Bøger om Det bibelske Israel

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.

An epicenter in present-day Pauline scholarship is the issue of the Law. The interpretation of this contentious issue started before Paul's letters and found its way into them by his citing how others perceived of his theology, and in Paul rendering rumors and criticism, and also interacting with them. To this reception-oriented perspective belong also punitive actions taken against Paul by synagogues. As a reception of Paul, Acts is included, leaving a more complex picture than argued by advocates of Paul within Judaism. Thus Karl Olav Sandnes uncovers the first interpretation or reception of Paul's view on Torah. It is limited in its scope, but provides a critical and necessary view on common trends in Pauline scholarship. Paul's decentering of the Torah was considered endangering for morality, for Jews and Gentiles alike. Perceptions of Paul's theology must be accounted for in Pauline studies.

Biblical books, which were transmitted on separate scrolls in antiquity, are not necessarily identical with books in the modern sense of a coherent and self-contained compositional unit. The books of the Primary History especially constitute a larger master narrative. This raises the question of how the distribution of the text to different scrolls relates to its compositional history. Were the respective books conceived as physically separate parts of a multivolume composition (whether Pentateuch, Hexateuch, Deuteronomistic History or Enneateuch) from the outset, or are we dealing with a more complex development of originally independent compositional units that were only connected or separated by later redaction? The present volume addresses these issues with respect to the transitions between the books of Genesis/Exodus and Joshua/Judges, which have obviously developed in dependency upon each other.

The figure Balaam has interested exegetes and scribes for millennia. Jonathan Miles Robker examines the different versions of the literary character Balaam as attested in biblical and epigraphic literature. By contrasting the distinct information about Balaam presented in the various sources (the plaster inscription from Della, Numbers 22-24; 31; Deuteronomy 23; Joshua 13; 24; Judges 11; Micah 6; and Nehemiah 13), the author seeks to trace the development of characterizations of Balaam from the oldest available material to the youngest in the Hebrew Bible. In this way, Jonathan Miles Robker advances discourse about the literary and tradition-historical development of the texts that became the Hebrew Bible. Beyond the text of the Hebrew Bible, he also traces the continued development of Balaam's characterization through the texts of Qumran and the New Testament. To this end, the author contributes discussions of the history of religion in Antiquity.

In this volume, scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and late antique religion demonstrate how special attention to the ritual and rhetorical functions of space can improve modern interpretations of ancient literary, liturgical, and ritual texts. Each chapter is concerned with reconstructing the dynamic interaction between space and text. Demonstrating the pliability of the idea of space, the contributions in this volume span from Second Temple debates over Eden to Byzantine Christian hymnography. In so doing, they offer a number of answers to the seemingly simple question: What difference does space make for how modern scholars interpret ancient texts? The nine contributions in this volume are divided into the three interrelated topics of the rhetorical construction of places both earthly and cosmic, the positioning of people in religious space, and the performance of ritual texts in place.

Religion requires education. Soon after the emergence of Christianity, religious education became crucial to the development of Christian communities in towns and in the countryside. The present volume analyzes the human agents of this education: bishops, catechists, mothers and fathers, monastic teachers. It thus offers a comparative analysis of teachers' roles in Christian educational contexts, dealing with questions such as: Who taught in late antique Christianity? Which imagery is used to describe such teaching? What impact do gender ascriptions have on teaching roles and processes? And where do conflicts emerge between different roles and their social settings?C ontributors:Christoph Birkner, Carmen Angela Cvetkovi¿c, Juliette Day, Therese Fuhrer, Peter Gemeinhardt, Katharina Greschat, Henrik Rydell Johnsén, Olga Lorgeoux, Andreas Müller, Maria Munkholt Christensen, David Rylaarsdam, Arthur Urbano

The political rhetoric of ancient Israel took several literary, architectural, and graphic forms. Much of the relevant material concerns kingship, but other loci of authority and submission also drew significant attention. Mark W. Hamilton illustrates how these "texts" interacted with other political rhetorics, especially those of the great Mesopotamian empires. By paying close attention to the argumentation of the Israelite literature as well as their function as epideictic oratory building solidarity with hearers he reveals the complexity of Israelite intellectual activity both during and after the period of the monarchy. By doing this he shows that this body of thought lies at the heart of Western political thought even today.

Were there figurines in Yehud during the Achaemenid period, and in particular in Jerusalem? A positive answer to this question disproves the general consensus about the absence of figurines in Yehud, which is built on the assumption that the figurines excavated in Judah/Yehud are chronologically indicative for Iron Age II in this area (aside from a few typological exceptions). Ephraim Stern and others have taken this alleged absence of figurines as indicative of Jewish monotheism¿s rise. Izaak J. de Hulster refutes this `no figurines -> monotheism¿ paradigm by detailed study of the figurines from Yigal Shiloh¿s excavation in the `City of David¿ (especially their contexts in Stratum 9), providing ample evidence for the presence of figurines in post-587/586 Jerusalem. The author further reflects on the paradigm¿s premises in archaeology, history, the history of religion, theology, and biblical studies, and particularly in coroplastics (figurine studies).

In this study, Paavo N. Tucker considers the different models of formation for the Priestly literature of the Pentateuch through an analysis of the Priestly texts in Exodus and how they relate to the Holiness Code in Lev 17-26. The texts in Exodus that are traditionally assigned to the Priestly Grundschrift are not concerned with the priestly matters of Exod 25-Lev 16, but are better understood as relating to the language, theology, and concerns of Lev 17-26, and should be assigned to the same strata of H with Lev 17-26. The same applies to the Priestly narratives beginning in Gen 1. The Priestly literature in Gen 1-Lev 26 form a composition that develops the themes of creation, Sabbath, sanctuary, and covenant to their climactic expression and culmination in the legal promulgation and ethical paraenesis of H in Lev 17-26. The author shows that, rather than being a "Priestly composition" as Erhard Blum argues, it is more fitting to see this literature as an "H composition," which weaves narrative and law together in order to motivate obedience to the laws of Lev 17-26.

The present volume contains the proceedings of an international colloquium held in February 2015 at the Arts Faculty of the KU Leuven that brought together specialists in (late) ancient philosophy and early Christian studies. Contributors were asked to reflect on the reception of two foundational texts dealing with the origin of the world - the third book of Plato's Timaeus and the Genesis account of the creation. The organizers had a double aim: They wished to offer a forum for furthering the dialogue between colleagues working in these respective fields and to do this by studying in a comparative perspective both a crucial topic shared by these traditions and the literary genres through which this topic was developed and transmitted. Contributors:Paul M. Blowers, Mauro Bonazzi, David C. DeMarco, Volker Henning Drecoll, David L. Dusenbury, Lorenzo Ferroni, Benjamin Gleede, Sarah Klitenic Wear, Clement Kuehn, Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, Claudio Moreschini, Samuel Pomeroy, Gerd Van Riel, Gregory E. Sterling, Dimitrios Zaganas

Pious Jews of the Second Temple period sought to conform their lives to Torah, the law God had given Israel. Their different sects disagreed, however, on how to interpret particular laws and even on the question of who had the authority to interpret them. Jesus and his earliest followers, while focusing primarily on what they believed God was doing in their own day, were repeatedly confronted with issues raised by its relation to God's prior revelation in Torah. This volume contains studies by Stephen Westerholm devoted to the meaning and place of Torah in Early Judaism as well as to New Testament understandings, particularly those of the gospels and Pauline literature. Attention is also given to the "New Perspective on Paul," to recent discussions of justification and Paul's relation to Judaism, and to aspects of the transmission of Jesus tradition among his earliest followers.

The contributions in this volume critically engage with Mogens Müller's work on ancient Judaism, the Septuagint, the New Testament gospels, and the reception history of the Bible, covering a variety of topics within the field of biblical rewriting and reception. Rewriting and reception are parts of a continuous process that began within biblical literature itself and have continued in the history of interpretative communities where the Bible has been received and cherished in innumerable ways until today. The present volume aims to further the scholarly debate on important topics within biblical studies. It demonstrates that the notion of reception can be addressed from very different angles and from diverse hermeneutical and methodological viewpoints, all of which offer fresh insights into ancient texts and their afterlife. Contributors:Gitte Buch-Hansen, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Tilde Bak Halvgaard, Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas Hoffmann, Jesper Høgenhaven, Martin Karrer, Siegfried Kreuzer, Michael Labahn, Martin Meiser, Halvor Moxnes, Jesper Tang Nielsen, Heike Omerzu, Christina Petterson, Frederik Poulsen, John Strange, Thomas Thompson, Francis Watson

The studies by Devorah Dimant collected in this volume survey and analyze Jewish works composed in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek during the Second Temple period, and discuss their contents, ideas, and connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls. In particular, themes related to the Aramaic Tobit and 1 Enoch are elaborated as well as the links between Hebrew Qumran apocryphal writings and the later apocalyptic writings 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. A chapter on the apocalyptic at Qumran proposes a new conceptual framework for the subject. Together the studies offer a broad and fresh perspective of the Jewish literary scene at this time, developed in the land of Israel in the last centuries BCE and the first century CE.

In this work, Andrei A. Orlov examines Jewish apocalyptic traditions about the angel Yahoel, tracing their conceptual impact on the development of later rabbinic and Hekhalot beliefs concerning the supreme angel Metatron. The author argues that the figure Yahoel, who became associated in Jewish apocalypticism with the distinctive aural ideology of the divine Name, provides an important conceptual key not only for elucidating the evolution of the Metatron tradition, but also for understanding the origins of the distinctive aural ideology prominent in early Jewish mystical accounts. Andrei A. Orlov suggests that the aural mould of Jewish apocalypticism exercised a decisive and formative influence on the development of early Jewish mysticism.

The present volume aims at a comparative study of the processes of reception, rewriting and interpretation between canonical and apocryphal texts in early Jewish and early Christian literature. A closer look at the respective developments in both corpora of literature can open up new perspectives for understanding the developments and changes between texts that were already considered authoritative and their reception in new, 'parabiblical' or 'apocryphal' compositions. The way of reception may also influence the perspective on canonical texts. The range of texts considered includes the LXX, Targumim and Pesharim, books such as Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, the Gospel of Thomas, and Apocryphal Acts, traditions about Esther, Ezra, Manasseh, Peter and Paul, depictions of hell from Enoch to the Apocalypse of Paul, and the development of miracle stories. Contributors:Veronika Bachmann, Michael Becker, Claire Clivaz, Jörg Frey, Wolfgang Grünstäudl, David Hamidovic, Meghan Henning, Alberdina Houtman, Jutta Jokiranta, Stefan Krauter, Martin Meiser, Simon Mimouni, Tobias Nicklas, Karl-Heinz Ostmeyer, Enno-Edzard Popkes, Jörg Röder, Julia Snyder, Michael Sommer, Janet Spittler

Large-scale economic change such as the rise of coinage occurred during the Persian-dominated centuries (6th -4th centuries BCE) in the Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East. How do the biblical texts of the time respond to such developments?In this study, Peter Altmann lays out foundational economic conceptions from the ancient Near East and earlier biblical traditions in order to show how Persian-period biblical texts build on these traditions to address the challenges of their day. Economic issues are central for how Ezra and Nehemiah approach the topics of temple building and of Judean self-understanding, and economics are also important for other Persian-period texts. Following significant interaction with the material culture and extra-biblical texts, the author devotes special attention to the ascendancy of economics and its theological and identity implications as structuring metaphors for divine action and human community in the Persian period.

In this study, David Willgren attempts to provide answers to two fundamental questions in relation to the formation of the `Book' of Psalms: "how?" and "why?". The first relates to the diachronic growth of the collection (how are these processes to be reconstructed, and on what grounds?), while the second relates to questions of purpose (to what end are psalms being juxtaposed in a collection?).By conceptualizing the `Book' of Psalms as an anthology, and by inquiring into its poetics by means of paratextuality, David Willgren provides a fresh reconstruction of the formation of the `Book' of Psalms and concludes, in contrast to the canonical approach, that it does not primarily provide a literary context for individual psalms. Rather, it preserves a dynamic selection of psalms that is best seen not as a book of psalms, but as a canon of psalms.

Akiva Cohen investigates the general research question: how do the authors of religious texts reconstruct their community identity and ethos in the absence of their central cult? His particular socio-historical focus of this more general question is: how do the respective authors of the Gospel according to Matthew, and the editor(s) of the Mishnah redefine their group identities following the destruction of the Second Temple? Cohen further examines how, after the Destruction, both the Matthean and the Mishnaic communities found and articulated their renewed community bearings and a new sense of vision through each of their respective author/redactor's foundational texts. The context of this study is thus that of an inner-Jewish phenomenon; two Jewish groups seeking to (re-)establish their community identity and ethos without the physical temple that had been the cultic center of their cosmos.

The close relationship between Jeremiah and Deuteronomy has stood near the center of Jeremiah scholarship for over a century. Nathan Mastnjak brings new light to this phenomenon by subjecting every credible allusion to Deuteronomy in Jeremiah to detailed analysis with particular attention to interpretative processes and the dynamics of authority. By locating each allusion in the history of the composition of the book, the author traces a discernible shift in the perspective on Deuteronomy's authority. While early texts in Jeremiah allude to Deuteronomy as merely one prestigious literary work among others, it emerges as a religious textual authority in the later layers. These later layers construct and deploy Deuteronomy as an authority but are simultaneously constrained to transform it in the interest of religious innovation.

In this work, JiSeong James Kwon examines a variety of scholarly arguments concerning the distinctive literary and historical relationship between the book of Job and the second part of the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), so-called Deutero-Isaiah. The general methodology in a comparative study between biblical texts has been the author-oriented approach which traces the complex interrelationships between corresponding texts, considering many verbal and thematic similarities. But this approach often arises from the misleading concepts of literary dependence from an early source to a later one. Here, JiSeong James Kwon argues that scribes were writers of biblical materials and belonged to a group of the literate elite in Judahite society. Resemblances between the two books result from the production of a scribal culture. This view may shed a light on traditional researches influenced by form-criticism, which divides the literate groups in Israelite society into different professional groups-priests, sages, and prophets.

Brian B. Schmidt presents five case studies in which architectural spaces, artifacts, epigraphs, images and biblical manuscripts corroborate the existence of a robust daimonic realm in late pre-exilic Israel, along with an embryonic pandemonium. The material and epigraphic data from Kuntillet Ajrud, Ketef Hinnom, and Khirbet el-Qom, along with the manuscript evidence from Deut 32 and 1 Sam 28, indicate that pandemonium members wreaked havoc on the living and the dead. The same data also preserve a countervailing realm of apotropaism over which YHWH and Asherah, portrayed as the quintessential protective deities Bes and Beset, governed. In addition to Asherah's role in this realm as YHWH's mediatrix, various other material media including amulets, inscribed blessings, decorated jars served to convey apotropaism's empowerment to humanity.

In this study, Jonathan S. Milgram demonstrates that the transformation of inheritance law from the biblical to the tannaitic period is best explained against the backdrop of the legal and social contexts in which the tannaitic laws were formulated. Employing text and source critical methods, he argues that, in the absence of the hermeneutic underpinnings for tannaitic innovations, the laws were not the result of the rabbinic imagination and its penchant for inventive interpretation of Scripture. Turning to the rich repositories in biblical, ancient near eastern, Second Temple, Greek, Elephantine, Judean desert, and Roman sources, the author searches for conceptual parallels and antecedents as well as formulae and terminology adopted and adapted by the tannaim. Since the tannaitic traditions reflect the social and economic contexts of the tannaitic period - the nuclear family on privatized landholdings in urban centers - the author also considers the degree to which tannaitic inheritance laws may have emerged out of these contexts.

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the Greek Bible translations employed in the Byzantine Church, whereas those used in the Byzantine synagogue have so far been largely ignored. Nicholas de Lange attempts to remedy this lack by collecting together all the available evidence for such translations from the Cairo Genizah fragments and other manuscript sources, setting it within its context in Byzantine Judaism. He traces the history of the translations over a period of a thousand years and demonstrates the persistence of a certain approach to translation which ultimately goes back to ancient Judaism and has left its mark on the Septuagint and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as in the Rabbinic literature and the Targums. Much attention focuses on the lost translation of Akylas (also known as Aquila) which played a key role in the dissemination of Rabbinic Judaism in the Greek-speaking communities of the Near East and Europe. There are traces also of the Septuagint, something which raises intriguing questions about a continuing Kulturkampf in Byzantium between Hellenism and Rabbinism; might this have implications for the understanding of Byzantine Karaism and Jewish-Christian relations? Byzantine Judaism played a key role in the transmission of Jewish religious culture from the Near East to Western Europe, meaning that this study has wide ramifications. The book is intended as a contribution to Greek Bible studies, Byzantine studies and Jewish studies. Most of the source materials were discovered and published by the author, with this being the first time they have been brought together and studied in book form.

Covenant and election are two theological concepts that dominate the landscape of the Hebrew Bible. If they became the main structuring concepts of the Hebrew Bible, they were not so from the beginning. Their centrality was the result of their utilization by exilic and post-exilic scribes and tradents to focus Israel's traditions into a coherent structure as fitted the revelation of one God. The essays in this collection examine covenant and election across the biblical literature, from the priestly document through Deuteronomy to Jeremiah and the book of Chronicles. They show how the ideas were shaped and refined under the conditions of national disaster and rebuilding.

Recent studies highlight the character of Deuteronomy's laws of public officials (Deut. 16.18-18.22) as the first draft for a constitutional government of the future. Sarah Pearce explores what these laws meant for Jewish interpreters and their communities in the Second Temple period. Her focus is on the reception and transformation of Deuteronomy's laws on the organisation of justice (Deut. 16.18-17.13): the appointment of local judiciaries; the authority and function of the central court; and the prohibition of single testimony. The author offers a detailed commentary on these laws in sources including the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, Greek Deuteronomy, the Books of Chronicles, the Temple Scroll, the Damascus Document, Philo of Alexandria, and Josephus. Her aim is to understand the ancient interpreters of Deuteronomy, first and foremost, in their own terms and their own contexts.

This study brings insights from character ethics in addition to the much discussed biblical scholarship on social justice in order to elucidate the concept of righteousness present in the book of Proverbs. The author's choice of Proverbs as a wisdom text in relation to the concept of righteousness reflects the realization that previous scholarship has not dealt with righteousness as a concept in its own right but as a corollary to the issue of social justice. Like character ethics, Proverbs use its depiction of the righteous person as its prominent pedagogic device of moral discourse. In other words, instead of offering abstract statements about morality, Sun Myung Lyu portrays the life of the righteous person as the paradigm of moral life, which is pregnant with numerous realizations into specific actions befitting diverse life situations. What the righteous person embodies is righteousness, the character in toto, which encompasses yet transcends specific virtues and actions. After presenting a comparative study of Proverbs with the Psalms and the ancient Egyptian wisdom texts, the author concludes that despite many similarities and parallels, Proverbs still stands out in its strong emphasis on character formation and internalization of virtues as foundations of morality in general and righteousness in particular.

Ethnic values changed as Imperial Rome expanded, challenging ethnocentric values in Rome itself, as well as in Greece and Judea. Rhetorically, Roman, Greek, and Judean writers who eulogized their cities all claimed they would receive foreigners. Further, Greco-Roman narratives of urban tensions between rich and poor, proud and humble, promoted reconciliation and fellowship between social classes. Luke wrote Acts in this ethnic, economic, political context, narrating Jesus as a founder who changed laws to encourage receiving foreigners, which promoted civic, missionary growth and legitimated interests of the poor and humble. David L. Balch relates Roman art to early Christianity and introduces famous, pre-Roman Corinthian artists. He shows women visually represented as priests, compares Dionysian and Corinthian charismatic speech and argues that larger assemblies of the earliest, Pauline believers "sat" (1 Cor 14.30) in taverns. Also, the author demonstrates that the image of a pregnant woman in Revelation 12 subverts imperial claims to the divine origin of the emperor, before finally suggesting that visual representations by Roman domestic artists of "a category of women who upset expected forms of conduct" (Bergmann) encouraged early Christian women like Thecla, Perpetua and Felicitas to move beyond gender stereotypes of being victims. Balch concludes with two book reviews, one of Nicolas Wiater's book on the Greek biographer and historian Dionysius, who was a model for both Josephus and Luke-Acts, the second of a book by Frederick Brenk on Hellenistic philosophy and mystery religion in relation to earliest Christianity.

Frederik Poulsen investigates the role of the Old Testament in biblical theology. Analyzing the works of Brevard Childs and Hans Hübner, he addresses main issues regarding the different versions of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint) and the significance of the New Testament's use of the Old. The author explores the interpretative implications of these issues by focusing extensively on Isaiah 42:1-9. The Hebrew version as such is ambiguous regarding the servant figure being portrayed, his identity, and his task. The Septuagint renders several key terms and statements differently and the reception of the passage in the New Testament reveals a manifold of diverse interpretations. Common to all versions is the servant's role as a mediator between God and the nations. Frederik Poulsen shows that this central task is constantly being reapplied to new servant figures.

William D. Barker analyzes a wide array of possible ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to Isaiah 24-27. He finds that there is a uniquely Ugaritic background to the chapters, with evidence of a literary framework and narrative progression that has been intentionally adopted and creatively adapted from either the Ba'al Myth (KTU 1.1-1.6) itself or a shared tradition between ancient Ugarit and ancient Israel. Barker also closely examines Isaiah 24-27 in the light of the Ugaritic material and thereby contributes to the resolution of some of the historic questions about the interpretation, genre, dating, and function of Isaiah 24-27. A new epithet for the chapters is also proposed.