef Stipp, reprinted here in revised form. These essays are devoted to texts from the Priestly Scriptures, the historical sections of Deuteronomy, and the Prophets. The essays are substantively focused on composition and interpretation.

This monograph is an investigation of Yahwistic votive practice during the Hellenistic period. The dedicatory inscriptions from the Yahweh temple on Mount Gerizim are analyzed in light of votive practice in Biblical literature and in general on the basis of a thorough terminological and theoretical discussion.
A special focus is laid on remembrance formulae, which request the deity to remember the worshipper in return for a gift. These formulae cannot only be found at Gerizim, but also in other Semitic dedicatory inscriptions. Therefore these texts are interpreted in their broader cultural context, placed within a broad religious practice of dedicating gifts to the gods and leaving inscriptions in sanctuaries. Finally, the aspect of divine remembrance in the Hebrew Bible is explored and related to the materiality of the votive inscription.
The research concludes that there is a perception of the divine behind this practice on Mount Gerizim that ties together the aspects of gift, remembrance and material presence. This ‘theology’ is echoed both in similar Semitic dedicatory inscriptions and in the Hebrew Bible.

Ben Sira is properly regarded as one of the most significant representatives of Jewish wisdom literature. Georg Sauer, the renowned Viennese Old Testament scholar, addresses the many sides of these scriptural writings in the present volume. He explores text-immanent questions regarding the structure, content, and theological meaning of Ben Sira’s book in consideration of evidence from Hebrew and Greek texts. In addition, this study illuminates the historical background and context for Ben Sira’s work as well as explores questions about the history of its interpretation in Judaism and Christianity.

The present volume is one of the first to concentrate on a specific theme of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely the book of Genesis. In particular the volume is concerned with the links displayed by the Qumranic biblical interpetation to the inner-biblical interpretation and the final shaping of the Hebrew scriptures. Moshe Bar-Asher studies cases of such inner biblical interpretative comments; Michael Segal deals with the Garden of Eden story in the scrolls and other contemporary Jewish sources; Reinhard Kratz analizes the story of the Flood as preamble for the lives of the Patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible; Devorah Dimant examines this theme in the Qumran scrolls; Roman Viehlhauer explores the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; George Brooke and Atar Livneh discuss aspects of Jacob’s career; Harald Samuel review the career of Levi; Liora Goldman examines the Aramaic work the Visions of Amram; Lawrence Schiffman and Aharon Shemesh discuss halakhic aspects of stories about the Patriarchs; Moshe Bernstein provides an overview of the references to the Patriarchs in the Qumran scrolls.

In addition to three scrolls containing the Book of Joshua, the Qumran caves brought to light five previously unknown texts rewriting this book. These scrolls (4Q123, 4Q378, 4Q379, 4Q522, 5Q9), as well as a scroll from Masada (Mas 1039–211), are commonly referred to as the Apocryphon of Joshua. While each of these manuscripts has received some scholarly attention, no attempt has yet been made to offer a detailed study of all these texts. The present monograph fills this gap by providing improved editions of the six scrolls, an up-to-date commentary and a detailed discussion of the biblical exegesis embedded in each scroll. The analysis of the texts is followed by a reassessment of the widely accepted view considering 4Q123, 4Q378, 4Q379, 4Q522, 5Q9 and Mas 1039–211 as copies of a single composition. Finally, the monograph attempts to place the Qumran scrolls rewriting the Book of Joshua within the wider context of Second Temple Jewish writings concerned with the figure of Joshua.

Drawing inspiration from the widely recognized parody of Ps 8:5 in Job 7:17–18, this study inquires whether other allusions to the Psalms might likewise contribute to the dialogue between Job, his friends, and God. An intertextual method that incorporates both “diachronic” and “synchronic” concerns is applied to the sections of Job and the Psalms in which the intertextual connections are the most pronounced, the Job dialogue and six psalms that fall into three broad categories: praise (8, 107), supplication (39, 139), and instruction (1, 73). In each case, Job’s dependence on the Psalms is determined to be the more likely explanation of the parallel, and, in most, allusions to the same psalm appear in the speeches of both Job and the friends. The contrasting uses to which they put these psalms reflect conflicting interpretive approaches and uncover latent tensions within them by capitalizing on their ambiguities. They also provide historical insight into the Psalms’ authority and developing views of retribution. The dialogue created between Job and these psalms indicates the concern the book has with the proper response to suffering and the role the interpretation of authoritative texts may play in that reaction.