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At the Images of Empire colloquium held in Sheffield in 1990, an international team of scholars met to explore some of the conflicting images generated by the Roman Empire. The articles reflect interests as diverse as those of the scholars themselves: Roman history and archaeology, Jewish Studies, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament and Patristics are all represented. All are focused on a single theme, the importance of which is increasingly recognized, not only for the historian, but for everyone interested in the political complexities of our post-imperial world.

The Old Testament, and biblical scholarship itself, distinguishes between mythical and historical. This book argues that only historical thing in the Bible is the Bible itself, a superb product of Jewish thought. What is narrated in the Bible is only myth.

The fifteen articles in this volume, arising from work in the Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, engage with the author''s thought and message through analysis of certain critical texts or by identifying and tracing larger themes through the work. The collection follows The Chronicler as Historian and The Chronicler as Author. Like these previous volumes, this book also endeavours to show the diverse approaches employed in Chronicles scholarship. Contributors: Robert H. Smith, Allen W. Mueller, Gary N. Knoppers, Gerrie F. Snyman, Ehud Ben Zvi, Philip Abadie, Mark A. Throntveit, Leslie C. Allen, Christopher T. Begg, Roddy L. Braun, John C. Endres, Isaac Kalimi, Brian E. Kelly, William M. Schniedewind and John W. Wright.

Three major essays by Baruch Halpern, Brian Peckham and Paul E. Dion deal with traumatic changes in Israelite culture, in particular the transition from the traditional culture of Israel in Iron Age IIA (tenth-ninth centuries) to a new, more widely literate culture in the eighth-seventh centuries BCE. These essays throw into relief changes in legal, political and religious culture in Judah in the last 150 years of its independence. Their combined implications for the origins of Western law and civilization, and for the models from which Reformation and Enlightenment political theory were drawn, are substantial.

This provocative book combines literary and historical methods to examine the phenomenon of the ''forsaken firstborn'' in Genesis. The dignity of the firstborn sons of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph-Ishmael, Esau, Reuben and Manasseh-is disregarded in the narrative and the rights inherent in their status are taken from them and conferred on a younger brother. One might easily compare this with the motif in many folktales of the youngest son outdoing his elder brothers in cleverness and skill. But unlike the folklore motif, in the book of Genesis the younger brother''s success is not due to any courageous deed or heroic feat on his own part. Instead the displacement of the elder by the younger is usually the result of somebody else''s initiative and achievement.

During the last decade or so there has been a renewed interest in the study of cult and priesthood. The various individuals who have contributed essays to this volume are of both junior and senior rank and from both Christian and Jewish backgrounds. Certain essays represent the fruitful interchange that is now developing among historians of religion, anthropologists and biblical scholars. Others focus on parallels between aspects of Israelite religion and their counterparts in Canaanite and early Greek contexts. There are also contributions on the literary shape of the priestly law-code.

The author analyses the various conversations that occur between the characters in the Jonah narrative and the ''conversation'' that occurs between the text and its readers. The study opens with an introduction to the field of conversation analysis, with a focus on one feature of conversation analysis-that a fundamental structure in the organization of language is adjacency pairs (for example, question/answer and invitation/refusal). Person notes how complex the adjacency pairs in the Jonah narrative are, and shows how they contribute to the narrative elements of plot, characterization, atmosphere and tone. He then refines reader-response theory (especially that of Wolfgang Iser) and provides a reader-response commentary on the book. The study ends with an analysis of the history of the interpretation of the book of Jonah, demonstrating how the structures of adjacency pairs in the narrative have been successfully and unsuccessfully interpreted.

This synthetic study has two primary tasks. The first is to elucidate the structure of the book of Zechariah. But in order to do this, a satisfactory method of analysis must be found. Thus the author begins by drawing up suitable literary criteria that will help to frame a reliable way of proceeding. The method is then tested on the book of Zechariah, and the results are compared with those of other biblical scholarship. Although this is a study in ''rhetorical criticism'', it approaches the text from the standpoint of the authors'' and redactors'' intentions. The result is a convincing and wide-ranging analysis of the various and complex structural patterns of Zechariah.

This tribute to Albert Pietersma of the University of Toronto is offered by a highly distinguished international panel of scholars, including John W. Wevers, Takamitsu Muraoka, Anneli Aejmelaeus, Emanuel Tov, Johan Lust, Robert A. Kraft, Johann Cook, Arie van der Kooij, Moises Silva and Claude E. Cox. The focus of the volume is on the Old Greek Psalter and its significance for biblical research and related disciplines, where it marks a definitive statement of research questions and issues in this increasingly important area of biblical textual studies.

A reader-oriented approach provides a substantially new angle of vision on Psalm 18 and Psalms study in general. Reader-based interpretation is compared to conventional methodologies by means of four separate analyses of Psalm 18: a textual study, a form-critical explication, a rhetorical study, and an experimental reader-oriented study involving the following strategies. Initially, the components of the text are considered as networks of signals for the reader. Secondly, the text''s speech acts are isolated and typified. Thirdly, the ancient and contemporary contexts for the reading of the psalm are examined. The reader-oriented study culminates in two perspectives upon Psalm 18. The psalm may be read as a ritual speech act performed by the community of ancient worshippers, or as a lyric poem that each contemporary reader experiences by identification with the speaker. The concluding chapter reviews each of the methodologies, evaluating strengths and weaknesses, as well as interrelationships among methods.

This book explores the social roles of women as portrayed within the book of Proverbs, as well as the character archetypes and patriarchal ideologies which undergird the sages'' portrayal. Using feminist folklore methodologies and performance studies, the author explores an alternative paradigm for understanding women''s relationship to wisdom traditions in the ancient near east, using parallel texts, later midrash and extrabiblical re-presentations of biblical women associated with wisdom. The author demonstrates that women were culturally authorized ''performers'' of the family based wisdom traditions of teaching, economic problem solving, and care giving, and that these roles provided them with a platform to use their acknowledged wisdom in public roles.

W.M.L. de Wette (1780-1849) was not only one of the founders of modern Old Testament criticism. His loss and recovery of Christian faith, his dismissal from his post in Berlin in 1819 on political grounds and his long subsequent exile in Basel left their mark upon his work in New Testament ethics, dogmatics and aesthetics. This first modern critical study of de Wette''s life and work evaluates his achievements in the context of his own times and asesses their importance on modern biblical scholars.

This Festschrift honours one of today''s leading scholars of early Judaism and Christian origins. Twenty-two essays by internationally renowned scholars reflect the pioneering contribution of Geza Vermes in the fields of Dead Sea Scrolls, Targums and Rabbinics and New Testament.

Exalted for centuries as a hero and author of the Bible, Moses is inseparable from biblical tradition itself. Moses is also an inherently ambiguous figure and a perennial focus of controversy, from ancient disputes of priestly rivalry to modern issues of class, gender and race.

This volume represents an international collaboration focusing on the books of Chronicles as literature, looking at their literary sources, their techniques of composition, their perspectives, how they were read in antiquity, and the value of contemporary reading strategies for bringing the text to life in the present day. It opens with five ''Overview'' articles by Kai Peltonen, Steven McKenzie, Graeme Auld, Rodney Duke and John Wright; William Schniedewind, Gary Knoppers, Ehud Ben Zvi, Armin Siedlecki and Howard Wallace deal with ''Themes''; and James Trotter, Christine Mitchell, Kirsten Nielsen, Noel Bailey, Roland Boer and Magnar Karveit address specific texts. The collection both reflects and stimulates recent and contemporary fascination with the Chronicler in biblical scholarship.