Bøger om Det bibelske Israel

"The thrilling true story of an ancient plant, wonderfully reborn in the modern era through the hard work of two female scientists.Thousands of years ago, in a time of rebellion, the Jewish people fought against their Roman rulers. The brutal Emperor Titus ordered the destruction of everything precious to the Jews: towns, villages, even their beloved Judean date palm trees. Centuries passed. The Jewish people were scattered, and the Judean date palm faded into extinction. Then, in 1963, a team of archaeologists uncovered two-thousand-year-old date palm seeds at the ruined fortress of Masada. For another forty years the seeds waited-until 2004, when Israeli scientist Dr. Sarah Sallon had a big, courageous idea. What if those ancient seeds could bring the Judean date palm back to life? Dr. Sallon recruited her friend Dr. Elaine Solowey, and their amazing experiment began...Intertwining world history, the scientific process, and colorfully detailed artwork, The Miracle Seed follows the Judean date palm's journey from tragic extinction to incredible rebirth. Captivating and hopeful, this graphic novel is an unforgettable look at perseverance and survival in the face of impossible odds. "--

A detailed exploration of the remaining wall scenes and texts from the tomb of Parennefer, the royal butler of the pharaoh Akhenaten, part of the archaeological site in the ancient Theban necropolis in Egypt.

Presents the results of excavations at a landfill outside the walls of Jerusalem dating from the 1st century CE that functioned as the final resting spot of the discarded items of the city. The findings reveal city life shaped by halakhic rules of purity.

Studies the material remains of the city of Ashkelon in the southern Levant during the Hellenistic period.

Der vorliegende Band versammelt Aufsätze, die aus Vorträgen auf der ,47. Internationalen Ökumenischen Konferenz der Hebräischlehrenden' (IÖKH) in der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg hervorgegangen sind.Die thematische Vielfalt der Beiträge reicht von der Betrachtung stilistisch eingesetzter Verbformen in biblischen und qumranischen Texten über die Untersuchung von Manuskripten vom Toten Meer auf ihre orthographischen und sprachlichen Kontakte untereinander sowie mit dem zeitgenössischen judäischen Aramäisch bis hin zu Studien über Etymologie, Vokalisierung und Akzentuation des masoretischen Textes.

Alexandria was one of the main hubs of the Hellenistic world and a cultural and religious "kaleidoscope." Merchants and migrants, scientists and scholars, philosophers, and religious innovators from all over the world and from all social backgrounds came to this ancient metropolis and exchanged their goods, views, and dreams. Accordingly, Alexandria became a place where Hellenistic, Egyptian, Jewish, and early Christian identities all emerged, coexisted, influenced, and rivaled each other. In order to meet the diversity of Alexandria's urban life and to do justice to the variety of literary and non-literary documents that bear witness to this, the volume examines the processes of identity formation from a range of different academic perspectives. Thus, the present volume gathers together twenty-six contributions from the realm of archaeology, ancient history, classical philology, religious studies, philosophy, the Old Testament, narratology, Jewish studies, papyrology, and the New Testament.

Der vorliegende Sammelband untersucht die Konzepte, Methoden und Inhalte der Auslegung autoritativer religiöser Texte in Antike und Mittelalter. Diese Texte sind Ausgangs- und Ansatzpunkte in Unterweisungen, die zur Orientierung und Identitätsbildung dienen, dem Einzelnen ebenso wie Gemeinschaften und Gesellschaften. Fachvertreterinnen und Fachvertreter unterschiedlicher Disziplinen - aus Geschichte, Philologie, Orientalistik, Religionswissenschaft und Theologie - spüren der vielfältigen Bedeutung der oft "heilig" genannten Schriften für Bildung und Erziehung nach. Sie beleuchten die Rolle, die diese Texte für Lehre und Lernen in ihren Ursprungskulturen hatten und haben. Darüber hinaus zeigen sie interkulturelle Bezüge auf, die heute für Diskussionen um Bildung und Religion in den multikulturellen Demokratien Europas höchst relevant sind.

Within the framework of Paul's use of Scripture, the contexts of biblical narratives are of great significance, although this has long been underestimated. This conference volume deals with the reception of traditions about Moses in the letters of the apostle to the Gentiles, especially the exodus and Sinai traditions. It focuses on the important and much-discussed passages about the danger of idolatry in 1 Corinthians 10 as well as on the glory of Paul's apostolic ministry in 2 Corinthians 3. The collected essays are methodologically oriented towards the issue of the relationship between education/formation and religion, and they thus perceive Paul's use and interpretation of those biblical traditions as a process of religious education. Tradition-historical backgrounds and the contexts of the situations are also taken into consideration, as well as literary structures and communicative intentions.

Taking account of a wide range of literary evidence and the most recent scholarship on the nature of education in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, these studies examine new and varied aspects of the scriptural and intellectual infrastructure of the educational ethos, the tension between oral tradition and literary practice, and the central role of the rabbinic sage as pedagogical innovator and model. They also study the underlying influence of social and economic factors, the evolution of teaching techniques and frameworks, and the formative role of both midrashic mentality and mythopoetic currents. With an eye on the broader contexts of Greco-Roman culture and emergent Christianity, these essays follow the development of rabbinic ideas and institutions from the first centuries of the Common Era in Palestine through the flowering of centers of learning centuries later in Babylonia.

The present volume contains the proceedings of a conference held in October 2018 at Humboldt University Berlin. The articles reflect the different categories of describing Judaism of the Second Temple Period in view of their sustainability in characterising an ancient religious community in different historical situations and discuss relevant (re)constructions of ancient Judaism in the history of scholarship. Since the Persian period, ancient Judaism existed in a world which was in constant flux regarding its political, social, and religious contexts. Consequently, Judaism was subject to permanent processes of change in its self-perception as well as its external perception. In all complexity, however, the Torah, the Temple(s) as a place where heaven meets the earth, and the 'holy' or 'promised' land as the dwelling place of God's people can be regarded as institutions to which all kinds of Judaism in the Babylonian and Egyptian dispora as well in Israel/Palestine were related in some way or another.

Research on the Book of Jeremiah has gained momentum in the past forty years and led to new results. The differences between the MT and the LXX have received more attention than ever. The extent of Deuteronomistic thinking and of redactions marks the debate on the composition of the book. It has become evident that the Book of Jeremiah intensively picks up earlier sources and offers a synthesis of them, comparable to a mosaic. It concentrates on the downfall of Jerusalem, conceives anew the prophet's role in the figure of Jeremiah and portrays the biblical God in a unique way. This collection of studies by Georg Fischer from the past ten years imparts insights into the recent discussions about the Book of Jeremiah.

The most important objects in the Hebrew Bible are a wooden box, styled in English "the ark" or "the ark of the covenant", and two statues of winged creatures, "the cherubim", that surmount it. Raanan Eichler attempts to understand these objects using the full gamut of data and tools available to the modern scholar. The study features an abundance of visual comparative material, much of it in colour, with a particularly close examination of the finds from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The author proposes solutions to a number of unsolved puzzles, such as the question of what cherubim looked like, and offers a new explanation of the nature of the ark and the cherubim, rejecting the prevailing scholarly view of them as having constituted an "empty throne" and footstool for the God of Israel. Rather, he argues, they constituted an empty frame, a unique cultic focus that surpassed all known systems in the ancient Near East in the extent of the efforts it represented to prevent an anthropomorphic conception of the deity in a cultic context.

Scholarly interest in intersections between Jews and Syriac Christians has experienced a boom in recent years. This is the result of a series of converging trends in the study of both groups and their cultural productions. The present volume contributes to this developing conversation by collecting sixteen studies that investigate a wide range of topics, from questions of origins to the development of communal boundaries, from social interactions to shared historical conditions, involving Jews and Syriac Christians over the first millennium CE. These studies not only reflect the current state of the question, but they also signal new ways forward for future work that crosses disciplinary boundaries between the fields of Jewish Studies and Syriac Studies, in some cases even dismantling those boundaries altogether.

How is Acts of the Apostles - its form and features - to be understood in light of the work's ancient Mediterranean cultural context? In the present study, Eric C. Moore offers a fresh response to this much-debated question, arguing for the utility of ancient colonization as an analytic lens for reading Acts, a story about the origins and replication of early Christianity. He explores how in narrating his account, Luke draws on a common stock of "foundation" motifs employed by ancient sources, textual and material alike, to glorify community beginnings.

Tractate Menahkot in the Babylonian Talmud considers the proper composition, formation, and presentation of offerings of grain and flour brought to the Jerusalem Temple. Redacted centuries after the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of the sacrificial cult, the tractate focuses on the work of the priests and the centrality of intent in validating or invalidating offerings. There is minimal consideration of the role or experience of the men and women who brought offerings. The tractate also contains a detailed discussion of major ritual objects: Torah scrolls, mezuzah, tsitsit, and tefillin. Dvora Weisberg's commentary focuses attention on the tractate's treatment of women and gender issues, considering the ways that the Talmud presents women's engagement with the sacrificial system and with key religious symbols.

A constant re-evaluation of the new archaeological and textual material unearthed and edited in recent decades is a recurrent duty of ancient and modern scholars. Since the overwhelming amount of available data and the complexity of new methodologies can be competently handled only by specialized scholars, such a re-evaluation is no longer possible for a single scholar. For this reason, archaeologists, cuneiform and biblical scholars as well as classicists joined forces at an international conference in Rome in May 2017 to share their accumulated knowledge. The results of the proceedings are presented here in the oral stage along with the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Greco-Roman periods.

In recent centuries critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible has brought to light a large gap between biblical portrayals of the historical reality of ancient Israel (story) on the one hand, and historical-critical reconstructions of the actual past (history) on the other. The problems the so-called "minimalists" and "maximalists" struggled to solve still remain unsettled, and students as well as scholars of the Hebrew Bible cannot ignore or even remain indifferent to the gap and overlap between story and history. Could and should Hebrew Bible scholarship in the future move beyond the milieu of the debate between minimalists and maximalists? This volume, consisting of nine articles by authors with different institutional and religious backgrounds, articulates that there are ways to overcome the increasing gap between story and history.

Andrew J. Kelley argues that Mark undergirds his high view of Jesus by characterizing him as a miracle-worker who does not defer to a deity in order to perform miracles. Survey work in the first half of this monograph shows that this is distinct from the many miracle-workers depicted in sources contemporary to the Gospel of Mark. Further emphasizing this distinction is the fact that all other miracle-workers in Mark either defer to the Jewish God or to Jesus to perform miracles. The author shows that these two characteristics of Mark's depiction of miracle working in contrast to other depictions of miracle working in the time period make it likely that Mark is using Jesus' autonomous miracle working to undergird his high, perhaps divine, view of Jesus.

A well-known characteristic of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls are their assertions that membership in the Qumran movement included present and eschatological fellowship with the angels, but scholars disagree as to the precise meaning of these claims. To gain a better understanding of angelic fellowship at Qumran, Matthew L. Walsh utilizes the early Jewish concept that certain angels were closely associated with Israel. Moreover, these angels, which included guardians and priests, were envisioned within apocalyptic worldviews that assumed that realities on earth corresponded to those of the heavenly realm. A comparison of non-sectarian texts with sectarian compositions reveals that the Qumran movement's lofty assertions of communion with the guardians and priests of heavenly Israel would have made a significant contribution to their identity as the true Israel.

Exile is a central concern in the Hebrew Bible. The fifteen essays in this volume, presented at an international conference in Copenhagen in May 2017, investigate and discuss images of exile in the prophetic books. Some deal with a specific passage or biblical book, while others approach the issue by comparing different books or by looking more closely at a particular metaphor or theme. A recurrent question is what role language and metaphors play in the prophets' attempts to express, structure, and cope with experiences of exile. Contributors:Sonja Ammann, Ulrich Berges, Göran Eidevall, Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor, Søren Holst, Else K. Holt, Jesper Høgenhaven, Paul M. Joyce, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, Anja Klein, Francis Landy, Frederik Poulsen, Cian Power, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

In the last two decades, increasing numbers of texts have been suggested as coming from or edited during the Persian period, but these discussions do not always reflect extensively on the assumptions used in making these claims or the implications on a broader scale. Earlier generations of scholars found it sufficient to categorize material in the biblical books simply as "late" or "postexilic" without adequately trying to determine when, by whom, and why the material was incorporated into the text at a fixed point in the Persian period. By grappling with these questions, the essays in this volume evince a greater degree of precision vis-à-vis dating and historical context. The authors introduce the designations early Persian, middle Persian, and late Persian in their textual analysis, and collectively they take significant steps toward developing criteria for locating a biblical text within the Persian period. Contributors:Reinhard Achenbach, Richard J. Bautch, Joseph Blenkinsopp, David M. Carr, Georg Fischer SJ, Raik Heckl, Yigal Levin, Jill Middlemas, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Konrad Schmid, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

In recent decades, the debate on monotheism and religious pluralism has been strongly influenced by the idea that monotheism originating in the Old Testament is the root of intolerance and violence. In this study, Daniela Scialabba investigates inclusive tendencies in Old Testament monotheism, in particular theological principles motivating and supporting the possibility of a positive relationship between non-Israelites and the God of Israel. Thus, she examines three texts thoroughly: the Book of Jonah, Psalm 33 (MT and LXX), and the novel "Joseph and Aseneth". Despite their difference concerning genre, date of origin and provenance, these texts have important ideas in common: the relationship between the God of Israel and non-Israelites as well as the concept of God as a universal creator who has pity with all his creatures.

In this work, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves. The author investigates what biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians considered "religion" and "history" to be, how they understood these conceptual categories, and why they studied them in the manner they did. Focusing on Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, his inquiry scrutinizes to what extent, in an age of allegedly neutral historical science, the very enterprise of reconstructing the ancient past was shaped by liberal Protestant structures shared by dominant historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this work, Karel van der Toorn explores the social setting, the intellectual milieu, and the historical context of the beliefs and practices reflected in the Hebrew Bible. While fully recognizing the unique character of early Israelite religion, the author challenges the notion of its incomparability. Beliefs are anchored in culture. Rituals have societal significance. God has a history. By shifting the focus to the context, the essays gathered here yield a deeper understanding of Israelite religion and the origins of the Bible.

This collection of essays by Isaiah M. Gafni reflects over forty years of research on central issues of Jewish history in one of its formative eras. Questions relating to representations of the past, beginning with Josephus but primarily in rabbinic and post-rabbinic literature, represent an axial theme in this volume. Throughout the collection the author addresses the tension between realities on the ground and the historiography that shaped the image of that reality for all subsequent generations. Two specific clusters of studies analyze the emergence and development of the Babylonian rabbinic community, as well as the complex relationship between the Judaean centre and the Jewish diaspora in Late Antiquity. A final selection of essays examines the impact of modern ideologies and revised methods of research on the image of Jewish life and rabbinic leadership in late antique Judaism.

The phenomena we call magic and mysticism had a profound effect on the shaping of Judaism in late antiquity. In this volume, Michael D. Swartz offers a wide-ranging study of the purposes, world-views, ritual dynamics, literary forms, and social settings of ancient Jewish magic and mysticism and their function in religion and history. Based on the author's studies over the past few decades, he proposes innovative methods for the study of these two phenomena. The author focuses especially on the rituals of early Jewish magic and mysticism, their social contexts, and the textual dimension of this complex literature. He also offers introductions to these phenomena. Michael D. Swartz argues that the authors of these texts employed intricate technologies, literary and artistic forms, and physical practices to negotiate between the values and world-views of their cultures and the texture of everyday life.