This paper investigates the ethics of the Kebrä Nägäst (KN). By way of analyzing the KN’s implicit and explicit moral and ethical principles, the study will take into account the ethical categories of good and bad on the one hand and divine command theory on the other and how these are relevant in a context where actions are viewed as activities on behalf of God in the world. Attempt will be made to argue that the KN presents divine sovereignty as the theocratic ideal for society and exhibits a religious natural law theory which argues that humanity should be ordered in a way reflective of divine sovereignty or God’s will for creation.

From birth to death, eating is a daily habit and ritual that people from every culture undertake. While we are all experienced eaters, this does not mean that we all understand what eating means and signifies socially. This paper will illustrate how research undertaken by cultural anthropologists on the topic of eating can stimulate the exegete’s imagination to better apprehend several relevant passages in the book of Isaiah. The first part of the paper will investigate the eschatological feast in Isaiah 25:6–8 with the help of Michael Dietler’s classification of feast types and David Sutton’s study on feasts, memory and reputation. These studies expose how the feast in Isaiah 25:6–8 deviates from normative categories to emphasize the inclusivity of YHWH’s kingdom and how the depiction of the feast aims to further YHWH, the host’s reputation. The second part of the paper will inquire into why Isaiah 65–66 repeatedly labels apostates according to their taboo eating practices (65:4, 11; 66:3, 17). Studies by Robert Priest and Mary Douglas on the violation of social eating norms will expose how eating can signify the entirety of one’s way of life. So, if one is willing to violate eating prohibitions, they are suspect of rebellion in all realms of life. This is likely the reason that Isaiah 65–66 identifies the apostates according to eating taboos. While tensions revolving around the study of living cultures and its relevance for interpreting ancient texts are evident in these case studies, it will be apparent nonetheless that cultural anthropology can be extremely helpful for stimulating the exegetical imagination to better grasp what these ancient texts are communicating.

This paper considers the iconography of the cross in late antique Christianity and the development of its association with redemptive violence, particularly the idea that Christ’s death is atoning. The violent spectacle of martyrdom in early Christianity, and the rhetoric of redemptive suffering and violence associated with that spectacle, helped set the ideological conditions for the idea of redemptive violence so familiar from Western Christianity; consideration of the martyr cult demonstrates that the emergence of the cross as efficacious for the absolution of individual sins begins to emerge only in the late fourth century. The cross was slow to develop in Christian thought as having any central importance at all, and only as a result of the ideological employment of the martyr cult in episcopal movements of cultural consolidation and centralization of power was the idea of the cross as a divine legitimation of sacrificial violence invented.

During the last decade there has been a vivid discussion between the so-called „Neo-documentarians“ defending a pre-Wellhausen form of the documentary hypothesis, especially with respect to an „Elohist“ source, and redaction-critical theories on the formation of the Pentateuch. The paper will continue this dispute with the supposition that the integrative Elohîm-Theology of the Priestly Code launched a universalistic formation of Israel’s religion. From a synchronic perspective the non-priestly „Elohîm“-texts in Genesis join the priestly texts, their literary form implies a complementary reading of ancient Israelite stories with the late-exilic texts in a post-exilic composition. The paper will discuss Gen 20-22 and the Joseph novelette.

Interpreting and creating stories about gods or deified men was a common practice in the Greco-Roman period, and it provides a matrix in which scholars have already considered useful in understanding how Jesus could have been seen as divine. There were many ways to theologize in the Hellenistic period and later, and not all such methods have been explored in ways to help us uncover how early Christian literature could have been composed. In particular, the theories and methods of Euhemerus seem to have been influential in taking completely preternatural stories of the gods and placing them into a historical and human context. This is not the same as rationalizations, and the distinction is important to understanding how some might interpret historicized tales of god-like beings. Christian apologists used Euhemerus’ theories as a cudgel against pagan deities, but pious ways of using the same theologizing technique could exist. Plutarch, for example, argued that the euhemerized stories of Isis and Osiris were encoding a larger cosmic drama, even if this was not true to the origins of the Egyptian myths. Could a similar model help explain some details of the Jesus story as historicizing some aspects of an older Christ myth? Here a possibility is raised: the stories of a celestial resurrection and ascension of Jesus are behind one of the birth stories of Jesus. This is suggested by the fact that a common title for Jesus, so far not well-explained, seems to have commonality with the Magi pericope from Matt 2. In three different places in the New Testament (Rev 2:28; 22:16; 2 Pet 1:19) Jesus is referred to as the ‘morning star’, and there is the Star Hymn of Ignatius (Eph 19) that has Jesus as a bright star. In these cases, the best explanation for what this Jesus-as-star belief is that this related to the resurrected state of the Christ. On the other hand, in Matt 2, the Christmas Star is said to be “in the East” or in modern translations “at its rising”, and this also seem to be related to the star’s first appearance. This is suggestive of the Star of Bethlehem also being a morning star. This insinuates a question: did the myth of Jesus as the morning star become the legend of the star of Jesus’ birth? After exploring the popularity and use of euhemerization in antiquity by various sources, reasons are given to believe that a similar process happened for at least one story of Jesus.

Interpreters have long debated the social location for apocalyptic texts, both in terms of author and audience. Drawing on the work of Weber and others (deprivation theory), many scholars concluded that apocalyptic texts derive from marginal, oppressed groups. In recent years, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, with some commentators arguing that more established priestly and “scribal elites” were responsible for the content we often label as apocalyptic. This paper will consider once again the socioeconomic location for select texts from the Enochic corpus, the book of Daniel, 4QInstruction, and certain New Testament passages. We will pay special attention to beliefs in the afterlife in such texts and whether an eschatological vision functions as sincere comfort to the afflicted or a tool of social manipulation. Does the promise of an afterlife finally provide a radical, neat application of the Tun-Ergehen-Zusammenhang, especially for those persons and groups who lack status in the society? In pursuing this question, the discussion will seek to add precision to such generic and clumsy designations as “scribal circles” and “scribal elites,” where these are offered without qualification or much consideration of the social location of the scribe and his potential audience(s). Moreover, we will argue that the audience for apocalyptic content did not always reflect the social status of the author, especially since visionary descriptions and the promise of an afterlife frequently circulated through oral transmission. We will maintain the extreme difficulty in positing definable communities for much of this literature, while at the same time holding that deprivation theory still holds some degree of value in exploring apocalyptic texts and their audience(s).

The character and book of Jeremiah have a minor but intriguing roll in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. In this paper I will begin by looking at the instances where the character of Jeremiah is referenced, highlighting aspects of the narratives that explain or expand the existing biblical text. Following this I will look at how certain characters from Jeremiah, namely the Rechabites and Baruch, have been used by subsequent authors and how these characters have developed from the Jeremianic text. Finally, I will look at some of the instances where passages of the book of Jeremiah are cited. The goal of this paper is to provide insight into the variety of ways that the character and book of Jeremiah were employed by later apocryphal and pseudepigraphal authors. What we see is a willingness by later authors to expand and fill in missing aspects of the narrative, crafting new stories around existing characters.

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When the Apostle Paul writes about "shipwrecks," "drifting at sea," and dangers in city and wilderness alike (2 Cor. 11:25-26), all kinds of landmasses, including islands, come to mind. When he espouses an evangelistic hybridity—"all things to all people . . . to save some" (2 Cor. 9:19-23)—one may argue that he is a “border-crosser." However, border crossing implies an ambiguity that can be used against us, argues Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera, such as when La Guadalupe, for example, can be used to oppress and control, on either side of the border, and not liberate. Borders can keep people in "their place," so that one "is not supposed to be here, but now . . . can't get back over there . . . Not here and not there?" as one of the characters in the novel Amigoland by Oscar Casares describes it. What kinds of "islands" and "borders" was Paul thinking about and encountering in his apostolic work? One island of today, Puerto Rico, seems to be caught in a classic and tragic case of hybridity and border—"not here and not there." Puerto Rico is bankrupt but because of its status as a "Commonwealth" of the United States cannot claim bankruptcy. It is, as the United Nations once recognized it, a "colony" of the United States, but in Spanish the euphemistic language, "freely associated state," translates the term, "Commonwealth." If ever "being all things to all people" and at the same time "none" applied to a place, it arguably does to Puerto Rico. This paper explores previous work on "islands and scriptures" and "border theory" and applies it to the current day situation of Puerto Rico in light of reading Paul and his border-crossings.

Incantation bowls, once relegated to the periphery of scholarship, are increasingly recognized as important sources for the understanding of ancient ritual practices. Two obstacles have prevented recognition of their full significance: first, the relegation of bowls to the category of popular superstition rather than religious practice and second, the study of the bowls primarily as texts, not as ritual objects made by specialists for their clients. These two issues turn out to be interrelated. While philologists painstakingly translate texts for modern research, they assume that ancient clients would not have understood them. Thus, they could use Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowls as evidence of non-Jewish religious practices. This, I argue, is only possible when no ritual or performative dimension is imagined. Although scholars have written about the rationale of the incantation bowl, asking why it took this shape and why it was placed upside down, they have not asked how clients interacted with the incantation bowls. While we may never be able to know for certain, I would like to suggest that an additional approach is possible, especially when we relinquish concerns about policing religious boundaries and enlarge our framework enough to let incantation bowls fit in their late antique milieu. In fact, the language of the bowls has much to teach us about their performance and recitation. The rhetorical strategies used in them deserve more attention. Explicating the full ritual process surrounding the composition and performance of incantation bowls, I will demonstrate how these objects may provide a glimpse into the homes of ancient Jews, shedding light on the beliefs of clients as well as ritual practitioners in at least one late antique Babylonian Jewish town.

The proposal I submit, which I would like to argue out at SBL in concurrence with the Call for Papers in section 1 of the Postcolonial BS Session is "Biblical Hermeneutics in Africa: An Intrinsically Postcolonial Enterprise Among the Ewe Peoples of Southeastern Ghana." In my opinion, there is no Biblical Hermeneutic in Africa and specifically among the Ewe peoples of Southeastern Ghana, that is not founded upon Postcolonial thought. I would explore a number of Hebrew Bible (Old Testament/First Testament) passages to substantiate my argument. I would also draw on the works of scholarship on both African biblical hermeneutical studies/practices and Postcolonial biblical hermeneutics. Ultimately, I would explore some proverbial and wisdom sayings from Ghana, W.West Africa that hermeneutically address issues of Postcoloniality.

The textual history of the book of Revelation is unique among other New Testament works, especially since it boasts relatively few early Greek manuscripts. However, the Byzantine period saw a renewed interest in this text, usually accompanied by the Andrew of Caesarea commentary tradition (7th century). The manuscripts produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which are usually of little text-critical value, are important for understanding how the Apocalypse was interpreted within this particular cultural framework. This paper will examine the relationship between the images and text of GA 2028, one of only four illuminated Greek copies of Revelation, analysing the ways in which these images act as channels of tradition in relation to Byzantine reading culture and artistic traditions. The end result of this study is a stronger comprehension of the ways in which the Apocalypse’s material culture acts as a medium of reception in particular cultural contexts.

The history of the monarchy in Israel is interspersed with episodes of mass killing and the purging of entire royal families and whole towns. The Northern Kingdom underwent multiple dynastic upheavals, several of which were exceedingly savage in terms of collateral death. This paper explores the genocidal purges that accompanied key coups in the Northern Kingdom, compares them with accounts of comparatively low-casualty incidents of Judean kings being murdered or deposed, and investigates the roles of mass killing and corpse mutilation in Israelite politics as described in the Hebrew Bible, especially 1 and 2 Kings. Regarding the Northern Kingdom, this paper explores the use of violence against the king’s family during the fall of the House of Jeroboam and the coups of Zimri and Jehu, paying specific attention to the thoroughness of the purges involved and the mutilation of the corpses not only of the overthrown king, but also of all his relatives. In each case, the text graphically recounts the complete eradication of the deposed ruler’s entire lineage. Furthermore, the corpses of the dead are mutilated or denied proper burial in each case; e.g., dogs and birds are called to feast upon the blood of each of these families (e.g., 1 Kgs 14:11, 16:4, 21:19-24; 2 Kgs 9:10, 36-37). 2 Kgs 10 recounts the decapitation and the display of the severed heads of Ahab’s seventy sons. This chapter captures the grizzly nature of the Jehu’s coup, vividly depicting usurper addressing the gathered people of Jezreel while standing beside two piles of decapitated heads (some likely children’s) before he slaughters “all of the remnants of the House of Ahab in Jezreel, all his great ones, his close acquaintances, and his priests, until he left him no survivor” (v. 11). Of the later political upheavals in the Northern Kingdom, the actions of Menahem, who seized power from Shallum (himself a usurper who committed regicide) stand out for their genocidal tendencies, as Menahem “ripped open all of the pregnant women” of Tiphsah because the town rejected his rule (1 Kgs 15:16). This paper compares these incidents to accounts about the kings of Judah, where the crown was passed through one family exclusively. Even in cases in which a reigning king of Judah was killed by his servants, he was succeeded by his son (e.g., Jehoash, Amaziah, Amon). Biblical texts also generally state that murdered Judean kings were buried with respect in their family tomb, unlike their northern counterparts. This paper also addresses two exceptional cases (David’s relationship with the remnants of the House of Saul and Athaliah’s purge of her own family in Judah after Jehu’s coup in Israel), which complicate a simple North vs. South generalization about how violence was applied during dynastic upheaval. By analyzing the acts of mutilation and mass killing in different accounts of hostile dynastic usurpation, this paper addresses the role of this type of violence in these texts and in intra-Israelite politics more generally.

The Lives of the Prophets (Vitae Prophetarum) is in the tradition of various retellings of biblical narratives of the Second Temple Period, such as the Book of Jubilees, Biblical Antiquities and expansions of the figures of the prophets, as in the Jeremiah and Baruch literature, the Assumption of Isaiah, and more. It also relates to the veneration of prophets, as demonstrated by the Praise of Famous Men in the book of Sirach. A major contribution to the retellings of the prophets was found in the Jeremiah and Ezekiel Apocryphons found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These texts shed new light on the changing concept of prophecy in Second Temple times. They further complicate the question of provenance for this text. The debates over the text’s dating and provenance are intertwined with imposed views of scholars on what elements are considered essentially Christian or Jewish. The advances of the past two decades on these views saw a shift from “the parting of the ways” paradigm to a more fluid approach of “the ways that never parted.” This also invites a reassessment of the debate between David Satran and Anna Maria Schwemer on the text’s nature. I propose to examine and question this issue of definitive and Jewish characteristics through the traditions of Jeremiah’s death as the appear in the Vitae Prophetarum, 4 Baruch, and the Apocalypse of Paul. I will consider the relationship of these accounts to each other as well as their exegetical use of biblical material, primarily from the book of Jeremiah, but also with references to the stoning of Zechariah (2 Chr 24:20-21), and the deuteronomic laws of the false prophet. I will proceed to contextualize these accounts as part of a Christian motif of execution of prophets fashioning the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as a Jesus typology (e.g. Heb. 11:36-37). The survey of these various texts will demonstrate an inherent impetus for a violent death of Jeremiah as an obvious expansion of the biblical narrative on the one hand, with clear choices to afford the account with Christian undertones on the other. At the same time, the absence of the name of Jesus from the account in the Vitae Prophetarum (excluding a single textual variant, to be discussed), leaves room to consider this as a pre-Christian account of martyrdom. Thus, a comprehensive answer to the question in the title requires a multi-layered approach, that combines several options based on exegesis, theology, and textual evidence. The conclusions will add to recent developments in the study of Jeremiah and Baruch literature in the context of the debate over the Parting of the Ways.

In this paper I will focus on the motifs of exile and return in the book of Genesis. The exile motif appears in the prologue of the book (chs. 1-11), it characterizes the stories of the Patriarchs (chs. 12-36), and it is the basis of the plot in the epilogue, that is, of the Joseph story (chs. 37-50). The book of Genesis highlights the motif of exile. Almost in the very beginning God created exile and exile becomes inseparable part of the life of most of the characters in this book. On the other hand, exile in Genesis is different from the description of exile in the book of Leviticus or the book of Deuteronomy, because in most cases exile in Genesis is accompanied by the motif of return. The repeated use of these motifs, which actually relate to travels from one place to another, paints the figures as wanderers. Therefore, one might think that using these motifs is an editorial technique for linking the different stories in the book. However, this paper will show that using these motifs has theological, national and historical purposes. Moreover, I will argue that all this points to the late date of the editorial work – the Persian period.

Esau is a character in the Hebrew Bible who has not fared well in either the Jewish or Christian traditions, where interpretations of this grandson of Abraham (and his descendants) range from lazy and bestial to ungodly and evil. And yet, a close reading of the texts concerning Esau suggests that there is more to his story than is often assumed, and that a more thoroughly positive reading of this character is possible. This paper offers such a reading of Esau, and then asks what a more positive construal of Jacob's brother might contribute to Jewish-Christian dialogue. Two key issues are noted. To begin with, it is suggested that although Esau is the unchosen son, passed over in favour of Jacob, a plausible case can be made that Esau is blessed in his own right, even if this differs from the blessing given to Jacob (Genesis 27). Second, attention is given to the narrative of Genesis 32-33, highlighting the role of Esau in the climactic reunion scene between the brothers. Here focus is placed on Esau as the 'face of God', and thus his role as an important part of how the story of Jacob unfolds. These soundings suggest that Esau as the unchosen is not excluded from the divine economy, and can even play a constructive role in Israel's story, even while these texts uphold the identity and chosenness of the elect. Taken together, Esau is 'other', but is also kin who is blessed in his own right, and in fact can be seen to contribute to the story of Israel. In this sense, I suggest Esau might be an unexpected resource for Jewish-Christian dialogue, as the traditions reflect on complex issues such as kinship, identity, otherness, and election.

One of the most popular editions of the Apostolic Fathers currently in print bears a striking physical resemblance to the standard biblical texts published by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft and the United Bible Societies. Like the Nestle-Aland, the Greek New Testament, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the Biblia Sacra Vulgata, and the Rahlfs-Hanhart Septuagint, Baker Academic’s edition of the Apostolic Fathers is printed on thin cream-colored paper, is bound in a dark cover with gold lettering, measures 7.5 by 5.25 inches, and comes complete with a yellow ribbon marker. Moreover, there is now a Reader’s Lexicon of the Apostolic Fathers, not unlike the well-known reader’s lexicons of canonical texts. What effect do these publication practices have on how we conceptualize this set of ancient Christian documents? Drawing on Eva Mroczek’s recent work, this paper suggests that these publication practices domesticate non-canonical texts by making them appear to be the same sort of “thing” as the bible. Such publication practices are an integral part of the increasing evangelical engagement with patristic literature.

With more than one thousand references in the Hebrew Bible, city gates were the most important civil structure in the biblical cities. The question I will attempt to answer is: Why the hub of the city was at its gate and not at its physical center, as in the case of the Greco-Roman cities? In this presentation I will use the model of liminality suggested at the turn of the 20th century by anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, and later developed by Victor Turner in the latter half of that century, along with Turner’s disciples Bjørn Thomassen, Mathieu Deflem and others. Since the city gate is the physical threshold of the city, it is by definition a natural space for liminality. The gateway is where the country folk meet and mingle with city dwellers under the terms found in liminality. I will examine the background and the social formation of biblical gates using Bethsaida as a case study. The Southern Levant societies which emerged from a presumed egalitarian pre-urban culture, developed during the 12-10 centuries BCE, statehood featured by structured hierarchical society. As urbanization developed, the gap between the haves and have not expanded. Unlike the Mesopotamian belief that cities were descended to earth from heaven, the Bible does not associate divine origin to the cities. Neither does it justify the existence of an urban elite by a divine decree or order. On the contrary, it views cities as the source of all evil and a place of social injustice. The founder of the first city was Cain, the fratricide and first criminal. The prophets were the bluntest emotional voice against urban social injustice. Isaiah did not see any remedy to this situation. According to him, (Isaiah 40:30) there is no other option but to go out to the desert and to start all over again. This time, God himself will paved the way. Jeremiah gives up hope for any social correction in a corrupt city and yearns to leave the city and settle in the desert (Jeremiah 9:2). Despite this dichotomy, the two populations, the city dwellers and the peasants, shared an elementary symbiosis and could not live without each other. Thus, the city gate was the ideal setting in which liminality plays its major role. This state of liminality was not one sided, but works both ways. Emerging at the end of the 10th century BCE from a liminal process into statehood, the people of the Southern Levant, whether Israelite, Arameans, Ammonites, Moabites or Edomites, developed urban life and solid social structures. The urban society differed from the un-structured egalitarian society of the liminal state. It produced a pyramidal structure in which an elite, urban upper echelon ruled a larger population of rural people. This polarization created dissidents and an increasingly unsatisfied population that felt that something was fundamentally wrong with the process of urbanization. Their best advocates were the prophets who reprimanded the urban elite and called repeatedly for social remedy, justice and righteousness.

The period of the exile is an important period in the history of the Hebrew language. Texts written in this period and afterwards show linguistic changes from the texts written before it. Therefore, we expect to see late elements also in the poetry of Second Isaiah. This lecture reconsiders a few Aramaisms appearing in parallelism that scholars have used to date the language of Second Isaiah. The first question is if these words are indeed Aramaisms or actually part of a Semitic stock that Hebrew and Aramaic had in common. If it is likely that the word is an Aramaism, the second question is whether it has implications for the dating of Second Isaiah. In most cases, a late Aramaism appears suddenly without the intention to use a foreign word like in the substitution of wayyoshet for the classical wayyishlah (Est.5:2). However, in a parallelism the Aramaic word does not appear instead of its classical counterpart but in addition to it. The question is if such a conscious borrowing of an Aramaic word can be regarded as a sign of Late Biblical Hebrew. This lecture will be limited to five so-called Aramaisms in Second Isaiah that appear next to their classical counterpart.

In 2011, Theodore de Bruyn and Jitse H.F. Dijkstra published a checklist of 186 Greek papyri, parchments, ostraka, and tablets of Christian origian from Egypt, and classified them as having been certainly, probably, or possibly used as amulets (BASP 48, 2011, p. 163-216). By editors and commentators, many of these have also been classified as phylacteries, prayers, school exercises, or miniature codices. In our presentation we will approach the question of how to classify artifacts from two different levels: the user of an artifact could have used any artifact in a magical way or not which depends most of all on her/his personal attitude that, usually, is not accessible for us any more; the producer of an artifact, on the other hand, usually had in mind a specific use of his product (e.g., a school exercise, a phylactery, an amulet) which, sometimes, may be accessed even today by analyzing the material evidence of the artifact (e.g., the quality of papyrus, parchment etc.; the ability of writing; specific signs, drawings, or characters used particularly in magical texts; etc.). This approach, the questions and problems that arise, as well as the possible solutions for a more profound classification will be explained by showing many different examples of Jewish and Christian artifacts, including an unpublished papyrus from the Vienna collection (P.Vindob. G 28.775) which contains Psalm 90:1 LXX.

Getting students engaged in the classroom has long been both a desideratum and a challenge for instructors. In the past decade or so, Universities and Colleges have been giving increasing attention to pedagogical concepts that put the student at the center, such as “learner-centered teaching” (providing students with the tools they require in order to play their own lead role in the creation of meaning), “active learning” (including case-based, field-based, inquiry-based, problem-based, and experiential-based learning), and “authentic learning” (students engaging in real or realistic activities similar to those they will encounter in the workforce). Often, however, practical examples of strategies that implement such theories are drawn from the physical sciences (e.g., labs; industry partnerships) and the social sciences (e.g., qualitative research; internships). Applications within the Humanities are somewhat more difficult to come by, particularly in disciplines and sub-fields such as Classics and Ancient Religions, where the subject under scrutiny lies in the distant past. Too often, instructors default to “Q & A” lecturing or, at best, periodic group discussions, as a means of fostering interactivity. And while lecturing and discussions remain important pedagogical strategies, they do not address the pedagogical theories named above. More should and can be done to foster engaged and effective student learning, particularly through in-class activities and assignment design. In this co-presented paper, two instructors teaching in two separate institutions will illustrate a variety of innovative activities that foster such interactive, engaged student learning in courses on Greek and Roman religions and Christian origins. We will include examples such as the “three-step” interview for interrogating an ancient text; creating and role-playing Mithras initiation rituals; debating Christian identity and “othering” discourse around “magic”; undertaking problem-based detective work in finding clues for uncovering small group practices in antiquity; and using “smart-classroom” technology for comparing and contrasting deities. Such activities not only address multiple learning styles among students, they are designed to encourage students to be accountable for their own learning process as they make their own discoveries about course materials, guided by specific prompts that leave space for the collaborative exploration of ancient texts, archaeological data, secondary sources, and theoretical frameworks. In our experience, student responses to these activities have been overwhelmingly positive. Students not only like the fun and creativity involved, they have articulated how their learning has been enhanced through allowing them to engage directly with real historical and exegetical problems that face scholars of antiquity.

John 20:24-29, because of its graphic depiction of Jesus’ physicality, has frequently been understood as an apologetic response to some incipient form of docetic or gnostic Christology. As plausible as these anti-heretical readings may seem to the modern mind, they reflect an inadequate and often faulty understanding not only of the Thomas pericope itself but also of early Christological debates. Early docetists concentrated their polemic against Christ’s suffering rather than against the resurrection. Cerinthus, often considered the primary opponent of the Johannine community, actually affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Some other docetists, though they denied that Jesus rose in the flesh, nevertheless claimed that his body was made of a mysterious, psychic substance that could be touched. Thomas’s insistence on tactile proof was perfectly compatible with these Christologies. John 20:24-29 presented no major obstacle even for the more extreme forms of docetism that claimed everything about Christ’s humanity was illusory. In fact, some allude to the Thomas pericope to support their docetic Christology. The Fourth Gospel never claims that Thomas actually touched Jesus’ body, and Thomas confesses not the resurrection of the flesh but the deity of risen Jesus. Aware of this omission, antidocetic writers consistently add to the story an explicit statement that Thomas touched the risen Jesus confirming the reality of his body. The fact this confirmation is absent from John 20:24-29 is itself a strong indicator that the author, whether the evangelist himself of some later redactor, was not interested in proving the physicality of the risen Jesus against those who denied it. The primary purpose of the Thomas pericope is to affirm Jesus' deity, and its origins most probably predate the rise of docetic Christology.

The themes of wealth, poverty, and socio-economic injustice have caught the attention of the Jacobean scholars in recent years. Nevertheless, most biblical scholars still focus primarily (or solely) on the epistle’s historical aspects and pay scant (or no) attention to reader’s present-day situation. A notable exception to this is Latin American biblical scholarship (see e.g. Tamez 1988; Pimentel 1998; Miguez 1998; Nogueira 1998; Kruger 2004). Yet, even though many Latin American scholars have read James from the perspective of their context and present-day socio-economic exploitation, their readings are not actual reports about how socio-economically exploited people themselves read and use biblical texts (e.g. de Wit 2004; Autero 2016). This presentation explores theme of wealth and poverty in James empirically. A new method called empirical hermeneutics, which focuses on the way people themselves interpret and use biblical texts (de Wit 2004; 2010; 2015; Lawrence 2008; Autero & Grimshaw 2014; Autero 2016), is used to explore new perspectives on the topic of wealth and poverty in James. For this purpose, a group of Latino Pentecostal believers in South Florida read Jam 5:1-6 in small Bible study group from the perspective of their religious experience, social marginalization, and economic exploitation. The presentation includes a reading report of the group’s reading of Jam 5:1-6 along with a short reflection on its present-day implications.

The question of the Other’s representation in Scripture has been raised primarily and significantly in feminist literary research. Below I use feminist research on the Bible and theories in gender research in order to read the Book of Esther. I will demonstrate that the Book of Esther contains a plot duplicity that relates to the question of Otherness and marginality. The book moves between two possible readings. In the first, it is a story about Esther’s inability to effect far-reaching, long-term changes – both for the security of the Jewish minority and for stabilizing her precarious standing in the king’s court. Social mobility is a near impossibility; minorities remain peripheral, danger often hovering above them. From this angle, society is hierarchic and women are excluded and marginal. This interpretation conforms to the first wave of feminist reading of Scripture – a wave that was characterized by a focus on exposing the misogyny of the male traditions embedded in the text and the critique of the androcentric aspects that suppress the biblical poetics. In the second interpretation that I present, the story is about Esther’s ability – as both a woman and a Jew – to breach the borders of her Otherness. In it, she is able to overthrow the restrictive definitions, to act in a revolutionary way in order to save her people and bring to a significant change in her status as a woman. This is a story that places the woman at the center of social activity and creativity and challenges the accepted social hierarchies. At its base is the understanding that boundaries are not ironclad. Indeed, a careful look reveals that the barriers are paper-thin; with correct planning, creative thinking, and at times even simply and naturally, one can pass from one domain to another. This reading can be characterized as consistent with the second wave in feminist reading of Bible. In this wave, an attempt is made to infuse the texts with a new light that tries to liberate the women from the shackles of patriarchy; it even scorns the oppressive cultural system. This approach contains an idealization of Scripture and an attempt to free the biblical text from thousands of years of patriarchal-androcentric interpretation while rewriting scriptural history and searching for the women who are lost in it. I attempt to show how the two possibilities for interpretation find their support in the text. Both alternative plots proffered by the text are themselves the complete meaning of the composition; only by hearing both voices can one understand the way in which the readings were woven together to create one picture of a complex reality; it is a multilayered work of art whose meaning is in its many tones. At the end I clarify why the Book of Esther in particular is worthy of reading in this dual manner. I further highlight the link between the literary phenomenon of dual reading and the book’s central motifs: the female central figure and the theme of foreignness and Otherness.

Shelby Brown argues that classical archaeology and ancient art history’s conception and pursuit of timeless aesthetic ideals have hindered the fields’ appreciation of and progress in feminist theoretical approaches. Feminist theory engages ancient artifacts from a variety of perspectives, resulting in the incorporation of previously unprivileged pieces. The Pergamon Altar has not suffered from lack of scholarship; it was and is world-renowned for what has been termed its ‘Baroque Pergamene style’. Although the Altar has received much attention, its inclusion in the canon of ‘great works of art’ has led to a blind spot in its appraisal, namely the role of the goddesses. The few studies that have engaged with the issue of gender have not fully appreciated the actively violent role of the goddesses within the iconography of the Altar. This paper calls for a re-evaluation of the visual interaction between feminine divine power and the Hellenistic viewer. The Pergamon goddesses are dominant, active, and succeed in overwhelming and startling the giants, whose faces express their anguish. Their primary identity is as goddesses, and their femininity provides no hindrance to their role as hero against the ‘Other’, which in this instance are male giants. The goddesses outnumber the gods 3 to 2 and do not support a conception that ‘men act and women appear’. Rather the Altar depicts strong and unapologetically violent goddesses that are appreciated as such. Their gender is not something that needs to be overcome. This culminates visually with Athena’s place at the heart of the Pergamon Altar. The heavily feminine presence in the overall iconography is given a leader and focal point as Athena forms a bridge between not only the chthonic and Olympian realms, but also between the masculine and feminine. This discussion contributes to the dialogue concerning how goddesses functioned as symbols of power, moving beyond a primary focus on fertility and the object of desire to a more nuanced look that views the feminine divine not as ‘Other’ or weak, but as a powerful enforcer who commands violence.

This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of the Hebrew segholate dešen by means of comparison with the Akkadian ditallu, “ashes.” Most lexica offer two definitions for the Hebrew form: 1) fat, 2) fatty ashes. The latter definition is of most interest to this paper, since the understanding of the biblical passages in which dešen is understood in that manner seem to have been impacted by the former definition. Subsequently the sort of fat indicated by dešen is seen as being essentially different than ’eper. This influence is understandable, since most biblical passages that employ one of these two words (as well as the related verbal form) are best understood as indicating fatness of some sort. This reading also seems to have affected the interpretation of texts written in other West Semitic languages, namely Aramaic and Ugaritic, which ought to be understood as speaking of ashes and not fat. I begin by reviewing lexical entries dealing with dešen, as well as scholarly discussions on biblical passages containing the word. Though some scholars have removed the notion of fattiness from their translations, a clarification of this word as being distinct from its homonym in etymology as well as meaning remains lacking. Following the review of past literature, I examine a collection of lexemes which have cognates attested in various Semitic languages and display consonantal variants relevant to this discussion – namely, alternating between dentals and sibilants, as well as shifts between liquid consonants. These consonantal disparities are well demonstrated within the Semitic family of languages and beyond. Since ditallu itself seems to be a loan word from Sumerian, the change from the unaspirated dental in the second radical of the Akkadian ditallu to the sibilant in the Hebrew dešen in particular can be shown to be not only a dialectical variation (perhaps influenced by the Hebrew homonym), but a diachronic development that took place in Hebrew but not in East Semitic. Finally, I examine passages in Hebrew and Ugaritic in which I assert that a fat-free reading is preferable. In 1 Kings 13, many translators and commenters have felt free to translate dešen simply as “ashes.” In the Pentateuchal passages employing dešen, however, one finds discussions about the fats from sacrificial meat affecting the ashes, which I contest is incorrect and in need of a different nuance. In KTU 1.65 and Psalm 22, however, I propose an entirely different reading from what has been previously understood. This proposition is not only based on the recognition that dešen is not necessarily linked – either semantically or etymologically – with fat or fatness, but also on an examination of the context and the parallelism employed in those passages. Moreover, based on a comparison of other texts which employ similar sacrificial language, it is possible that even the verb yedaššneh in Psalm 20:4 may be better understood as indicating immolation (resulting in ashes) rather than acceptance of an offering as has been traditionally understood.

What function did the psalms of lament serve for the ancient religious community that preserved these texts? While earlier scholarship on the psalms speculated on the details of their cultic context, and more recent works have focused on particular aspects of the psalmist’s voice, construction of identity, etc., students of the Hebrew psalter still have much to gain from additional approaches, particularly from ritual theory and performance studies. This presentation will explore the lament psalms as verbal expressions of an individual’s or community’s passage through a transitional period of physical and/or emotional hardship. For more precise descriptive language, I turn to the conceptual treatment of Arnold van Gennep’s “rites of passage” by Victor Turner, who discusses how participants in such rites transition between “pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal” stages of relationship to their wider community. If we apply these general categories to the Hebrew psalter (compare Walter Brueggemann’s psalms of “orientation, disorientation, and new orientation”), the psalms of lament can be said to present a liminal stage in a religious individual’s and/or community’s perception of their social orientation toward each other and toward their God. Given the preservation of these psalms alongside more traditionally “religious” psalms of praise and thanksgiving, as well as the movement toward praise at the close of many lament psalms, what then can we say about the role that these texts played in defining and maintaining the religious community? Insights from performance studies suggest that since verbal performance effects change in its participants, the communal recitation of a lament psalm could draw participants through a liminal stage and guide their transition to a socially approved post-liminal state, just as in a series of physically enacted rites. In other words, liminality can be performed. The psalms of lament would thus serve the same purpose for religious individuals and communities that van Gennep ascribed to “rites of passage”: they reduce the harmful consequences of life’s inevitable liminal periods. When members of the community experience distressing changes of condition, these “performative rites of passage” speak the wisdom of the society, preserved through time, to guide them through the liminal transitional stage. These performances serve to maintain and define the religious community by engendering a sense of “communitas” and directing periods of disorientation down a well-travelled and socially constructive path.

How can we think about influence and novelty in culture and religion? Diverse populations came into contact in the wake of Macedonian and Roman expansions, and in this milieu new social, political, economic and religious relationships emerged. An earlier era of scholarship labelled the religious landscape of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman worlds with the prejudicial and insufficiently analytical term “syncretistic.” As a concept, syncretism starts with a fictive notion of of the essential integrity of cultures. Proceeding on that false assumption, it mischaracterizes the ordinary strategies and activities by which individuals and groups process and manage novelty, innovation, and difference as examples of the degeneracy of authentic cultural forms through mixing or unauthorized appropriation. For this reason we can no longer speak of the religions of antiquity as syncretistic. Instead, this paper looks at an ancient form of such discourses of syncretism. It examines the the way that interested parties use narratives of origins, influence, appropriation and authenticity in culture and religion, through a comparison of three polemic and apologetic discourses from Mediterranean antiquity. Each discourse comes from or concerns figures from ancient Asia Minor and Alexandria, and each concerns the origins of cultic and religious practices and doctrines. Plutarch writes a famed account of the origins of the cult of Serapis (Is. Os. 28) in Egypt. His is a legend with a possibly historical kernel: a new pan-Hellenistic cult had emerged through the direct cultural appropriation of a cult image from Sinope in Asia Minor by the Greco-Egyptian king Ptolemy Soter. Plutarch’s ambiguous and mystifying narrative embraces, with a wink and a nod, the synthetic origins of Serapis worship, incorporating it into his larger project of finding Greek philosophical truth in an Egyptian mythos. Plutarch illustrates how a narrative of appropriation can confer a mystifying prestige to an origins story. In contrast Lucian, the Satirist from Samosata at the Syrian end of Greco-Roman Asia Minor, defends Epicurean identity and doctrine through a satirical and parodic assault on the origins of the worship of the god Glaucon in Pontus (Alex.). In portraying Alexander, the priest of Asclepius, as inauthentically manipulating existing cultural forms to deceive the gullible, he illustrates the polemical power of a narrative of appropriation to undermine rival institutional formations; at the same time the probable historical kernel at the heart of the parody complicates matters by showing how novel religious formations come to be through realignment of group boundaries and creative reapplication of available cultural materials. Finally, in his treatise On the True Doctrine, the probably Alexandrian polemicist Celsus attempted to defend cultural boundaries by portraying Christian doctrines of Jesus as an inferior synthesis of earlier and more authentic mythic forms. But in the Alexandrian/Syrian Christian Origen’s apologetic Contra Celsum, which preserves our only window into Celsus’ thought, we come face to face with the heart of the problem. Origin stories are inevitably tied to questions of originality and authenticity.

Meir Bar Maymon, Tel Aviv University Job: The First (Jewish) Subject and the Sovereignty of Yhwh Saadiah’s translation of the book of Job can be viewed as a reflection of some of his ideas in his theological treatise The Book of Beliefs and Opinions. Saadiah argued that Job lived around the time of Abraham and was not Jewish, however, some researchers claim that for Saadiah, Job symbolizes Israel as a whole. While Saadiah’s premises of the translation of Job are based on the Rabbinical school, his emphasis on the concept of the trial between an individual and his god is different. Saadiah’s title, The Book of Theodicy, implies his theological purpose: to construct a solid image of Yhwh as the sovereign who forms the correct model of a (righteous) individual, hence promoting the creation of Jewish subjectivity or individualism. The latter concept that is somehow alien to the Rabbinical school. By avoiding the theological construction of Yhwh as the sovereign who constructs a subject, and by rendering Yhwh as a god that is not always the main focus of the Jewish community, the construction of Jewish individualism by the Rabbinical school was incomplete. In my view, Saadiah intended to correct this paradigm. Treating Job as the first subject, or the first individual, while referring to Israel as a whole, is partially introduced by Saadiah and answers different Islamic theological challenges. To illustrate my points, I will analyze a specific chapter(s) (to be determined soon) and focus on Saadiah’s translation--wording, syntax, and commentary--as his way to transmit the importance of the sovereignty of Yhwh and his connection to his subject, all the while promoting the formation of Jewish individualism that is a part of the Jewish greater body. Finally, I will compare Saadiah’s translation (of the chapters chosen) to the same chapters in Yefet Ben Eli's translation to see if there are differences between the two in their perception of Jewish subjectivity.

While the Judaism of Jesus’ day was far from monolithic, there is little disagreement that the temple was, broadly speaking, the center of Jewish culture. Even movements driven away from the Jerusalem sanctuary did not simply renounce temple theology but, rather, sought to reinterpret temple traditions (e.g., the community-as-temple beliefs of Qumran; the Gerizim temple of the Samaritans; the temple established at Leontopolis by the Oniads; cf. T. Wardle [2010]). Not surprisingly, then, the early Christians also spoke of their community as a temple (e.g., 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19; 1 Pet 2:4–5). Did such Christian affirmations emerge ex nihilo or can they in some way be seen as an effect of the historical Jesus and his conflict with Jerusalem authorities? This paper will argue for the latter option, offering specific focus on Jesus’ saying about the “stone rejected by the builders” in the logion following the Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Matt 21:42//Mark 12:10–11//Luke 20:17//G. Thom. 66). This paper will argue that the saying is best understood as utilizing temple imagery. As is widely recognized, the saying is best viewed as an allusion to Psalm 118:22, which, appears to involve a description of a temple building project (e.g., T. Gray [2008]). Moreover, in context, the saying appears to describe Jesus himself as the stone that is rejected. In this, Jesus is linked to temple language (e.g., J. Marcus [2009]; J. Charlesworth [2014]). Even more interesting, the saying suggests Jesus is only a part of the temple, namely, the cornerstone, thus implying that others might also share with him in constituting a sanctuary (e.g., A. Collins [2007]; W. Davies and D. Allison [1997]). After dealing with arguments that see it as merely the product of later Christian imagination, the case is made here that there is good reason to believe it reflected something Jesus likely said. First, an appeal to recurrent attestation reveals that in our earliest sources Jesus is remembered as having been in conflict with the Jerusalem temple authorities. Moreover, Jesus is frequently remembered as using cultic language with reference to himself (e.g., the witnesses at the trial in Mark 14:58 and parr.; the words over the cup at the Last Supper in Matt 26:27–28//Mark 14:24//Luke 22:20//1 Cor 11:25; etc.). Second, that Jesus would speak in such terms would not at all be surprising in his first-century Jewish context. As mentioned above, others in conflict with the Jerusalem establishment such as the Qumran community identified with rival temples. Finally, that Jesus said something like the logion in Mark 12:10–11 and parr. would also help explain how early Christians came to identify Jesus as the New Temple and believers united to him as participating in that reality.

This paper reinvestigates the compositional practices and intentions implicit in Tatian’s Diatessaron. The Diatessaron presupposes the fourfold gospel collection by the mid-second century, yet it would be anachronistic to call these gospels canonical. Although the classification of Mepharreshe for the Old Syriac gospels implies that the Diatessaron circulated earlier than the “separate” gospels, it does not necessarily follow that the Diatessaron was intended to supplant its predecessors. Tatian primarily incorporated Johannine Sondergut into the Synoptic narrative arc while comporting John’s distinctive two-year timeline to the Synoptics’ lone Passover chronology. Tatian apparently added no original content to the Diatessaron, and yet he participated in an ongoing process of gospel writing (see also the Longer ending of Mark). Compositional practices of imitation and recapitulation as well as reading practices and book collection suggest that Tatian wanted his gospel harmony to be read alongside—not instead of—the earlier gospels. Even if Matthew and Luke had intended their gospels to supplant Mark’s, Tatian’s retention of the Gospel of Mark reveals how unrealistic would have been any attempt to supplant the earlier gospels. Tatian could have intended his harmony to correct—or even surpass—his sources, but he would have expected his own gospel to be read alongside the fourfold gospel, and the process of gospel writing would by no means end with Tatian.

Forthcoming

Proposal Text Social scientific criticism continues to demonstrate it's utility in aiding scholars in understanding ancient texts. As we understand various cultural and social puzzle pieces with more clarity, the text continues to come together with theological meanings that we never could have anticipated prior to our discoveries. In this essay, I am attempting to close the loop on several discussions that have been existent, but have not been brought together clearly, In the case of Galatians, I am arguing that Paul is attempting to throw counter curses back on the Galatians as he has supposedly "bewitched" them. This is no new argument. However, as Paul attempts to do this, he must also prove to them that their proposed fascinum (i.e., circumcision) will not be effective in warding off curses. The connecting of the evil eye with circumcision allows for a more nuanced theological understanding of the issues in Galatians with the results being nothing less than 'fascinating'.

Kate Cooper’s work Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women reminds us that the material reality of the past must always remain central and that the feminist political project cannot afford to lose its emphasis on embodied history. The Band of Angels project, appropriately named after the text, builds on this vision. We seek to provide an online resource to collect similar stories and broaden access to the stories and experiences of early Christian women like Thecla of Iconium. Like the Project Vox (projectvox.library.duke.edu) out of Duke University, the Band of Angels project aims to interrupt educational ‘habits’ that continue to exclude women. Many teachers and community leaders are interested in bringing women into the center of our understanding of early Christianity, but do not have easy access to resources that will help them to correct the record. The Band of Angels project (BandOfAngels.org) intends to remove those obstacles by collecting and providing an online resource with links to primary sources, bibliographies, and useful web links, with extracts from Cooper’s book as an initial gateway.

“I want to understand you: I study your obscure language.”- A. S. Pushkin In the same field a cow looks for grass, a dog for a hare, a stork for a lizard. We find, over and over, what we are looking for. We find faces in the clouds, the Virgin on a piece of toast; Jesus on a water-stained wall. It is very hard to look for something that is unknown. Being academics we are programmed to want direction, purpose and control: mastery over our “field”. I recently read the anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s classic, “Return to Laughter” about her experiences in rural Nigeria in the late 40’s and early 50’s. In it she describes the confusion, the infantilization she experienced her first year while learning the language and customs of the Tiv. She felt awkward, often ridiculous, despised, dependent, confused. She published her brilliant little book under a pseudonym so that other academics would not think her an anthropologist who did not know what she was looking for. I could never have found what I did, or describe Roman religio in our book, Imagine no Religion, if I had gone into the Roman world looking for “religion”. Many scholars do indeed look for the Romans’ “religion” – as “experts” they have their field bounded, surveyed and mapped before they start digging. Needless to say, they always find “religion”. The project of studying Roman religio entailed almost a decade of looking and looking at a set of words and passages that I could not understand, that entailed a physics of the world that still is, after forty years of studying the Romans, still not clear. I collected the passages, leaving religio untranslated. I shuffled, rearranged, and re-examined the passages year after year until they began to fall into patterns. There were so many and such contrary ways to understand religio that I wound up making maps and charts. I eventually abandoned the effort to translate, and elected only to try to understand and describe. I ended up with an understanding of aspects of Roman culture occluded by the search for Roman “religion”. What I would like to do in this talk is, apart from explaining my method, is to give just a few examples of Roman ways of understanding of their world that cannot be found on any of our intellectual maps.

The study of religion and emotion is an established and growing field. Ritual is in many ways an emotional experience for the believer (Gade, Perfection Makes Practice, 2004), and the process of becoming a believer in the first instance is often emotionally charged. But, beyond a brief characterisation by Gade inThe Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2007), there has been little work on the rhetorical strategies designed to provoke the reader’s emotion within the Qur’an, or the role of emotional language in the text. In this paper I assess the function played by emotional rhetoric in four Qur’anic suras: Baqara (Q. 2), Ma’ida (Q. 5), Maryam (Q. 19), and Yusuf (Q. 12), particularly focusing on pathos as a means of persuasion. There is a profound link between emotion and faith in these suras. At times, emotion divides believers, who, like God, are forgiving and merciful, from the Children of Israel, whose hearts have been made hard (Q. 5:13), and who are characterised by animosity and hatred. The emotional resonance of Mary’s call “I wish I had died before this!” (Q. 19:23), draws the reader into her world, evoking sympathy for her plight while giving birth alone at the foot of a date palm. In both cases, the emotional language of the text creates a feeling of belonging in the believer, a sense that he is among those who truly feel, and therefore truly understand. The text connects the heart and the mind: those endowed with “hearts” are those who know and understand God’s word best, as in Q. 2:269, “He gives wisdom to those whom he wishes… but none heed except those who understand.” Emotional understanding thus becomes a type of religious knowledge; and yet sometimes the Qur’an admonishes people to do things that are contrary to their own feelings, as in 2:216: “warfare has been prescribed for you, though it is hateful to you.” This paper gives a general overview of the function of emotions in all of these suras, and also compares the function of emotions in the Meccan suras (Yusuf and Maryam) with that in the Medinan suras (Ma’ida and Baqara). This comparison raises the question of whether the emotional register is different in the Meccan suras, which are commonly understood to be the more persuasive and poetic.

In his New York Times bestselling book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer researched and put to practice the ancient precepts of the ars memoriae, according to Cicero, Quintilian, and the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium, along with many of their medieval and modern intellectual descendants. As his subtitle would suggest, he did this in order to remember everything. He thus took on a question that has been of great interest to scholars of Christian origins: the question of the efficacy of human memory. In order to do so, Foer, like most other practitioners of mnemo-techniques and scholars of their application in early Christianity, focused on memory primarily as the learned art of memorization; that is, the complete and accurate recall of a set corpus of information. Whether assessed as reliable or unreliable, memory in early Christian studies has been weighed primarily according to its ability to recall and reproduce material—e.g., a saying of Jesus—accurately. For the compositionally-literate population of the second century C.E., however, such a limited understanding of memory, as basically memorization alone, was only a tool or a first step toward full acts of memory. The more advanced goal, according to Quintilian, the rabbis—and, we shall argue, the author of the Apocryphon of James (Ap. Jas.)—was that such acts of memorization would authorize the memorizer’s own interpretation and even composition. This paper considers evidence from both Roman rhetorical and rabbinic schools that would suggest this entire process: memorization, interpretation, and composition, was all included in the full sense of memory. While the novice might have been satisfied with mere memorization, the truly enlightened sought the higher goals of memory. We will then use the Ap. Jas. as a case study for this understanding of memory in the discursive context of late second century Christianity. At a time when Christian authors seem largely concerned over their and their communities’ identities in relation to burgeoning orthodoxy and its hints of canonicity, the author of the Ap. Jas. uses this intentionally apocryphal text to communicate to an exclusive reading community. In order to do so, he appeals to memory, both as part of his own credentialing as author and as a rhetorical marker distinguishing himself and his own esoteric reading community from those of other, lesser classes of Christians. Whereas, in the study of Christianity at this time, memory has generally been considered as a means to some historical Jesus end, this paper suggests instead that for the author and audience of the Ap. Jas., memory was responsible for producing as well as preserving the continuing voice of Jesus.

The Scheintod or apparent death of the hero or heroine is a stock feature of the ancient Greek novel. It is an effective literary device because of the surprise and horror it evokes in the narrator, the other characters, and in the reader, all of whom fear the character’s death as the most undesirable event that could possibly occur. The Scheintod in the ancient novel is often accompanied by a vivid and sensuous description of the violence and gore that accompany the supposed death. Much has been written about the myriad novelistic elements, like the Scheintod, that fill every martyrdom narrative. In this paper I shall show that the Scheintod displays an almost perfect inversion of the motif when compared to its occurrence in the novel. As in the novel, the martyrdom's Scheintod is accompanied by vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of the apparent death. However, the fact that the hero or heroine values his or her own body significantly lower than his or her spiritual values, death actually becomes a desideratum. Therefore, the people closest to the hero or heroines, often family members and fellow-converts, demonstrate joy in the apparent death, but this turns to grief when it is determined that the death was only simulated or imagined. Longing for the living physical body of a lover in the erotic novels contrasts sharply with the mortification of the martyr’s living flesh while alive and the subsequent sanctification of his body when it becomes a holy relic after his death.

The Gospel of John sticks to some elementary narrative patterns which characterize the Synoptic approach to writing history. This paper argues, however, that at crucial points John intentionally leaves the historically oriented approach to the gospel story. The reason for this is primarily John's aim is to "transcend" the model of ancient history-writing.

The infrequent use of the definite article is characteristic of biblical poetry. This feature is typically attributed to archaic (or archaizing) language since the use of a definite article only emerged around the early first millennium BCE, though it has also been suggested that the definite article may be dropped due to metrical constraints or the economy of language within poetic style. Little work has been done, however, to analyze the linguistic contexts in which the article is omitted. For instance, the definite article is often absent in poetry with nominals having unique or generic referents, and these categories also show variation in the use of the definite article within prose. Examples in which the definite article was omitted from a nominal that refers through anaphora or deixis would be more remarkable. This paper will outline a taxonomy of functions for the definite article in biblical Hebrew and apply these categories to representative corpora of biblical prose and poetry in order to gain a better understanding of the conditions under which poets are likely to omit the definite article.

Though the institution of the Sabbath is at times understood as separate from God’s creative activity, it is possible to understand the institution of the Sabbath as the culminating creative act, in which time was divided into normal time and “sacred” time. With that said, the Sabbath also marks the beginning of the creation of the social order described in the rest of Genesis 2 and into chapter 3. Thus, the Sabbath may be understood as a liminal event that stands between the two stages of creation and by which the creation, having been formed, is now made into a functioning structure. In this, the institution of the Sabbath shares features with other inaugurations of other sacred spaces such as temples. Moreover, this suggests that the Sabbath, rather than being a period of inactivity, is one of specific activities associated with the liminal nature of sacred space. Corresponding to this overall function, Genesis 2 highlights three specific activities performed on the creation Sabbath: sanctification, blessing and assembly; all of which are central features of inaugurations or dedications. Significantly, these activities also appear to be reflected in later instruction to Israel concerning their experience with Sabbaths; the last activity, that of assembly, in particular noting the liminal nature of the Sabbath as the normal social order or hierarchy is set aside so that all individuals within a given household, including the stranger, may have the opportunity to interact with the divine. For the latter-day Saint, like their ancient Israelite counterparts, the Sabbath is a time to perform these three functions. Yet, the latter-day Saint may provide another perspective into the Sabbath by virtue of their experience with temple inaugurations, or dedications. Because temple worship is a central feature of LDS worship, the building of temples is a common event. Like ancient Near Eastern temple dedications and the institution of the Sabbath, LDS temple dedications formally complete the building of the temple while at the same time making the edifice functional. This is done by inviting God into his newly-built house. Thus, invitation lies at the heart of LDS temple dedications. This may provide a new perspective on the Sabbath in Genesis 2, as God, having finished with the creation, now dedicates it thus ‘inviting’ its new occupants into the created world. In like manner, the LDS may use their experience at temple dedications and its emphasis on invitation as a possible model for Sabbath behavior.

Models from the Social Sciences have shed much light on the historical worlds of past societies. But, in addition, they seem to work well, and at times, even better within imagined social worlds that exist/ed only in the shared, social memory of a particular, ancient or modern, group (or sets of such groups). This paper will first discuss a number of substantially different, illustrative examples concerning the world of memory about ancient Israel that existed among the literati of late Persian/early Hellenistic Yehud/Judah. Then it will begin to explore the question of why these models not only work within imaginary/remembered worlds, but at times fit even better these remembered/construed worlds than their counterpart ‘historical’ or ‘actual’ worlds as reconstructed by historians. This question will lead to a preliminary discussion of the methodological implications of these observations for research on the ‘historical’ ancient Israel and on its memory.

In the world of the Bible the most important path to authority was land tenure. Tenure to any given tract of land was divided among different parties who held different rights. The divine patron of a culture had ownership rights to all land. Leaders of tribes and states held both administrative rights to protect some tracts of land from misuse or destruction. Fathers had land use rights to the resources of their households, which they acquired by marriage to women who represented the ownership rights of YHWH and the administrative rights of their tribal and state leaders as long as they honored both their divine patrons and their leaders. Neither administrative, nor land use rights were absolute. I propose to demonstrate how a better understanding of how these various land rights functioned contributes to a better understanding of the roles of the women in the teachings in Deuteronomy to honor one’s father and mother (Deut 5:7-21), the teachings on why Hebrew fathers of households would want to marry female prisoners of war (Deut 21:10-14), the teachings requiring both mothers and fathers be present to terminate their heirs (Deut 21:18-21), and the teachings prohibiting fathers of households from remarrying wives whom they had previously divorced (Deut 24:1-4).

Transliterations are useful to those who are not intimately acquainted with the complex orthography of Biblical Hebrew. Even in scholarly publications, transliterations are often used, and producing them can be a source of frustration. Being able to copy them from a reliable source is helpful. When done well, transliterations are also useful to those who research Biblical Hebrew orthography. Ideally, a transliteration allows one to recreate the precise orthography, excluding cantillation marks, of the Hebrew original. In addition, it ideally resolves numerous ambiguities inherent in the Masoretic and pre-Masoretic orthography. That is, maximally useful transliterations identify when consonants serve as matres lectionis and when the letter aleph is quiescent, distinguish between dagesh lene and dagesh forte, distinguish between qamets and qamets-hatuph, distinguish between vocal shewa and silent shewa, and identify syllable boundaries. Transliterating the entire Hebrew Bible by hand would be a laborious and error-prone process. However, previous purely algorithmic efforts at transliterating have not been entirely successful. There is a fundamental problem with a purely algorithmic approach: in some cases identical surface forms require that Massoretic ambiguities be resolved differently, resulting in different transliterations. To avoid these problems, we have produced transliterations of the entire Hebrew Bible using a semi-automatic process. Our algorithm uses the Westminster Leningrad Codex and the Westminster Hebrew Morphology as its inputs, uses these inputs to group together words that are guaranteed to have identical transliterations, and relies heavily on the rules for syllable structure to identify possible transliterations of those words. Crucially, the algorithm knows its limitations. While in most cases the algorithm produces a single, correct transliteration, in other cases it produces multiple options for the correct transliteration. A human resolved the remaining ambiguities and selected the correct transliteration from among the options provided by the algorithm. In a handful of cases, mostly involving orthographic anomalies in Codex Leningradensis, the algorithm could not identify a single plausible transliteration, and the human supplied it. We used a variety of algorithmic methods for identifying possible mistakes and inconsistencies so that the quality of the transliterations would be high, representing a significant advance over previous transliterations we have seen. We are now releasing the transliterations freely for non-commercial use.

While traditional Biblical Hebrew grammars define the difference between the Niphal and Hitpael in terms of voice and reflexivity, the stems differ more distinctly among the semantic categories they occupy. This paper seeks to generalize on the unique semantic domains of each of these stems in order to drive towards a more adequate definition of both. On the one hand, the Niphal and Hitpael overlap considerably in the area of voice, to the extent that reflexivity does not offer an adequate way to distinguish them, as Benton 2012 explained. In that paper Benton argued that only the context and not the binyan can determine whether we should interpret the particular verbs as reflexive or passive. On the other hand, certain verbs and semantic categories clearly prefer one stem over the other. For example, the verb LXM “go to war” appears almost exclusively in the Niphal; the verb HLK “go” is quite common in the Hitpael, and nearly absent in the Niphal. Similarly, they differ in broader lexical categories. Verbs with the meaning of “act like” appear most often in the Hitpael. Similarly, we find more Niphal adjectival participles than corresponding adjectival participles in the Hitpael.

Gary Knoppers’ recent monograph (Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations [Oxford 2013]) on the relationship of Judea and Samaria in the Persian and Hellenistic periods has the potential to effect a sea change in Pentateuchal scholarship. Whereas it has been common in scholarship to date to interpret the Pentateuch in its final form as the redactional product of the Jerusalem priesthood with the intent to legitimize the Jerusalem Temple and its cult, Knoppers makes a strong argument that the Pentateuch is a “compromise document” between the Judean and “Samarian” (sic) establishments that allowed each community to interpret the text to support their own claims. Knoppers engages in an initial re-reading of the Pentateuch from the perspective of Samarian interests, showing how the various altar laws in the document could be construed favorably to Samarian claims. This paper continues Knopper’s provocative re-reading of the Pentateuch by surveying many other macroscopic narrative elements from Genesis through Deuteronomy, such as the locations dignified by patriarchal shrines or cultic activity; the valorization of Judah and Joseph and their descendant tribes in the narrative; the blessings and other benefits bestowed on these patriarchs and their descendants; and the role of Jerusalem/Zion vs. Shechem/Gerizim in the Pentateuchal narrative. The Pentateuchal narrative is found to be more amenable to interpretation in favor of the ethno-theological claims of the Samarians than those of the Judeans. The far-reaching implications for Pentateuchal research of this counter-intuitive finding are discussed.

Studies on Biblical reception history have not ignored the book of Psalms. Numerous works detail the use and interpretation of the Psalms in its Second Temple, New Testament, and Early Christian contexts. Few studies, however, engage with Psalm interpretation in Jewish Late Antiquity. Those that do tend to focus on Midrash Tehillim, a late exegetical compilation. Recently, Susan Gillingham has published a wide-ranging and insightful study on the reception of Psalms 1-2, which includes a large section detailing the interpretation of these Psalms in rabbinic Judaism. This paper seeks to engage with and critique Gillingham’s portrait of Psalm 1 in Rabbinic Judaism. The first part of this paper will problematize the sources she employs, particularly Targum Tehillim and Midrash Tehillim. While each source is easy to access, they are both late compositions and do not necessarily reflect the interpretive trends of the classical rabbinic period. When writing a reception history of this period, we must ask difficult-to-answer questions, such as: which sources do we choose and why? What sources best give us a glimpse into the life of the Psalter in rabbinic Judaism? How can we access them? The second part of this paper will paint of positive portrait of rabbinic Psalm reception by featuring Psalm 1 as a case study. It will demonstrate that at stake for the Talmudic Rabbis was not the connection between Psalms 1 and 2, which receives one passing comment, but rather the ideal reader of the Psalter, namely the rabbinic Sage. We will detail how the Talmudic editor repurposed earlier exegetical remarks regarding Psalm 1 in the construction of his argument, and suggest that the reason for this activity is connected with the proliferation of Christian Psalter introductions, usually embedded in a commentary on Psalm 1. Ultimately, I argue that reception history should not simply collect data and notice trends, but rather contextualize them and attempt to determine what is at stake for the participants of a particular discourse.

Scholars have long debated whether the account of the insurrection of Adonijah in 1 Kgs 1-2 was originally the beginning of the Book of Kings, or whether it’s earliest provenance was at the end of the Book of Samuel, and has been grafted onto the beginning of Kings in final redaction. This paper examines the issue utilizing a new tool currently in the beta stages of development at Bar-Ilan University: The Tiberias Project - A Web Application for the Stylistic Categorization of Hebrew Scriptures. Using cutting edge technology from the field of authorship attribution, Tiberias delivers a trove of verifiable and controllable data unavailable until now (for more information about Tiberias, see the following three-minute trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDjx99KTMto). Analysis of the books of Kings and Samuel reveals that Tiberias can correctly identify a passage from one book or the other, with nearly 100% accuracy. It arrives at these conclusions on the basis of its analysis of lexemes, syntax and morphology. The findings highly suggest that Samuel and Kings were composed independently and that each has a distinct style. Moreover, the analysis of 1 Kgs 1-2 reveals that 1 Kings 1 is strikingly more similar in style to Samuel than it is to Kings, and that 1 Kings 2 is strikingly more similar in its style to the Book of Kings than it is to the Book of Samuel. The demonstration concludes with a discussion of how Tiberias can shed light on a range of issues related to the composition of Hebrew Scriptures.

Multiple and various migrations shaped Ancient Israel’s social life over many centuries. The social processes of migration not only engage spatial movement, societal rearrangement, and the formation of distinct communities, but are also intertwined with constructions of identity, memory, and imagination. Migrations and identities of migration are constructed in between memories of past places and imaginations of new places, and these imaginations and memories mingle together in myriad ways. This paper will examine ancient Israelite and Yehudite migrations and mobilities as spatial practice (involving Edward Soja’s perceived Secondspace and enacted Thirdspace) and as performances of identity forged through memory and imagination.

Recent years have seen some excellent scholarly proposals, which attempt to understand Paul, especially Paul’s ethics, in comparison with contemporary Stoic philosophers (e.g. the work of Engberg-Pedersen, Thorsteinsson, Huttunen). Rather surprisingly, though, the issue of suffering features only marginally in those works. This paper, which contains a comparative study between Paul’s and Epictetus’ notion of suffering will offer some important inroads into this topic. The paper will focus on the question whether and how suffering can be made serviceable for the wider goals of ethics. Offering a close reading of various passages in Epictetus, which deal with the athletic struggle (e.g. Discourses I. xxix. 34-35) and of Romans 5: 3-5, this paper will argue that both Paul and Epictetus have a strong notion of suffering and hardship as potentially generative tools of virtues. In both authors, however, external hardship is not the primary or necessary factor in the cultivating of a good character. The individual virtues Epictetus sees growing under hardship are tranquility, freedom, self-sufficiency and self-respect, they flow from, illustrate and further build up what truly constitutes human excellence (arete), which enables human flourishing (eudaimonia). The brief virtue-chain in Romans 5, on the other hand, reveals much more the specific qualities needed to stand firm under persecution-generated hardship. What centrally constitutes the human being is the notion of “belovedness” for Paul, which strangely interrupts the chain of hardship and virtues in Romans 5. Critiquing numerous commentators, this paper will argue that the concept of suffering as divine discipline (paideia) is completely absent from Paul’s theology of suffering and must not be imported into this passage. Love is neither the motivating ground nor the positive outcome of suffering but rather, read as God’s saving outreach in Christ, the externally granted and inwardly owned pledge of salvation, which enables believers to patiently endure suffering. This comes close to Epictetus’ conceptualizing of human volition (prohairesis) as an externally given yet internally owned divine gift. While for Epictetus suffering is overcome wholly internally by accepting it as part of a well-ordered cosmos and responding to it in a dignified way, Paul’s notion of God’s outreach into a disordered cosmos allows for both a realistic notion of suffering and the hope for its ultimate abolition.

The liberal arts university where I teach includes a College of Performing Arts: Music, Theatre, and Dance are organized into separate schools within the college. These performing arts students make up 37% of our approximately 1650 undergraduate population. Many of them aspire to sing and dance on Broadway or make it big in LA (though a fair number have their sights set on Disney’s many ventures). The general education curriculum of the university include one religion course. Students may choose between Introduction to World Religions and Introduction to Biblical Literature. In both courses the religion faculty seek to make the courses applicable to the students for whom the arts are the focus of their studies. In this presentation, I will discuss the ways my colleagues and I who teach Biblical Studies (especially the intro class) tailor our assignments and classroom activities to make it relevant to music, theatre and dance students. In the classroom, we use Readers Theatre, choral reading, student developed monologues, clips from movies and musicals, music, artwork, and at times even dance to draw upon the students’ interests and often times preferred learning styles as we discuss the biblical text. The skills they are learning in their major classes are utilized whenever possible in the classroom. We also tailor our assignments so that students who are studying musical theatre, for example, may write a paper on Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar or another stage adaptation of a biblical story. Our goal is to teach the content and critical thinking skills such as exegesis, but also demonstrate to the students that the Bible really is relevant to their major.

As more and more educational opportunities are being offered beyond the context of traditional campus classrooms, there are few efforts to challenge the sedentary-style learning that higher education almost exclusively depends. It is rather unfortunate that distance learning is failing to transcend this trend in demanding the same learning styles associated with classroom instruction. Students are sitting for their degrees, whether that be at a desk in a classroom or at home. As online teaching and learning opportunities continue to develop, cyberspace is monopolizing the possibilities of where the academic “spatial turn” is heading. Is our innovation so constrained that we can only imagine students attentively learning if they are stationary and hunched over a desk? How can we employ digital technology to remove the intellectually and physically confining walls of such educational models and expand the range of learning environments we provide for our students? I would like to focus my paper on how the implementation of podcasts for educational purposes can provide entirely new possibilities for students’ engagement with Judaic Studies. For the first part of my presentation I will review studies on the impact of walking on our thought processes, and in the maintenance and development of a healthier mind-body relationship. The second part will demonstrate ways of incorporating podcasts to create educational opportunities that both enhance students’ engagement with the subject matter and promote a more active, embodied, learning mode. I’m suggesting we take the words of Leviticus 26:13 seriously, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.”

Irenaeus loves the adjective “new.” But, it has to be employed properly. New Covenant, new humanity, new law, new advent new Spirit, new oblation, new flesh, new cup, new heaven, new earth; all receive his enthusiastic theological treatment. He views all in a positive manner, all parts of the one divine plan. But they demand careful parsing, careful explanation in a manner that relates them with precision to the “old.” Every new thing exists in a particular relation to old things and this relation is never one in which the old are disparaged. Yet when his opponents introduce something new, it is a fiction, a heresy. Furthermore, their “new” constructs are in fact merely representations of old and useless Greek myths. Even when they are informed by the ancient in their construction of the “new” and attempt to frame their thought in continuity with the “old,” Irenaeus objects. In large part, the argument in the second-century between Catholic, Valentinian, Marcionite and “Gnostic,” is over the legitimacy of novelty in theological construction. The advents of Jesus and the Spirit are “new” and they require new theological constructs. Even the biblical texts employ the adjective in this sense. In Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses we witness a key polemicist’s description of the various models of novelty, his evaluation of each and where called for, his justification.

Philo offers at least three different lines of argumentation to address the perplexing question of why the lawgiver Moses begins his legislation with the Book of Genesis, which starts with an account of the creation of the world, presents narratives about the patriarchs of Israel and their predecessors, and contains practically no legal material. These rationales resonate with such sapiential themes as nature as a source of knowledge about the divine, reward of the good and punishment of the bad, intuitive understanding of how to live a virtuous life, and review of virtuous exemplars. In this paper, I will outline Philo’s different rationales, highlight parallel notions in wisdom literature, and consider the significance of these parallels.

Bahamians describe their connection with their cultural heritage, through dance and music, as “in da belly.” The deep, inner fluctuations intimated by the phrase are not unfamiliar to biblical writers, for whom the seat of wickedness, inner thoughts or the “heart,” fear, distress, even orgasmic response are locatable in the gut’s varied forms (e.g., Prov. 18:8; 20:27; Job 30:27; Ps. 40:9; Song 5:4). This paper investigates what it means to register identity and belonging in such somatic, affective terms. For the Bahamas, the paper is especially interested in how such belly-subjects manage their inwardly articulated identity amidst outsiders/others who regularly transgress their physical (geographical and corporeal) borders via tourism. Tourists’ expectations are to immerse themselves in island culture, becoming temporarily Bahamian or “taking home a piece of paradise,” and tourist promotional materials trade on such ideas. It is a dream that is being constructed by promoters, islanders, and tourist spectators alike, and I am interested in what the participation in such exchanges of identity might say with/for the belly. The implication is that belonging is material, that it can be transferred from person to person, commodified, and even transported outside of the country. The paper, then, is interested in insiders and outsiders—and also in literal insides and outsides. Using work from tourist studies, and engaging with ideas of affect and nationhood, I read tourist promotional materials and paraphernalia alongside a few belly-texts of the Bible. Can these emotive, generative, and frequently violable somatic spaces point the way to a framing of belly hermeneutics for the Caribbean context?

The paper will critically assess the theories and methods deployed in several recent descriptions of the “ancient economy.” Questions to be pursued are, What constitutes an “economy” and how is that term to be defined? To what extent ought the consideration of sociopolitical relations play a role in discussions of an ancient economy—in addition to other factors typically considered under the rubric of “the economy,” including production costs, supply and demand, consumption, technical advances, etc.? Finally, what is at stake in the use of various theoretical frameworks by which the “economy” has recently been defined?

The stories of the Annunciation and the birth of Jesus in the Qur’an and the Bible have recently been the subject of several literary studies, all of which bring up the use of silences in the text: how they function as textual devices, and what they may signify. This paper addresses the versions of the Mary and Jesus stories available to us in the three printed editions of al-Kisa?i’s Qi?a? al-anbiya? in similar vein, through intertextual comparison of these accounts with the stories as told in the Qur’an, the Bible, and other variants found in premodern qi?a? collections and Islamic historiographical sources. It explores the extent to which the silences of the Qur’anic and Biblical stories have been maintained in the al-Kisa?i accounts, and, if the stories have been fleshed out to explain these silences, to what literary effect. In doing so, it also focuses on how the al-Kisa?i accounts use direct quotation from the Qur’an, and what material from the Qur’anic accounts is retained and what is omitted. By comparing al-Kisa?i’s accounts of the Annunciation with those told in the Qur’an, the Bible, and the wider Islamic Mary and Jesus corpus, it is possible to gain some insight into the author’s literary agenda; the extent to which al-Kisa?i’s accounts are representative of the Islamic qi?a? tradition as a whole; and how he draws on the wider narrative pool for his material, makes reference to the Qur’an, and manipulates theme and characterisation.

In the dénouement of the court tale in Daniel 6, the protagonist Daniel responds to the king’s concern about whether he has survived the night in the lions’ den by exclaiming: “[the lions] have not damaged me … and moreover against you, the king, I have done no damage” (6:23). By means of a careful play of words, Daniel relates the physical threat against his person to a different kind of threat, namely one against the king and, more properly, the authority of his kingdom. In another Aramaic court tale, the Elephantine Book of Ahiqar, we find a strikingly similar rhetoric of “damage” in the context of a discourse on loyalty and/or resistance to “royal power” (malkuta). Even more intriguing is that this terminological and thematic connection extends to other documentary evidence from both the Judean (e.g., Ezra 4-6) and Egyptian-Judean (Elephantine) contexts. Daniel 6, therefore, may be representative of a broader conversation among Jewish populations in the Persian and Hellenistic periods concerning the complicated relationship and response to foreign state powers, especially in terms of the respective communities’ political and theological identities. This paper, therefore, will reassess the position that Daniel 6 takes with regard to royal power in light of the broader Aramaic literary and social contexts.

Archaeological evidence divides biblical texts presenting the linear history from Genesis through 2 Kings into three distinct categories. First, texts describing the monarchic period of the early/mid 10th c. – 586 B.C.E. mention historically verified events and persons known from experience, memory, or other documents. Second, and the focus of this presentation, narratives of the conquest and settlement of the land draw on visible archaeological ruins from earlier centuries to substantiate a pre-monarchic history. Third, the archaeological evidence of Israel’s origins – the Patriarchs and matriarchs, Egypt, Sinai – is all circumstantial; neither contemporary nor earlier remains corroborate the specifics of the biblical narrative. The dates of the relevant physical remains suggest a chronological stage in the production of the “historical” texts.

James Talmage’s "Jesus the Christ" in 1915 contained numerous features that made it resemble other “lives of Christ” as well as “historical Jesus” works of its day. But its integration of additional material based on the uniquely Mormon scriptures makes it a literary genre all of its own. Still, because of Talmage’s position in the LDS hierarchy, the work assumed a hermeneutic of authority, which, though it may have been appropriate in doctrinal matters, has proven occasionally problematic in terms of historical and literary criticism. Today, in the year after the one-hundredth anniversary of its publication, some still tout it as the most important book on Jesus ever produced in LDS circles. This essay, co-authored by one LDS and one non-LDS New Testament scholar considers the ways in which Talmage’s book could fit into and make a contribution to the scholarly guild of biblical studies still today, ways in which it would not be deemed acceptable by modern canons of historiography, and its enduring legacy in both categories of material.

War is an act of premeditated violence and destruction, with destruction of place functioning as an effective means of demoralizing and incapacitating one’s enemy. Originating in the context of the Babylonian incursion against Jerusalem in the sixth-century BCE, the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations speak to the effectiveness of the destruction of place as a military strategy. Both books use language which results in a mirroring of the land and the people such that both are seen as victims of war. One such word is smm (and its derivatives) whose closest translation is desolate/desolation. Desolation is used to describe both the destruction of the material world and the emotional response to that destruction. In exploring the language of shared fate and response, it is possible to read the human despair of these writing as a form of solastalgia, a term which describes despair in the face of radical change to one’s home environment.

The final form of the opening chapters of Judges have been notoriously difficult for scholars to interpret, regardless of the exegetical methodology employed. Text- and source-critical questions aside, two of the more perplexing phenomena in these chapters are the use of narrative repetition and the reappearance of the already-deceased Joshua in Jdg 2:6. This paper proposes a structural analysis of Jdg 1:1–3:6 that accounts for these repetitions and retrospective jumps in the plotline. The paper draws on the work of Serge Frolov in his recent FOTL commentary, but modifies his analysis in order to strengthen a major weak spot in his argument. Traditionally, scholars have solved the perceived narrative discontinuities in Jdg 1:1–3:6 by appealing to redaction criticism (so Martin Noth and Robert Boling). However, one problem with such studies is a general inability to explain the present form of the text. Even if Jdg 1:1 is a later addition, one must still explain how the addition jives with 2:6. To appeal to different editors is one solution, but if it is the scholar’s default answer, one eventually arrives at an editor-of-the-gaps who can conveniently explain any exegetical difficulty. This is the case even in the well-argued diachronic analysis of Yairah Amit (who does focus on the text’s final form). Thus, a synchronic reading of Jdg 1:1–3:6 must be seriously considered, if possible. The paper will begin by outlining, the above-mentioned difficulties of diachronic exegesis in Jdg 1:1–3:6. Subsequently, we will summarize the synchronic account of Serge Frolov by tracing the contours of his argument in a clear and concise manner. We will show that Frolov uses the syntax of the text to posit two narrative loops in which the plotline of Judges (and of the Enneateuch as a whole) jumps backwards to an earlier point in the narrative. Although generally compelling in its ability to explain Joshua’s reappearance, we will point out a significant weakness in Frolov’s interpretation, namely, his failure to address the verbatim quotations from Joshua in Jdg 1:11–15. Following this, the paper will make a constructive synchronic proposal for reading Jdg 1:1–3:6. The author will employ Frolov’s methodology by using the text’s syntax as a point of departure. This will entail agreeing with Frolov that there are indeed two narrative loops in the text, but also disagreeing with him by suggesting that Jdg 1:26 does not represent the inception of either one. Rather, we submit that the non-WAYYIQTOL clause in Jdg 1:9 is structurally significant and should be translated as a pluperfect. This allows Frolov’s account of Joshua’s double demise to hold water while simultaneously accounting for the quotes from Joshua in Jdg 1:11–15. Thus, the modification to Frolov’s reading is supported not only by syntax, but also by the narrative logic of the plot in which these verses are necessarily part of a narrative regression.

The Destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria, in either 391 or 392 CE, is a difficult historical event to write about. As one of the most cataclysmic examples of Christian violence in Late Antiquity, it often appears in naive narratives about an ancient culture clash between "pagans" and Christians. From The Swerve by S. Greenblatt--winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction and winner of the 2011 National Book Award--to presentations in academic venues (J Pollini, "From Polytheism to Christianity in Egypt: A Peaceful or Violent Transition in Late Antiquity?" SBL San Diego 2014), the toppling of the temple has been used to signal the violent triumph of monotheism over polytheism and the victory of Christianity over classical Rome. This presentation argues for a different interpretation. By drawing attention to the language used to characterize the Christian attackers ("soldiers of God," Rufinus of Aquileia) and integrating that vocabulary with new studies about the intra-Christian origin of the word "civilian" ("pagan"), I suggest that the fall of the Serapeum is better seen as tragic collateral damage in a long-running, heated conversation taking place between fourth-century Christians over whether they should accommodate or acculturate to the larger Roman world. In this reconstruction, the destruction of the Serapeum is a sign that--one hundred years after Christianity's legalization--Jesus' followers remained socially divided about how to participate in a pluralistic world.

The paper elaborates on, critiques and modifies previous theories on the origins, development and significance of the Christian Greek nomina sacra practice. According to Kurt Treu and Robert A. Kraft, the nomina sacra – specially highlighted short forms for “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Christ,” “Spirit” and a few other words present in basically all Greek biblical manuscripts – are of Jewish origin and carry meaning. C. H. Roberts and Larry W. Hurtado, on the other hand, argue for a Christian beginning and significance. A different model is suggested by C. M. Tuckett who maintains that the nomina sacra are of Christian origin, yet without any meaning beyond their function as reading aids. Strengths and weaknesses pertaining to these theories of beginnings are aired and a new proposal presented. By comparing second- to third- with fourth- to fifth-century New Testament manuscripts, the paper contributes to the discussion on the development of the nomina sacra practice to include an increasing, and in some cases decreasing, number of words (typically between four and seventeen). It is asked if such variations hold valuable information for understanding the emergence of the scribal convention. The final section ponders this and related questions of significance of these contracted or suspended words – supplied with a supralinear line – in terms of identity, textuality, exegesis and theology. What are their significance vis-à-vis parallel Jewish scribal practices? As a supra-textual phenomenon, do they at all affect exegesis of the text? How do their presence on the biblical page affect the notion of scripturality? And what impact did these Christian–Jewish textual highlighters of central figures of the faith have with regard to the canon-formation process, non-canonical literature, and the wider Christian cultural sphere?

In 408 CE the emperors Theodosian II and Honorius issued a prohibition of a supposed Jewish ritual associated with the celebration of Purim, later collated as Theodosian Code 16:8:18. The law provides details of a ritual that includes the burning of a crucified effigy of Haman. Theodosian Code 16:8:18 has traditionally been analyzed to determine the veracity of the ritual itself or to assert that Jews were indeed celebrating Purim as early as the fifth century CE. The law claims that while Jews celebrated Purim they intentionally mocked Jesus and thus Christianity by crucifying a representation of Haman. Such an injunction, one imagines, is a serious offense, and according to the law Jews “are bound to lose what had been permitted to them until now unless they abstain from that which has been forbidden.” Previous scholars have attempted to determine and explain if Theodosian Code 16:8:18 reflects reality; however, using Russell McCutcheon’s theory of mythmaking one can see that Theodosian Code 16:8:18 may not merely represent an actual ritual. Rather, the law contains polemical language that sets Judaism and Christianity in competition with one another and, in the process, the law authorizes the imperial version of Christianity while asserting the nefarious qualities of Jews and Judaism. The language of Theodosian Code 16:8:18 is particularly denigrating towards Judaism. The law is riddled literally with mythologizing the Jewish people as a group who would mock Christianity. According to Honorius and Theodosius II, Jews are prohibited from crucifying Haman “so that they do not mix the sign of our faith with their jokes (iocis) and they shall restrain their rites from the contempt of Christian law.” The celebration of Purim by Jews then is a joke in the eyes of the emperors and the Roman legal system. This rhetoric marks a dismissal of the Jewish religion, similar to the tendency to refer to Judaism as a “superstitio” instead of “religio” after the Christianization of the empire. Other portions of the law are used by the Roman legislators to reinforce the legitimacy of the Christianity of the empire: according to Theodosian Code 16:8:18 Jews are forbidden “from burning with sacrilegious intent (sacrilega mente) a form like the kind of the saint cross in contempt of the Christian faith (christianae fidei).” The “sacrilega mente” of Jews and Judaism is seemingly used in antithesis to the Christian faith, again establishing the good and the bad parties as seen through the eyes of later Roman law. This juxtaposition establishes a dichotomy between Roman imperial Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, the language emphasizes that lawmakers mythologize Judaism as illegitimate, reinforcing the authority of Christianity as well as the villainy of Judaism in the competition for power in the Roman Empire.

The annotated translations of the Septuagint (NETS, Bible d’Alexandrie, Septuaginta Deutsch etc.) have permitted to explore the Septuagint in its entire breadth. What is needed now is to go into more depth: to sound out the mentality—values, ideas, aspirations—of the translators, and to estimate to what extent it may have influenced the translation. Studying the vocabulary of the version is a promising way to do this. The words used by the translators, often as more-or-less standard equivalents of Hebrew words, reveal much about their understanding of the source text, and even more about their own thought world. When the translator of Genesis translates the phrase “the sons of my people (beney ‘ammi)” as “my fellow citizens (polítai)” his rendering is faithful enough. He nevertheless replaces the ethnically oriented discourse of the Hebrew text with political notions of the Hellenistic age. The Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint offers a framework for research on the vocabulary of the Septuagint according to the highest scientific standards.

Sociologists have long noted that the construction of ethnic and national identity is often dependent on discovering the authentic or essential characteristics of an ethnic community in the distant past. Max Weber, John Armstrong, and Anthony D. Smith have especially highlighted the ways in which the creation and adoption of mythic figures and tales frequently serve to authorize and advertise particular understandings of ethnic identity. Smith has noted that the use of these mythic figures from the distant past can follow genealogical or ideological lines. That is, the heroes can claim ethnic authenticity primarily as forebears, or primarily as examples of the virtues borne by all true members of an ethnic group. This paper shall examine a number of examples of the presentation of heroes as paradigms in early Jewish writings (e.g. 2 Macc 1-2, 1 Macc 2, Sir 44-50) to examine the various competing ways in which Judean ethnicity was constructed in the Hellenistic period. It will particularly highlight the performative aspects of ethnicity over and against the genealogical.

The frescoes of the Dura-Europos synagogue offer a spectacular display of ancient Jewish interpretations of biblical texts, close to midrashic literature. This article focuses on the Ezekiel cycle on the northern wall and defends its eschatological orientation: the painter wanted to represent the final resurrection, far from the literal sense of the oracle, but close to its common ancient re-readings. We will first offer a broad panorama of the main texts in Jewish antiquity that reinterpret Ezk. 37 from the Second Temple period until Talmudic times. It will appear that frequent themes in these various traditions, added to the source-text of Ezekiel, are represented in the fresco – for example, the final condemnation of the wicked and the retribution of the just. In particular, one extract of the Targum on Canticles presents the main aspects of the painting that diverge from the prophetic book. This leads us to identify the mountain as the Mount of Olives, where the dead will be gathered according to the late prophesies of the Day of the Lord. Secondly, the confrontation between the previous literature and the frescoes viewed both in its inner structure and in the context of the whole synagogue, allows us to perceive the artist’s theology. He was especially concerned by two themes, the Fount of Life and the Ark of the Covenant, and therefore represented two major narrations from the book of Ezekiel: (1) the dry bones oracle (Ezk. 37) as a metaphor for the final resurrection, leading to a new cultic assembly; (2) the last scene of the fresco has often been separated from Ezekiel’s cycle, and attributed to other biblical books, but we suggest that it might represent the chastising of the idolaters in the Holy City (Ezk. 8–10). Indeed it reflects the Merkabah traditions, and has a strong thematic link with the previous scene, the cult. This fresco had therefore a deep meaning for the worshippers congregated in the synagogue around the Torah shrine, especially in their singing of hymns.

Approaches to biblical interpretation that employ modern psychological categories and methods raise methodological questions. Can psychological research developed primarily from modern Western experience be applied to ancient Near Eastern texts? This presentation will focus on the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13 as a case study for reading biblical narrative through the lens of the psychology of trauma. In particular, Tamar’s statement to Amnon after the rape is striking: “This wrong in sending me away is greater then the other that you did to me.” (2 Sam 13:16) Does her statement represent a psychologically realistic response for a rape victim in a culture in which rape is resolved by marriage between rapist and victim (Deut 22:28-29)? Or are her words a narrative strategy to present her as someone who can not possibly be blamed for the rape and its consequences? The study will adopt the American Psychological Association definition of trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event, like an accident, rape, or natural disaster.” This psychological definition with it focus on emotion serves the present focus on the emotional experience of the Tamar within the story world and (by extension) the emotional involvements of the audience(s) of the text. The presentation will review psychological resources about rape and its aftermath developed in modern Western social sciences and compare these with available information for other cultures. Classroom experience indicates that psychological approaches can help modern readers engage the dynamics of the text and its salience for the ongoing reality of rape and discussions of campus rape.

The literacy of Jesus is not a neglected topic in NT scholarship, but the complexity of the issue pre-empts consensus. Just asking the question already requires several distinctions: what is meant by (1) being literate, or “educated” in an ancient context; (2) what would “scribal expertise” entail and (3) how to incorporate aspects of genius and/or charisma in a first-century Galilean religious movement. In the first part of the paper I review the major contributions to the debate, assessing arguments and interpretation of evidence. From the review it is clear that terms such as “schools” “education” and “literacy” carry a great deal of cultural freight which makes assessing the evidence for Jewish “education” in the first century without resorting to anachronism or imposing present-day concerns and categories on ancient people difficult. Much of the discussion is dominated by a rather unhistorical paradigm about "Jewish education" which lacks critical understanding of literacy and the history of education. The other aspect that is made clear by the review is that decisions based on redaction criticism, synoptic tradition criticism and the theologies of the Gospels cannot settle the matter. In the final part of the paper it is argued that the quest for historical plausibility of Jesus’ literacy has to be informed by cross-cultural work dealing with educational and sociological research on emergent and cultural literacies. Such subjects may enrich the study of education in antiquity and the interpretation of Jesus’ literacy, with emergent literacy shedding light on the historical probabilities relating to education in a pre-mass-education context — including the roles and impact of regular exposure and interaction with texts, symbols, praxis and performance. Studies of historical and cultural literacy could provide helpful insights on the development of oral proficiency and oral fluency, and how to theorize about the interaction with bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, cultural artifacts, and authoritative fictions within a given culture.

The denial of female procreative agency is common among ancient texts. Ancient near eastern and Greco-Roman theories of procreation assign passive roles to the woman, and failure to conceive is described as a uniquely female problem. Furthermore, social standing was strongly tied to a woman’s ability to bear children, specifically male heirs, and an inability to fulfill this purpose could bring dishonor on the woman. This paper argues for the critical value of female procreative agency within ancient texts through examination of the Old Testament birth narrative involving Sarah and Abraham and its subsequent interpretation within the Intertestamental period and the New Testament. Readers are introduced to Sarah in Genesis by means of a negation of her procreative agency, “she was barren.” This denial of procreative agency remains a feature of Sarah’s identity, in contrast to the procreative agency afforded to Abraham despite the common age-related infertility ascribed to both Sarah and Abraham later in the narrative. Despite the divine agency afforded to Sarah as the mother of the promised male heir, the denial of female procreative agency at the expense of the male’s role is present in later interpretations of the birth narrative, including Jubilees 17, Romans 4:19 and Hebrews 11:12. After surveying these later interpretations, this paper argues for an associative reading of procreative agency rooted in the details of the Genesis birth narrative that restores procreative agency to Sarah, thereby critiquing patriarchal models of procreative agency. This relationally defined procreative agency finds points of contact among later Christian interpreters and replaces solitary patriarchal agency with one that is unavoidably mediated by the marital relationship. Within such a reading, Abraham’s fertility – or lack thereof - cannot be understood in isolation from his relationship with his wife, Sarah, and the faith for which Abraham is lauded cannot be understood in isolation from the divine promise of progeny through two human agents.

Given the mass human movement occurring globally, the Church must rethink its humanitarian involvement in the global concern of immigrants seeking asylum. This proposal for missional hermeneutics is situated against the backdrop of an exegetical reading of Deut 16:18-20 with its emphasis on just judging. Looking through the hermeneutical lens of practical theology and its attention to contextualized praxis, the paper situates the argument for social justice in conversation with qualitative research conducted inside an immigrant family detention facility. The voices of these Central American women and children seeking asylum serve to contextualize, localize, and humanize mass migration while also reminding us to acknowledge our connection to their human plight as sisters and brothers who also are created in the image of God (Gen 1:27). The paper argues for the Church’s increased missional activity with migration as its faithful biblical response to belief in God, and it concludes by offering recommendations for the particular shape and focus of the Church’s necessary missional praxis.

Elder abuse is receiving increasing attention as the US population ages. For example, the Indianapolis Star in January 2016 published two extensive investigative reports on elder abuse in Indiana. These reports identified various types of abuse, the role of Adult Protective Services, and the fact that APS is woefully underfunded and understaffed in Indiana, despite increasing numbers of requests for services. Current research suggests that 1 in 10 older adults are abused, and the risk increases as older adults become more frail and isolated or experience dementia. Abuse harms older adults financially, physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. Many older adults who are affected are faith involved. Tragically, this is an issue that is given scant attention in faith communities. One possible reason for this lack of attention is that the sacred texts have not been examined as possible resources for breaking the silence and addressing elder abuse. This paper will examine two texts in the Hebrew Bible, one prose and one poetry. The prose text is Genesis 27, which is traditionally interpreted as Rebekah and Jacob “tricking” Isaac to obtain the blessing for Jacob. We will interpret this story as a situation of elder abuse by family members as a way to illuminate the dynamics of abuse. The poetic text is Psalm 71 where the pray-er is suffering because of “enemies” in old age. We will consider this psalm as a possible resource for understanding the role of faith in elder abuse. This paper will be jointly presented by Nancy R. Bowen, Professor of Old Testament at Earlham School of Religion and Anne Marie Hunter, AAR member and Director of Safe Havens Interfaith Partnership Against Domestic Violence and Elder Abuse in Boston, MA. Bowen has team taught a course on Bible and Pastoral Care and has previously presented in this Section. In her role as a national Technical Assistance Provider for the Department of Justice. Hunter works with diverse faith congregations across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and across the U.S. to promote safe and effective faith-based responses to domestic violence and elder abuse.

Scholars working in biblical literatures often encounter explicit and implicit appeals to authority, and scholars themselves often describe ancient texts as "authoritative" or "scripture". However, these terms are seldom defined, explained, or nuanced. What kinds of authority are there? Is so-called "J" an authority for Genesis? Are Samuel and Kings authorities for Chronicles? Is Deuteronomy authoritative or scriptural for Temple Scroll? This paper is an exploration aiming toward a taxonomy and description of what we mean by "authoritative text" and "scripture", which will be useful for better understanding of the history and evolution of Jewish literature in antiquity. Second Proposal, if first is rejected: "Now that Trump is President, How Can We Get 1 Billion Dollars of Fence Money for SBL?"

In my work with Carlin Barton in preparing our joint book, Imagine No Religion, I learned (and adopted) her method of research into the complexities of the conceptual systems of ancient cultures via analysis of myriad contexts of key words. In short, in Barton's procedure, one translates the context of the word in question, a context fairly extensively chosen, but leaves the key word entirely untranslated. The coordination of various contexts into groups and the study of their family relationships then enables the production of a sort of map of the semantic field providing much more nuanced access to the actual semantic relations within the language in question than is reached through the sort of head word and sub meanings approach of conventional lexica. In this brief communication, I will argue that this method is consistent with Wittgenstein's ideas as presented in his later work, notably the Philosophical Investigations.

Modern scholarship has often understood pseudonymous authorship as primarily or even exclusively a deceitful claim to antiquity and authority. Adapting an older religious-psychological approach to pseudepigraphy, however, Charles Stang has recently analyzed Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s use of a pseudonym as a means of splitting the self in preparation for mystical union with Christ. While earlier work of this kind argued that the unknown author vacates his self in favor of the spirit of the authoritative figure for whom he writes, Stang interprets Pseudo-Dionysius as creating a self that is both his self and not his self. This split self, unknown to itself, is open to union with Christ: as Paul wrote, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). Taking its cue from Stang, this paper turns to classic (Sethian) Gnostic literature, most of which is pseudepigraphic, and argues that pseudonymity can enact a self that is understood not to be split, but to be essentially multiple or layered. For example, in The Reality of the Rulers, the voice of an anonymous author (who, like Pseudo-Dionysius, looks back to Paul) gives way to that of the “biblical” character of Norea, who in turn gives voice to the great angel Eleleth. The opening of the Secret Book According to John slips seamlessly from the voice of a nameless narrator to that of the apostle John to that of the multiform savior. Other works perform this multiple self ritually. In Three Steles of Seth, the pseudonymous Dositheus presents overlapping hymns of praise that give voice to divine beings and human worshipers simultaneously. The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit presents itself as a book that Seth composed, in which a series of divinely spoken praises leads to an anonymous “I” of petition, praise, and thanksgiving. Gnostic use of pseudonymity not only seeks to establish authority through literary deceit, but also performs the self as layered, subsumed within higher abstractions and inclusive of lower particularities. Pseudonymity was a literary and ritual strategy to enact a mystical union with the Barbelo and other divine beings as one’s higher selves in a manner that differs from yet anticipates the “apophatic anthropology” that Stang discerns in Pseudo-Dionysius some three centuries later. Valentinus’s eschewal of pseudepigraphy for personal inspired speech may signal a revised gnostic understanding of the self and of the mysticism that it practices.

Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 604 AD, is known in the Church as a major reformer. His papacy saw the spread of Catholicism throughout major parts of Europe, which required extensive missionary work and diplomacy with other peoples, such as the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, and Goths. These missionary efforts resulted in several letter and gift exchanges. Moreover, Gregory the Great, in his attempt to purge Christianity of corruption, wrote extensively to Church officials to deal with issues concerning the distribution of Church revenue and assets. Fortunately, Gregory the Great left his Register of Letters (over 854 entries), which records these correspondences and the gifts he gave to foreign leaders and Church officials. These gifts include items such as relics, timber, and cloaks. In this paper, I will investigate Gregory the Great's gift giving and financial administration as seen in his Register of Letters. I will discuss what gifts Gregory the Great sent around the Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity and why he did so. Several of his gifts are responses to items he already received, as he tried to continue the established gift-giving tradition. Some of these interactions solidified socio-political interactions, as with the Lombards. However, other gifts, such as gold sent to widows and virgins, were used to protect them and their estates from corrupt clerics. These items shed much light on the financial administration of the early medieval papacy, a topic that has received little attention in scholarship.

In Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri questions the idea of applying the term “religion” to other cultures or as seeing it as a universal category of experience, and not as a modern Western Christianizing construct with implicitly polemical purposes (see Ristuccia 2014, 84-85, who also mentions Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad, Russell McCutcheon, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith ). Yet the word “religion” continues to be used unabashedly by Eidinow, Finkelpearl, Kindt, Mikalson, North, Ogden, Price, Rives, Rüpke, Smith, Teeter, and Woolf, among others. One can, moreover, make out a case for the use of “religion” as something understood by first and second century classical authors. Nongbri does not mention the Acts of the Apostles, an important document for the first century, nor Plutarch, a leading historians of religion in his time. First, in Acts of the Apostles, 25:19, Festus, the new prefect, finds a good occasion to settle the case of Paul, when King Agrippa, an expert in Judaism, and his wife, Berenike, arrive. In Festus’words: “. . ., they [the Jews] had certain points of disagreement with him [Paul] about their own religion (??t?µata d? t??a pe?? t?? ?d?a? de?s?da?µ???a? e????) and about a certain Jesus..."(NRSV). The key word here is deisidaimonia, which modern translations seem universally to render here as “religion,” though usually it means “superstition.” The elite had a way of talking about the “religion” of other people even if the terminology was very fluid and mostly consisted of circumlocutions. Readers of Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris would certainly understand the work as treating a part of Egyptian “religion,” though at times referring to Egyptian religion in general. He refers, also, to Persian religion, though specified as Zoroastrianism. A modern translator might simply translate “Egyptians in their wisdom touching all that has to do with the gods” (351D as “in Egyptian religion,” and similarly for “Phrygians,” “Thracians,” or “Greeks” (415A-B) But Plutarch can often be more specific, such as indicating the Heliopolitan cult. The problem also arises in contrasting Greek and Roman religion in his Roman Questions and Greek Questions. Even though the “questions” (a?t?a) often have to do with individual cults, even in different cities, it is clear that he is contrasting or comparing what most readers would see as Greek religion and Roman religion. In the Roman Questions, Plutarch treats Roman religion as rather monolithic, that is, of the city of Rome. However, in the Greek Questions he largely treats subdivisions of Greek religion, that is local religions. For example, at the beginning of the work alone, he mentions cults at Epidauros, Cnidos, in Arcadia, in Sparta, and at Opuntian Locris. But he also frequently mentions practices that seem to belong to all the Greeks. Thus, one needs some caution in denying a concept of “religion” to first and second century classical authors, even when they used no specific word for it.

The exposed hero or foundling myth is ubiquitous throughout ANE and Hellenistic literature as the story of a child who is abandoned by his birth parent(s) only to be found and raised by someone else (e.g., by a wild animal or a shepherd or other herder). Employing enough of the pattern’s elements in a narrative would have evoked the myth, with all of its attendant themes, in the mind of the ancient reader. Even though no one element is essential for expressing the pattern, some of the elements necessarily depend on each other. If an omen has been pronounced concerning the fate of the child, we expect the substance of that omen to be fulfilled later in the narrative. This paper recognizes a peculiar phenomenon in the deployment of this myth in three different early Jewish and Christian texts: (1) the Moses birth narrative in Exodus 2.1-10, (2) the birth of Jesus in Matthew 1.18-2.18, and (3) the story of Aseneth’s conversion in the Jewish romance Joseph and Aseneth. The phenomenon takes the form of a discrete modification in the type-pattern. One of the elements of the pattern that depends on the others is conspicuously absent, which creates an unfulfilled expectation for the reader. The narrator supplies a different element outside the exposed hero pattern that fills roughly the same purpose as the missing component. This leads to a synthesis between the themes supplied by the myth and the theological aims of the narrator. In the Moses birth narrative, the famously missing element is the announcement of Moses’ birth as a threat to the Pharaoh’s sovereignty. The danger Moses faces is supplied instead by the genocide motif, which helps connect the themes that were introduced by the myth with the broader aims of the editor of Exodus. Jesus’ birth in Matthew, it has been suggested, is an exposed hero myth without the exposure. And in Aseneth’s story, the elements are subtly modified and attenuated that her exposure is never confirmed for us at all. Examining each of these stories within the matrix of early Judaism and Christianity can help us to understand the enduring force of this myth and its malleability within the Jewish and Christian idioms.

Names are important evidence on funarary inscriptions. Through names on Christian epithaps from the areas around Iconium and Laodicea Combusta much about the origen, culture and social status of the Christians living in these areas from the 3rd to the 5th century CE is revealed. The paper illustrates the importance of the study of names for the historiographer and the seminal role of the database supporting the research: Inscriptiones Christianae Graecae.

This paper looks at the topic of “mitigation” in biblical Hebrew from a pragmatics perspective; in particular, politeness analysis. The focus of study will be primarily linguistic expressions of strategies of intent and effect (i.e. illocution and perlocution) though grammatical or syntactical expressions are included in the discussion. Judah’s plea to the unknown-to-him Joseph in Genesis 44:18-34 is used as a representative text for study, as this plea uses a range of linguistic expression that can be considered polite, and which mitigate the effect of Judah’s request of Joseph. Mitigating devices of intent and effect found in Genesis 44:18-34 are: master-slave deference, apologizing, exaggerating interest to the hearer, and questioning or hedging. Grammatical and syntactical mitigation found are: the politeness particle by, the jussive with the particle n’, and in v.34 an avoidance of the use of second person pronouns and address. The strategies vary in concentration across the plea, with most found in the requests of vv.18 and 33.

In recent years, a number of scholars (Tiemeyer, Tull, Linafelt, Middlemas, Sommer) have begun to see connections between the book of Lamentations and Isaiah 40—55. These scholars argue that significant portions of Isa 40—55 respond to and reverse the imagery and language found in Lamentations in an effort to engage and encourage the Judahite community that had experienced the tragedies of the exile and the destruction of Jerusalem. Significantly less attention, however, is paid to possible connections between Lamentations and Isa 56—66. Building on the observations of Steck and Blenkinsopp, this study presents and examines a number of lexical and thematic connections between the lament of Isa 63:7—64:11 that cannot be explained simply by similarity in genre. Of particular significance for this study are the portraits of Yahweh in Lamentations as an “enemy” (Lam 2:3–4), the notion that Yahweh has acted without pity (2:2, 17, 21; 3:43), Yahweh’s acts of violence along the “way” (3:9, 11, 40), and the utter destruction of Jerusalem. Isaiah 63:7—64:11 draws heavily and consistently from the book of Lamentations, particularly from the aforementioned aspects of the book, in an effort to reframe and re-present the mourning of the Judahite community. In doing so, Isa 63:7—64:11 presents a less ‘raw’ portrait of the destruction of Jerusalem and a less violent depiction of Yahweh and reverses the images of divine abandonment (Isa 64:7) and pitilessness (Isa 63:9) present within Lamentations. Based on these efforts at re-presentations and reversals, this paper argues that the Isaianic lament presents both a different picture of Yahweh and of the historical situation in which the lament takes place, as it takes a longer historical view of the community’s trouble and reformulates and elides a number of images related to Yahweh’s interaction with the Judahite community. These differences are best understood as the product of an early postexilic provenance, in connection with the scene in Zechariah 7:1–3, which portrays a protracted mourning process even as the Jerusalem temple was being rebuilt. Furthermore, this study points toward a structure of Isa 63:1—66:17 based on the use of and response to Lamentations within the three sections of Isa 63:1–6; 63:7—64:11; 65:1—66:17. As such this study offer a potential way forward in the study of Isa 56—66 that builds on previous Isaiah scholarship.

The Lucan resurrection narrative (Luke 24) has often been compared to those found in the others synoptic gospel, focusing on 1) the sources that the author would have recycled, 2) the theological particularities that the author displays, 3) the historicity of the author in providing geographical details to his accounts, and 4) the prophecy/fulfillment details provided. While these researches have focused their attention on underlining the theological congruency of these accounts, little effort has been devoted to investigating the emotions narrated and the affect that these narratives exhibit. Recent research in the field of cognitive science has stressed the outcome of narrative-affect and group-affect, underlining bodily reactions to narrative expectations (Brian Massumi, 2002), as well as group-affect regarding narrative interpretations (Barsade and Knight, 2015). Parallel to these theories, the apparition narrated in Luke 24 describes different emotions when encountering the resurrected Jesus; while fear took over the women (eµf?ß?? de ?e??µ????: Luke 24:5) as well as the disciples (eµf?ß?? ?e??µe???; Luke 24:37), others experienced a burning heart effect (?a?d?? ?µ?? ?a??µe??; Luke 24:32) and joy (ap? t?? ?a???; Luke 24:41). The question that follows is why these characters exhibit different emotional responses, and what is the link between their emotional reactions and their characterization throughout the Gospel of Luke? Massumi proposes that narrative affect and its resulting emotional reaction can be perceivable at the heart-beat, breathing and skin reaction when narratives agree, contradict, or offer a new interpretative possibility (ibid). Thus, how can we connect narrative-affect and group-affect in relation to the resurrected apparitions? This research argues that the purpose of these narratives was to present new interpretative possibilities that fuelled group-identities. Furthermore, rather than limiting the analytical spectrum to the emotional coherence of religion as limited to belief and practice (i.e. Paul Thagard, 2005), this research proposes that the change of interpretative paradigm is an underlying culprit for the narrative-affect, perceived not only in the sense depicted in these accounts (sight, hearing and talking), but also in the characterization of insiders versus outsiders, thus demonstrating a vast and rich range of responses to the enigmatic encounter with the risen Jesus.

When interpreting a text divorced from its author, one must decide how to negotiate the contribution of the intra-textual context and that of the world external to the text as mediators of the author’s intended meaning. In the letters of Paul, for example, reconstruction of the immediate historical situations depicted or of the thoughts conveyed, as well as reconstruction of his perspective on other contemporary groups (like other Jews) or of his larger thought structures, depend in some way on how the interpreter weights the evidence of the text on the one hand, and that of the wider social, cultural, or religious environment, including other texts, on the other. The present paper focuses on several passages in 1 Corinthians (4:3; 7:15; 7:20-21; 10:25-29; 11:10) where attention to the text’s “structural cohesion,” as described in Hallidayan functionalist linguistics, helps to clarify Paul’s meaning. In some cases novel interpretations are offered. The approach is grounded in two hermeneutical convictions. First, because word order and thought structures are ostensive indicators of meaning alongside lexical semantics and word morphology, adherence to the unfolding structure of the source language in translation discloses the essence of the original thought in ways that translation rendered in the preferred sequence of the target language cannot. Second, although intra- and extra-textual context are mutually interpreting, it is the intra-textual context that exteriorizes thoughts in the particularities of their place, time, community, and conversation, as against the “total cultural environment,” which is too diverse to arbitrate, “from the bottom up,” meaning in particular instances, and too malleable to be used as a fixed set of possible significations. The paper in short, argues for the intended meaning of these texts first from the text’s structural cohesion, and then sets about for evidence that the given interpretation in each case fits comfortably within Paul’s wider socio-cultural context.

The study of early Jesus people and texts has made surprisingly little reference to education in antiquity. When referred to, education is often mounted to argue for or against the technical skills of Paul or gospel writers (Paul was or was not rhetorically trained, for example). But encyclia paideia (encyclical education) was not about the acquisition of technical skills. Rather, it introduced students to a world in which reading, writing, commenting, and critiquing carried significant social capital as the practices of the literary elite. This is the world in which people gathered in the gymnasium to hear a traveling historian or poet, the world in which people gathered around the dinner table to hear reading of a philosophical tract, and, I argue, the world in which some of our early Jesus texts are right at home. Situating early Jesus texts in this intellectual milieu will help us move away from the notion that Christianity was in any way unique, and allow us to understand early Jesus people and texts alongside other intellectual groups in antiquity. In spite of a movement away from belief, experience, and community as generative of early Jesus groups and texts, there is still a lingering reliance on the primacy of the Jesus-myth of a letter or gospel. While not denying that the figure of Jesus is important, my paper argues that it is not Jesus that gives a text its traction, but the fact that a social world already existed in which that content of the text could be deemed significant. To argue this I will situate the Gospel of Thomas in the Graeco-Roman world of the pepaideumenoi (the ones who have been educated) to illustrate the ways in which its genre, form, rhetoric, and content fit nicely within a sphere of intellectual culture in Graeco-Roman antiquity.

A central theme of the book of Ezekiel is the presence or absence of God. The theme is implicated in the book’s context and woven throughout its content. Absence is evoked in the book’s opening reference to exile (Ezekiel 1:1-3), and presence is declared in the book’s closing phrase, “The LORD is there!” (Ezekiel 48:35). Opening and ending frame a complex array of visions and oracles which tell judgment against the people on account of their idolatrous worship and repeatedly assert that “You (or they) will know that I am the LORD.” Both the charge and the vow carry the theme: idolatry is false understanding and practice of divine presence, while the recognition formula evokes true understanding and true practice, that which necessarily, inescapably, leads to the full realization of the promise, “The name of the city from that day shall be ‘the LORD is there!’” (48:35). The resolution to this theme comes not only in the words of the prophet but in their writing. The book of Ezekiel does not so explicitly wrestle with the fact of its writtenness as the book of Jeremiah, for example (see Jer 36), yet its origin and ongoing existence as writing is subtly cued, from the opening references to eating the scroll and prophesying the “very word” (Ezekiel 3:1-4) through the concluding command to “write it down in their sight” (43:11). Yet writing, in Ezekiel’s day, was inseparable from reading, that is, from voiced speech. The vocabulary itself tells as much: to read is to call, that is, to read aloud. The bare form of the consonantal text requires vocalization for meaning. Throughout the Bible, references to writing are joined with injunctions to proclaim what is written: writing is not the end of orality rather, oral proclamation is the end, the purpose, the goal, of writing. Biblical texts expect speech. Thus, the dry bones vision of Ezekiel 37 may be read as a narrative of the intersection of the text’s consonantal bones and the lector’s reanimating breath leading to an experience of God powerfully present. Similarly, the closing vision’s commands to “look closely and listen attentively … declare all you see” (40:4) and “write it down in their sight” (43:11) juxtapose oral-aural and image-visual cues in a way that suggests the signifying power of material-text seen and heard as bearing part of the burden of the book’s message of presence.

As a first page, the prologue is fundamental to the dramatic structure of the Gospel of John. Through the threshold of John 1:1-18, audiences come to the body of the Gospel armed with the information in the prologue—information only the narrator and audiences have. Although the enigmatic ideas of the prologue may prove elusive initially, this is precisely what creates the tension that begs the question of the ‘how’ of God’s action in the world. The subsequent drama shows what the prologue tells. The Fourth Evangelist’s use of the poetic prologue as a foundation for his Gospel that suddenly and definitively breaks into prose narrative can also be understood as a reflection of his theological perspective. The incarnation of the Word suddenly and definitively turns the custom and ‘truth’ of the world on its ear. This paper explores the formative influence of performance on the carefully composed prologue to the Gospel of John. The term “prologue” comes from the Greek logos, which literally means “word” but has larger connotations of “speech” or “study,” and the prefix pro, meaning “before.” Prologues therefore serve as a message before the body of a narrative or drama that become a key to appreciating the full force of the story to come, giving background that introduces the setting, previews the main characters, sets up the action, and establishes the primary themes of the work. In Greek tragedy, the prologue was often the first component of the play that set forth the subject and protagonists of the drama when the chorus entered the stage. It would give the mythological background necessary for understanding the events of the play. Much like the chorus in ancient Greek dramas, therefore, John’s prologue gives audiences a synthesis of events to come. It tells audiences the who and the what of the events at hand, but leaves open the how. The story itself is necessary to understand how it all plays out. All of this becomes information audiences have that characters in the story don’t have but likely wish they did. Thus it puts audiences in a privileged position as we participate in the action of the story, identifying with some characters and waiting, even hoping, for them to catch on, as it were, and begin to grasp the fullness of what is at stake. God became human and dwelt among us in a new act of covenant and John’s prologue is the beginning of the word that shares that story.

Jerome’s Vulgate is an important witness to a Hebrew text or texts of the Bible current in fourth-fifth century Palestine, yet it generally receives short schrift and limited attention in Hebrew Bible scholarship. Nevertheless, it holds great interest for the text critic and the student of early biblical interpretation alike. I would like to present one example for each and to demonstrate just some of the exciting possibilities still possible within Vulgate studies. It is well known that the apparatus of BHS (and also BHQ) is insufficient for proper text critical work. One such example can be found in the metaphorical description of Judah’s ultimate destruction in 2 Kings 21:13. The Vulgate version of this passage presents an image far more consonant with both biblical and ancient Near Eastern imagery than the strange picture found in the Masoretic text. The Vulgate form of this passage thus suggests that the MT has undergone some manner of corruption. An example of the exegetical nature of Jerome’s work can be found in his (or his advisor’s) translation of Psalm 42:2 (iuxta Hebraeos). Here we find Jerome struggling with the vivid image presented in the verse. The rare verb 'arag, interpreted in light of a related noun 'arûgâ, becomes the crux for his interpretation of the verse. The surprising translation that results demonstrates something of his interpretive method. These two examples demonstrate the continued relevance of the Vulgate for text criticism of the Hebrew Bible and further for the ongoing task of interpreting the often difficult text.

The Museum of Islamic Art was opened in 2008. A number of scholars visited the Museum at or near its opening, some of them working its Qur'an manuscripts. Among the early visitors were Marcus Fraser, David Roxburgh, and Francois Déroche. However, in the years since the Museum's opening, a number of new acquisitions of early Qur'an manuscripts have been made. I visited the Museum in 2015, photographing (with a few pages excepted due to display mountings) all pages of all Qur'ans in the collection that were of likely origin within the first several hijri centuries, approximately 200 shelf numbers at this point. In this paper, I survey and give highlights of the collections of the Museum, with special attention to more recent acquisitions.

Interpreting Mark 7:31-37, the story of Jesus healing a Deaf man, requires a bifocal understanding of the ancient worldview of deafness and modern Deaf culture. This paper discusses in-depth how the word kophos (deaf) is employed in Greco-Roman literature. Kophos has several meanings: deaf, mute, senseless, dull, less acutely, etc. Although kophos is a very common word for “deaf” in Greco-Roman literature, it is also used in a way that means “senseless” or “dull". Also, nowhere in Greco-Roman literature is there a word of praise about the deaf; the word kophos is almost always used negatively. Indeed, the use of kophos accurately reflects the common view of deafness in ancient Hellenistic culture. It is no wonder that ancient Roman law classified deaf people as mentecattifuriosi, which basically means “manics”. In addition, early rabbinic literature apparently expressed a low view of deaf people and even encouraged people to treat the deaf condescendingly. For instance, the Talmud includes deaf people with the intellectually disabled as exempted from following Jewish laws because they cannot understand them. Examining perceptions of deafness in Greco-Roman literature and early rabbinic literature helps one envision how the community of the deaf man in Mark 7 possibly viewed deaf people. Finally, the text will be analyzed verse by verse, and modern Deaf culture will serve as a primary companion to the exegesis of the text. In the end, one will see clearly that reading this Marcan text through a bifocal lens of the ancient worldview of deafness and modern Deaf culture manifests the uniqueness of this healing. The only other miracle in the gospels where Jesus heals someone privately is the healing of Jarius’ daughter in Mark; however, Jarius’ mother, father, and three disciples were present in the room. Moreover, Jesus only says one word to the deaf man, which is unusual compared to his other miracles. Even more, Jesus does not utter any word in his prayer, he simply groans. These peculiar characteristics of the miracle can be explained by an integrative understanding of the ancient view of deafness and modern Deaf culture.

The goal of the «Way of Immortality» of Hermes Trismegistus was to first be reborn as divine, and then to ascend and behold the perfection of the Eighth and Ninth spheres beyond the material cosmos. This visionary ascent was considered as a necessary preamble to the final ascent after death, for the soul to find its way past the planetary spheres. The way of ascent thus reverses the way of descent narrated in the Poimandres (CH I), in which the hermaphroditic primal Human descends through the spheres and becomes embodied. The latter process is described as the consummation of first the narcissistic love that the Human feels for his own reflection in the nethermost moist Nature, and the love that Nature feels for the Human. This love has by scholars been identified with errant desire, and interpreted as a fall from grace. Yet there are no negative connotations in the language of love and desire in the text before the Human is divided into two sexes, at which time errant love for the body leads to the way of death. In the Kore kosmou (SH XXIII) God instills eros in the hearts of gods at the dawn of time, which makes them desire to seek him (§ 3), and he told the souls that eros and necessity will rule them (§ 38), and that the righteous will experience a transition towards the divine while the others will be reborn in new bodies (§ 41). The distinction between love of the inner self and the body is made explicit in The Mixing-Bowl: «If you do not first hate your body, my son, you cannot love yourself; but having loved yourself you will receive nous, and when you have nous you will participate in knowledge» (CH IV, 6). In the treatise that details the visionary ascent, the Discourse of the Eighth and the Ninth (NHC VI,6), it is love that gains the disciple progress in wisdom (54,6-9), a ritual embrace of love between master and disciple secures the vision (57,26–28), and it is God’s love that gives him the power to ascend (61,1-2). In the embodied state the soul can thus experience two different types of love: love for the body, which chains the soul to a continuous process of devolving metempsychosis, and the love for one’s essential self, which leads the soul on the way of ascent.

Like many other passages in the Book of Job, the verses with which Job begins his second poetic speech (6:2-7) present numerous philological and interpretational difficulties. Some scholars believe that Job here virtually ignores Eliphaz’s long peroration in chapters 4-5, instead continuing chapter 3’s lament as if his friend had never spoken. Others, however, perceive a number of links between Job’s words and those of Eliphaz; Beuken, for example, has pointed out many possible semantic connections between Job 4-5 and Job 6 (and indeed with chapters 3 and 7, as well), while Habel views 6:2-7 as a response to 5:2-7 (and 6:8-13 to 4:2-6). Taking the latter position as a point of departure, in this paper I argue that 6:2-7 is best interpreted as a sharp—even satirical—riposte to both Eliphaz’s “vision” and “curse” (4:12-5:7). It is proposed, for example, that the ostensible occurrences of what Crenshaw termed “impossible questions” in 6:5-6 (e.g., “Does the ox low over its fodder?”) are instead a parodic response to the central query of Eliphaz’s vision, “Can mortals be more righteous than God? Can human beings be more pure than their Maker?” (4:17). This reading can help to illuminate some of the more difficult terms and expressions in these verses, such as the enigmatic phrase often translated as “white of an egg” in 6:6.

Biblical scholars generally accept that Num 27:1-11 and 36:1-9, the two judgments regarding the Zelophehad daughters’ inheritance and marriage, were composed at different times by different authors. A primary reason for this is the perceived conflict between the edicts given by Moses in each section. Interpreters hold that in Num 27 YHWH grants the daughters of Zelophehad vast, new rights, but that Moses severely curtails these rights in Num 36 by restricting the daughters’ right to marry. Undergirding this interpretation is the assumption that the daughters are asking to function as sons to perpetuate their father’s name. This paper reevaluates the content of the daughters’ request both within the context of Numbers and within the context of the intestacy laws and marriage customs for similar situated unmarried girls in the Ancient Near East. Based on this analysis this paper demonstrates that it is more likely that the daughters are only asking that their father’s name not be excluded from the land allocation list of Num 26 and that they receive the land that would have been his. Furthermore, the daughters would have understood that their inheritance of real property would result in limitations being placed on the range of potential husbands. Thus, the two pericopes are not in conflict and, therefore, any proposed “conflict” is not a valid reason for postulating a two-stage composition for these pericopes.

The angels Harut and Marut, mentioned in Qur’an 2:102, are the subject of narratives in the Islamic genre of stories of the prophets, narratives which have been noted for their similarity to Jewish, Persian, and hermetic lore. Especially striking in its intertextual connections is the early version presented by Ishaq bin Bishr (d. 821 C.E.), which is found in two unpublished manuscripts, one in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the other in the Zahiriyya Library in Damascus. I will present portions of Ibn Bishr’s version of the tale which differ from the later collections of Al-Tabari (in his Tafsir), Al-Tha‘labi, and Al-Kisa’i. These portions include an encounter between the two angels and the temptress Zuhara, in which the angels repeatedly request sexual intercourse, while Zuhara replies with a series of escalating demands. The scene as narrated by Ibn Bishr has its closest parallels in stories with Egyptian orientation, such as the Demotic Egyptian tale of Setne Khamwas and the Greek alchemistic text Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horos. At the same time, as is characteristic of Ibn Bishr’s stories in general, links with biblical motifs are stronger than in other versions of the tale. I will argue that the transmitters of this text (including Makhul bin Abi Muslim, the principal named source for the Egyptian-like parts of the narrative, and Ibn Bishr himself) were aware of the diverse religious orientations of the intertexts, and that this contrast is employed strategically in the narrative, so that the monotheistic elements cluster around the (initially) monotheistic angels Harut and Marut, while the pagan elements cluster around the pagan woman Zuhara. This makes the angels’ trial a type of the tension between Islam and the alluring, polytheistic world. The implications of these findings are both historical and literary. They suggest that Egyptian pagan learning survived, was accessible, and was interesting to early Islamic scholars to a greater extent than is usually supposed. While current models of the stories’ intertextuality, such as that developed by John Reeves in a recent study on Harut and Marut, stress the continuity with parabiblical traditions, this study suggests a more composite and creative model for the stories’ production.

Displacement due to war and ecological disaster has become increasingly common in the past few decades, currently reaching alarming levels, especially as Syrian refugees flee Daesh (ISIS) and fan across Europe and North America. This paper seeks to juxtapose this modern forced displacement with an ancient one reflected in a reading of the Letter to the Hebrews. Relying upon spatial theory from Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja as well as studies in migration and refugees, this paper will investigate place, place-less-ness, movement, and marginality in Hebrews to argue that the author calls his audience to earthly marginality – to be foreigners upon the earth – and migrant status to achieve heavenly centrality. Especially in chapter 11 onward, but elsewhere as well, the author recasts such biblical heroes as Abraham and Moses to reflect the audience’s own marginal, disrupted, and displaced status along the fringes of the Roman imperial system in the general context of Jewish-Roman hostilities: here they have no lasting city, whether Jerusalem or Rome. They wander toward a new homeland. The audience is called to a life of wandering and marginality here and now for the reward of god’s throne and tabernacle later. Earthly marginality in fringe places of deserts, caves, and holes in the ground leads to the heavenly city and homeland. It is a message of future hope in the midst of an ongoing struggle.

The competition to gain or maintain group members and to display one’s own superiority was common practice between early Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries. What has not been given the scholarly attention it warrants is the use of physiognomy — the widespread idea that a person’s character could be discerned by his or her outward appearance and bodily comportment — in these intergroup rivalries. This paper will examine how early Christian authors capitalized on physiognomic thought as a strategy to showcase their purported superiority over theological rivals, with a particular focus on the fourth century when physiognomic thought was especially predominant. Given that the primary function of physiognomy was that it was thought to reveal insidious character traits which the subject of such scrutiny might otherwise attempt to conceal, it was deemed a useful rhetorical weapon to employ to empirically “prove” an opponent’s moral shortcoming and the superiority of the members of one’s own group, despite the inherent subjectivity of the enterprise. Church fathers not only responded to physiognomic criticisms from their non-Christian opponents by leveling similar charges against them, but also maintained the superior bodily appearance and comportment, and thus ethical character, of Christians.

Martin Luther’s exegetical work on the Book of Revelation is restricted to two Prefaces. The first accompanied the publication by Melchior Lotther, in 1522, of Luther’s translation of the New Testament: Das Newe Testament Deutzsch (or the September Testament). Then from 1530 onwards a longer Preface superseded it, featuring from 1534 to 1546 in successive editions of Luther’s full Bible translation. The first Preface was famously dismissive of Revelation as a book that failed to do justice to “Christ and his deeds”: in the Reformer’s view, “Christ is neither taught nor known in it.” The second Preface, by contrast, attached enough worth to the Book to undertake succinct commentary of Revelation; it contains occasional christological material which may be summarized as follows: brief acknowledgement of “Christ, the Lamb of God” when commenting on Rev 4–5; a note on how Christ begins “to slay his Antichrist” and a mention of “the city of Christ,” in relation to Rev 14; a passing reference to the fact that “the one called the Word of God (19:13) wins”; a terse comment on “the eternal marriage feast [when] Christ alone is Lord,” referring to Rev 21; and concluding remarks to the effect that “our holiness is in heaven, where Christ is” and that Christ is ever with us: “through and beyond all plagues, beasts, and evil angels Christ is nonetheless with his saints, and wins the final victory.” In neither Preface did Luther have anything to say about John’s opening vision of the one like a son of man (1:13–17) or, in particular, about John’s report of the figure’s extended opening speech (1:17b–3:22). Luther’s silence here is odd: as his Preface to the New Testament as a whole makes clear, it is precisely a concentration on Christ’s preaching that qualifies John’s Gospel to be “the one, fine, true, and chief gospel”: says Luther, “the works do not help me but the words give life, as [Christ] himself says.” This paper will measure Luther’s commentary on Revelation, from initial disparagement to later qualified approval, against the Reformer’s own christocentric hermeneutic as well as highlight the particular interpretative moves that govern his second Preface. The paper will then reflect on some of the christological fallout, for the reception and impact history of Revelation, from the stance adopted by the Reformation’s prime mover: through selective soundings, an attempt will be made to clarify the nature and gauge the degree of Luther’s ongoing influence over the interpretation and valuation of Revelation’s Christology. Finally the paper will consider whether and to what extent Revelation’s Christology has been (re)valued subsequently and might have recovered, or may yet recover, a role in constructive Christian theology today.

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In recent years, the field of New Testament studies has seen a minor resurgence of interest in spirit possession phenomena in Jesus, Paul, and early Christianity (e.g. Peter Craffert, Colleen Shantz, and forthcoming Giovanni Bazzana). A variety of factors have led to this resurgence, including the reevaluation of an unconscious scholarly bias against “mystic” interpretations of New Testament figures that was prominent throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also influential has been the wider dissemination of familiarity with the Dead Sea Scrolls and in particular some of these texts’ interests in spirits (good, bad, and neutral) as well as apotropaic practices. Arguably, however, the most fruitful new data has been the incorporation of anthropological and sociological studies of spirit possession in cultures around the world as well as limited but intriguing engagement with recent discoveries in neuroscience. The resulting new models of New Testament spirit possession have at times confirmed, challenged, and/or complicated what Pentecostals and Charismatics have long held as given about the New Testament: namely, the profoundly spirit-filled world it portrays, the relative passability of borders between individuals, communities, and those spirits, and the simultaneous variety and centrality of spirit experience in the early Jesus movement. So far, in regards to biblical studies, these anthropological approaches have largely been limited to the study of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. After outlining these recent developments in New Testament scholarship and commenting on their potential rewards and risks, this presentation poses a series of questions. Utilizing anthropological and historical studies (including works by Janice Boddy, Michael Lambek, and Paul C. Johnson), I ask: How might the incorporation of these new methods contribute to our understanding of spirits and spirit possession in the Old Testament? How have modern, western notions of the “buffered self,” of psychology, and of metaphysics affected our readings of spirit phenomena in biblical texts? In cultures where spirit conjurers and exorcists are prevalent, how are they viewed and what functions do they fill? What ritual, therapeutic, and/or political roles do spirit episodes play in literature and in social contexts? Finally, what are some of the ontologies of spirits that underlie these accounts? As a case study, I will look at the portrayal of Saul in the book of Samuel. Three episodes from Saul’s life are of interest: First, the “prophetic frenzy” story (1 Sam 10:5–13, cf. 19:18–24), second, the accounts of the tormenting spirit (1 Sam 16:14–23, cf. 18:10–16), and third, the witch at Endor episode (1 Sam 28:3–25). Recent works in biblical studies that have begun to engage with these questions (e.g. Loren Stuckenbruck, John Levison) also inform this study.

The story of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5:1-20 is one of the most striking pericopes in the Second Gospel. It is here where Jesus confronts the most powerful demonic force in the Gospel, save for Satan himself (1:12). Jesus demonstrates that he is the “stronger one” (1:7) able to bind the “strong man” (3:27) by driving out the demons that plague the demoniac. Many have noted the literary artistry of the narrative, its logical difficulties notwithstanding. Boring aptly represents this view, labeling the pericope “The longest, most detailed, and most vivid of the Synoptic miracle stories” (Boring 2006). In this narrative, Mark graphically portrays a man hellbent on his own destruction because of the unclean spirits that have overtaken him (5:3-5). Yet, there is a puzzling element to this narrative that has yet to be resolved, namely: why is such a serious story also full of incongruity and humor? The pericope of the Gerasene demoniac contains a high volume of humorous details. Though some commentators read the text in a serious manner, others have noted the comic tone of the passage, stating that “the humor...is thoroughly evident” (Tolbert 1989) as the pericope maintains “un humour blasphématoire” (LaMarche 1996) and has qualities of “burlesque comedy” (Marcus 350). However, no scholar of which I am aware has attempted to systematically interpret the humor in the pericope. Furthermore, scholars rarely explore the rhetorical function of the text's humor. These are significant omissions, for if Mark intentionally crafted the pericope in a humorous manner we are missing a crucial piece of the interpretive puzzle by failing to pursue the way in which comedy might shade its meaning. In the present study, I will take up these issues. I will systematically explore how the text is humorous through the application of the General Theory of Verbal Humor, a method developed by humor theorists to detect humor cross-culturally and historically, and analyze the rhetorical function of humor in light of Greek, Roman, and Jewish comedic texts. I will demonstrate that Mark has indeed crafted an intentionally humorous narrative with two major rhetorical thrusts. First and foremost, humor allows Mark to convey a crucial, serious story without losing his audience. The comedy in the passage provides relief from the narrative's gravity, allowing the audience to consider the important theme of good versus evil as it is played out in the dramatic encounter between Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac. Second, Mark addresses misconceptions about Gentiles by comically inverting Jewish stereotypes about them, ultimately holding up the demoniac as an exemplary disciple. This challenges Jewish-Christian expectations and/or stereotypes regarding Gentiles, while simultaneously ingratiating Mark to a Gentile-Christian audience.

In this paper, I submit that in 2 Cor 11:12-15, Paul uses transformation discourse productively. I argue that attention to the interrelationship of identity and transformation in 2 Corinthians illuminates his use of the verb metaschematizo in 11:13-15 and that Paul portrays his opponents as transforming their outer form (11:13, 15) in contrast to genuine (apostolic) metamorphosis (2 Cor 3:18) and true renewal, which is that of the inner person (2 Cor 4:16-18). Paul, therefore, employs discourse about two different types of transformation for the purpose of identity construction: false apostles (11:13) alter their outward forms and disguise their true identity, but Paul and his apostolic team undergo outward decay and inner renewal, which reveals their identity as true apostles. Paul’s transformation language emerged in a historical context in which thinkers recognized the paradoxical relationship between human metamorphosis and the stability of identity. To what degree, for example, can a person’s identity remain constant when one undergoes changes—e.g., natural aging, shifts in social status, alterations to one’s physical appearance, and so forth? As a result, ancient transformation discourse—whether in philosophical treatises or narrative depictions—provided sites for continued reflection on various aspects of human existence. Moreover, writers like Ovid and Apuleius used literary depictions of metamorphosis in hermeneutically productive ways: their transformation discourse generated contemplation on human identity, morality, sexuality, politics, and more. Especially pertinent to this paper, for example, are several of Ovid’s accounts, such as the transformations of Io into a cow and Callisto into a bear, as well as Zeus’ taking the form of a bull to lure Europa. In each of these stories, personal identity—a “self”—persists, and the transformation occurs to a given character’s outward form. These and other examples prove helpful in categorizing types of transformation at play in 2 Corinthians, and they help advance my argument that Paul uses varieties of transformation for identity construction. These categories enable me to explicate why Paul’s use of metaschematizo in 2 Cor 11:12-15, which is often (and rightly) translated as “disguise,” qualifies as a distinct type of transformation. In addition to historical contextualization, I will also explain how different parts of 2 Corinthians (esp. chs. 3-5) relate to ch. 11, in order to establish how one may interpret the various instances of transformation language in relation to one another. Finally, on the basis of my historical and exegetical analysis, I will offer proposals on how Paul uses transformation for identity construction. Important for this step is that both transformation and identity are not merely anthropological or social categories; for Paul, they are theological categories. True metamorphosis shows alignment with Christ (3:17-18). Association with those who only change their appearances, however, suggests alignment with Satan (11:14). Thus, underlying conflicts over financial support (11:7-11) is the matter of the Corinthians’ self-understanding, which Paul aims to shape through the presentation of competing identities through the discourse of change.

In Imperial Aramaic (IA) the III-yod roots are orthographically distinguished in the short (Jussive, -y) and the long (Imperfect, -h) prefix conjugations. However, in the proverbs of Ahiqar, which are linguistically distinct from the framework story, the otherwise consistent orthographical distinction does not hold. In IA, the Jussive is consistently negated with ?l, but in the proverbs of Ahiqar, ?l is used to negate III-yod roots in a prefix conjugation, sometimes ending in –y and sometimes in –h. Scholars have not yet been able to explain this apparent spelling variation. One important piece of evidence that to my knowledge has not been identified in the literature is that the spelling variants are mostly clustered in two sections: one section using the –y spelling and another section using final –h. After the evidence has been considered, two conclusions are presented. First, despite the spelling variation, every Jussive in the proverbs of Ahiqar is graphemically marked as a Jussive at the verb phrase level, that is each Jussive is marked with final –y and/or the volitive negation ?l. Second, in light of the fact that the –y and –h spellings are mostly clustered in two separate sections, the spelling variation may indicate that the proverbs were originally composed in different dialects and then compiled into one text. Although it is possible that this is the result of a scribal error, I would suggest that the dialect with the negated Jussive ending in -h may have already undergone the merging of *yaqtulu and *yaqtul.

According to Ruth Leys, a trauma theorist, autotelic narratives are frequently responses to trauma, which can be real, imagined, or constructed for an ulterior purpose. Often they reflect a survivor's guilt brought on by an inability to justify one's own position vis-a-vis the traumatic event or idea. Consequently, they must contain an internal justification as legitimate expressions: it is in their telling that the trauma is remembered and continues to act upon those who repeat the narratives. In that, the act of telling and retelling mobilizes collective identity, a point perhaps seen most clearly in a traumatized group's self-identification as "victim." We see this, for instance, in Nehemiah 13 (and the choice of this will be explained) as an autotelic response to a perceived unwelcoming situation in Persian-Period Yehud. By comparison, we see a similar process occurring in the first-person narratives from the currently ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, especially under the increasing vocalization in those narratives against Europe's pattern of response. Through a comparison of Neh. 13 and modern first-person narratives, this paper sets the historical and the modern into conversation within the framework of Leys' theory. It argues that autotelic responses reflect a shift in the core of collective identity such that it becomes an irresolvable, foundational part of the group's self-understanding. The past and the present are perhaps no different in that regard. But why are the interpretive strategies given to the biblical texts oftentimes quite different than those given to certain imminent struggles and oppressions? A proposal for that will be offered in this paper.

In the last several decades, there has been a trend to apply interdisciplinary orality studies to the Gospels and consequently, to the Synoptic Problem, especially the puzzling phenomenon of agreement and variation characteristic of the Synoptic Gospels. In this paper, by examining the history of scholarship on the topic of orality, I attempt to show that many past studies have largely inherited the invalid “Great Divide” theory from M. Parry, A. Lord, and W. Kelber, in which the oral and the literary media are seen as “contradictory and mutually exclusive,” and the role of scribal memory is generally neglected. On the contrary, building upon R. A. Derrenbacker’s observation of ancient compositional practices and A. Kirk’s model of “oral manuscript culture,” which emphasizes the role of scribal memory as an interface between orality and writing, this paper further explores the mechanical operation of “scribal cued memory” and applies it to the Synoptic Problem. In light of the operation of scribal cued memory, I agree with Derrenbacker, Kirk, and F. G. Downing that the agreement of order between the Synoptic Gospels does indicate the documentary status of the evangelists’ sources, and that the Two Document Hypothesis (2DH) is mechanically more probable than the Two Gospel Hypothesis and the Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis, although the occasional micro-conflation phenomenon is still a potential problem of the 2DH. This paper then argues that the agreement of order does not necessarily indicate the evangelists’ visual contact with their written sources. It is rather the very high degree of verbal agreement that indicates visual contact with the texts. Thus, Derrenbacker’s theory regarding the visual contact in the ancient compositional practices is modified in this paper. Based on the modified model, I suggest that Matthew had quite frequent visual contact with Q 10-11 and 12-13 (rather than with Mark which provided the skeletal order of Matthew’s narrative) throughout his work. My suggestion is able to explain the occasional micro-conflation on the 2DH with a more mechanically probable procedure.

Spirit and Perception in Mark’s Gospel

The implications of a correction in the Köln fragment seem to have been universally overlooked. The original reading was ep[eta?e?, but ep was cancelled with three diagonal strokes and p??c written above the line (?ep? \p?????[c]/ e[ta?e?). This did not involve correction of a copying error. Rather the text was brought into line with one or more of the synoptic gospels which all read p??s?ta?e?. The change can be explained in one of two ways. If the scribe was changing the reading of his Vorlage, then the change is a later text-critical decision reflecting an awareness of the synoptic textual tradition. While this is certainly possible, one wonders whether a scribe would be inclined to make a change towards the synoptic gospels when copying a text that was obviously meant to be different from them. Alternatively, the change might have been made by the original author in the process of composing the work. Since only one MS is preserved and there is no other attestation or citation of material unique to P.Egerton inv. 2, this possibility should be seriously considered. In producing a final copy of the work the author might have decided to ßring ?p?ta?e? into line with one or more of the synoptic gospels. That would also mean, of course, that the same author knew one or more of the synoptic gospels.

It is well known that a basic difference between medieval Rabbanites and Karaites is the place of the psalms in Judaic liturgy. Both Rabbanites and Karaites viewed the psalms as having a prophetic function for Jews after the destruction of the second Temple. Both included psalms in their liturgies. But Karaites and Rabbanites differed drastically in whether the psalms were central or ancillary to a prayer service, in how psalms might be used in personal prayer, and in what ways psalms might legitimately be interpreted as prophetic. These questions grew out of fundamental disagreements over the nature of Judaic holy scripture (whether or not it includes the Oral Law) and over the proper relationship between God and individual community members. The movements were both shaped by centuries of debates over these issues, not only between Karaites and Rabbanites but also among proponents of each movement. The basic historical outline was drawn by Uriel Simon in his widely cited book Four Approaches to the Book of Psalms, published in Hebrew in 1982 and in English in 1991. Karaites (represented by Salmon ben Yeruham and Yefet ben 'Ali) placed the psalms at the center of their liturgy; while they considered the entire Hebrew Bible as a legimate source for prayer, the Book of Psalms was the foremost source. Rabbanites (represented by Saadiah Gaon and Abraham Ibn Ezra) replaced Temple rituals with their own communal and domestic prayers. While they include psalms in their liturgies, they must select them carefully and define them as something other than prayer. Simon focuses mainly on the prefaces to the commentaries that lay out and support the authors' versions of Jewish theology as well as critiquing and rebutting that of their opponents. In this talk, I begin to extend and fill in Simon's outline. First I begin to trace the rhetorical strategies used by a wider array of Rabbanites and Karaites. The sophistication of the arguments highlights the importance of rhetorical theory in the intellectual environment of the surrounding Islamic culture. Second, I make a case for the importance of analyzing annotations and interpretions of individual psalms, particularly those known as "lament" psalms. By treating the psalms as prophecy, the Karaites make all 150 of them available to individuals to use to entreat God to intervene to solve their day-to-day problems as well as for the community to use to appeal for rescue from exile. However the range of topics addressed in the psalms is rather narrow for this purpose. In contrast, the Rabbanites included only about 50 psalms in their liturgy—mainly hymns and communal thanksgiving psalms. It is no accident that they excluded most of the 60 or so first-person laments, because these are the most prayer-like. Their interpretations of these psalms as prophecy—for example limiting interpretations of Psalm 22 to Esther or King David, close off this avenue. My aim is to show that the debates pushed both Karaites and Rabbanites into intractable interpretive dilemmas and rigid liturgical traditions.

This presentation aims to offer an interpretation of the hitherto perplexing motif of a royal or otherwise powerful figure pointing at a deity. Prior interpretations, such as something like accusation or the assertion of a power, do not do justice to the scene as such or to the range of variations within it. This presentation will draw on theory of art and literature to argue that different elements in the scene are active and expressive along distinct channels of communication, for different audiences within the worlds of the artwork. It will also compare the scene to the feet impressions at the temple of Ain Dara. And it will conclude with implications for biblical literature for religion in ancient Israel and Judea.

In a series of eight Syriac memre-blessings attributed to Jacob of Serug, the author deals with a range of topics especially appropriate for meal-time reflection, such as: providence, honey, bread and wine, gluttony, and reading scripture at table. The texts presume a meal-time setting, a repast consisting of normal food and wine at which lay-persons are in attendance. Neither distinctly liturgical nor monastic, they illumine something like a parish meal or a late antique agape feast, presided over by a bishop who occasionally struggles to divert his hearers' attention from the delights of the table long enough to savor deeper matters. Characterized by a tone of thankful praise, the meditations of these memre move between the body’s delight in the Creator’s provision of physical nourishment and the soul’s deeper need for spiritual sustenance. The texts are full of biblical images. After briefly setting these texts in their historical, theological, and ecclesial context, this paper will focus on the author's use of scripture and biblical imagery as primary ingredients at the table, helping attendees experience the meal as a participation in formative spiritual realities. The shared meal setting provides a unique opportunity for the preacher to cultivate biblical imagination, thereby enhancing parishioners' appreciation of food and sharpening their reception of scripture. By 'seasoning the meal with scripture,' these performative texts invite the hearers to engage in spiritual practices connected with food as a divine gift, depicting a community biblically formed into a table fellowship by habits of embodied gratitude and discipline. These texts not only illuminate relatively unstudied yet common practices, but also contribute to our understanding of the different ways in which scripture was used to shape the faithful in the late antique Christian East.

In this paper, I argue that Judges 1:11-15 should be read as the story of Achsah who resists the patriarchal system and thus plays a role as an ideal female. Judges 1:11-15 has attracted the biblical interpreters’ attention because the passage offers a positive description of a female character, Achsah, especially in light of negative characterizations of other women as sacrificial victims such as Jephthah’s daughter (chs. 11-12) and the Levite’s concubine (ch. 19) in the book. Despite that Achsah has her own voice in the story and plays a role as the subject in the patriarchal system, the male-dominant reading has weakened the subjectivity of Achsah by modifying the subject of the incitement to her husband in verse 14 or by depreciating her incitement as a purposeful pillow talk. Thus, the male-dominant reading of the story has produced the hierarchical relationship between the male characters and the female character, Achsah. Consequently, the significant role of Achsah has been overlooked in the male-dominant reading. In contrast to such a male-dominant interpretation, this feminist reading interprets the story in an inclusive way that focuses both on the minor characters, the inhabitants of Kiriath-sepher (Debir), and on the female character, Achsah, disregarded by other interpreters. More importantly, this feminist reading gives the minor and female characters their own voices in the story. While the inhabitants of Kiriath-sepher have been ignored due to their ethnicity as the Canaanites, Achsah has been neglected because of her gender as a female. Furthermore, the original meaning of Kiriath-sepher (“the city of books”) is erased in the modern translations, whereas the subjectivity of Achsah is ignored in the ancient texts such as the Septuagint and the Vulgate in which the subject of the Hebrew verb (???) that means to incite is changed from Achsah to Othniel. Against such exclusive interpretations, this feminist reading empowers not only the inhabitants of Kiriath-sepher to preserve their culture and literacy but also Achsah to hold her subjectivity. In doing a feminist reading of Judges 1:11-15, I focus on how the story is read in an inclusive way and how Achsah can be an archetype of a feminist. To accomplish such objectives, I raise three questions and answer to them. First, whose story is Judges 1:11-15 and who are the voiceless characters in the story? Concerning the first question, I explore how the inhabitants of Kiriath-sepher are conquered by the Israelites and how the name of the city is erased in the modern translations. Second, who is at stake in the story? Regarding the second question, I investigate the threatened subjectivity of Achsah, especially in verse 14. Last, how does Achsah resist the patriarchal system in the story? With regard to the last question, I exegetically analyze the relationship between the meaning of Achsah’s name (“to hobble”) and her action to dismount from her donkey, and examine her audacious request against her father’s mistreatment in verse 15.

This paper explores the way in which Origen provides a compelling glimpse of prophecy as a relationship between the divine and the human insofar as human beings can desire and attain prophecy in his Commentary on Romans 9:1-3. In the commentary, by weaving 1 Corinthians 14:1 into his exegesis of Romans 12:6-8, Origen aims at reinforcing his over-arching premise that the gifts of God (charismata, gratiarum) are located in a complex synthesis in divine-human relationship and his more specific premise that prophecy is inextricably connected to the relationship between God and humanity. He also seeks to persuade his (Christian) readers to cultivate a specific disposition, which involves a life worthy (mereo-cognate) to receive the spiritual gifts, especially prophecy. According to Origen, the worthy life takes cultivating virtues such as self-control. Origen suggests an implicit way to cultivate virtue: it is by reading and exegeting the scripture. This paper underlines how early Christian discourse on prophecy is situated within a larger philosophical conversation in the Greco-Roman world from the first to fourth centuries C.E., in which cultivating a properly religious self is an important discipline or askesis. I explore how the debates on prophecy in early Christianity are predicated on the idea that certain practices are necessary to be considered worthy for the divine/the Holy Spirit to dwell. Using Pierre Hadot’s insights, I contend that Origen’s discussion on prophecy calls for training in a particular way of living, and thus could be influential to early Christians regardless of whether they would ever attain the status of prophet or not. By encouraging his Christian readers to participate in reading and studying the Scripture as a way to purify their souls, Origen argues that everyone need to cultivate himself or herself to be worthy to receive spiritual gifts such as prophecy. In this way, Origen discusses prophecy and spiritual gifts in an ethical register. In his commentary on Commentary on Romans 9.1.-3., Origen develops his argument by changing the focus: in the beginning, Origen amply discusses the divine-human relationship in spiritual gifts and especially prophecy. Later, Origen expands the divine-human relationship in spiritual gifts to communal level. My reading is that Origen’s triangular relationship (God-a human-other humans) reflects his over-arching pedagogical purpose: first, as Paul says, spiritual gifts are for the sake of community; secondly, one’s striving for, or becoming more worthy to receive the spiritual gifts (esp. prophecy) takes meaning in community, especially insofar as Origen expands Paul’s understanding of the role of prophecy in relation to the community to a universal community. Prophecy is a negotiated concept. Paul circumscribes boundaries among spiritual practices, and privileges prophecy over speaking-in-tongues in 1 Corinthians. Commenting on Paul’s text, Origen takes a different route than Paul by considering reading and exegesis of the scriptural texts as prophecy. By doing so, Origen tries to deny legitimacy to an ecstatic form of prophecy.

Within the various sapiential traditions of antiquity economic knowledge was central to understanding and ordering the world. This paper, intended for the second project, suggests the parables comprise a distinct variety of such knowledge that trades in the language of coinage, price, wages, and payments. Indeed, quite unlike "traditional" wisdom, parabolic wisdom makes imaginative use of the marketplace - a morally fraught arena of short-term transactions, commercial profit, and temporary social relations.

Before the monumentalization of pilgrim destinations in the fourth century C.E. and after, the earliest Christian pilgrims were creating landscapes of ritual movement. While the routes these pilgrims traversed would have been well-worn already through centuries of military, economic, and pagan pilgrim travel, the rise of this new brand of pilgrimage would mean an increase in routes leading to new destinations. As particular sites – especially those connected to Jewish and Christian texts and to well-known saints and heroes of the faith – grew in popularity, these preexisting routes would develop into a ritual landscape that was specifically Christian. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the bodies of early Christian pilgrims, through peregrination and ritual practice, created Christian landscapes out of preexisting space. The demands of Christian pilgrimage, developing slowly but surely, became distinct from the demands of other types of travel (religious and otherwise) in the ancient Mediterranean. This distinction would eventually be further articulated through the construction of large-scale monuments, built to emphasize the centrality of particular saints and places, but the earliest pilgrims were essential participants in the process of rewriting the landscape. This rewriting, ranging from the mundane (logistical support for travellers) to the spectacular (purpose-built monuments on a grand scale), was occurring in conjunction with major political, cultural, and religious shifts in the Mediterranean basin. The construction of space on the ground, through the repetitive work of the pilgrim body, was a valuable corollary to these cultural and religious changes. Using spatial and ritual theory, along with relevant material and textual data, I will discuss the role of the pilgrim body in constructing and solidifying this shift in the religious landscape of the Mediterranean.

John, Jesus, and the Quest for the Historical Synagogue: Beyond Birkat ha-Minim and ‘Johannine Community’

This paper reflects on the nature and significance of female resistance in the Old Testament. Drawing on the concluding chapter of my recently completed book, Claiming Her Dignity: Female Resistance in the Old Testament (Liturgical Press, 2016), this paper considers the agency of women who even in the most difficult of circumstances show themselves able to rise up and change their situation of victimization into a space of transformation that benefits not only themselves but also their communities. Moreover, it will be shown that the resistance of women who find themselves in various situations of violence can be described as quite complex. Reading stories of female resistance in the Old Testament with compassion implies that one understands and appreciates that these women are acting to the best of their ability in very difficult circumstances. Finally, despite the complexity that inevitably is associated with women’s resistance in the Old Testament and in so many communities around the world, one finds that a common feature of all these women who stand up and refuse to accept violence as normal is that their resistance is rooted in the hope that things can be different. Hope as the source of these women’s resistance is thus the ability to imagine a counter reality in which the future is distinctly different from the present.

In 2013 the Sojourners conducted a survey of pastors and faith based leaders concerning their responses to women who sought help from intimate partner violence. The report indicated that the majority of clergy were still not equipped to help victims of abuse. A high percentage of clergy still discouraged women from leaving their abusive partner, placed them at risk by counseling both individuals together, and preached one or less times per year concerning domestic violence. While victims of abuse continue to feel unsafe in their homes, the failure of spiritual leaders to help them increases their feelings of helplessness and despair while tied to an oppressive and dangerous relationship. However, clergy have a tremendous resource at their disposal with the Exodus narrative. Faith communities, as well, need to engage the Exodus story as those leaving captivity also struggled with broken relationships, trust, hope, and fear. While containing violent images, Exodus offers hope for those in oppressive and exploitative relationships. Yahweh, in this narrative, models empathy for those who proclaim the story of the flight from Egypt as well as those who feel imprisoned by unhealthy relationships. First, God identifies with the oppressed and suffering children of Egypt. Second, Yahweh confronts the oppressor, in this story Pharaoh, directly and empowers leaders to do the same. Finally, the wilderness wandering provides an opportunity for the victims of bondage to experience a safe relationship in a “new God.” Yahweh’s patience and guidance offered both freedom from captivity and a season in the wilderness to experience this God as they struggled through traumatic bonding, resistance to relationship, despair, and joy. While the forty year wandering may have been the result of rebellion, it provided the next generation permission to experience a new start and heal from the pain of their ancestors. The Exodus narrative provides opportunity for faith leaders to inspire and empower victims of abuse who likewise struggle with trauma, fear, and survivor guilt. This narrative also offers faith communities insight into helping families in abuse to heal and view their faith community as a support system in their journey out of captivity.

This paper will argue that making a text public in the ancient world implied a measure of fluidity in a given text’s content, due to the oral-written dynamics of texts in an oral culture. This “publishing” process produced a socially constructed text, since it involved oral composition, dictation, and reading in a social setting. As the moment in which a text addressed its broadest audience, public readings permitted verbal expansion upon and therefore temporary entextualizing power over the text, while continuously identifying the oralization as the same text as the transmitted written document. Joshua 8:30-35 is one of the few ancient Hebrew texts that narrates a scene in which a public reading takes place; this public reading ceremony demonstrates how a long-term text could be perceived to live in dynamic movement between the oral and the written. The narrative describes Joshua as remembering the book of the law from the past, observing its commandments during the ceremony, then writing the text down according to previously given commandments, followed by a public reading of the entirety of the text. Using categories derived from semiotics, this paper will examine how the final form of Joshua 8:30-35 portrays this oral-written text as addressing its public. The account attributes selected fictive material characteristics to the book of the law, which illuminate how the changes in modality that “publishing” required would both stem from and reflexively develop its social context. This material portrayal of the text permits it to maintain some fluidity of content while retaining identification as the Mosaic book of the law. Even though Joshua 8:30-35 imagines a covenant reading ceremony beyond the scope of daily textual production, it models a valuable perspective on publishing an oral-written text in the ancient world.

The paper is prompted by the surge in publication in recent years of bullae from seals bearing personal names of Israelites, mostly from pre-exilic times. The number of individuals known from such seals and bullae has almost doubled since 2000. I have been registering them all in The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew Revised, currently in progress, each individual being numbered separately. I know, for example, of 91 persons named Shallum, 81 Azariahs, 34 Ahabs, etc., including those in the Hebrew Bible. But how many individuals do we know of altogether? I expect to offer an answer in the paper, together with some conclusions and questions about what the data reveal of Hebrew onomastics and of popular religion. We are greatly in need of an online database with information about every ancient Israelite individual we know of, and the paper will sketch a proposal for the creation and maintenance of such a prosopographical database.

Hebrews, Typology, and Contemporary OT Interpretation

In more recent decades fresh appraisals of lament psalms, as a form within the Psalter, have emerged along with an accompanying recognition of their importance in both personal and communal devotion. Most of these appraisals naturally lead to a key question, ‘What then ought we to do with these psalms?’ While it is undoubtedly important to analyze them for their features and evaluate them for their effectiveness, one might wonder what happens when we lament, using these psalms as prayer our devotional practice? Could their use add ballast to a person’s capacity to engage with their distress and, if so, what might this ballast look like? This paper will focus on one of the most interesting features found in lament psalms; the tripartite relationship between the psalmist, their enemy and God. Even a cursory examination of most lament psalms reveals that the presence of these three entities is ubiquitous. Interestingly, the three do not exist in isolation but, rather, occur in dialogue with each other and shaped into the form of a lament over distress. From the dynamic produced through dialogue (or, dialectic as it is more accurately described) between the three parties, psychodynamic shifts can be observed and even experienced by those who pray these psalms. These psychodynamics, in turn, draw attention to intrapsychic processes which reflect typical experiences of those who are distressed. In addition, lament psalms foreground theological issues with which a distressed person desiring to trust in God contends. By illuminating this, lament psalms offer a unique window into the lived experience of a distressed person. When viewed together, these psychodynamics reveal one aspect of the capacity of lament psalms not only to shape a person’s experience of distress but also to form their sense of relationship with God. Rather than disavowing their distress, this formation occurs as the person embraces their experience within the faith context articulated in lament psalms and courageously confronts God with their struggle.

In recent decades a scholarly consensus has emerged according to which the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity, and between Jews and Christians, was a much more protracted and complex process than previously thought. Jewish identities were many, we are told, and so were Christian identities, leaving room for all sorts of Judaeo-Christianities and Christian-Judaisms to populate the space between “Judaism” and “Christianity.” Support for this thesis is said to derive from various sources, not least the eight Discourses against the Jews (the standard English translation uses the title Discourses against the Judaizing Christians) delivered in Antioch in the 380s CE by Bishop John Chrysostom. From the Discourses we learn that some of the good Christians of Antioch attended synagogue on the Jewish New Year and on other festivals. They revered the ark which contained the holy scrolls. They believed that oaths taken in the synagogue were more fearsome than oaths taken in the church. And, in general, says Chrysostom, they showed more respect towards Jews and Judaism than a proper Christian ought to do. Do the actions of the Antiochene Christians as reported by Chrysostom document blurred and inchoate boundaries between the Jewish community and the Christian? In brief, the answer is no. If we read Chrysostom closely, we will see that the verdict of religious confusion and blurred boundaries derives entirely from his own malicious and prejudiced interpretation of the events. Obviously there was friendship and good will between the members of the Jewish community of the city and the members of the Christian community, but there is no reason to attribute identity confusion or boundary uncertainty to the members of either community. On the contrary, the Christians who are befriending the Jews, showing them respect, and venerating synagogues, are doing so as Christians; these actions are part of their Christianity. Who are we to tell the Christians of Antioch how they should have behaved? Chrysostom thinks that their religious identities were confused but we are under no obligation to follow Chrysostom. One final point. Even if I am wrong and we follow (as most modern scholars do) Chrysostom’s view that the Antiochene Christians were not sure where Christianity ends and Judaism begins, we may note that it was only the Christians who were not sure. The Jews seem to have been sure. There is no indication anywhere in Chrysostom’s Discourses that the Jews attended Christian churches or showed any veneration for Christianity. We may assume that when the Christians visited the Jewish synagogue they received a cordial reception, but the Jews certainly knew what was Judaism and what wasn’t.

This paper examines the practical difficulties encountered by early Christian lectors in the public reading of early Christian papyri. A widely held view is that many New Testament papyri were regularly used for the oral recitation of Christian Scriptures in early gatherings of believers, as evidenced by the use of scribal “reader’s aids.” An overlooked issue is the frequent presence of numerical abbreviations within the body texts of those papyri, an especially problematic feature when one considers the need for clarity in public reading. Such problems could be faced in two ways: when numerals are indistinguishable from the nomina sacra (I¯H¯ = IESOUS or 18?), and when they stand for grammatically inflected forms (A¯ = heis, mia, or hen?). When faced with such ambiguous abbreviations, how would the lector to know what should be pronounced? Following an investigation of the numerals in early New Testament papyri, it is argued that copyists were well aware of such potential difficulties and intentionally avoided using ambiguous shorthand. That is, where numerical shorthand does occur in these manuscripts, it is almost always clear from the context what is to be read aloud despite the otherwise ambiguous nature of the symbols. Clarity superseded economy. The implication of these observations is that these papyri were not simply used in the public reading, they were created by the original copyists with the purpose of being read aloud without ambiguity. This contributes to our understanding of early Christian visual and material culture, and makes sense of an otherwise misunderstood feature of early manuscripts: numerical shorthand.

Rape, and the threat of rape, is present in a variety of early Christian literary genres. The treatises, letters, and sermons of Christian authors such as Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Pope Leo I address the perilous nature of virginity and caution against behaviors that might lead to its loss. In martyrologies and other forms of fictionalized literature, rape is typically a threat but is not realized. This paper will examine primarily two stories featuring threats of sexual violence: the martyrology of Agnes (Ambrose, De Virginibus 1.2; Prudentius, Peristephanon Hymn 14), and the martyrology of Pelagia (Ambrose, De Virginibus 3.7, Ep. 37; Chrysostom Hom. de S. Pelagia). The question driving the analysis of these texts is, what function does the threat of rape play in telling each of these stories? In answering this question I aim to connect the fictionalized worlds of these martyr narratives with Christian literature that is responding to real-world instances of rape, violence, and sexual temptation in order to explore the ways in which rape narratives function to maintain social order. In addition to speaking extensively on Agnes and Pelagia, Ambrose is of particular interest given his involvement in helping to craft these martyrologies which he then uses as evidence to support his proscriptions for how Christian virgins should behave, as well as how his writing informed later authors, such as Augustine, who address the same subjects.

In ancient Greek and Latin texts, the discursive construction of gender regularly references bodies. These are bodies that dress in certain ways, do things with their hair, move their eyes in particular ways, walk in a telltale fashion, scratch their heads with one finger, and so on. Such details of bodily doings purportedly provided meaningful clues about gender identity for the ancient audience. At least, these details provided clues about what the author of the text wanted to convey about the gender of his subjects. Meanwhile, in the Gospel of John very little is communicated about the physical appearance of particular bodies. Attention to bodies in the Gospel generally revolves around physical needs and realities: thirst, food, illness, wounds and death. What then, is the relationship between the body and gender in the gospel? This paper probes the generic similarities and differences between the Gospel and the ancient body of writings that have informed recent gender critical analysis of the New Testament to explore the intersection of bodies and gender in John.

There can be little doubt of the eschatological and apocalyptic themes inside the Qur’anic text, no doubt the product of the events of the 7th century. These included wars, plagues, an appearance of Halley’s Comet in 610, and possibly climatic changes. However, while one can say that there is a strong apocalyptic sense to the Qur’an, there are no actual apocalypses in the holy text. As with other elements of Islam, the development of apocalypse was one that was facilitated by the Muslims’ contact with Jews and Christians, and apparently does not come to full fruition until the end of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th. Nu`aym b. ?ammad al-Marwazi’s (d. 844) Kitab al-fitan (The Book of Tribulations) is an important text for the study of Muslim apocalyptic literature. The book can be dated to approximately 819-20 (the most recent identifiable events in the text), although it contains a good deal of historical material, some of which can be dated back to the 720s. Most of the work, however, is the product of two substantial losses for the Muslims of Syria: the loss of the opportunity to conquer the Byzantine Empire and then after the rise of the `Abbasids in 747 the loss of empire altogether. The Book of Tribulations consists largely of Syrian Muslims hoping to relive the good old days, and trying to see some way that the `Abbasids would be overthrown. One of the key questions to be answered with regard to Nu`aym is the role of the Qur’anic citations in the text. Integrating the apocalyptic sense of the Qur’an into a literary apocalypse—a feat also being carried out unbeknownst to Nu`aym by the author of Pseudo-Methodius in Christian circles only just a few years before his time—was not very easy. There are standard texts that indicate the suddenness of the Hour (e.g., Q 6:158, cited about a dozen times), or ones that indicate the messianic promise of a future peaceable kingdom (e.g., Q 47:8, cited more than any other in Nu`aym). How exactly to take other texts and place them within a literary apocalypse, and what precisely they are supposed to prove is an open question. Standard citations such as those concerning Gog and Magog (e.g., 21:96) and the dabbat al-ar? (27:82) appear, which is no surprise. However, it is a bit odd that there is no attempt to cite or to integrate the Gog and Magog Qur’anic citation of 18:94, or to build off the Dhu al-Qarnayn sequence. But as interesting as the Qur’anic citations themselves are, there is a whole range of citations that are not adduced. Probably the most unexpected are the Qur’anic questions of when precisely is the Hour (e.g., Q 7:187, 79:42). [ABSTRACT TRUNCATED]

Jubilee's ability to address economic woes, both real and imagined, in our time.

Studies of benefaction and patronage in antiquity have had a tremendous impact on our ability to understand social relations in the New Testament world. However, the papyri present us with still greater potential for refining this understanding of patronage in Ptolemaic and early Roman Egypt. Unique language appears in papyri showing the presence of a system in which protection (skepe) could be offered in a relationship of patronage (a pistis). This system has been identified by several scholars including Michael Rostovtzeff, Marta Piatkowska, and Dorothy Crawford, who have shown that both labour and debt relationships could have elements of security and mutual obligation ingrained within them. This study overviews these unique practices in Ptolemaic papyri and explores how they might elucidate the social world of Judaeans and Christ groups through several examples from Judaean literature.

This paper will explore Philo’s reception of contemporary currents in Jewish apocalypticism and wisdom literature by looking closely at two passages in his allegorical treatise, De mutatione nominum. In the first, Mut. 103–120, Philo engages in an extended allegorical interpretation of Exodus 2:15–22, the scene of Moses’ first meeting with Raguel and his seven daughters. According to Alexander Polyhistor, the same scene was dramatized sometime in the second century BCE by the Jewish Tragedian, Ezekiel, and a few fragments of this scene in the drama are extant. Raguel remains a major character in the tragedy, an idealized priest-king and exegete of Moses’ dream-vision in a manner reminiscent of an angelus interpres. Taking as a dual starting point that (1) Ezekiel’s Exagogue mediates or represents some form of apocalyptic Judaism to the Jewish community in Alexandria (VanderKam and Boesenberg [2014]; Orlov [2005]; Van der Horst [1984]; cf. Jacobson [1981]) and (2) that Philo himself had seen the play, appreciated it, and knew it well enough to engage it (Sterling [2014]; Jacobson [1983]), the first and major part of this paper will argue that Philo also undertakes to correct certain (real or potential) misappropriations of its apocalyptic elements. While previous scholarship has looked largely at the comparison of Moses in Ezekiel and Philo’s Vita Mosis (Sterling [2014]; Runia [1988]), this paper will focus in particular on Philo’s allegoresis of the figure of Jethro/Raguel in Mut. 103–120, in which the Alexandrian responds not only to the biblical text, but also to Ezekiel’s tragedy (see Mut. 114, 198; Jacobson [1983]). I will test the hypothesis that Philo wants to revise both the tragedy’s apocalyptic visionary mechanics as well as its potential misuse in Jewish political discourse. In a second passage, Mut. 197, Philo then goes on to offer a satirical portrait of gnomic wisdom of a sort similar to Pseudo-Phocylides. What unites these two criticisms in Philo? Both apocalyptic tragedy and gnomic wisdom have great rhetorical and psychagogic power, which render them either impotent or susceptible to sophistic misuse. While Philo would certainly not banish the poets from Alexandria, he does insist that one must “consecrate” (by way of allegory, dialectic, etc.) these various “excellences of speech” (Mut. 220) for the service of philosophy.

In addition to providing a sample chapter from the author’s commentary on De mutatione nominum, this paper will present an exegetical skeleton of the entire work and address some perennial questions about the Allegorical Commentary raised by this treatise. In particular, the paper will consider the thematic unity of the entire work, comparing Philo’s exegetical invention in this “middle” treatise (Runia [1987]) with other treatises of this type, including De migratione Abrahami and Gig.-Deus. The paper will then briefly consider what evidence the Abrahamic treatises contribute to the concept of “cycles” (Cazeaux [1989]) or “clusters” (Runia [2015]) within the Allegorical Commentary, particularly, the possibility of an “Abrahamic cycle.”

Modern translations like the NRSV or NJPS reveal little in the translations themselves about the translators who rendered the source text into English. For one thing, most modern translations pass through committees and cannot be considered to be the work of any one person. And that is how we expect them to be, free of idiosyncracies, personal preferences in language and style, and any details that would place the translation in a particular time and place. In the case of the books of the LXX, they appear to have been rendered into Greek by one, or perhaps two translators, depending on the book in question, yet the conservative approach taken toward the source text mitigates against attempting to extrapolate any details about the life of translator from the translation. On the other hand, in a fluid translation such as OG Job there is a greater likelihood that the translator has left some evidence of their own life. This paper examines that possibility with respect to OG Job, with positive results.

This paper argues that the periodisation of history associated with Second Temple apocalypses illuminates the portrayal of martyrdom in two key (historiographical) texts: 2 Maccabees 6-7 and Acts 7. It explores these texts alongside 4 Ezra, with special attention to the vision of the mourning woman and the eagle vision in 4 Ezra’s fourth and fifth episodes (4 Ezra 9:26-10:59; 11:1-12:39). In recent studies, a focus on genre and rhetoric has limited attention to these kinds of cross-genre comparisons. This is particularly evident in Acts scholarship (Sterling 1991; Rothschild 2004; Adams 2013; Uytanlet 2014; Shauf 2015), despite Todd Penner’s identification of the need for comparisons beyond historiographical texts in 2004. Indeed, when it comes to treatments of history in Acts, the enduring influence of Hans Conzelmann’s (1954) hypothesis that Luke’s account reflects a separation of history from eschatology in light of concerns about the delay of the parousia imposes a further impediment for considering insights from apocalypses to illuminate Luke’s understanding of history. However, I argue that not only those features which hint at motifs shared with apocalypses, such as Judas Maccabeus’s vision of the golden sword (2 Macc 15:15-16) and Stephen’s angelic appearance (Acts 6:15) and vision of the heavens opened (7:55-56), but elements of a view of history as periodised in both 2 Maccabees and Acts serve an important function in the texts’ martyrdom scenes. This paper begins with a treatment of 4 Ezra 9-12, highlighting the ways in which periodisation and the concept of “the end” shapes the text’s treatment of both the woman’s mourning and Ezra’s own despair. Turning to 2 Maccabees, I consider the ways in which the text extends a Deuteronomistic view of suffering to provide solace that suffering constitutes benevolent discipline before God’s people’s sins reach their “telos” (2 Macc 6:12-17), and the frame this provides for the promise of post-mortem reward asserted in the scene of the martyrdom of seven sons and another grieving mother (2 Macc 7). Finally, my analysis of Acts 7 argues that the periodisation of history in 4 Ezra also illuminates Luke’s schema of history, but in this martyrdom context a new element is introduced: Stephen’s vision confirms that Jesus is already in place at the right of God (Acts 7:55-56; cf. Lk 22:69). I suggest that for Luke, although suffering still continues (Acts 14:22), the final period at the end of history has already arrived, which grounds his portrayal of hope (cf. Acts 17:31). Thus, for both 2 Maccabees 6-7 and Acts 7, elements of a periodised view of history, shared with apocalypses such as 4 Ezra, shape both their portrayals of martyrdom and the assurance provided for their readers.

Recent research on the rhetorical nature of the Priestly writings has prompted some scholars to characterize the Jerusalemite priesthood as jealously guarding their right to perform therapeutic rituals to the detriment of the practitioners of alternative treatment options. That restrictions were imposed on certain healing professions is tentatively affirmed by an episode in 2 Chronicles 16:12 in which King Asa is criticized for consulting with physicians instead of relying on Yahweh. However, the opposite attitude is presented in Ben Sirach 38:1-15. In this wisdom poem, turning to a physician is not only portrayed as a legitimate option for dealing with a health crisis, the author of the poem also utilizes scripture in order to bolster these claims. This paper will examine how Ben Sirach uses a variety of different biblical sources in order to legitimize the work of the physician. Particular attention will be paid to Ben Sirach’s relationship to the priesthood and references to the temple cult in his poem. The example of Ben Sirach illustrates how the flexibility of priesthood and Priestly tradition during the Hellenistic period allowed for the integration of alternative treatment options alongside temple service and sacrificial cult.

Several stories in the Hebrew Bible report a close correlation between priesthood and extraordinary violence. Joel Baden showed there to be no fewer than 4 origin texts about the Levites that fuse priesthood with a proclivity toward violence (Gen 34; Gen 49; Exod 32; Deut 33), a theme that arguably makes sense given priests’ responsibility for regular slaughter at altars. In this paper I look at these and other related stories (including Num 25; Judg 19), noting in particular the prevalence not just of violence, but of sexual boundary crossing that provokes the severe and bloody response. With these tropes in mind I turn to the few texts about which scholars have argued that women act as priests, especially Zipporah circumcising her son in Exod 4 and Ja’el slaughtering Sisera in Judges 4-5 (Ackerman 2002). Not only does the trope of violence and sex strengthen the claims for women acting as priests in ways unrecognized, it also helps to solve interpretive problems. This is especially true concerning the case of Ja’el, whom scholars have seen either as a seductress or as priest (e.g., Niditch 1989; Sasson 2014). I argue rather that the dimensions of sex and priestly violence are not only compatible, they are fused in stories about exemplary priests. I conclude by framing the constellation of priesthood, sex, and violence within the development of Israelite monotheism and by suggesting these stories as a means by which gender boundaries were drawn and reinforced around priesthood.

Despite being known since the second half of the eighteenth century, and made available by scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called “two ‘Books of Jeu’” of the Bruce Codex are today among the most neglected texts in Coptic Gnostic literature. Primarily concerned with soteriology, the “Books of Jeu” develop a complex sacramental system. Of the multiple sacraments given by Jesus to his disciples, some are prior to the unveiling of “mysteries”, needed by the soul for its ascent. Before the revelation of the mysteries of the twelve aeons, the disciples must receive three baptisms – of water, fire and of the Holy Spirit –, as well as a mystery that will remove from them the malice of the archons. These rituals are famous for the details of their description: which plants and spices are to be offered as a sacrifice, which plants the disciples must hold in their hands, which seals the disciples must trace on their forehead, which plants must be placed on their head, which formulas are to be uttered, etc. This paper will look specifically at the spices, plants and gems mentioned in the baptismal rituals of the “Books of Jeu”: what exactly are they, where could they be found, were they common and freely available, or rather rare and expensive, were they used in other ritual practices, etc. Doing so, we hope to better determine just how practical, or idealized, were the baptismal rituals of the “Books of Jeu”.

The story of human origins, as told in Genesis, is the story of the birth of emotions, especially emotional suffering: fear, shame, and sadness. While much contemporary work on the account of Genesis 3:16-17 emphasizes aspects of God’s oracle to the first humans that relate to gender, physiology, and agriculture, emotions play an important part of the story. But whether or not contemporary exegetes interpret God’s pronouncement as emotional—and standard modern translations and commentaries generally do not—ancient interpreters of Genesis placed emotional suffering at the heart of the Genesis myth, and thus also at the heart of their understanding of human nature and salvation history. In this paper I examine the emotions of Genesis 3, and the reception history of God’s oracles to the first human pair among Hellenistic Jewish interpreters and ancient Christian interpreters. While contemporary translations do not recognize the centrality of sadness and emotional suffering in the biblical text, some recent scholarship suggests that the sentence upon the first humans—normally characterized as the physical pain of childbirth and painful labor in the fields—is rather a sentence of emotions, emotions entwined with cognition, principally of sadness or grief. Early Jewish interpreters of Genesis understood God’s words in fundamentally emotional terms. The Septuagint renders God’s words as explicitly emotional, as a curse of emotional suffering, of sadness, grief, or distress, lupe, a word that in the Hellenistic period—among Stoics, Peripatetics, and others—carries an overwhelmingly emotional valence. The Septuagint intensifies the emotionality of the story in various ways, and further connects the emotional repercussions of Eden to the first murder, driven by Cain’s sadness (perilupos), a passion that now pervades the world. Jewish biblical interpreters and pseudepigraphic expansions, too, framed the early history of humanity after Eden as a history of emotional suffering. Philo and Josephus both emphasize the pervasive emotion of sadness or grief in their retellings of the Genesis tale. And Hellenistic adaptations of the Genesis story further magnify the role of emotions as both catalyst and consequence of the human expulsion from paradise. The Life of Adam and Eve is a tale of tears and woe that expands the Genesis narrative into a complex reflection on grief and loss. The contemporary apocalypse of 4 Ezra, unusually for an apocalypse, is too obsessed with the emotional consequences of the Eden narrative, which resulted in a world of sorrow, which will only be transformed at the end of the age, and then only for the select few. The emotions of Genesis will be an important touchstone for Christian reflection on history and human nature (even physiology). We can see this not just in antiquity, for example in St. Ambrose’s exegesis On Paradise, but through the Middle Ages, as seen in Hildegard of Bingen’s theological and medical reflections on the destructive and epidemic melancholia bequeathed to humanity by Adam, and even among early modern interpretations, such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

When reading biblical text, often times there are “gaps” in the narrative which lend to more questions than answers. Why did Abraham simply get up and go off to Moriah to sacrifice his son? What was the purpose of throwing Joseph in a pit? In his work entitled Mimesis Erik Auerbach suggests that so much of the biblical narrative relies what is implied instead of what is explicitly expressed. This lends to the need for interpretation and for someone to fill in the gaps in the story, and the way these gaps are filled points to particular theologies. While the term “midrash” points to a particularly “Jewish” interpretation of filling the gaps in the biblical narrative, the method is something done by religious interpreters of all traditions. Because of this, incorporating midrash into general Bible courses taught in particularly “non-Jewish” settings (on stories important to both Jewish and Christian tradition such as the Garden story in Genesis 3 and the Joseph story in Genesis 37-50) has the benefit of exposing students to Jewish interpretation of biblical scripture, Rabbinic methods of interpretation, and thus opens up ecumenical dialogue removing some of the distance between religious traditions.

This paper will look at what it might mean to label the Johannine Jesus, "Ioudaios." It will analyse and contextualize scholarly tendencies in the study of the "Jewishness" of the Johannine Jesus and unravel some of the problematic assumptions of a static (and often unconscious) imposition of a model of what scholars continue to assume Judaism essentially to have been. The focus of this paper will be on the complex portrayal of the Johannine Jesus in relation to the Johannine construction of "oi Ioudaioi" and "the world" more generally. However, rather than imposing modern, essentialist notions of what early Judaism supposedly is or is not, this paper will emphasize the importance of John’s presentation of Jesus as an exercise in the ideological creation of Jewishness and Judaism, or, indeed, indifference to such constructs. It will also ask how such constructions, including the construction of Jesus, might have been perceived by external audiences in relation to other ancient constructions of Jews and Judaism.

This paper considers the formation of the book of Jeremiah from the perspective of its multiple understandings of the entities called ‘Israel’ and ‘Judah’. By considering the contexts in which these terms are used, the paper aims to construct a picture of the social and geographic entities to which they refer, including an analysis of the frequency of and changes in their use in different periods. Though the results of this work are necessarily preliminary, they suggest that—at the moment of Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem—‘Israel’ comprised the ruling elites of the kingdom of Judah, whilst ‘Judah’ functioned as a geo-political term for the territory centred on Jerusalem. With the conquest of the city and the deportation of its elites to Babylon, however, ‘Judah’ developed an ethnic significance, as a response to the division of the population and as an alternative to the ‘Israelite’ identity claimed by the deportees. Ultimately, these identity terms were conflated into a single ‘Israel and Judah’ tradition. The paper uses the changing relationships between these two entities to contribute to the discussion regarding the formation of the book.

Over the course of the last century the narrative of Israel’s origins and subsequent history has collapsed: the patriarchs cast off—the exodus from Egypt denied—Joshua’s conquest rejected—David and his glorious monarchy reduced to local chieftain. The consequences of this collapse have been severe. In the traditional narrative, we understood Israel as a people—an ethnos—which became a large and powerful Israelite state, before fracturing into two kingdoms—Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Though the north kept Israel’s name, the south retained its traditions, transforming Israel into a religious identity which it carried through the destruction of Judah, the deportation of its elites to Babylon, and the eventual return of their descendants to the land. As Israel’s history collapsed, however, the thread which held together these disparate Israels disintegrated; historians have been left scrabbling to explain why the population of a kingdom called Judah would call themselves ‘Israel’. This paper addresses this question from the perspective of the book of Jeremiah, using each appearance of ‘Israel’ and ‘Judah’ in the book as a witness to the ancient remit(s) of these concepts. By considering the contexts in which these terms are used, the paper aims to construct a picture of the social and geographic entities to which they refer, including an analysis of their frequency and changes in their use in different periods. The complex composition and transmission history of the book are of particular use for this latter issue. Though the results of this work on Jeremiah are necessarily preliminary, they suggest that—at the moment of Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem—‘Israel’ comprised the ruling elites of the kingdom of Judah, whilst ‘Judah’ functioned as a geo-political term for the territory centred on Jerusalem. With the conquest of the city and the deportation of its elites to Babylon, however, ‘Judah’ developed an ethnic significance, as a response to the division of the population and as an alternative to the ‘Israelite’ identity claimed by the deportees.

One of the most politically incendiary questions ever put to Jesus concerned the tribute to Rome: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But what was the meaning of Jesus’ response: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”? Traditionally, it has been understood as an affirmative answer to the question. Alternately, some overtly political readings have seen Jesus’ response as subtly negative: Since everything belongs to God, Caesar gets nothing. The difference is critical, and – in keeping with the interrogators’ strategy – neither response is without consequences for Jesus. But the discussion of this pericope has not given adequate consideration to the combination of Jesus’ verbal response with his use of the coin as a visual aid. Ancient orators and teachers, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, understood well the effectiveness of visual aids to add drama, vividness, and even propositional content to their words. Examples from the Hebrew Bible, 2nd temple Judaism, the New Testament, and Greco-Roman oratory indicate that a visual aid may enhance, clarify, and concretize the meaning of a verbal utterance. The application of these insights to the tribute pericope sheds light on the meaning of Jesus’ response and the larger questions of Jesus’ politics, his stance toward Rome, and his sympathies – or lack thereof – toward Jewish resistance movements.

The armed conflict that began in Syria in 2011 has produced a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. In 2014 the regional nature of the situation escalated, beginning with the take-over of Mosul by ISIL, followed by their subsequent gains in northern Iraq. In Syria alone, combat has reached every region, with nearly a third of the population internally displaced and more than four million have left the country as refugees. These war-wearied Syrians and Iraqis are struggling with a loss of identity and a lack of control over their lives, and these feelings are further compounded by the destruction of their as a result of the ongoing conflict. Thousands of cultural properties have been damaged through combat-related incidents, theft, and intentional destruction. This paper examines the impact of the conflict on the protection of cultural property by discussing the activities and outcomes of the Cultural Heritage Initiatives (CHI) project, a cooperative agreement between the US Department of State and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).

I propose to revisit the early controversy over circumcision among Jesus’ adherents in two ways: one, by juxtaposing the discourse on it in Paul and the Acts of the Apostles to the proselytization of Izates, king of Adiabene, as recounted by Josephus (Ant. 20.17-48); the other, by assessing these texts with criteria appropriate to ‘l’histoire en milieu scientifique’ (over against ‘l’histoire en milieu théologique), as set out by Simon Mimouni (in a paper delivered to the Construction of Christian Identities Group in 2011 and published that same year in Recherches de science religieuse). Doing so, I believe, will show that, while Paul and Luke frame the matter largely in theological terms—for Paul, soteriology; for Luke, eschatology—Josephus reveals it to be a wider sociological concern in Jewish culture, carrying dynamics not signaled in the New Testament sources that are critical for a full historical reconstruction of the dispute: the eagerness of some male Gentile converts, for instance, to be circumcised; the danger which might loom for some Gentiles to observe the rite; or the debate among Jews, themselves, over the necessity of the act in certain circumstances.

Despite the range of linguistic frameworks that have been applied to the study of information structure in Biblical Hebrew texts, there has been a widespread tendency for scholars to focus on how information structure relates to word order. Without discounting the undeniable insights offered by such research, taxonomic approaches to information structure, such as that proposed by Ellen Prince (1981) and given further refinement by Gillian Brown and George Yule (1983), offer a means by which to catalogue the information status of discrete referents within both individual clauses and, ultimately, the development of a discourse. This paper proposes a model for the analysis of narrative texts that adapts the combined insights of these taxonomic frameworks, which is then applied to an extended case study of Exodus 3:1-4:17 and the various expressions used to introduce new referents therein. With a particular focus on the distribution of definite forms, I argue that although the author of this discourse had a range of options to select from when first mentioning a new entity (e.g. with a definite construct chain or with an independent personal pronoun), the use of a particular form is constrained by the information status of its referent. Thus, in those instances where the author had a choice, brand new entities are characteristically introduced with indefinite expressions while unused entities, which are assumed to already be known, are mentioned with definite expressions and, often, 'et.

This paper, part of a larger project focused on land in Matthew’s Gospel as a contested site of imperial dominance, argues that the five women in the genealogy (1:3, 5, 6, 16) represent conquered nations which are colonized by God. While much previous work has identified various significances for the women, their identity as representatives of conquered nations and lands has not been advocated. Through methods of imperial critical work and postcolonialism that include gender constructions, spatial and geographical theories, and narrative criticism, I build on Carter’s and Dube’s analysis that Matthew’s Jesus imitates and reinscribes imperial claims by claiming the reassertion of God’s sovereignty over the land. I sustain my argument by 1) examining the female personifications of conquered peoples/land at the Sebasteion in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor and on 1st century Judea Capta coins, 2) elaborating the women’s links with Bethlehem (Tamar), Jericho in Canaan (Rahab), Moab (Ruth), the land of the Hittites (Bathsheeba), and Judaea (Mary), 3) noting the genealogy’s evoking of God’s covenantal land promises and royal roles including the acquisition and conquest of land in establishing Jesus’ genealogical and geographical ties to Abraham (1:1, 2, 17), King David (1:1, 6, 17), and Solomon (1:6, 7), 4) attending to the imperial usurpation of this land by Babylon and its reoccupation in 539 under Persian control (1:11, 12, 17) and 5) demonstrating that Matthew’s post-70 CE context includes numerous yet unsuccessful Jewish attempts to regain control of the land (Jewish War 66-70 CE). Matthew’s gospel, I argue, envisions an alternative empire governed by the sovereign rule of God. Though liberating the land from Rome’s oppressive grasp, the land fails to escape colonial control.

From a sociological perspective, the fundamental elements necessary for speech to be considered gossip are “face-to-face” evaluative communication between/among persons about an absent third party. This project will suggest that Paul’s recollection of his tussle with Peter in Antioch – in a written correspondence to the Galatian believers that was likely “performed” (read!) out loud to the congregations – easily constitutes “epistolary gossip” as it embodies all of the necessary ingredients of such speech. The project imagines Paul’s recollection of the “incident” as an attempt at self-interested “information management/control,” à la Robert Paine, embodying a peculiar invitation to the Galatians to engage – at a distance! – with Paul in constructing an absent Peter’s identity as a “coward” and a “hypocrite.” Following Holly Hearon’s lead in a recent article, I will utilize a multi-modal approach to oral (performance) and scribal (epistolary) communication to unpack the recollection of the incident by Paul in the letter, not only to underscore the reason(ing) behind Paul’s gossip at that point, but to unpack the social risk(s) Paul takes by engaging in such evaluative speech. People know when it’s a good time to gossip, and sometimes, people “gossip” in writing, too.

Prior study has shown that, in his portrayal of significant figures, Luke often draws upon both scriptural (Septuagintal) character types and Greco-Roman conventions about philosophers. Jesus and John the Baptist, for example, appear under Luke’s pen as ancient Israelite prophets opposing evil kings on the one hand, and as Greek philosophers confronting Hellenistic tyrants on the other. In this paper I propose that Luke’s depiction of Pharisees entails a similar juxtaposition and application of extratextual conventions from Jewish scripture and philosophical tradition. On the scriptural side Luke’s Pharisees mirror those who repeatedly murmur against the Lord and Moses (=Jesus) in the wilderness traditions, and, on the philosophical side, the Pharisees reflect the common image of Sophists or false philosophers whose hypocrisy, greed, and lust for status are expertly exposed and condemned again and again by the true philosopher (=Jesus) and his disciples. In a final section I address broader implications of Luke’s extratextual characterization of Pharisees.

The Annadamangal, a seminal pre-colonial epic from Bengal, considered by critics to mark an acme in Bengali composition, depicts some of the most gruesome acts of religious violence in South Asian literature. The violence perpetrated in these scenes are contrasted in the text with equally vivid inter-religious debate. This paper will explore the significance of this portrayal and, arguably, the text’s deeply moving reflections on Hindu-Muslim relations, grappling with strategies for religious accommodation while facing the risk of de-humanizing religious violence. The study will draw on a variety of theoretical models to understand the subtle workings of this text, including reader-response theory, the anthropology of story-telling and the phenomenology of violence. The paper’s examination of the cultural meanings embedded in the Annadamangal’s depiction of inter-religious debate and violence will hopefully also contribute to understanding, more broadly, the ongoing use of specific cultural tropes in Hindu-Muslim relations between post-Partition India and Pakistan.

The book of Ezekiel from its outset demonstrates an attention to spatial location. Although presented through the voice of the prophet Ezekiel, mostly located in Chaldean territory with the ability to travel back and forth to Jerusalem, the place from which the book sees the world is not peripheral space of exile and diaspora but Jerusalem as the world’s new center. This paper employs postcolonial geography in order to pay attention to the imperial registers present in the construction space, particularly the boundaries of the renewed Israel, in the book of Ezekiel. The spatial tendencies of the book represent several maneuvers present within imperial cartography that tied representations of spaces on maps as the prior mechanism needed to assure political, economic, and cultural control on the ground. The paper first explores the nation oracles located in chs. 25-32 in order to read them from their god’s eye view cum imperial center’s presentation of the reterritorialization of space. In these oracles space is reorganized mostly through the erasure of space by means of the decimation of their populations. Informed by postcolonial geography’s attention to materiality, notice is paid to the material and literary dimensions of space in these oracles given the frequent command to the prophet to “set your face toward.” Yet at the same time these oracles provide imaginative spatial configurations intended to support cultural practices of subordination and exclusion in real space, in the manner of imperial maps. The oracles describe the absolute destruction of several places - Ammon 25:7, Edom 25:13, the seacoast 25:17,Tyre 26:17 - suggesting a recharting of spatial maps. In other cases nations will suffer decapitation - most tellingly Egypt - enabling the reorganization of the use of space. The paper assesses these descriptions as offering an imperialized geography of control that operates through the domination of space as culturally defined by politics, identity, and representation. The final section of the paper examines further the book’s imperialized geography through its invention of the mythical space Magog as a complement to its use of actual space. Proceeding on the basis of 38-39 as another nation oracle similar to those of 25-32, the paper presents the case that the imagined Magog provides the Ezekielian map with an effective border that not supplied by other real spaces. As a mythic space, Magog’s destruction is tied to the fate of Gog who is utterly destroyed and buried in lands that marks the boundaries of the purified Israel. This clearly demarcated border controls entry into the land and functions as the outer limits necessary for the imaginative reterritorialization of sacred space in the temple-city. Various new places emerges marking the effective borders of the cleansed land to exclude bodies deemed inappropriate. Through these nation oracles a new map of the world emerges in Ezekiel that bear echoes to imperial registers of difference and Otherness that support practices of control and subjugation.

The Qur'an and the Book of Mormon are the foundational texts of Islam and Mormonism, respectively. Because they emerged in radically different contexts, it is no surprise that they are very different kinds of texts in terms of genre (one is narrative, the other is not), language, and theology. And yet beneath these very significant differences, I will argue, lies a deep commonality that warrants comparative examination. Both the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon are read today by their respective faith communities as extensions of and correctives to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and are each self-consciously in dialogue with biblical stories and figures. It is the tie that each makes for itself to the biblical tradition that allows us to discern categories that can anchor meaningful comparisons between them. In this paper, I will discuss how the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon both present specific prophetic figures from the Bible as a way of establishing their own bona fides. While significant work has already been done on how the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon each do this on their own terms, a comparative approach has never yet been undertaken with any rigor. My paper will demonstrate the value of comparison for showing what is distinctive about each scriptural tradition and how crucial a recognition of the biblical context is to that comparative project.

At first blush, Mesopotamian incantation-prayers appear to be a paradox. They are “incantations,” or performative speech that is efficacious upon enactment; the rituals themselves explicitly guarantee positive results. Despite this guarantee, they are also “prayers,” or persuasive pieces of rhetoric that work to move the god to intervene. This paradox is made intelligible when we approach these rituals from a performance perspective. Performance approaches to ritual understand ritual to be similar to other social domains like theatre and sports. These domains exist because they are framed environments in which special actions take place. When we enter these domains, we take on new identities and agree to give up aspects of our agency in order to participate. These same principles hold true for participation in ritual. The efficacy of incantation-prayers was dependent on the proper participation of human and divine agents. Mesopotamian notions of ritual failure appear to match closely with this performance approach to incantation-prayers. This approach also holds promise for illuminating other rituals that take place within the Hebrew Bible that appear to assume performatively efficacious action but also require the participation of Yahweh.

Since 2013, I have directed a project to catalogue the Coptic and Arabic manuscripts at the Monastery of the Syrians in Egypt. That library collection contains over sixty biblical volumes dating from around the ninth or tenth century through the medieval and modern periods. In this paper, I will turn my attention not simply to the biblical texts themselves, but to the colophons, statements of endowment, notes, prayers, and other insertions that provide a window into the history of the texts, including their transmission and reception by scribes, patrons, and readers across different generations. These Arabic marginalia reveal how the manuscripts ? as material objects ? came to function as privileged venues for monastic practices of piety.

The alteration of words (or a word) in a well-known saying or text was a type of rhetorical parody used by literate persons in the first century CE in order to make a witty and humorous statement and gain a rhetorical advantage over an opponent in a dispute. I will argue that Paul embedded rhetorical parody in his letter to the Galatians in order to argue against the Missionaries’ “other gospel,” which demanded that the Galatians become Torah-observant. Rhetorical parody should not be associated with the type of parody exhibited in Greek Comedies that connoted ridicule and buffoonery. Rather, rhetorical parody could be used by a literate person in the first century CE with a variety of functions: satirical, playful, serious, ironic, polemical and/or humorous. I will begin by contrasting rhetorical parody, evinced by Quintilian and others, with the theatrical parody that appeared in Greek Comedies and was associated with ridicule and buffoonery. Although theatrical parody does appear in literature contemporary with Paul (e.g. Philo, Flaccus, 36-40), numerous studies of the meaning and use of parody in the ancient world by Murray, Householder, Rose, and Genette indicate that many forms of ancient parody did not imply disrespect for the original work and that ancient parody was not limited to the ridiculous or burlesque. I will depend on Genette’s description of ancient rhetorical parody as the recognizable quotation of a familiar text that is distorted to the degree that the quotation is separated from its original context and given a new meaning. Ancient rhetorical parody should be understood as a figure of discourse and should be separated from the post-Enlightenment understanding of parody as a genre that deals with the ridiculous. I will demonstrate that Paul used rhetorical parody in order to present a parodic reinterpretation of LXX Prov 10:16 in Gal 5:19-23. The proverb and the Galatian verses are the only passages of Scripture that discuss “works” and “fruit(s)” as the by-products of two opposing types of individuals. Proverbs 10:16 states: “The works (???a) of the righteous bring about life, but the fruits (?a?p??) of the ungodly [bring about] sins.” Paul, however, reverses the positive connotation of works (???a) and the negative connotation of fruits/fruit when he describes the positive “fruit (?a?p??) of the Spirit” in contrast to the ungodly “works (???a) of the flesh.” In the proverb, the types are the righteous as opposed to the ungodly with the implied understanding that the “righteous” ones adhere closely to the law. For Paul the two types of people are those led by the Spirit and those who are “under the law.” By reversing the original meaning of the proverb, Paul continues his polemic against the Missionaries’ “other gospel” in the exhortation section of his letter. Therefore, I argue that Paul continues to address the Galatian situation throughout the entirety of the letter.

Were there figurines in Yehud during the Achaemenid period, and in particular in Jerusalem? This question is relevant in the context of research on the history of religion, and more in particular with regard to the rise of monotheism. As such this paper takes a position against the influential thesis by Ephraim Stern that the absence of figurines would be proof for the purification of the people during the exile and the consolidation of monotheism in Yehud. Besides questioning the link between the absence of figurines and the establishment of monotheism (cf. Frevel, Pyschny, and Cornelius 2014 [OBO 267] arguing against a ‘religious revolution’), one can engage with the possible presence of figurines in Yehud. There are several archaeological arguments not to dismiss these figurines as residual remains (not in circulation) based on the assumption that figurines are indicatives for the Iron Age II. 49 figurine fragments from Stratum 9 in the ‘City of David’ (Shiloh’s excavation) are scrutinized in this paper (elaborating on de Hulster 2012 [ZAW]). Study of the typology of these figurines as well as figurine fragments found together with domestic material dated to the Achaemenid period but excavated in later strata corroborate not only that figurines were used but also that they were most probably produced during the Achaemenid period in Jerusalem. Stern’s thesis and its reception do not only touch on archaeology and history of religion but also on coroplastics (‘figurine studies’), history, theology, and biblical studies, as will be briefly explicated in the paper.

In this contribution, I will study the so-called Lucianic Manuscripts of the Book of Joshua. First, I will clarify that the so-called Lucianic manuscripts offer a Hexaplaric text in the Book of Joshua. I will then focus on examples where after clearing off the hexaplaric stratum, these manuscripts can help to reconstruct the Old Greek of Joshua. I will then also comment on the consequences of this action for the labelling of the text type of Codex Vaticanus. The paper will end with some conclusions on the so-called Lucianic manuscripts and their use and value in the Book of Joshua.

The anthropological study of the centrality and meaning of food cultivation and preparation is burgeoning. Often, food is a medium through which culture, ethnicity and religious beliefs may be communicated and reinforced. More recently, Biblical scholars have turned their attention to exploring the meanings of food within the Hebrew Bible. To address the theme, “You Are What You Eat: Meals and Identity,” a reading of Daniel 1:5–21 is offered. Four Hebrew young men are captured under a new regime and must learn to survive in a foreign country. The notice that Nebuchadnezzar gives his prisoners of war a ‘good education’ and a daily provision of food portrays his supposed magnanimity. However, something serious, even sinister, lies beneath the culinary surface. Nebuchadnezzar’s meal provision is as much a display of prideful power as is his military campaigns. The monarch wishes to communicate his identity as supreme ruler through the act of providing food. Meals, even the ones provided as a show of seeming generosity, may carry deeper meaning. Traditionally, the four Hebrew captives’ protest of Nebuchadnezzar’s provisions has been viewed in terms of strict religious protest. Yet, the anthropology of food adds further to our reading by highlighting the reality that individuals and communities use food to communicate key aspects of their ethnic heritage and cultural identity. Research concerning migration and assimilation suggests that often food links and connects migrants back to the homeland and helps with the experience of being in a ‘strange land.’ Through the act of protesting the food set before them, and their success in getting the food they prefer, the four young men indicate something significant about their identity. Nebuchadnezzar may try as he might to orient his captives to a completely new identity but they will subvert and resist this through food. The young men may have been taken from their homeland, given new names and be awarded with Babylonian Ivy League scholarships, but they will never fully accept Nebuchadnezzar’s postured identity nor allow theirs to be completely determined by the monarch or his regime. In a dire circumstance in which they should be careful about biting the hand that feeds them, the four Hebrew captives protest as a way to indicate and reinforce their identity.

In the Hebrew Bible, care for orphans and widows is not only God’s prerogative (e.g. Ps 68:5; 146:9); it is also expected that a righteous king or judge will both help orphans and widows and treat them justly. The syntagm appears more than 30 times in the LXX, but only once in the New Testament. Whereas care for widows can be seen in a number of NT letters (though not in the message of Jesus), the orphans appear only once in James 1:25. This paper will present the Jewish-Hellenistic context for this unusual and seemingly untimely admonition in the Letter of James.

The story of Ethiopic biblical scribal history has two elements: those places where individual scribes follows some aspect of the tradition available to them, and those places where the individual scribe innovates for one reason or another. One aspect of our work on the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament is to identify those places where manuscripts contain idiosyncratic readings. When we process our data, we gain for each manuscript not only a profile of affiliation with a cluster of manuscripts in the tradition, but also a profile of idiosyncrasy for that scribe in that manuscript. When the idiosyncrasies of the 30+ manuscripts are combined, we can develop a profile of the nature of scribal idiosyncrasy within the transmission of that book of the bible. And when this aspect of transmission is studied in several books of the bible, we gain a view of the nature of this aspect of Ethiopian transmission history. In this presentation we will share some of our findings about the profiles of individual manuscripts, the profile of innovation within 30+ manuscripts of the same book of the bible, and the larger profile of idiosyncrasy in the Ethiopic Tradition.

All too often in the history of biblical scholarship, the word "prophet" is used interchangeably with the word "intermediary." This identification obscures these two sets of personnel in the delivery of a divine message. As a result, the prophet has received primary attention and the interaction of non-prophetic intermediaries with kings and prophets has not been evaluated adequately. While literature in the Bible is replete with designated prophetic individuals who interact with the divine, the role of non-prophetic mediators necessitates scrutiny. In many cases, the delivery of the prophets’ message is carried out by a third party—sometimes a royal official or family member—who exercises a degree of autonomy in the process. The integration of biblical prophecy into the practice of communication with kings echoes the picture constructed in Old Babylonian prophetic correspondence. The Old Babylonian letters from Mari compel us to consider how all prophecy is socially framed. This paper offers a re-evaluation of two letters, ARM 26/1 194 and ARM 26/2 414, which form the best test case of Mari mediation because they include the only occurrence of a prophet in direct contact with the king, who transmits a god’s message verbatim yet still in a written document. Secondarily, these two texts depict the sole example of a prophet who eschews the intermediary, thereby illuminating the networks of prophetic communication within the Mari kingdom. In ARM 26/2 414, the apilum seeks out the highest ranking Mari emissary posted in the allied kingdom of Andarig, but then refuses to divulge the words of Šamaš to him and requests the presence of a scribe and witnesses. In striking fashion, the prophet asks for someone he trusts, an act which is not otherwise documented in the corpus, and objects to the practice of telling his report to the king’s envoy. Without analysis of this mediation that governs the practice of prophecy, the evidence provided by the Mari letters would not be accessible. The material in turn motivates reconsideration of biblical narratives about prophecy addressed to kings.

In his 1964 Anchor Bible commentary, Bo Reicke suggested that the most likely explanation of the relationship between Jude and 2 Peter is that the authors of both letters made use of a then-current “sermon pattern,” “a common tradition which may well have been oral rather than written” (190). In this Reicke was, and remains, decidedly in the minority: nearly all recent commentators have concluded that the verbal similarities in these texts must entail a literary relationship between them. However, both Reicke’s claim and the consensus view seem to have been reached solely on the basis of scholarly intuition, with no detailed evidence being presented on either side. In this paper I assess the plausibility of Reicke’s proposal by comparing the verbal agreements in Jude 4-18 and 2 Peter 2:1–3:3 to those found in some actual oral traditional texts, including transcripts of a set of Arabic-language oral-traditional narratives recorded in Jordan in 2003. In light of this evidence, and in view of the exigencies of early Christian preaching, I argue that Reicke’s suggestion deserves much more careful consideration by New Testament scholars than it has so far received.

This paper responds to two somewhat recent critiques of my application of the ethos of reciprocity and social context of patronage and benefaction to the exegesis and theology of the Letter “to the Hebrews.” These critiques were framed by Amy Peeler in her published dissertation, You Are My Son (T. & T. Clark, 2014), and Jason Whitlark in his, Enabling Fidelity to God (Paternoster, 2008). In regard to the first, I suggest that, while the relationship between God and Jesus as father and son indeed stands in the foreground of the letter and feeds the author’s strategy in important ways, the relationship between God and believers as father and “many sons and daughters” is far from a dominant image. More to the point, it obscures the dynamics of the warning passages to read the latter (rather provisional and conditional) relationship into those paragraphs. In regard to the second, I suggest that setting “reciprocity” and “divine enabling of human fidelity” as stark alternatives formulates an unhelpful dichotomy and forces unnecessary choices. These alternatives may help maintain theological categories deemed important (monergism versus synergism; an “optimistic” versus a “pessimistic anthropology”), but they divide asunder what the author of Hebrews holds together. Similarly, I challenge the usefulness of setting a forward-looking faith and a backwards-looking gratitude in competition with one another as factors in the author’s strategy for shaping his audience’s trajectory.

This paper aims to locate and explain the increasing Christian self-fashioning as practitioners of philosophy over the course of the second century. In Rome in the 130s we learn of Valentinus’, Ptolemy’s, and Heracleon’s Platonic and Stoic Christianity. In Rome during the 150s Justin appropriated such philosophical signifiers as the philosopher’s cloak and a cherished relationship with a master, while his student Tatian rejected animal slaughter like a Pythagorean and ridiculed other sects in the manner of Cynics. During the 170s and 180s Hegesippus and Irenaeus, visitors to Rome, emphasized Greek modes of self-fashioning and rhetoric such as vegetarianism and asceticism, the boasting of successions (diadochai) of institutional leaders, and philosophical classification of rival schools of thought. Even if these Christian philosophers hailed from elsewhere (Alexandria, Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor), they gravitated toward Rome which before as a site for their philosophizing activity. I argue that Christians begin to represent themselves as philosophers in Rome because the Roman emperors between 120 and 180 fashioned themselves in part as Philhellenic intellectuals during the so-called Second Sophistic, as surviving portrait statues and coins of the emperors show. Hadrian was the first Roman emperor to wear a beard in the manner of Greek intellectuals. Antoninus Pius’, Lucius Verus’, and Marcus Aurelius’ portraiture increased the emphasis on the long beard of a Greek intellectual while also highlighting the self-control, mildness, and of philosophers. The increasing friendliness of emperors to Greek intellectual activity is reflected in other Roman elites fashioning themselves as intellectuals and in private Roman sculpture such as second-century Muse sarcophagi. The paper contends that philosophically-inclined Christian men in Rome adopted philosophical self-fashioning as part of a larger second-century trend in Rome, reflected both in material culture and in texts. The diffusion of philosophical self-fashioning in so many Christians in Rome reflects the influence of emperors’ self-fashioning in the most important urban center of the Roman Empire, which became the chief incubator of philosophically-inclined Christianities.

The etymology of the name “Yahweh” has been a topic of perennial discussion. Perhaps the most popular suggestion, at least among English-speaking scholars, is the suggestion of Cross that the name was originally a C-stem preformative verb from vhyh/hwh, and the full form of the name was ðu yahwi ?aba’ôt “he who causes hosts to be,” originally an epithet of El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon. This suggestion has remained remarkably tenacious, even though the idea that Yahweh was originally an “El god” has since waned in popularity. The other popular suggestion, first proposed by Wellhausen but more recently defended by Knauf, has been that the term is to be connected to Arabic vhwy “to blow,” a suggestion that better fits what can be discerned about Yahweh’s archaic character but which is relatively linguistically distant from the Northwest Semitic context in which the deity’s name appears. This paper argues that the name should rather be connected to Hebrew vhwh “destruction,” and likely originally meant something like “He Destroys.” In a similar fashion, Yahweh’s epithet “Shadday,” which has typically been connected to všdh “mountain,” as argued by Cross, or “breast,” as argued by Biale, or vsdh “field,” as argued by Knauf, should instead be linked to všdd “to destroy.” Interestingly, these etymologies were among the earliest offered for the two names, dating back to the early days of historical-critical scholarship. In more recent literature, however, neither possibility typically appears, or if it does then it is summarily dismissed. This paper will argue, however, that connecting the two divine epithets to “destruction” both provides a sounder philological basis and fits remarkably well with what can be determined about the nature and character of Yahweh in what appear to be our earliest extant sources. Finally, this paper will draw on comparative evidence from the broader ancient Near East to demonstrate that a deity with a name related to the idea of “destruction” would hardly have been out of place in ancient Syria-Palestine.

God’s hidden face or averted gaze is employed often in the Hebrew Bible as a metaphor for God’s inattention or neglect of the individual or community. God’s hidden face implies that God is not looking, does not see the affliction of the people and is consequently unable or unwilling to respond. Thus, the psalmists may lament, “How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps 13:1) or petition God, “Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger…” (Ps 27:9). This metaphor is conventional, even idiomatic, in the Hebrew Bible; moreover, it has merited detailed analysis in Samuel Ballentine’s The Hidden God (1983). However, while Ballentine presents a thorough study of the negative view of God’s hidden face, he only briefly acknowledges the unusual metaphor in which God’s hidden face is something desired. In such rare cases, God’s hidden face or averted gaze is employed as a means to conceptualize divine compassion or attention to the individual’s need of redemption. In Job 7:19a, God’s gaze results in Job’s suffering so he questions, “Why do you not look away from me?” In Ps 39:13, the suffering individual petitions, “Look away from me so that I may smile…” And in Ps 51:11, the penitent may petition God to “Hide your face from my sins,” a striking metaphor for forgiveness. In each of these cases, God’s averted gaze is positive, a desired result that will benefit the speaker because God’s gaze represents judgment that leads to distress. Therein, the typically negative metaphor is reinterpreted as something positive, creating interest and surprise for the audience. For the reader familiar with the conventional wisdom that God’s gaze is something to be desired, to encounter a petition for God to “hide [God’s] face” would be striking. Drawing on the principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this paper will explore how a conventional biblical metaphor may be reinterpreted, reversed, or “turned into its contrary” and the rhetorical significance of such metaphorical creativity. The paper will focus on the specific example of God’s hidden face or averted gaze, but will draw from similar studies on the reinterpretation or reversal of other conventional biblical metaphors (Walchli, 2013; Kostamo, 2014).

The Life of Aaron is one of the most interesting and important hagiographical works in Coptic literature. The work contains descriptions of the lives of ascetic monks on the southern Egyptian frontier in the fourth and early fifth centuries, and was probably written in the sixth century. Even though the first edition of this work was already published by E.A. Wallis Budge in 1915, it remained virtually untouched until quite recently and a critical edition was long overdue. Since 2011, I work on a collaborative project with Jacques van der Vliet (Leiden/Radboud University) that aims to fulfill this desideratum by presenting not only a new critical text, based on the only completely preserved, tenth-century manuscript, but also a translation and detailed commentary. Among the first fruits of our critical edition, which is nearly finished, we will focus in this lecture on the biblical citations in the Life of Aaron. Hagiographical works, it is well known, are teeming with references and allusions to the Bible and this is no different in Coptic literature. In the past, scholars have often disregarded biblical citations as simply rehearsing Scripture or rather – if not cited correctly – distorting it. However, what is forgotten in such an approach is that these citations figure within a literary context and as such have a meaningful role to play within it. To illustrate this point, we will discuss some concrete examples of biblical citations from the Life of Aaron, which range along the entire specter from full quotation to general paraphrase. As we will see, they show the creative ways in which the author made use of the Bible to enhance the spiritual authority of his protagonists.

Literary theorists have long recognized that narrative characters are not actual human beings, but semiotic representations. In Mieke Bal’s famous formulation, they are “fabricated creatures . . . paper people, without flesh and blood” (Narratology, 115). That is, literary characters are implied persons, accessible only via the narrative form through which they are encountered. With respect to narrative form, recent developments in contemporary literary theory have unsettled several common but problematic binaries: speech v. silence; presence v. absence; one v. many; interiority v. exteriority. This paper explores the ways in which interrogating these apparent contrasts complicates the literary characterization of Luke’s “paper people.” For example, most scholars recognize that direct speech reveals key aspects of a character’s identity and narrative function(s), and concomitantly cues readers to judge those characters in particular ways. I argue that silences ought to be conceptualized similarly: character silences and narratorial silences are also effective strategies of characterization — not incidental instances of language, but integral tools in the narrator’s persuasive arsenal. Reading Luke’s Emmaus road episode (Lk. 24.13-35) in light of the inherent instabilities of speech/silence; presence/absence; one/many; and interiority/exteriority opens up interpretive possibilities regarding the Lukan characterization of Jesus, Cleopas, and the anonymous disciple, and illuminates the larger gospel narrative represented synecdochically in this pivotal pericope.

Does class rhetoric inform apocalyptic speculation? Can we speak of class consciousness and class conflict with respect to the ancient apocalyptic texts? Answers to these questions depend on our understanding of apocalyptic epistemology and our views on the functions and social settings of apocalyptic literature. This paper offers an introduction to the topic of class rhetoric, group affiliation, and apocalyptic speculation in light of past and present approaches and in view of the central texts and issues.

First Corinthians 5:1 has usually been assumed as Paul’s naming a specific type of sexual immorality (porneia) in the Corinthian church (cf. vv. 2-8, 9-13). “Incest” has thus become a “nickname” for 1 Cor 5:1-13. Particularly, the result clause hoste yunaika tina tou patros echein seemingly suggests that Paul is condemning an ongoing incestuous relationship between a man and his father’s wife. As a result, 1 Cor 5:1-13 has occasioned many speculations and theories, namely: one of the earliest Pauline forms of excommunication; the origins of church discipline; the Corinthians’ corporate responsibility in condoning the incestuous man; that this sexual affair, while unusual, should not be considered illegal within the Roman civil society; the outbreak of sexual libertinism in Corinth; and other related possibilities. Despite the intense focus–and largely justifiably so–of scholarly interests on these verses, serious analysis of the rhetoric and syntax of 1 Cor 5:1 has not received due scholarly attention. Specifically, three grammatical elements deserve close attention. First, if the passive voice of akouetai is construed, then it implies only hearsay that Paul overheard. Second, what exactly–and I mean exactly–was meant by the term porneia (twice in one verse)? Third, and most seriously, the result clause introduced by hoste can be constructed in two ways: (1) the actual result with a verb in the indicative mood, indicating an “actual” event (cf. 3:7; 7:38; 11:27; 14:22); and (2) the natural result with a verb in the infinitive, stating only a “probable” event (cf. 1:7; 5:1; 13:2). Given Paul’s using hoste + echein, this clause should not be taken as an actual offense. This paper argues that a careful analysis of the rhetorical syntax of 1 Cor 5:1 therefore reveals that Paul himself did not know whether or not such an affair actually took place in the Corinthian church; rather, he was responding with rhetoric to the rumor (5:1), urging the Corinthians to forestall that vice (5:2-8), and allowing the Corinthians the opportunity to counter his charge (5:9-13).

This presentation will analyze intertextual links between Rachel weeping [Jer 31:15] and the Witness Blanket, a large-scale art installation that recognizes the atrocities of Canadian aboriginal residential schools. The Witness Blanket honors these children and symbolizes the need for ongoing reconciliation. This paper uses as its methodology the poststructural approach to intertextuality developed by Julia Kristeva’s in Desire in language: a semiotic approach to literature and art. In contrast to traditional critical practices in biblical studies, poststructural intertextuality allows for an expansive view of text, textuality, context, and interpretation that opens both text and readers to outside influences [to the extra-textual world?]. It aims to transform texts, readers, and worlds in a politically/ethically driven practice. This presentation will return to the origins of intertextuality, using it in a way that warrants an exploration of the intersection between text, art and culture. Intertextual reading propels readers from their social worlds toward other texts, contexts, and other social worlds. I move back and forth between Jeremiah’s poem about Rachel’s dead children and Canadian aboriginal art about the 150,000 children that were removed from their families and forcibly sent to boarding schools in what is recognized as a cultural genocide. The visual and written story and art are juxtaposed with a mass of children’s suffering past and present. From this perspective, intertextual reading situates Jeremiah’s text and its readers in spaces opened up in a plethora of narratives, art forms, where real mothers cry inconsolably for children who are no more. Intertextual reading so envisioned is intended to unsettle readers, moving them to action. Rachel weeping for her dead children is an emotionally charged image that provokes strong reactions in readers seeking to deal with the unjust violence against children. In the first century, Jeremiah’s poem was used in Matthew’s story of the Bethlehem infanticide [1:16-18]. Curiously, most exegetical commentaries of Jer 31:15 and Matt 2:18 pay little attention to the violence of these texts, or to the ethical and political issues they raise. Reading and interpreting Jeremiah with the Witness Blanket allows the construction of a speech that addresses the reality of unjust violence. This artwork is composed of countless broken or damaged objects from Indian residential schools that are like paragraphs of a narrative that seemed doomed to oblivion. “Woven” together, these artifacts and Jeremiah’s poem become a testimony of reconciliation for generations to come.

Seneca’s invective against the perversion affiliated with Roman banquets is a neglected parallel to Rom 1.26–27. Its resonances, however, make it plausible that the 'aberrant' acts associated with the convivia stand in the background of Rom 1.26–27. Despite the disparity of details in Rom 1.26–27, it is likely that such convivial misconduct would have occurred in the minds of Paul’s audience in Rome. The proposed background lends more support to an interpretation of Rom 1.26–27 that centers on aggressive free-for-all parties involving multiple consensual partners, professional courtesans, exploited prostitutes, and abused children.

Gendered approaches to the Bible, including long-established methods like feminism and newer ones like masculinities studies, have mostly focused on literary analysis, owing primarily to the influence of postmodern methods on gender studies and the associated rejection of objectivism and positivism. But historical and related social-scientific methods have much to offer a gendered analysis of the Bible, and vice versa. Far from being anachronistic, gendered approaches recognize that men’s and women’s social status in ancient Israel were at least in part constructed along gendered lines. It is also critical to recognize that this means men just as much as women were subject to these social forces, and thus gender criticism cannot be conflated with feminist criticism alone. This paper will provide a methodological overview of some of the relevant issues and will then apply those methods to a textual case study from Leviticus.

The occurrence of the phrase panta ta ethne in Matt 28:19 has occasioned a long-standing debate: Does ta ethne here have the distinctive Jewish sense of “non-Jewish nations,” or might it denote “all nations, inclusive of Israel”? One of the issues at stake in the debate, at least until recently, has been the question of anti-Judaism. Since the publication of Kenneth W. Clark’s influential essay “The Gentile Bias in Matthew” (JBL 66 [1947] 165-172), the rendering “all the Gentiles” has been fundamentally linked with a reading of Matthew according to which the Jewish people as a whole has rejected their Messiah (27:25), with the result that God has rejected Israel in favour of a new nation (21:43) drawn from all the Gentile (i.e., non-Jewish) nations (28:19). The appeal of the alternative interpretation of 28:19—that Jesus here commands a mission to all nations, inclusive of Israel—has been the perception that it leads to a less anti-Judaic reading of Matthew: the mission to all nations (28:19) is to be seen as an expansion, rather than an abrogation, of the mission to Israel commanded in chap. 10. While I have tended to favour the inclusive interpretation, partly for this reason, my more recent study of the phrase (panta) ta ethne in Jewish and Greco-Roman usage has raised questions for me about whether it can be maintained. Concurrently, Matthean scholarship has recently witnessed a developing line of approach in which a very Jewish- and Israel-centred reading of the Gospel is combined with an exclusive (i.e., “all the Gentiles”) interpretation of panta ta ethne (e.g., Runesson) or, at least, with an openness to the interpretation (Konradt). My purpose in this paper, then, is twofold. First, I will examine the interpretation of 28:19 in the context of Jewish (and, to a certain extent, Greco-Roman) usage, looking particularly at (i) the full phrase panta ta ethne, and (ii) the distinctive development in Jewish usage in which ta ethne comes to refer to (non-Jewish) individuals rather than (non-Jewish) nations. Secondly, I will bring the results of this study into conversation with recent “Jewish Bias” approaches to Matthew (Konradt and Runesson; also, e.g., Saldarini, Overman, Sim) to ask what it might mean for our reading of Matthew as a whole if the Gospel ends with a command to “make disciples of all the Gentiles.”

In 2014 Accordance Bible Software published an electronic edition of Aron Dotan and Nurit Reich’s "A Complete Alphabetic Collection of Comments from the Masora in the Leningrad Codex." In its present form, the Thesaurus is a partial fulfillment of Dotan’s vision to produce “an exhaustive Tiberian Masora Thesaurus, covering fully the Masora of the entire Tiberian School to the Hebrew Bible,” which he outlined in his 1977 work, "Thesaurus of the Tiberian Masora — A Comprehensive Alphabetical Collection of Masoretic Notes to the Tiberian Bible Text of the Aaron Ben Asher School: Sample Volume: The Masora to the Book of Genesis in the Leningrad Codex." As the title suggests, the Thesaurus presents alphabetically each Hebrew and Aramaic form or phrase for which the Leningrad Codex’s Masorah parva (MpL) and Masorah magna (MmL) presents an entry. This presentation (1) explains the layout and functions of the Thesaurus, (2) demonstrates how to use the Thesaurus for biblical research and teaching, and (3) discusses its successes and shortcomings.

While care for the poor was widely advocated and practiced in early Christianity, charity was not universally endorsed. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, is notable for its rejection of almsgiving, along with other practices such as fasting and prayer (Gos. Thom. 6, 14; cf. Gos. Thom. 27, 104). Similarly, Ignatius of Antioch accuses some of his opponents of neglecting almsgiving (Ign. Smyrn. 6.2) and Polycarp of Smyrna, Ignatius’ friend and fellow bishop, suggests that almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are practices that will help counter false teaching in Philippi (Pol. Phil. 7.2). This paper will explore the role of almsgiving in competing visions of soteriology in second century Christianity, including consideration of texts such as 2 Clement, the Letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s To the Philippians, and the Gospel of Thomas.

This paper will investigate quotations of and allusions to the Hebrew text of the Book of Psalms found in 1QS and related compositions from the 2nd Temple period. The focus of the paper will be on the use of quotations and allusions for the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

African Postcolonial urban spaces sit on histories of dislocation and alienation, where cities were colonial centers, that were not build to serve indigenous people, but rather where indigenous people were brought in to serve to colonial masters. In the post-independence many African cities remain unfriendly, dehumanizing and unwelcoming to indigenous populations. How do women bridge postcolonial urban hostility through women networks and agency? The book of Ruth is known for its woman-centred characters: Naomi, Ruth, Orphah and the women of Jerusalem. This paper presents Batswana women’s reading of the book of Ruth, which occurs in the popular activity of Naomi Shower, an event organized by women for another woman, who is receiving a new daughter-in-law. It assesses how women-centred networks in the postcolonial urban reconstruct, re-inscribe or rewrite their stories of dislocation through Ubuntu perspectives. In the ubuntu ethical thinking, one’s identity is performed through the capacity to consistently make room for the Other in one’s space. The paper also explores how Ubuntu is used in the face of neo-liberal economic structures in the urban space of Gaborone, Botswana. It will further explore how the Naomi Showers are used to subvert both the colonial dislocations and patriarchal constructions through the lens of Ubuntu.

Scholars have long puzzled over the imagery focused on Moses in 2 Corinthians 3, specifically how that imagery fits into the apologetic context of 2 Cor 2:14-7:4. Many have explained the imagery as the apostle’s reaction to the “super-apostles,” Jewish missionaries mentioned later in the canonical letter. These preachers, it has been argued, promoted either a ?e??? ???? or a Judaizing agenda. In this presentation, I contend that the Moses imagery has nothing to do with the super-apostles or any other type of Judaizing agenda; it functions instead as an integral part of Paul’s apologia sent to Corinth. This apologia was composed to dispel suspicions about the apostle’s honesty, integrity, and poor physical appearance.

The early Christian Greek novel known as the Pseudo-Clementine "Homilies" (and now also as "Klementia") lifts up the Apostle Peter as the most esteemed disciple of the True Prophet Jesus, excellent in every way. Among Peter’s virtues are powers of healing and exorcism, and over the course of the narrative, these special apostolic abilities enable Peter to follow after his nemesis, Simon Magus, and issue healing among the populace wherever the magician has inflicted disease. The healings themselves play less of a probative role in the narrative than the pattern itself (healing upon disease), which, as Peter explains it, manifests a fundamental dualism that the Creator has embedded in every aspect of creation. It is in the understanding of the pattern, both built into the order of creation and worked out through history, that one gains the ability to read the signs of the times correctly. At the same time, we find, embedded within the narrative framework of the contest between Peter and Simon, a series of fascinating philosophical meditations theorizing the nature of demons, their work in the world, and best practices for avoiding them or ridding oneself of them. Thus, within the narrative, there emerges a kind of practical catechism from the mouth of the Apostle that establishes and rationalizes both the mundane practices and the specific rituals that will be effective against demon-inflicted illness even in a post-apostolic age. In this paper, I explore whether the instructions on healing and exorcism in the "Homilies" might help us to locate better the milieu in which the final form of this enigmatic text is at home. Porphyry of Tyre proves a fascinating conversation partner for the "Homilies", helping us to see that, while some of Peter’s advice incorporates specifically Christian symbolism and ritual, much of the Apostle’s teaching might have been right at home in certain contemporaneous philosophical circles.

At the conference of Carthage in 411 to address the century-old Donatist controversy, the Donatists responded to the Caecilianist insistence on the mixed nature of the church, which they based on the eschatological dimension of the preaching of John the Baptizer on the separation of the wheat from the chaff (Matt 3:12/Luke 3:17), the parable of the wheat and the weed (Matt 13:24-30 and 36-43), the parable of the net (Matt 13:47-50), and the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31-46), by turning to Jeremiah 23:28 about the incompatibility of wheat and chaff (Gest. 3.258). This paper examines the appearance of this passage from Jeremiah in the earlier African ecclesiological tradition and in how, on behalf of the Caecilianists, Augustine responded to the appeal to Jeremiah both at the 411 conference and the writings he directed against the Donatists. Augustine’s response simply is to insist that Christians are bound to the words of the gospel, meaning that in a conflict between Old and New Testaments the New must prevail, which concurs with the third principle for the interpreting of Scripture Augustine found in Tyconius.

Scholars’ realization that “religion” is a modern category—and is thus particularly anachronistic for understanding the pre-modern world—has led to instructive research in the study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Setting aside this modern category has often resulted in fresh readings of ancient sources and has attuned scholars to contextual clues that had previously been obscured by naturalizing this abstraction. The goal of this paper is to explore how this disparity between ancient materials and the modern category of religion functions not only as a useful research tool, but also as an instructive pedagogical tool. In the winter quarter of 2015, I had the opportunity to teach a course for the University of Chicago undergraduate program in Religious Studies. I designed the course, entitled “The Ancient Romans and their ‘religion,’” with two goals in mind: first, to familiarize students with the sources for ancient Roman ritual and the dominant scholarly paradigms for studying these; second, and more importantly, to raise the question: how does thinking of the Romans as having a “religion” challenge the way the term is understood today? In designing the syllabus, selecting the readings, and conducting the class sessions (80 minutes, twice a week), I tried to thematize for the students, in different registers, a set of questions: what do we fail to see when we interpret pre-modern cultures based on a concept that so thoroughly organizes our contemporary world? How can we conceptualize and speak about the ancient Romans and their ritual practices without invoking the concept of religion? What cultural nuances and complexities are illuminated by doing so? If the ancient Mediterranean world can easily seem removed from modern concerns, the idea of religion can suffer from the opposite tendency: it can seem natural and universal to the point of needing little explanation. For many students, religion is simply an unsurprising part of a checklist of features, along with law, economy, etc., that comprises every human society. In class, students often speak of religion as though they know precisely what it is. In the course above, I attempted to cultivate a classroom setting where we could examine more carefully and meticulously the assumptions students brought to the table about religion and how these assumptions can often affect their interpretations of the world, perhaps unbeknownst to them. Throughout the quarter, we used ancient Rome as a case to interrogate common concepts about religion and to test these concepts methodically against the rich detail and nuance of Roman culture. For the students, the sustained and careful investigation of Roman culture generated both congruencies and incongruencies with their own preconceptions of both religion and antiquity. With each course reading, I prompted students to consider how classification matters and to recognize that calling certain texts, practices, communities, and institutions “religious” can tilt interpretation in advance and eclipse other interesting evocations and contexts.

In this paper, I apply a sociological linguistic methodology, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to the dialogue between Nehemiah son of Hakaliah and King Artaxerxes in Neh 2:1–10. Particular attention is given to the aspect of interpersonal metafunction. In order to accomplish this task, this paper is divided into three sections: (1) an overview of interpersonal metafunction within socio-linguistic criticism as a methodology; (2) an interpersonal analysis of the dialogue found in Neh 2:1–10; and (3) a large scale analysis of Neh 2:1–10 that will give attention to the sociological information gained through my analysis. It will be discovered that the present socio-linguistic methodology, SFL, provides valuable insight for understanding the forced migration of Judah and the interpersonal relationship between Nehemiah son of Hakaliah and King Artaxerxes.

Martin Luther was convinced that due to its corruption and distortions of Christ's message, the office of the papacy - as opposed to any one particular pope - had become the biblically-prophesied Antichrist. In 1521, a 26-page pamphlet was released (with Luther's prior knowledge and approval) entitled "Passional Christi und Antichristi," with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach the Elder, that illustrated for lettered and unlettered alike the specific ways in which the papacy had become Antichrist. This paper will explore the apocalyptic imagery of Passional Christi und Antichristi and other works of early Lutheran illustrated print propaganda, examining how biblical apocalyptic imagery was adapted to the artists' purpose: to convince the laity that the papacy was indeed Antichrist, and that their very souls were in danger. In addition to Passional Christi und Antichristi, Cranach also prepared woodcuts for Luther's Septembertestament, for which initially only the Apocalypse was illustrated. Here again, Cranach wove into his visual exegesis papal imagery; for example, the beast from the bottomless pit mentioned in Revelation 11:7 appears in the Septembertestament illustrations wearing the papal triple tiara. Interestingly, however, while Passional Christi und Antichristi and the Septembertestament illustrations themselves had a long reception, the use of biblical images to condemn the papacy in the evangelical movement of the sixteenth century was itself short-lived, as visual propagandists moved on to more direct attacks on the papacy and clergy that were not biblically based. This paper will explore the trajectory of Lutheran anti-papal imagery and discuss why the use of biblical imagery in particular may have been limited almost exclusively to Cranach - who also happens to be one of the few Lutheran visual propagandists to sign his work. What factors may have influenced the turning aside from biblical imagery, and why did Cranach's images persist without there being much in the way of later works on similar themes? These are the questions this paper seeks to address.

Nineteenth-century Mormons saw themselves as a new Israel. They appropriated ancient Israelite sentiments, customs, rhetoric, and Israel’s status as God’s covenant people. Consequently, when nineteenth-century Mormon women sought to find models for themselves and create their own space within the Mormon community, they often turned to the same place where their male counterparts found a sense of identity: the Bible. In the pages of the Woman’s Exponent (a bi-monthly newspaper that played a significant role in Utah and in the Mormon Church from 1871 to 1914) we find evidence of the rich female heritage these women created, often undergirded by scriptural support, within a self-consciously patriarchal society and theology. Relying on the hundreds of articles within the Woman’s Exponent that discuss scriptures, I analyze how Mormon women interpreted the Bible through poetry, speeches, and prose. More particularly, I focus on how Mormon women interpreted biblical women’s stories in order to provide Christian role models, to argue for gender equality and expansion of women’s sphere, and to defend the Mormon practice of polygamy. Through their writings, these women joined their female counterparts of other faith traditions in asserting women’s authority to interpret scripture and create their own identity. Looking specifically at how Mormon women employed biblical women, we may identify trends and methods that allow us to situate Mormon women within the larger context of nineteenth-century female exegetes. This in turn complicates and expands previous understanding of Mormons’ interpretation and use of the Bible compared to their Protestant contemporaries. By the mid to late nineteenth-century, biblical exegesis took many forms as individuals engaged in both “so-called lower criticism—textual criticism that aimed at establishing the original text of scripture free from mistranslations—and higher criticism which sought to discover the historical background of the biblical texts, their authors, sources, and literary characteristics.” This historical-critical method encouraged interpreting the Bible with the same methods used to analyze “any other book” and was employed by both skeptics and adherents of various faith traditions. However, as Christina de Groot and Marion Taylor have discovered, the majority of nineteenth-century women interpreters writing for both religious and secular publications still predominately practiced non-critical exegesis. Taylor’s and de Groot’s findings aptly describe Mormon women’s exegesis within the Exponent as well. Similar to Rebecca Styler’s and Julie Melnyk’s findings on Protestant women, Mormon women used biblical women to provide Christian role models who spoke to their own needs, particularly within the contexts of nineteenth-century gender debates, and to authorize the expansion of women’s public role. Stark differences surface, however, as Mormon women use biblical women to defend doctrinal positions, most prominently the practice of polygamy. Their socio-historical context inflects Mormon women’s understanding of the Bible on multiple levels; consequently in making these exegetical moments explicit, I seek to turn their exegesis into a case study for how women (of many faiths) prior to the twentieth century actively participated in theological discourse and used and adapted the Bible to shape their society.

A discussion on the enforcement of Greek language in the administration on Seleucid Palestine and its effects on everyday life

This paper deals with the search for a referent behind the figures cast as non-Israelites in the Book of Joshua, and examines the purpose of the gap between the demographic reality during the transition from the Late Bronze period to Iron I and the Biblical construction of an indigenous Other that ostensibly populated Canaan in this period. I will investigate the role of ethnicity and collective identity in Biblical texts that represent the indigenous “non-Israelite” population of Canaan and show how the figure of a “foreign” indigenous Other serves as means to marginalize those beyond the pale of the current “in” group.

The intriguing correlation between the names of the Daughters of Zelophehad in Numbers and toponyms discovered on the Samaria Ostraca is often noted but infrequently investigated. The few explanations offered vary widely but incline towards opposite poles. Some propose that the ostraca are evidence that the story in Numbers reflects authentic 2nd millennium Canaanite culture, including inheritance practices. Others claim that familiar toponyms were merely anthropomorphized, fictively employed to legitimize legal practices, perhaps as late as the post-exilic era. These opposite views substantially influence exegesis of the text, of course. But perhaps more consequentially they obscure the variety of possible relationships between the corroborating literary and material witnesses. This paper examines the spectrum of possible relationships between the various witnesses to the names of the Daughters of Zelophehad, identifies deficiencies of previous explanations, and proposes that the correspondence of names in Num 27 and 36 with toponyms on the Samaria Ostraca need not be understood as evidence of a direct relationship between the two. Rather, the story and the ostraca reflect similar data which was derived from a broader social tradition. These two particular reflections of the tradition, one literary and one material, together with other witnesses to the daughters and their clan, indicate that the story of the Daughters of Zelophehad is more than fictive etiology yet less than a precise reflection of 2nd millennium Canaanite or Hebrew inheritance practices.

This paper will survey Christian interpretations of the biblical verse, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth (Song of Songs 1.1), from Origen (who takes the kiss to mean the direct communication of the true sense of scripture by the Logos) to Thomas Gallus (for whom it signifies intimate communion between the soul and the Word in a state of concentrated suspense). Other commentators will include Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Elvira, Honorius of Autun, Bernard of Clairvaux and Rupert of Deutz. The shift in understanding of the song will be shown to exemplify a more general shift from an Origenistic or Dionysian concept of the “mystical” as the true sense of the scriptures to the mediaeval concept of “mystical states” which may be cultivated by ascetic discipline and subjected to philosophic introspection. The paper will conclude with some remarks on the relation between the erotic and sexual in Platonism and in Christianity.

Scriptural citation in the Epistle of Barnabas remains one of the central interests in recent studies on the epistle, and rightly so. With roughly one hundred explicit citations, ranging from Isaiah, Psalms, Deuteronomy, etc., the text of Barnabas provides a rich resource for understanding the role that the Jewish scriptures played in early Christianity. Less studied, however, is a particular sub-set of Barnabas’s citations that are composite. Building upon my recent work, Composite Citation in Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), this paper will delineate and then consider the composite citations of scripture within Barnabas in dialogue with the question of Barnabas’s sources and his interpretative tendencies. Among other things, what I argue is that in some of Barnabas’s composite citations we can see his skillful hand at work as an author who seeks to advance his ideological agenda. This conclusion runs counter to the common perception that Barnabas is simply an unreflective, sloppy editor of his sources. The paper concludes with some summary reflections on Barnabas’s use of Scripture, his view of Judaism, and even with some implications for future critical editions of Barnabas.

Two well-known Abrahamic accounts mentioned in the Bible and Qur'an could lead and create positively new perspectives on the religious values in the Abrahamic religions. In his respond to the divine command, Abraham undoubtedly followed the divine order related to the slaughter of Isaac\Ismail. No matter what the Jewish and Christian Biblical and Qur'an commentators had argued about the reality of the divine command, or if God actually was testing Abraham to see if he would kill his own son. The Abrahamic respond, as a human being, is very significant in comparison with his respond to the divine command on destruction of Sodom the city of Lot's people. When the (angles) visited him, they conveyed two reverse news, good news on having Isaac after his and his wife Sarah's sterility, and scary news on destruction of Sodom. However, his respond to the second one, i.e., arguing angels, namely God, for Lot's people was striking since the people of Lot was committing lustful and violent acts, but the most striking is the divine respond to his arguing by describing him as a forbearing, tender-hearted, and devout messenger. After a bitter struggling with having a child to be his successor, Abraham without any hesitation followed the divine command on the slaughter of his beloved successor Isaac\Ismail. Analyzing these responds in both of the Biblical and Qur'anic texts, and the exegetical works would open a vista on the meaning of Abraham's argument "yujadiluna" and the Qur'anic respond to homosexuality.

In scattered comments throughout Rashi's Torah commentary, Rashi interpreted a number of verses as exegetical supports for the rabbinic notion that God commanded an "Oral Torah" alongside the Written Torah. One example of this phenomenon in Rashi's commentary is his comment on Exodus 34:27, among the biblical prooftexts employed by the rabbis to substantiate the scriptural basis of the Oral Torah. As one might expect, these comments of Rashi's mainly appear on verses that narrate or describe events related to the giving of the Torah(s) at Sinai. One major exception to this is found in Rashi's commentary on Genesis 26:5. Spoken to the patriarch Isaac and appended to the end of God's promise to include him in the Abrahamic covenant if he remained in the land of Canaan despite the famine, Genesis 26:5 is God's explanation of why He established a covenant with Abraham, "Because Abraham heard My voice, and he observed My observance, My commandments, My statutes, and My Torahs." The rabbis of the first millennium CE typically employed this verse as a support for their blanket assertion that Abraham kept the whole Torah, both the Oral and Written, generations before they were given at Sinai. According to this verse then, God established His covenant with Abraham because he kept all of God's commandments, both biblical and rabbinic. Traditions to this effect appear in Mishnah Kiddushin 4:14; PT Kiddushin 48b; BT Yoma 28b; Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 30; Leviticus Rabbah 2:10 and 2:12; Aggadat Bereishit 24, 33, and elsewhere. Taking a cue from his rabbinic predecessors, Rashi also interpreted Genesis 26:5 as the prooftext for the claim that Abraham observed both Torahs. But unlike any other extant earlier rabbinic tradition, Rashi interpreted each element of this repetitious verse as referring to a different class of divine instructions Abraham observed: God's tests; rabbinic decrees designed to prevent transgression of biblical commandments; commandments that need not have been written because they are obviously God's will; seemingly illogical commandments that God explicitly commands and for which the nations of the world mock Israel; and finally, both the Written and Oral Torahs. Rashi's typological interpretation of the elements of this verse serve to expand and amplify the earlier rabbis' claims that Abraham kept the whole Torah by both offering more detail and the attachment of each class of commandment to a specific element of the verse. Besides noting Rashi's innovations in his comments on this verse, in this paper, I will present Rashi's methodology in his more expansive exegesis of this verse, his motivations, the implications of his comments, and what was at stake for him that he went to such hermeneutic lengths to demonstrate that Abraham kept all the commandments.

The book of Jubilees retells the rape of Dinah known from Genesis 34. The version doesn’t simply stick out because the authors of Jubilees use the story as an initial point to proclaim strict prohibitions of intermarriage. Rather, it also enhances the notion of Dinah as being innocent.What are the rationales behind the text, so that the word „innocent“ on the one hand is not even mentioned but on the other hand the innocence of Dinah is very obvious? The Book of Jubilees intertwines specific rationales about gender, age, ethnicity, social relations and sexuality to convey the idea of Dinah’s innocence. The paper examines how Jubilees uses these rationales in order to effect the reader.

This paper approaches the theme of ‘Queer Futures and Pasts in Biblical Text and Interpretation’ by re-reading the narrative arc stretching across Genesis 18-19, from Sarah’s laugh to Sodom’s destruction and beyond. Surprising, liberative dimensions emerge from the story when read through the critical lens of theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s ‘queer futurity’: Against the notion that queerness rejects future thinking as such (for its association with reproduction and children), Muñoz insists “the future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” An exercise neither in biblical criticism proper, nor theological interpretation of scripture, this essay develops an experimental, tropological reading of this passage in the spirit of Muñoz’s utopia: a precarious attempt to “distill queerness” from the past represented in and by these Genesis narratives, and thereby use it to imagine alternative futures. How might reckoning anew with Sarah’s laugh and Sodom’s sin interrupt our now in the way Muñoz describes, that is, interrupt the ‘quagmire’ of our present affective and intellectual investments in debates over sexual identity? At the present cultural moment, the question emerging seems no longer to be whether LGBTQI persons will be accepted into ‘mainstream’ American civil and political life. Nor whether some will choose to live as visible members of the very religious communities which once rejected them. That’s no longer a hypothesis. It’s something to observe, not theorize. What’s pressing as a problem for religious hermeneutics instead is this: How best to narrate—in scriptural images ‘local’ to the way religious people talk—this arrival already underway, this future already present in our midst: how to narrate the temporal and spatial interruptions of those long constituted as strangers, as an ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ of communities civil and religious? These are the sort of questions Genesis helps answer through a series of stories about wandering angelic strangers. By reading its narrative movement as one linking Sarah’s laugh to Sodom’s fall and beyond, I develop a thick description of the range of responses which present themselves upon the arrival of new flesh, that is, the arrival of the new and risky futures represented in the form of ‘strange’ bodies. Part 1 reads in Sarah’s laughter a response of cynicism—a deeply human way of knowing in time, an anxious attempt to seal oneself off from the risks of disappointment. Part 2 casts the men of Sodom as those who can see in the arrival of the stranger only a threat to be known (‘yada’), neutralized, and subjected to the violent programs of management and control. In a brief, suggestive conclusion, I propose that in the figure of Hagar, the story invites us beyond both options—cynical withdrawal and violent containment—and toward something else: a queer future which challenges not only ‘traditionalist’ rejections of the stranger, but further—by questioning even the progressive narrative of ‘inclusion’—seeks to unmake the logic of ‘estrangement’ itself.

The writings of the 4th century bishop Ambrose of Milan are filled with borrowings from the 1st century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. While the nature of these usages within Ambrose’s five so-called Philonic treatises has been well studied, the existing scholarship on the use of Philo in the letters of Ambrose is scant. Within the collection of Ambrose’s letters, 16 of them make extensive use of a Philonic treatise. This study seeks to provide some general conclusions about the nature of Ambrose’s adaptational choices within this corpus. The way in which Ambrose handles his source reveals a thinker who holds Philo (and the tradition that he represents) in the highest esteem. Nonetheless, he is willing to dialogue with his source, alter it for his own purposes, and bring out the elements that are most suited to his own faith and context.

What do we make of Revelation’s grotesque subversions of Rome as both Whore and Beast? In this presentation, I explore the significance of Revelation’s subversive deployment of the comic. John of Revelation, I argue, utilizes humor as a survival tactic in the face of imperial trauma. Drawing from his marginal Jewish context and larger historical circumstances, I demonstrate how John incorporates popular aspects of the comic into his text as means by which to undermine Rome and ultimately create a signal of transcendence for both him and his implied Jewish community. In John’s pursuit, however, the vitriolic humor directed against Rome attaches itself to his messiah’s and god’s empire, which goes against the grain of the text’s interests, and therefore has the effect of turning the joke on both John and his apocalypse. Building on the work of David Frankfurter and Melissa Jackson, this essay opens up a new space for reading Revelation within an ancient Jewish context and alongside uses of humor in traditional Jewish texts. In so doing, it also addresses a longstanding debate concerning the Jewishness of ancient Christ-centered writings. For example, while scholars typically label Revelation a Christian text—or at best a Jewish-Christian or Christian-Jewish text—this essay explores how and why it is Jewish from beginning to end.

This paper will propose a connection between the stories of Jephthah and his daughter and the daughters of Zelophehad found primarily in Numbers 27 and 36. The paper will suggest that by situating the regulation that develops from the legal case of Zelophehad’s daughters alongside the seemingly successful judgeship of Jephthah, a protrati of the narrative implication in the book of Judges of Jephthah’s actions emerges with greater clarity. This reading will look to explore the possibility of type-scenes (such as endangered daughters), legalities (such as vow-making or law-writing), and the narrative effect of such regulations as they are played out in the respective selections.

The Newness Effect: HDŠ in Second Isaiah and Beyond

Recent interest in digital humanities has given rise to research methods that allow for immersive, pluralistic explorations into the past. This paper presents a 3D, navigable model of the ancient synagogue of Bet Alpha to demonstrate the benefit 3D modeling offers archaeologists in conceiving of how ancient peoples experienced their art and their architecture. The Bet Alpha model, in this paper, will be used to explore synagogue-seating capacity, the archaeoastronomy of synagogue art and architecture, and the visual-effect of dynamic lighting upon the building’s mosaic floor. In addition to the exploration of research questions, 3D modeling also proves useful pedagogically. With the use of a simple, affordable virtual-reality viewer, such as Google Cardboard, an instructor can take his or her students on a first-person journey through antiquity. This paper and presentation will display the value of 3D modeling on the aforementioned areas of synagogue research as well as the pedagogical benefits of modeling and exploring ancient environments with students in virtual reality. Concerning methodology, the Bet Alpha model was produced using a combination of drafting software (AutoCAD), 3D modeling software (3DS Max and Blender), structure-from-motion software (PhotoScan) and video-game editing software (Unity3D). The final model of the synagogue was then exported and loaded onto two platforms: first, it was loaded onto a web-server so that it could be accessed and explored via a first-person playable character by anyone with an active internet connection; and second it was loaded onto the website SketchFab, which allows anyone with a virtual-reality viewer to explore the model in 360 degrees. By the time of the SBL annual meeting, an updated version of the Bet Alpha model will be presented in relation to the questions posed above with a focus on methodology of digital production and the pedagogical usefulness of modeling ancient art and architecture. The final model (currently a draft) will be viewable online at http://bcerickson.com/3d/unity/betalpha.html and also viewable via the Oculus Rift, one of the newest 3D headsets currently on the market.

Jeremiah has been interpreted as the teacher of Torah, but also as “Moses redivivus” or even as surpassing Moses (Otto), etc. heavily building on a large number of intra-canonical intertextual references. One of the passages frequently hinted at is Jer 36. The story of Baruch writing the scroll dictated by Jeremiah, the public reading of the scroll by Baruch and its destruction by king Jehoiakim in Jer 36 is intertextually linked to a plurality of biblical intertexts, most prominently among them 2 Kgs 22, but also Exod 31-34 and Deut 17. The paper argues that these intertextual links do not so much create a link between Jeremiah and Moses or even Jeremiah and Moses’ Torah. They characterize the scroll as taking over the function and therefor replacing either the Torah or some written entity which could later on be associated with the Torah. In studies concentrating on Jer 36 the scroll has often been characterized as the chapter’s main protagonist. It has less often been argued, that the intertextual link between words that are written and read function as organizing center within a net of intertextual relations establishing “displaced equivalences” between protagonists which are linked via their respective relations to these written words: Baruch parallels Moses (Ex 31-34) in writing the scroll or the tablets; Jeremiah parallels God in dictating their content; Moses parallels the king in destroying what has been written; the prophetess Hulda (2 Kgs 22) parallels Jeremiah in predicting the king’s personal fate. The paper analysis and reevaluates the function of the scroll in Jer 36 as replacing written words which are elsewhere associated with Moses, this establishing an intertextual link which organizes a variety of intertextual links establishing “displaced equivalences” which on their part highlight the dominating role of the scroll.

Earliest studies of Ezra-Nehemiah focused on question of historicity, typically judging it poor history. Attention to Ezra-Nehemiah as literature in recent decades have moved the conversation to a clearer sense of what the book is communicating. Archaeology, even with its competing claims, has helped reconstruct a matrix within which Ezra-Nehemiah is emerging. This paper will review some key insights gained from reading Ezra-Nehemiah in light of such archaeological discoveries.

A continuing provocation to discussion in Gospels’ scholarship is the position of the Matthean audience vis-à-vis “Judaism” or, alternatively, “the Judean people.” Were Matthew’s addressees intra or extra muros this larger social entity? David Sim runs a strong case for the former option. He argues, inter alia, in support that Matthew’s Gospel (especially in Matt 5:17-20 within the larger context of 5:17-48) advocates obedience to the Mosaic law for Christ-followers and to this extent is inimical to Paul’s understanding. In this paper I will argue for the alternate, extra muros view. The core of the argument will be a redaction-critical assessment of Matthew’s Transfiguration narrative (17:1-8) in relation to that of Mark (9:2-8). This will highlight the stark replacement of Moses by Jesus as the only and ultimate object of obedience for Christ-followers, in a passage emphasising Jesus’ numinous closeness to God aligned with the gentle nature of his presence to believers, a combination expressive of Emmanuel in Matt 1:23. This argument will prompt a re-assessment of Matt 5:17-20 (and 5:17-48) as coherent with this position. The paper will conclude with the proposal that Matthew’s view of the Mosaic law is not that different from Paul’s, with both, however, opposed to Judean/Jewish supersession.

The genealogy of Jesse in Chronicles informs us that Zeruiah, mother of Joab (and Abishai and Asahel) was David’s sister (1 Chr 2:16). However, throughout the books of Samuel, David’s familial relationship to Joab or his brothers is never referenced or insinuated. In fact, in 2 Sam 17:25 Zeruiah is said to be sister of the Ammonite Abigail, who was the daughter of Nahash. Nevertheless, the familial ties of the sons of Zeruiah with David are regularly assumed by scholars (e.g., ABD 6:1086) who read them back into the David story in Samuel. Scholars usually argue that the MT of 2 Sam 17:25 that lists Abigail’s father as Nahash is in error (e.g., McCarter 1984: 392). However, in this paper I will argue against this position and against reading the Chronicler’s attribution of a sibling relationship between David and Zeruiah back into Samuel. On the text-critical level, both the MT and LXX of 2 Sam 17:25 agree on Abigail’s father being Nahash. While some Greek (e.g., Lucianic) manuscripts instead read “Jesse,” the reading of “Nahash” is to be preferred as it is the more difficult reading, and the change to Jesse is easily explained as due to the influence of the Chronicler’s genealogy. On the compositional level, I will argue that the Chronicler’s presentation of Zeruiah as David’s sister was part of his Tendenz to glorify David. In the Chronicler’s Vorlage, Joab was presented as a complex character with numerous heroic qualities, but also as a shrewd, rebellious general who often disregards David’s orders and undermines the king’s authority (e.g, 2 Sam 3; 11; 18; 20). What is more, David describes himself as “soft/weak” (Heb raq 2 Sam 3:39) in his dealings with his cunning general, and ascribes his failure to rein-in Joab as due to the wildness of the “sons of Zeruiah” (2 Sam 3:39). This picture of David being impotent in the face of Joab would not fit with the Chronicler’s programme. However, if Joab was understood to be part of David’s family, the king’s ‘softness’ (raq) with Joab is somewhat explained. Furthermore, as Japhet has pointed out, 1 Chr 28:4 underscores the significance in Chronicles not only of God’s choosing David, but of God’s choosing the house of Jesse as well (Japhet 1993: 449). By making Joab David’s nephew, the Chronicler makes the wily general part of Jesse’s blessed house. Therefore, Joab’s many significant contributions to David’s kingdom (e.g., taking Jerusalem) bring glory to the house of David. This paper will further examine the implications of these views for reading the narratives in Samuel.

Kierkegaard (or at least his pseudonym Johannes Climacus) seems to maintain that Christian faith has historical content, and yet is not supported (or undermined) by historical evidence. This combination seems paradoxical to many, for normally historical beliefs must be supported by historical evidence to be justified. One way to resolve the tension would be to read Kierkegaard as holding to a “non-cognitive” account of faith in which it has no propositional content, but this solution, however appealing, seems ruled out by the text. In this paper I will explore Kierkegaard’s reasons for taking this “non-evidential” view of Christian faith in both Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I shall argue that those reasons are powerful. They support the claims that Christian faith does not have to be based on historical evidence and is never simply the product of historical evidence. However, they do not justify the view that historical evidence has no relevance or value to Christian faith at all.

Despite the repeated interrogation of authors as authorities in numerous theorizations of composition, reading, and interpretation, discussions of textual production and, especially, reproduction frequently turn to vague notions of authority as explanation of and justification for the collection and transmission of texts. This paper will attempt to complicate the relationship between authority and textual transmission by exploring the reception of the Ignatian epistles in the second and third centuries. While fourth century evidence indicates a veritable explosion of interest in Ignatius, the evidence for the early reception is scant. Only Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Origen give any indication of knowing his work while a prominent writer from his own city, Theophilus of Antioch, makes no mention of him at all. By tracing the geographical and literary contexts in which Ignatius was remembered and forgotten, I suggest we can see how Ignatius’s words were initially transmitted not for their rhetorical or didactic content but as a monument to his exemplary piety and perseverance. The Ignatian epistles, especially Romans, served as a commemoration of his heroic martyrdom, the sharing of which marked that act as socially and ethically significant for some nascent Christian communities. Early readers (occasionally) read and shared the work as an encouragement to perseverance in devotion to Jesus but shied away from incorporating his words into their teaching and including him in genealogies of authority. This interplay between remembering Ignatius’ example while eliding or forgetting his words ultimately helps make Ignatius a martyr worth remembering.

In this paper, I propose to read Judges 19-21 in conversation with Agamben’s Stasis. In this work, Agamben turns to the ancient Greek conception of civil war and to civil war in Hobbes. However, he avoids civil war narratives in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, the civil war in Judges 19-21 presents an interesting case for considering what it is to be a people without a human sovereign nor a centralized polis as the body for the people. As Agamben places emphasis on the threshold of oikos and polis, Judges 19-21 complicates his binary. Nonetheless, Agamben theory of civil war helps to explain the text. Biblical scholars’ discussions of Judges 19-21 tend to lack a comprehensive theorizing of civil war that explains the three chapters as a narrative. I seek to show how the theoretical understanding of the civil war helps to explain the narrative together but also to identify Israel as a people. Israelite identity of a diverse collective without a unified body, or a physical human sovereign, requires other means for signifying themselves as a people. It is the act of civil war that unifies Israel, including Benjamin, as a collective body.

When scholars bring texts from Nag Hammadi and Medinet Madi together, the presumption is that the former set of writings influenced the latter. Such a conclusion rests on an early dating of the Nag Hammadi texts, whereas the Manichaean Medinet Madi texts are considerably later. Still, the dating of the extant codices of both corpora is nearly the same (4th–5th cent.), wherefore a new possibility emerges: Not only did the Nag Hammadi texts influence the Medinet Madi texts but also vice versa since Manichaeans were active in Egypt for almost a century before the Nag Hammadi Codices were produced. Literary contacts are clearly visible between the writings from Medinet Madi (the Kephalaia and the Psalm-Book) and Nag Hammadi (e.g. Eugnostos the Blessed, On the Origin of the World, and the Paraphrase of Shem). The paper discusses these connections and the possible role of monasticism in the exchange of theological ideas.

In my talk I aim to bring together and extend these two somewhat contrary insights and argue that Circe’s speech is, in fact, our earliest extant evidence of a Greek genre of oracular hexameters, one that it shows Circe herself in the role of an orally performing prophetess. Or to put it more concretely: the oracle – especially the so-called colonization oracle well known at Delphi -- is a specialized hexametrical form of the larger speech-act of the map-and-text type and one that was available to Homeric poets as part if their repertoire of short hexametrical genres. The fact, moreover, that it is a female who gives this oracle in the Odyssey is of great interest, because there is a strong, albeit still under-appreciated, tradition of oracular women in the archaic age, best illustrated by the hexametrical oracles of the Pythia at Delphi and the Sibyls in Anatolia, which were most likely orally composed and re-performed, much like epic narrative, hymns and the gold tablets themselves (see MacLeod [1961] and Maurizio [1997]). The talk is divided into two parts: the first offers a close reading of the beginning of Circe’s speech as a kind of colonization oracle (for the genre, see Fontenrose [1978] and Dougherty [1992]), where she describes how and where precisely Odysseus must go in the westward world. The second part analyzes the remainder of the speech in which Circe tells him what rituals to perform and what will happen as a result: here, I shall argue, there are also close correspondences between another popular genre of oracle which tells cities and individuals how to inaugurate new rituals and cults. This talk is part of a larger project in which I identify short hexametrical genres, like oracles, incantations or laments, that the Homeric poets knew and could draw on to structure or give dramatic emphasis in their narrative performances.

James Royse commented on the singular role which duplicate manuscripts can play in textual criticism saying that they provide “the best possible case” to access a scribe’s habits and that by using Abschrift manuscripts “we can virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder.” He then mentions that 0319, which copies Claromontanus (D06), is our earliest example of such a manuscript. Claromontanus is the only extant New Testament manuscript to have two known duplicates in 0319 (ninth century) and 0320 (tenth century). 0319 and 0320 are also the only known duplicate majuscule manuscripts. This paper analyzes test passages of 0319 and 0320 in order to determine the scribes’ habits. The shocking conclusion is that neither 0319 nor 0320 add or omit any text in the test passages. These scribes make many orthographic and other variants but they make very few significant substitutions and no additions or omissions. I have analyzed these manuscripts as duplicate manuscripts and I have also analyzed these manuscripts using the singular readings method. The result is that I am able to compare the resulting scribal habits when using the duplicate manuscripts method against the scribal habits when using the singular readings method. Duplicate manuscripts such as 0319 and 0320 have historically been ignored for the very reason that they are copies of a known manuscript. While it is correct to exclude a manuscript from critical editions when we can know that it is a copy, it is not sufficient to ignore them altogether. While the text they contain is dependent upon another known text, these manuscripts contain useful information concerning the nature of scribal copying. There are, at the moment, fourteen manuscripts for which we know the Vorlage but there are surely more of which we do not yet know. After analyzing many duplicate manuscripts I have charted their scribal habits through time and will comment on their textual stability in light of Constantine. One unavoidable disadvantage of previous studies on scribal habits is that they, of course, do not have access to the Vorlagen of early manuscripts. They therefore must postulate what the Vorlage probably said and then base conclusions concerning scribal habits off of the hypothetical Vorlage. While such hypothetical reconstructions are unavoidable, the duplicate manuscript method is to be preferred, when possible, because it requires no hypothetical reconstructions and we can get to the actual habits of these scribes. The enormous disadvantage of the duplicate manuscripts method is that there are very few sets of duplicate manuscripts and most of them are very late with the ninth-century 0319 being the earliest.

This paper revisits an old idea that appears frequently in the 19th-century Lives of Jesus: the theory of a “Galilean crisis” in the ministry of the historical Jesus. The crisis theory held, in general, that Jesus’ public career passed through sequential stages of friendly and hostile reception, and further contended that growing opposition to Jesus led to certain changes in his theology, outlook, or rhetorical tone. It will be argued that while the crisis theory is implausible as a historical hypothesis in the macro, it offers intriguing proposals about the interpretation of specific texts and themes in the Gospels that should be more widely accepted. The paper develops the following points: (1) The crisis theory is worth revisiting because it raises questions that current Jesus research has largely been content to ignore. Since the advent of form criticism in the early 20th century, critics have, for good reason, been skeptical of the chronological reliability of the Gospel narratives. But one consequence of that skepticism is that subsequent criticism has generally focused on Jesus’ teachings and deeds irrespective of chronological placement, with the exception of his activity in Jerusalem during the final week. This approach more or less assumes, rather than demonstrates, that Jesus was consistent throughout the course of his career. The whole question as to whether Jesus was or was not consistent is not addressed by recent criticism, simply because of the approach of the historian. The point is demonstrated simply by looking at the organization of most books on Jesus in the past 30-40 years: they proceed topically through important questions: Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom; Jesus’ call to discipleship; Jesus’ miracle-working and exorcistic activity; etc. (2) The interesting Q passage that contains the woe over Galilean cities (Luke 10:13-15; Matt. 11:20-24) provides good reason to identify development in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. It is hard to read this passage without concluding (a) that it stems from a later period of his activity, (b) that it conflicts with other traditions about Jesus’ positive impact in and around Capernaum, and (c) that it expresses disappointment over poor results in these areas. If this saying goes back to Jesus in some form, which is likely, then we have some development here that is not unlike what the old Lives of Jesus had proposed. (3) There are other features of the Jesus tradition that make the most sense as attempts to rationalize opposition and rejection, and thus naturally position themselves at a later point of his career. Certain parables, such as the Parable of the Sower, have sometimes been read in this way in the history of interpretation, and for good reason it seems. Also relevant are pessimistic sayings about the recalcitrance of “this generation,” and appeals to some moral or epistemological deficiency in those who fail to accept Jesus’ message.

The historical study of amulets in late antiquity generally has been framed by strong distinctions between magic, religion, and science that emerged from the early 20th c. anthropology of religion (Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, etc) and the narrative of modernity’s disenchantment from its religious past (Weber). While recent treatments have successfully avoided the pejorative/primitive evaluations that previously accompanied the category “magic,” scholars tend to cluster amulets in with other ancient ritual objects that receive condemnation from Christian elites. My goal in this paper is to disrupt these classical boundaries of magic and religion insofar as they are limiting for our understandings of elite ambivalences and anxieties about the use of gospel amulets in late antique Christianity. To do so, I follow the lead of John Lardas Modern (2012, 184) in his attempt to re-enchant modernity through analyzing what he calls the “habitus of technomodernity.” I propose to think instead with its counterpart, what I call the “habitus of technoantiquity.” This describes the ways in which texts are indeed technologies that organize and mediate humans’ interaction with the world, whereby the relation between human and text can become a site for controversy. The elite “discourse[s] of ritual censure” (Frankfurter 2005, 257) concerning amulets tended to be overtly negative, yet some of the proscriptions made by elites like John Chrysostom or Augustine (e.g., Chrysostom, Ad populum Antiochenum 19.14; Augustine, Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis, 7.12) were much more ambivalent about curative functions of gospel texts. Thus, these proscriptions cannot be fit comfortably within a framework that primarily draws distinctions between “non-magical” institutionalized use of ritual objects and their “magical” use as a form of deviance (Aune 1980) or local expression (Frankfurter 2015). Elite ambivalences and anxieties about gospel amulets do not necessarily reflect an aversion to the “magical” manipulation of unseen powers but rather a preference for an internalized textuality, facilitated by elite and largely male textual productions such as homilies and catechesis. Re-enchanting late antique textual practices takes place first through the analysis of these elite ambivalences and anxieties about the proper use of gospel texts. A whole range of textual practices (associated with gospel texts in this case) make up the habitus of technoantiquity, a diverse but equally-enchanted disposition toward texts and their use. I propose that elite proscriptions against amulet use emerge from an enchanted habitus of technoantiquity rather than in opposition to it.

Valentinian meditations on names and naming have long attracted scholars’ attention. While many have sought for them historical parallels, others have made textualist efforts to distill a coherent and comprehensive linguistic theory. This paper provides a reconstruction of the theory of names emerging from Gospel of Truth, which along with Gospel of Philip is one of the two fullest testimonies to Valentinian reflection on this issue. In order to contextualize historically Gospel of Truth's theology of the name, readers have pointed out important parallels. G. Quispel and J. Daniélou have set the text's speculations against its alleged ‘Jewish-Christian’ backdrop, while J.-É Ménard, J.-D. Dubois, and G. Stroumsa have insisted, though in contrasting forms and with different focuses, on links with second Temple literature. A. Orbe, on his part, has questioned that these streams of Jewish onomatological reflection had any sizable impact on that of Gospel of Truth. My paper will re-assess the question by analyzing chapters 38-40, where the most complete account of the power of the name is offered. These chapters are invariably read in scholarship as preaching that the Father is at first hidden and then revealed through the bringing forth of the Son as His name. My analysis will start from the re-interpretation of one problematic string of text ("he has the name; he has the Son; he can be seen") and will argue, contra virtually all previous readings, for a construal that envisions the Father’s visibility and the name’s invisibility. This reading will rely on the claim that in Gospel of Truth the name benefits from an identification with the incorporeal lekton ('expressible'), a prominent element of Stoic grammar. This identification appears particularly plausible in light of the indubitably Stoic roots of ancient linguistic reflection on the proper name. Gospel of Truth should of course not be read as a Stoic text through and through, but rather as a work bearing the recognizable marks of Stoic linguistic theory. Underpinning this interpretation is, in turn, the assumption that the proper noun had received already in Stoic doctrine the full status of a lekton, and that the Stoics may have posited a special relationship between these two elements that has not yet been acknowledged (a claim I will support with three arguments). Moreover, I suggest that whoever brought to bear this equation upon Gospel of Truth's name of the Father did so not only because Stoicism was the go-to theory for onomatological questions, but also on the strength of a longstanding Stoic interest in theonyms and their semantic value.

In early 363 with war on Persia looming and resistance to his Hellenizing program growing among Hellenes and Christians, the Roman emperor Julian (361-363) drew on Jewish practices, institutions, and heroes to model orthodoxy for Hellenes and to destroy Christianity. To this end, Julian developed a Hellenic priestly order to compete with the Christian episcopate. These priests were responsible to ensure that people worship the gods properly as only such worship would guarantee the success of Julian’s program and ensure his victory against Persia. As a theurgic Neoplatonist, Julian believed that only animal sacrifice accompanied by prayer could affect the gods into acts of beneficence. But such acts of worship were not commonly found in the mid-fourth century. Julian employed Jewish prayer and sacrifice as models for Hellenic orthodoxy in his Against the Galileans. There he claimed that Jews and Hellenes shared all practices in common except for belief in one God. His primary example was that Jews continued to sacrifice and pray in private. Meanwhile, he began to rebuild the Jerusalem temple so that Jewish public sacrifice might recommence. At about the same time Julian wrote his Letter to the Community of the Jews wherein he asked Jews to pray to the “Most High God” on his behalf. The request marked a normalization of Jews with the Roman Empire. Just as Jews used to sacrifice on behalf of the empire, Julian asked that they now pray to their God on his behalf until such time as he completed the rebuilding of their temple. Julian’s description of Jewish prayer in this letter closely resembles Neoplatonist prayer both in requiring extreme concentration and in suggesting that prayer is incomplete without sacrifice. When this letter is read with his Against the Galileans, 305D-306A, we find that Julian claimed that Jews offered Neoplatonic prayer and sacrifice both in private and in public. The description of Jewish prayer also closely matches the type of worship he sought from his Hellenic priests in writings of early 363 (Fragment of a Letter to a Priest). Jewish prayer then served as a prototype of how he wished his Hellenic priests to worship. This would have been especially convincing to Neoplatonist priests who were accustomed to viewing Jewish sources and practices as a source for ancient Hellenic wisdom.

The book of Joshua is often thought of as being hostile to foreigners, but some recent exegesis of the book has noted that it gives a significant amount of space to narratives of the inclusion of foreigners. Beyond this, the land allocation also provides a significant focus on the inclusion of foreigners. This paper therefore considers Joshua 24 as an intentional conclusion to a book which has provided a model for including foreigners within Israel. It explores ways in which this chapter is a paradigm for the book as a whole and and also how the book provides a paradigm for continued reflection on what it means to include foreigners across the Former Prophets as a whole and also the New Testament.

The object of the paper is to investigate the hermeneutical efforts taken up by LGBTQ Muslims in Indonesia to re-read and re-interpret the Qur’an, particularly on al-A’raf 80-84. These efforts are significant in finding a place for the existence of LGBTQ communities in the Sunni-Muslim majority Indonesia, as well as to further the plurality of intellectual traditions within Islam. For sure, Indonesian LGBTQ Muslims are not the first who pioneered the whole discussion on Islam and sexuality. However, their presence – with other Muslim pro-LGBTQ advocates – is opening a space for interrogating the practices of literalist readings of the Qur’an that, in the context of Indonesia, often goes hand in hand with patriarchal Qur’anic interpretations. There are several questions that the paper would like to address. First, how do LGBTQ communities in Indonesia conduct their interpretation and reading of Qur’an 7: 80-84?; second, what are the hermeneutics that they employ in their efforts to present alternative perspectives on the Qur’anic notion of sexuality?; and third, how and when do their specific reading on the notion of sexuality in the Qur’an is in conversation with its international counterparts (e.g., Barlas (2002), Ali (2006))?. For the purpose of this paper, we will interview several LGBTQ activists in Indonesia who are involved in re-reading and re-interpreting the Qur’an to explore the limit of sexual inclusiveness offered by the Qur’anic teachings. Results of the interviews will be analyzed within the feminist hermeneutics as proposed by Asma Barlas (2002) and Kecia Ali (2006). Consideration will be given to socio-political, historical, cultural and religious contexts specific to LGBTQ communities in Indonesia which influence the ways they interpret the Qur’an. These specific contexts are particularly important due to recent upsurge of anti-LGBTQ protests in the country that place the communities in defensive position and oblige them to present alternative perspectives on sexuality in Islam. Furthermore, we will also see alternative epistemological ties between the Qur’anic position on sexuality and perspectives offered by Islamic jurisprudence that the LGBTQ communities employed to find their place in the Sunni-heterosexual-cisgender-Muslim majority society.

As one of the co-founders of the Religious Experience in Antiquity section in 2005, it is particularly rewarding to mark year eleven, the beginning of our second decade together. In this commemorative session, I look backward at the methodologies and directions this group has taken, noting the currents that seem most promising for the future. I then take up a more recent method for our section that attends to the materiality of objects used to facilitate religious experience. Using an approach melded from environmental history, Bourdieu's theory of practice, and Durkheim's discussions of magic, I examine the role of obsidian in facilitating religious experience. My discussion centers on a hitherto untranslated obsidian amulet from the Madison Collection at James Madison University. This discussion provides another site that illuminates categorical differences between mysticism and religious experience.

The birth of Jacob’s sons in Genesis 29-30 is commonly read to anticipate the vision of a tribal family with Jacob standing for Israel, anticipating the name given in 32:29. Without assuming that equation, the story drives toward a single name, Joseph as the only son of Rachel. There is precedent for identifying Joseph with all Israel in Psalm 80:2 and Amos 5:4-6, both texts anchored in northern kingdom perspective. If Israel should not be read into this birth narrative in its original composition, then the scheme of half-brothers was created not to explain “the tribes of Israel” but rather Joseph’s closest allies. This interpretation is confirmed by the recent dissertation of Dustin Nash, who finds that “brother” language does not describe members of one people. Precedent for a similar list of allies lacking definition as Israel is found in the core battle account in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:14-22). Jacob is only reread as the father of all Israel with expansion of the list to include Simeon, Levi, and Judah, with expectation of Benjamin to make twelve. The narrative offers a geographical home for this vision of Joseph in Bethel of 28:10-22. Before the recasting of Jacob’s journey to Syria as a cycle of exile and return, the births were made the culmination of that trip, explaining the importance of Leah and Rachel as sister-wives. Such a hypothesis accounts for the introduction of Laban as “Aramean” and the contrasting eastern interest of ch.31, which assumes the birth story and was added to it. This entire account of the Jacob cycle is new and reorients the historical associations through time of this originally northern text.

Proposal for the Open Session Worship constitutes a key religious experience that impacts everything from a group’s world view to its social cohesion. Scholars of modern religions have direct access to the study of worship and its rituals; they attend rituals and interview participants to gain their insights. Historians of religion lack such immediacy and struggle to reconstruct rituals and ritual experience from occasional records or stray information. This difficulty is particularly clear in the study of first-century synagogue worship, which suffers from a dearth of data. Only two communal rites are evidenced and then poorly: Scripture reading and communal prayer. Reading Torah and other scripture is documented in the centuries leading up to 70 CE—by Aristeas, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, Philo, and the Theodotus Inscription—but few details are known. Communal prayer is even less well evidenced. The original name of the synagogue—proseuche—suggests its main activity was prayer, while Aristeas and Philo reveal that Jews considered communal prayer a common activity. But if we stay with written evidence, that is the sum of our knowledge. Archaeology provides an unexploited source of information about pre-70 synagogue ritual, namely, the synagogues themselves—the remains of buildings where worship took place. Those remains reveal the architecture of buildings designed for the rites of Scripture reading and communal prayer. Architecture has the potential to channel human activity and movement, and can even provide a structure supporting particular actions. For example, it can point people’s eyes in particular directions, position honored objects for viewing, or hide them. Architecture provides areas for ritual, its participants and its observers, and can be shaped to enhance the congregation’s visual or aural experience. If we place our knowledge about synagogue rites into a contemporaneous synagogue and ask how that synagogue’s architecture shaped the way such rites took place and influenced the congregation’s experience, that would provide significant new information. This talk aims to accomplish just that. It takes the two activities we know took place in first-century synagogues—the public reading of Scripture and communal prayer—and places them into the best evidenced synagogue of that period, namely, that in the Golan town of Gamla. The question I pose is straightforward: How did people use and experience the synagogue’s architecture in their worship? What can we learn from the form in which a building was built about how human beings behaved and interacted within it. To answer this question, I draw upon affordance theory to read the architecture and evaluate how it could have been used in these two rituals and how it would have shaped the experience of congregation who watched and participated. In particular, we will see that some architectural features of the Gamla synagogue seem designed for people gathered to hear Scripture read, while others were more suited to a smaller number of people coming together for prayer.

It has often been noted that in the late Second Temple period there are fewer texts describing a royal messiah than we might expect given the prominence of the king and a messianic hope in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. There are also texts that say that some Jews, or even the nation as a whole (e.g. Hecataeus of Abdera, cf. Ben Sira), rejected the need for a monarchy altogether. At least one, 1 Macc 8:14–16, explicitly praises the Roman model of government by senate. This paper proposes that such data testifies to a widely held political theory that might best be labelled a “Jewish republicanism”. Evidence for the distinctive character of this Jewish republicanism comes from diverse sources, including texts that have until now been viewed as primarily religious rather than self-conscious expressions of a political philosophy (e.g. the Testament of Moses, the Qumran Self-Glorification hymn). Insofar as this political theory: eschews government by kings, grants equalities to to all members of society, and places authority in a body of representative elders (a gerousia or Sanhedrin) it is quite like the Roman one. In three ways it is quite distinctive. It treats the OT as a whole, and the laws of Moses in particular, as its charter. It grounds its critique of kingship in general, and ruler cult and emperor worship in particular, in a biblical theological anthropology that ascribes royal privileges, status and identity to all humanity (viz Gen 1:26–28). And it sets up the high priesthood as a representative office with a unique set of rights and privileges in a way that makes best sense as the outworking of the biblical doctrines of creation and election in the political realm.

First, this paper begins by identifying several Psalms material from Qumran that has come to light in recent years, leading to a survey of which Psalms are either represented or quoted in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Second, as many scholars of the Psalter are aware, the DJD edition of 11Q5, edited by James A. Sanders, was incomplete for several reasons: (a) It was published in 1965, when several (partially preserved) columns of the scroll were not available to the editor. This section was published separately in 1967 by Yigael Yadin, who termed it "Fragment E." (b) Sanders produced a popular edition of the Scroll (the "Cornell Edition) in 1967; even there he was not able to incorporate Fragment E in the main edition, but added it as an Appendix. (c) Since the wealth of Psalms material from other caves (notably Caves 4 and 11) was largely unavailable to Sanders, the many variant readings from these manuscripts could not be collated in the edition. (d) A complete edition has yet to be published (although Fragment E appeared in DJD 23, published in 1998). Third, I will present samples of the Complete Edition of the Great Psalms Scroll (11Q5) for the series Dead Sea Scrolls Editions, and elicit feedback with respect to the textual notes, layout of the text (facing Hebrew and English pages), the full reconstructed text in an Appendix, and the use of photographs in the Appendix (facing the reconstructed text). One goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of this format for presenting a biblical text in the series Dead Sea Scrolls Editions.

This study proposes another reading lens to understanding ancient Israelite perspectives of children, by reading biblical texts in light of Mesopotamian material while focussing on distinct stages of a child’s life to demarcate the comparative lines. One such stage, the Mesopotamian perspective of the pre-born child culled from medical literature, prayers, and myth, can illuminate the ritual and social roles of children and the divine-human characters involved in children’s lives at that stage. To populate our data for this stage, texts such as Psalm 139:13-15, Job 10:8-11, but specifically here Jeremiah 1:4-5, are set within a broader cultural context to assess how the Israelite expression is both similar and distinct from that context. Emerging conclusions include: the pre-birth stage is a definable childhood stage according to the ancient perspective and that stage constructs a social value for childbirth and children beyond utility and economic considerations. In biblical texts, like their Mesopotamian counterparts, social value is supported by the deity-child connection in which the child’s life may be a vehicle for the promotion and social acceptance of deities within the family unit. Studying the pre-born stage also sets foundations for discussing how the social values given to children interacts with the seemingly opposing mistreatment of children in these ancient contexts. Finally, the comparative method of aligning distinct stages of a child’s life between the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern perspectives, sketches another proposed approach to the discipline where stages can act as helpful reading lenses to biblical texts that assume a similar stage.

In 2007 Graham Stanton leveled the challenge that researchers need to “proceed gingerly and in a critically responsible manner” if the Pseudo-Clementine “writings are to be used as evidence for Jewish believers in Jesus” at all. In subsequent years, however, scholars such as Annette Reed and Karin Zetterholm have made compelling arguments for the Jewish self-identity of the author-editors of these texts, citing how the Homilies—in particular—emphasize Moses, the Torah, and halakhic observance, show respect for rabbinic purity practices, and even present a favorable view of the Pharisees. Despite these advances, one heretofore unexplored aspect of this discussion is the way that the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies focus on the spoken, rather than written, tradition of Jesus’s words may also indicate how its author-editors—who were operating out of fourth century Syria, and possibly even the city of Antioch—had a close affinity to, and respect for, the nearby developing Palestinian rabbinic tradition. In order to explore these connections, I draw upon the recent work of Rebecca Wollenberg, who has argued that rabbinic Jewry did not immediately embrace the written biblical text when first canonized, but instead trusted the oral retellings of these narratives, since the written version, as many rabbinic polemics underscore, could easily be misinterpreted by Christians. I then show how the author-editors of the Homilies make a similar move with respect to the sayings of Jesus. In particular, I demonstrate how the author-editors of the Homilies do not quote directly from the words of Jesus as preserved in the gospels, as many of their orthodox Christian contemporaries like John Chrysostom did, but instead prefer—like the Rabbis—oral retellings of these narratives. This emphasis on the spoken, rather than written canonized words of Jesus, I argue, suggests deep affinities between those associated with the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and nearby groups of rabbinic Jewry, thereby reinforcing the Jewish self-identity of the author-editors of this text and complicating past assumptions that the parting of the ways between Jews and Christians occurred in a manner that was unilinear in character and global in scope. Though non-rabbinic in form, these Ioudaioi, as they seem to describe themselves in Homilies 11.16, also prefer oral retellings of scripture, although unlike their rabbinic Jewish contemporaries, they emphasize the True Prophet’s [i.e. Jesus’s] spoken, rather than written testimony, making them distinctively, for lack of a better term—Jewish-Christian. Accordingly, this evidence suggests that, at least in the fourth-century Palestine/Syrian milieu, efforts to draw the boundary between who was a Jew and who was a Christian constituted a long and involved process, insinuating how—despite the official rhetoric of rabbinic Jews, in Palestine, and proponents of orthodox Christianity such as John Chrysostom, in Antioch—these two designations were not fixed entities even as late as the fourth century CE.

Why did Ethiopian communities translate a wide range of patristic literature in the early second millennium? This presentation seeks to address this broad question through a focused study on the transmission and translation of a single homily from Syriac to Arabic to Ethiopic. It offers glimpses into the reasons why Syriac literature was translated into Ethiopic and the accommodation of this literature to Ethiopian needs and expectations. The first part of this presentation traces the transmission of Jacob of Serugh’s (451–521) Homily on Thomas and New Sunday. Two Arabic translations survive: One appears only in manuscripts that contain homilies ordered according to the liturgical year. The other appears only in manuscripts that contain collections of Jacob of Serugh’s writings. The Ethiopic translation was based on the Arabic translation included in a liturgical homiliary. This suggests that the Ethiopic translation of this homily was made to fulfill a need for homilies ordered according to the liturgical calendar. The second part of this presentation focuses on differences between the Ethiopic and Arabic translations. The Ethiopic translation displays concerted efforts to accommodate the poetic nature of this homily to fit pre-existing patterns of prose. It also includes additions to the homily that relate to exegetical issues not addressed in the original Syriac version or the Arabic translation. As a whole, this presentation reveals the agency of Ethiopian communities in translating and adapting Syriac literature to address the concerns of their own time. These communities chose to fulfill the particular needs of homilies for liturgical commemorations by translating a pre-existing Arabic collection of homilies. But they also deliberately adapted these homilies to address their own concerns. The processes by which such texts were translated into Ethiopic in the second millennium suggest a community locating itself within a broad Christian tradition yet looking to address the questions of its own time.

What Job’s Friends Want from Him It is usually assumed the friends are castigating Job for past sins and demanding that he repent and beg for forgiveness. In fact, however, for the first three cycles their attention is focused almost entirely on his current state and behavior. (The speeches under consideration are those of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, the latter’s third speech considered as 27:1-23, with Elihu considered by way of comparison.) At the start, the friends seem to think that Job is basically innocent (8:20) or at least not very sinful, and they believe that he has hope, that is, reason to hope (e.g., 4:6). In fact, Job is obliged to feel hope, because he must believe that God will support him (8:21). What really disturbs the friends is not some past sin on Job’s part that presumably brought on his suffering, but his present failure of nerve (4:5). Job’s fearfulness and hopelessness show a lack of confidence in God. Before chapter 22, Job is not accused of having committed any particular evil prior to his tragedy. (He presumably did something wrong, but that is not in focus now.) The rectification needed is not for Job to regret the behavior that presumably got him into this condition, but to change his current state of mind, for this which is preventing him from acting in a way that would reconcile him with God. Job must call upon God and beseech him. What is demanded of Job is essentially a ritual, namely a subordination ritual. It aims at the demonstrative recognition of hierarchy. Inner penitence is not necessary, though one must of course right the wrongs he has committed. Things change in the third round of speeches when Eliphaz, having worked himself up into a pique at Job’s obstinacy, suddenly erupts in accusations of major crimes, thereby contradicting what he said earlier about Job’s innocence. (Stylistic features show Eliphaz to have undergone a change.) Eliphaz has become frustrated at the failure of his earlier genteel approach. Also, Job’s insistence on interpreting his suffering as punishment (albeit unjustified) may have provoked Eliphaz into concluding that Job is indeed being punished, and deducing the crime from the result. Elihu will return to the earlier stance: Without accusing Job of great sins, convincing him to rectify his current relationship with God. The issue for the friends is not theodicy, but rather the way sufferers should approach God to achieve reconciliation. The crisis and resolution lie within man, not God. Job sees it otherwise.

In recent years, the number of studies that employ the concept of trauma as a lens through which to interpret biblical literature has increased. While “trauma” can refer to severe physical injury, it is the psychological and social dimensions of trauma, as well as the reflexes of these dimensions in literature, that have garnered significant interest among biblical interpreters. On psychological as well as social levels, the phenomenon of trauma encompasses both an experience of overwhelming stress that threatens to annihilate the individual or collective, and the range of ways in which individuals and collectives who experience such stress respond to it. In many cases, biblical interpreters apply insights gleaned from current psychological and sociological research into the effects of traumatic stress and ways of surviving and recovering from it. Biblical interpreters may also turn to recent literary theory that seeks to understand the ways in which literature may reflect experiences of psychological and social trauma. To interpret a biblical text through the lens of trauma is to situate that text in a context that can be described as traumatic, whether on an individual or collective level. For many biblical interpreters, the ancient contexts from which biblical texts emerged and in which they were appropriated remain significant. To interpret the ancient contexts of biblical texts by applying insights drawn from contemporary psychological and sociological research, much of which is conducted in the modern West, raises the methodological question of cross-cultural applicability. Concerning psychological trauma, there is a growing consensus that a range of basic psychological effects of trauma remain relatively constant across cultural boundaries, while cultural resources and social support provide important explanatory paradigms for how recovery occurs. The present paper reviews current discussion of the applicability of psychological trauma theory across cultures. It offers methodological considerations for bringing insights gained from psychology regarding traumatic stress and recovery from it. Among other issues, it considers the cross-cultural applicability of Judith Herman’s second “task” of the recovery process: remembering, grieving, and interpreting the traumatic experience.

Scholars have occasionally noticed that the Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe bears some interesting similarities to the Joseph Story. What can we learn from a comparison between the two tales? Present evidence suggests that the best explanation for the similarities is typological, not genetic; that is, the Tale of Sinuhe did not directly influence the biblical authors and redactors. What can we learn from such typological comparisons? In this paper, I will argue that typological comparisons, together with careful reflection on the method involved in their use, offer one way forward in the ongoing debate regarding the date and social setting of the composition of the Joseph Story. Several important arguments in this debate infer the compositional milieu from literary or theological features of the text. Gathering texts outside the bible to determine the frequency with which such features are associated with particular settings can strengthen or weaken such arguments.

In his eighth-century collection of narrations on the topic of struggle in the path of God, ?Abd Allah al-Mubarak (d. 181/792) reported on the authority of Mu?awiyya bin Qurra and Anas ibn Malik that when questioned as to the monastic practices (rahbaniyya) of Islam, Mu?ammad responded, “To every umma there is given a monasticism, and the monasticism of this umma is struggle in the path of God (al-jihad fi sabil Allah).” Writing in critique of claims that Ibn al-Mubarak was a partisan of early anti-monastic movements during the expansionary period of Islamic history, in Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity (2009), Thomas Sizgorich argued that the intentional diminution of the self, an ascetical act for Ibn al-Mubarak, “made jihad a venue in which acts of martial valor or conquest (or simple raiding, theft, or murder) could be reinscribed as acts of piety and moments of communion with the numinous” (112). What became essential in the relationship between the individual and divine, therefore, was the notion that the divine promise and reward precedes all other spiritual, material, and political concerns. Underlying this relationship, however, is the concept of the borderland, which Sizgorich defines as “a space in which no one cultural or political force is able to exercise uncontested hegemony, and in which one is likely to encounter discursive economies which incorporate the influences of various cultural traditions and political interests” (16). Considering Ibn al-Mubarak a participant within such a milieu, Sizgorich opened to future study the possibility of jihad as a concept, doctrine, and behavior evolving in relation to both Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Although Sizgorich would gesture toward a modern linkage of his work in late antiquity to the modern era in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2009, the relation of his work on the renunciative aspects of Ibn al-Mubarak’s jihad to the contemporary jihadi-salafi discussions of jihad has remained incomplete. Seeking to resolve this linkage, this paper argues that jihadi-salafi discussions of martyrdom operations (al-?amaliyyat al-istishhadiyya) and suicide (inti?ar, qatl al-nafs) identify and create an idealized ascetical subjectivity that has been influenced by jihadi-salafi appropriations and reconfigurations of Ibn al-Mubarak’s renunciative jihad. With this precedent established, the paper will argue that the appropriations of traditions and laws governing jihad by contemporary partisans of al-Qa?ida, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, and other similar movements occur within the borderland conditions identified by Sizgorich as so crucial to the praxis of Ibn al-Mubarak. Such a linkage opens the possibility for critical reflection upon the discourse of jihad offered by jihadi-salafi authors and the identification of the role and influence of non-Muslim discourses upon their idealized path to martyrdom through struggle in God’s path.

The various strands of the Pentateuch are commonly described by scholars as having rather different depictions of the Ark of the Covenant. Most notably, the ornate, gold-plated, cherubim-topped Ark in P is often contrasted sharply with the “de-mythologized” Ark in D. This paper will survey the most relevant parallels to cherubim and the Ark in ANE art, compare these to the descriptions in the Pentateuchal sources, and appraise the methodological role of these parallels in understanding the biblical depictions.

What have the Persian riders and the bearded men, the pregnant women and mothers with child in common with horse-and-rider-figurines, pillar figurines and so called Astarte plaques of the Iron Age? The find context of Iron Age figurines is varied as the regional distribution patterns, while the bulk of Persian period figurines have been found in favissae in well-defined areas. While pillar figurines may be indicative for the borders of Judah in Iron IIB-C they are lacking almost in the Persian period. Certain attributes, for instance nakedness, seem to be completely different. At first sight, both clusters have not very much in common, but the practiced comparison stating a wide difference may be misleading. The paper will address distribution patterns, usage contexts, gender, variance, traditions etc.

In this paper, I will analyse the concept of the Messiah in the Book of Isaiah and how this concept influenced the Deuterocanonical Literature

Class analysis of John’s Revelation is severely underdeveloped. A focus on the class commitments in the text leads to two conclusions. First, while John’s framework is neither Marxist nor capitalist, it is closer to Marxist thought. Second, an examination of class commitments in Revelation is insufficient on its own, for gender and religion are inextricably linked to John’s analysis of his own society and to our own analysis of his text. This paper briefly reviews the paucity of class analysis of Revelation and then describes John’s critique of class relationships in the Roman Empire. John’s class analysis relies heavily on the image of the gaudy, drunken whore Babylon and on the institutions of sacrifice in order to make its case and so the economic issues are not isolated from issues of gender and religion. Moreover, John predicted a two-stage resolution of class conflict that did not eliminate the class structures against which he railed. Rather, John used language that preserved the vocabulary of “heaven,” “kingship,” and “city” in ways that distorted these forms to the breaking point. This utopian description did not clarify the resolution of antagonisms, preferring instead to confuse our categories.

The earliest readers of the New Testament were clearly bothered by the two different accounts of Judas’ death. Did he remorsefully hang himself as in Matthew 27 or fall and split open his abdomen as in Acts 1? Two such conflicting accounts called for harmonization. The Vulgate’s translation of Acts 1:18, for example, joins together the two deaths and describes Judas as being hung and then bursting open. This paper will take a different approach. Beginning with the assumption that neither account is a historical record, I will examine the stories of Judas’ death not in light of each other, but within the context of other texts that focus on hanging and disembowelment in the Hebrew Bible and in Second Temple literature. Ranging from narrative sources to law codes, these sources demonstrate that there were important literary motifs and legal precedents that circulated within early Judaism that contributed to these two, alternative depictions of Judas’ death. The New Testament writers were, in fact, harmonizing their own views of Judas with larger Jewish concepts that grappled with issues of foreign and divine power. In doing so, these deaths were intended to say something not just about Judas’ demise, but also about how New Testamental readers should understand his life vis-à-vis that of Jesus.

This paper explores how martyrdom operates as a "frame of violence" when it is dissociated from death. How does an ideology of martyrdom shape the spiritualities and worldviews of adherents when that ideology does not require that the martyr be killed (or that she undergo any physically inflicted suffering)? And what social and political repercussions do ideologies of living martyrdom have for the communities who adopt them? I begin with a discussion of these issues based on the works of late ancient authors from the Latin West who framed martyrdom as not necessitating physical death (Commodian, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, Augustine, and Gregory the Great). These authors, in various ways, sought to frame martyrdom in such a way as to make it both more accessible to Christians absent active persecution and more totalizing in its effect on contemporary Christians--if one can be a martyr without a "murderer," what limits can there be on the spread of martyrial thinking and its effects? Grounded in the lessons learned from these sources, I will then illuminate martyrial dynamics in contemporary American political discourse, including the martyrdoms of such public figures as Kim Davis and Donald Trump. At stake is the question: How does sublimating violence in ideologies of martyrdom actually highlight and expand the violence (physical or otherwise) that martyrdom discourse can legitimate? How does divorcing martyrdom from death enable the diffusion of martyrdom ideologies and the violence they can perpetuate?

The Triumph of Hope in Habakkuk

This paper will investigate quotations of and allusions to the Hebrew text of the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets found in 1QS and related compositions from the 2nd Temple period. The focus of the paper will be on the use of quotations and allusions for the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

In 4QDa 8 i, the Damascus Document introduces regulations on the admission of new members into the community. Scholars have routinely traced these regulations to motifs and linguistic elements associated with the biblical account of Moses’ address to Israel. While there are striking analogies between the two, there is also one crucial difference. Whereas in its biblical form the Mosaic covenant was part of a binding instruction that marked distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, the Damascus Document turns the Mosaic covenant inward and uses it to mark distinctions between fellow Jews. The question thus arises why the authors of the Damascus Document turned the Mosaic covenant into a source of intra-communal division. In an effort to resolve this textual conundrum, scholars have turned to the sociology of sect/sectarianism, a theory first proposed by Max Weber (1905; 1922) and developed further by Bryan Wilson (1982) and Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (1985; 1996). Following this line of argumentation, the document’s regulations on admission are a manifestation of sect formation. Although this theory provides a possible explanation for this textual conundrum, it neglects one key question. How did the authors of the Damascus Document acquire the capacity to reimagine the meaning of the Mosaic covenant? Qumran scholars have generally neglected this key question, because the sociology of sect/sectarianism is based on the implicit assumption that people have the innate agency to reimagine the meaning of their local tradition. However, Ussama Makdisi (2000) complicates this common assumption and explains why scholars must reevaluate their shared assumptions about human agency when trying to understand sect formation. In this paper, I will explain how Makdisi’s work on the proliferation of sectarianism in Beirut, Lebanon can help Qumran scholars more fully understand the Damascus Document’s political and historical context. My argument will unfold in two stages. First, I will provide an overview of Makdisi’s theory of sectarianism. As I will explain, Makdisi argues that in the case of modern Lebanon sect formation was a mechanism of the British and French Empires’ colonization strategies. According to Makdisi, sectarianism emerged in Lebanon after European administrators encouraged Lebanese natives to turn local religious laws inward and use them as a source of local division. Foreign officials encouraged this behavior, because it undermined the power of Lebanon’s local government and made the region vulnerable to foreign domination. Second, I will read the Damascus Document’s regulations on admission in light of Makdisi’s theory. Building upon the work of Yonder Gillihan (2011), I will enumerate how the regulations’ analogies with Greco-Roman military associations reveals the mechanisms by which Hellenistic power gave the authors of the Damascus Document the discursive capacity to use the Mosaic covenant as an entry procedure into a local militarized association, transforming it from an emblem of collective unity against non-Jews into a source of intra-communal conflict and division. I will conclude that the Damascus Document’s regulations on admission demonstrate that sect formation was possibly a mechanism of the Hellenistic Empire’s colonization strategies.

A historicist approach to political philosophy helps explain the persistence of torturing, massacring, and beheading captured fighting-age men since antiquity. The study of the ancient Mediterranean should include pursuits that illuminate present sociopolitical problems. Further, political philosophy should engage history to explain the ingrained violence of adverse social power relations. The persistence of adult-male torture, massacre, and beheading become historically intelligible when examined by this approach.##A central rule of militaristic or martial power since antiquity imparts an command-giving entitlement and command-receiving obligation to torment, kill, and behead men on authorized command. One early attestation of this rule is a royal directive to massacre insubordinate men in Bronze-Age Hittite martial society. Centuries later, the Romans aptly phrase this power principle as vitae necisque potestas. To set aside vitae here, necisque potestas does not simply mean ‘the power to put to death,’ but the power to kill others with torturous pain. In Roman society, this rule is best known as patria potestas so that Roman men could keep their households as subordinate brigades. Roman martial decimation further shows this rule doing the same to the men: Commanders could have every tenth man beaten and executed among contingents judged insubordinate or ineffective, so that the overawed remainder would hasten to follow orders. When applying necis potestas to external groups, commanders also unleashed their forces to torture and kill enemy men in diverse ways, including mutilation, collective execution by javelin-throwing squads and beheadings with an axe. ## Men, women, and children were turned into slaves (douloi) as subjects under martial power. Collective martial slavery was distinct from ancient mercantile chattel slavery, but it was still social death—the turning of people into violable non-persons to be beaten, tortured, and killed with impunity for disobeying orders. As seen in Roman martial society, the main male ranks could be beaten and selectively put to death for insubordination or ineffective performance. The men’s women and children were also violable under martial power on two counts. First, their own men could beat or kill them for being insubordinate. Second, forces of the men’s angry overlords or furious comrades could also violate, kill, or enslave the men’s women and children as an added way to punish the men as rebellious or as cowards.## In antiquity, only slaves could be tortured and killed with entitlement by those in control. Treating free persons thus was an outrage. Yet this slavish treatment was standard protocol for subject peoples under this martial power.##Slavish oppression of this sort is still at work in martially run societies. In the twentieth-century Balkans, men assigned to torture and kill targeted men en masse face the same or similar treatment if they refuse. Freedom as an ideal since antiquity stresses the need for inviolability because of the concerted historical effort to get out from under the deeply violable customs of martial power, which preclude collective self-determination and autonomy.

One of the rallying cries of the #BlackLivesMatter movement is #SayHerName; saying her name refers to preserving the names and memories of black and brown trans- and cis-gendered women whose lives have been disposed of often along with their names and memory in public consciousness. This paper will explore the phenomenon of royal women offered, secured and held as hostages to facilitate forced migration in the Judean context, focusing primarily on the royal women of Jehoiachin (Jer 38:22), Zedekiah (Jer 38:23) and unidentified princesses (Jer 41:16; 43:6). The disposition of their bodies will be read through a womanist #SayHerName #BlackLivesMatter hermeneutic.

On its surface, Josh 5:2-9 narrates a straightforward ceremony where Joshua ensures that all Israelites are circumcised before they celebrate the Passover for the first time in the Promised Land. Passing details include the nature of the tools that Joshua should use and an etiology for Gilgal. These few verses have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, often focusing on confusing descriptions of Israelite cultic observance and major differences between Hebrew and Greek versions of the text. This paper introduces a new understanding of the pericope’s compositional history, refocusing understanding of the text on its etiology. It also proposes a timeline of the various additions and harmonizations to both MT and LXX. The research proposes that Josh. 5:2-9 underwent four primary stages of composition. The earliest recoverable strand contains a short etiology for Gilgal and one of its hills, explaining the names by relating them to an act of communal circumcision. This etiology presented ideological problems for later authors, as it seems to indicate that circumcision is a new procedure. An author employing Deuteronomic vocabulary then supplemented the etiology with further information about the people involved in the circumcision, explaining that the ritual involved the children of the rebellious generation who had wandered in the wilderness. After this point, the verses were expanded in two different extant recensions. One of these Hebrew traditions became MT, and the other Hebrew text became the basis for LXX. Finally, both MT and LXX contain scribal harmonizations and errors. Reconstructing the compositional history of this small sample text provides clues to understanding the writing and editing process for the whole of the book of Joshua.

This paper looks closely to the passages in Q. 21:30-35 to identify allusions to the creation story in Genesis 1 and its interpretation in the Midrash. Some of the parallels may be seen by Q. 21:30 using the term “rtq,” which might mean darkness, alluding to first few verses of Genesis. The Qur’anic passage discusses water, which apparently gives life, is perhaps an allusion to the water in Genesis 1:2. Also Q. 21:31 uses the term “fijaj,” which resembles the Qur’anic call to ?ajj that people will come from deep valleys (fajj ‘amiq) (i.e. Qur’an 22:27). This might resemble the darkness in the deep in Genesis 1:2. The Midrash interprets the deep as Hell or the dwelling place of the dead based on Proverbs 9:18, which uses the term “‘imqi.” Q. 21:34-35 discusses life and death making a further allusion to the interpretation in the Midrash for Genesis 1. Q. 21:32-33 discuss signs (ayat) in the heavens and the creation of the night and day, and the sun and the moon resembling the signs (utut) of Genesis 1:14-18. Q. 7:54 and Q. 10:3 use the term “al-amr” or “yudabbir al-amr” in connection with the six days of creation. This represents intertextuality with Genesis 1, as it uses the Hebrew term “amr” in the creation story (i.e. Genesis 1:3, 1:6, 1:9, 1:11, 1:14, 1:20, 1:24, 1:26, 1:28, 1:29), where it usually is combined with the term to be, “yhy.” The Qur’an also in many instances combines the term “amr” with the term “kun f-yakun” (be and it becomes) (i.e. Q. 2:117, 3:47, 19:35, 36:82, 40:68). The term “yudabbir” is from the root “dbr,” which, in Hebrew, means speaking or a word. Psalm 33:6 uses the term “debar” as a word that brings forth the heavens and the term “rua?,” related to spirit, that brings the entire host. According to Genesis 1, the word or the saying (amr) that brings forth everything is “yhy,” which is related to “hyh” meaning “be.” Exodus 6:2 uses the terms “dbr,” “amr,” and “yhwh,” which may also be related to “hyh” together. This brings us to the prologue of the Gospel of St. John stating and the Word in itself was God that without it nothing was created that was created. As such, St. John might be alluding that the word is related to “be” or “yhy” in Genesis, which in itself is God, as it is related to “yhwh.” The Midrash states that the Throne of Glory was among the first things made and interprets the Spirit of God in Genesis 1:2 as an allusion to the Messiah. The Qur’an would be viewed to also use the term “yudabbir al-amr” as an allusion to the Messiah, who is also related with the term “be” (kun f-yakun) (i.e. Q. 2:116-117, 3:47, 3:59-60, 6:73, 19:34-35, 40:68). This brings forth the Qur’anic engagement with the Bible in perhaps an attempt to interpret it.

This paper analyzes the failed ritual procession in 2 Sam 6:1-10 in which Uzzah died because he took hold of the ark of the covenant to steady it on the cart (vv. 6-7) and compares this with the successful procession a few months later, by which David was able to convey the ark into Jerusalem (vv. 12-19; cf. Ps 24:7-10). I compare these processions with aspects of Hittite processions from the temple of Telipinu to the river (to wash sancta) and back during the fourth day of the ninth year festival of Telipinu and also with the religious-political Babylonian processions at the New Year Festival of Spring that took images of the gods outside the city to the akitu house and then brought them back into Babylon. The purpose of my paper is to see what makes an Israelite procession successful, in light of its ANE background, and what can make it fail, and to ascertain what this reveals about the nature of the deity and his relationship to his people.

The evitable is inevitable. Third week into the Spring 2016 semester at Los Angeles Valley College, Instructional Media Department sounded the clarion call for this septuagenarian: Instructors: For your convenience, virtually all classrooms now have computers and projectors. We urge you to use the college computers rather than bringing in your own laptops which can introduce a host of connection and compatibility problems for you and others who use the classroom after you. Just bring in a flash drive with your PowerPoint or other files and put it in the USB drive. Though I acknowledge the assets related to digital media, I prefer the traditional method in teaching the Hebrew canon, New Testament, and Rabbinics. I use an historical-critical method that stresses that two-millennia-old Jewish texts and related literature are engaging diversified Judaism (religion) as an interpretation of ethnicity in the context of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman era. I limit the straight lecture approach preferring student encounter not encroachment ambience. By encouraging the student to do research at home in order to explicate the text in class, and answer questions of difficulty from a peer group, I hope to plant in the students seeds of loyalty to great concepts, which otherwise would not grow from the total lecture method that often detaches the student from the material; and I impact a teaching moment with a “hands on-feel good “ magid teaching lesson. How (na`aseh) and Why (nishma`) interweaves personality, pedagogy, and personal relevancy. Furthermore, the student gets impact from such an exposure, his or her own germane ideas are able to sprout, and a relaxed teacher-student relationship is created. Demonstrated texts Exod 3, 24; Num 15; and Deut 6.

Despite methodological debates, due to the late dating of the earliest rabbinic texts, much ink has been spilled noting the various parallels between the traditions attributed to Jesus in the Gospels and those associated with the rabbis in Tannaitic literature (e.g., Lightfoot, Strack-Billerbeck, Basser). For the most part, these discussions have not moved beyond heuristic attempts to shed light on Gospel texts (e.g. Oliver, Torah-Praxis, 2015). And while several studies have demonstrated recently the preservation of various forms of later rabbinic methods of exegesis (i.e. qal va-homer, gezrah shavah) in the Synoptic Gospels (Viviano, Matthew and His World, 2007; Notley and Garcia, “Hebrew-Only Exegesis,” 2014) this largely remains the case. Yet, such evidence should be the impetus to move beyond the simplistic model of using rabbinic texts to elucidate “earlier” gospel texts—or substantiate Second Temple traditions—without noting anything more concrete. This is especially pertinent in regards to two gospel pericopes (“On Almsgiving;” “The Rich Young Man”) which have nearly precise parallels with Tannaitic texts (m. and t. Peah). Because these texts fall outside of the often-discussed halakhic controversies, scholarship has largely missed their quintessential rabbinic argumentation and content. To that end, such close parallels raise a number of key questions vis-à-vis the historical Jesus: From where do such rabbinical-styled traditions arise? Was there a gospel source(s) where the author(s) sought to rebrand Jesus into a first-century tanna? It is unlikely that such rebranding could be credited to the Evangelist(s), and is not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, or any other known Second Temple source. Therefore, this paper seeks to examine the two aforementioned gospel narratives along with their rabbinic counterparts in order to propose something more methodologically substantive about the use of rabbinic parallels in recovering specific aspects of the earliest Jesus traditions.

The Coptic codex entitled The Chapters of the Wisdom of My Lord Manichaios, now housed in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, contains a great deal of disparate material gathered from multiple sources and made part of the evolving genre of Manichaean kephalaia. Within this vast work is found a sequence of poorly preserved chapters (starting at no. 295 and continuing through several quires) that may be described as a kind of gospel book, because here the material has been deliberately arranged to cover the life of Jesus from his advent to the open tomb. The text provides a rich opportunity to explore Manichaean traditions, and it also evidences numerous points of contact with so-called gnostic gospels and similar productions from the early Christian period.

The fourth expedition to Lachish is a joint project, directed by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Profs. Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil of the Southern Adventist University. The expedition started the field work in 2013 and its plans are to excavate five seasons, till 2017. The focus of the project is the Iron Age II, mainly Levels II-V. So far new fortification system had been recognized and an old one, so far attributed to the Iron Age, is now dated to the Middle Bronze Age. A new gate had been recognized in the north-east corner of the site. New domestic and public architecture had been unearthed. Rich assemblages of pottery were uncovered, together with other find categories, including stamped clay sealings. The fourth expedition to Lachish is a joint project, directed by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Profs. Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil of the Southern Adventist University. The expedition started the field work in 2013 and its plans are to excavate five seasons, till 2017. The focus of the project is the Iron Age II, mainly Levels II-V. So far new fortification system had been recognized and an old one, so far attributed to the Iron Age, is now dated to the Middle Bronze Age. A new gate had been recognized in the north-east corner of the site. New domestic and public architecture had been unearthed. Rich assemblages of pottery were uncovered, together with other find categories, including stamped clay sealings.

The Southern Levant is considered to be a thriving economic center according to the common consensus. This holds especially true for the vassal states, like Ashkelon, Ekron or Judah. All these tributary states have produced agricultural surplus – like wine, olive oil or grain – that could be exported. However, the situation in the Assyrian provinces Maggidû and Samerina was completely different. Recent archaeological surveys in Galilee and the Manasseh Highlands have shown a serious economic decline especially in the provinces of the Southern Levant that lasted till the Hellenistic period. Neither the Assyrians nor the Babylonians have been interested in a proper administration of these provinces.

An overview of the contributions of J. Louis (Lou) Martyn to Pauline scholarship, and a description of his legacy.

The Revelation of Thomas (ApkTh) is certainly one of the least appreciated apocryphal apocalypses. Known for a long time only by a reference in the Decretum Gelasianum, at the beginning of the 20th century few manuscripts portraying eschatological events were coincidentally discovered in Italian and South-German libraries. The text of the apocalypse itself, as well as its transmission, are factors which make it fascinating and simultaneously unique: The ApkTh is transmitted in three different Latin versions, each with diverse content. A common ground for all these witnesses (namely the “short form”, the “long form” and the “abbreviated form”) is the narration of single terrible events happening on seven days before Christ's arrival on the eighth. The “abbreviated form” comprises only the list embedded into other medieval scriptures, while the “short form” and the “long form” characterize the apocalypse as a revelation to Thomas given by Jesus. The “long form” additionally has a detailed prophetic introduction which contains insinuations to historical events of late antiquity. After examining the manuscripts and providing an overview of the content of Thomas, I will make some text-critical observations. At this point, I will also comment on a new manuscript recently discovered in Kassel, Germany, which can contribute to our understanding of the text's history of transmission. Finally I make some observations concerning the provenance of this underappreciated text.

Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Septuaginta-Unternehmen in Goettingen in 2008 resulted in some changes for future editions. These are discussed along with lessons learned in preparing the critical edition of Ecclesiastes for the Goettingen Septuaginta as well as general lessons in LXX Text Criticism.

The Emperor Claudius's letter in response to the conflict among the Jewish and non-Jewish Alexandrians (P. Lond. 1912) is extraordinary for the unique insight it offers into how the political status of Roman subjects was adjudicated from an imperial point of view. It is an extraordinary document that bears on the social history of Hellenistic Jewish communities in the Roman Empire. And since the circumstances of the religious communities of Alexandria are otherwise well attested, the background to the Emperor's response and their political implications can be traced in unusual detail. With an eye toward understanding the political dimensions of the Alexandrian communities' competing appeals to the Emperor, this paper proposes a different theoretical tool to understand the events there––the thought experiment called "the prisoner's dilemma." James Case, in his book Competition, explains the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD); He posits a scenario in which two criminals, apprehended during a robbery, are being interrogated separately to obtain a confession. If neither talks, both will be found guilty of possessing stolen property and will each serve a year behind bars; if one talks and the other remains silent, the one who talks will receive mild probation and the one who stays silent will receive a full five year sentence; if both talk, they will both serve three years each. The PD is a dynamic resource for understanding all kinds of competition and the strategies that result when two parties are competing, but the actions of each will bear on the outcome for the other. The PD models the way subjects in competition are compelled by circumstance to make decisions that are wrapped up in, and inescapably contingent upon, the decisions of one another. In this reading of Claudius's letter, the Jewish community and the Greek-speaking citizens of Alexandria both choose to talk when each community made an appeal to the Emperor, as reflected in the letter. Claudius's response, then, represents the outcome of both sides turning on one another in which both side loses to a certain degree. But tracing this strategy and its outcome also signals other possibilities available to these communities and, by extension, to the minority communities who lived throughout the provinces of the Roman East. The terms of PD being so explicitly reflected in the social history behind Claudius's letter, in short, tells us a great deal about the political game that all subjects had to play Applied to the fraught political context of 1st century Alexandria, the PD rephrases questions about Jewish experience under Rome, re-centering the venue for questions about Alexandrian Judaism on their competitive engagement on the interdependent cultural field of ancient, Roman Alexandria. The social historical realities that bear on Judaism, in this model, are inseparable from any conclusions we might pose about the evolution of Hellenistic Judaism under Rome––indeed it makes the political stakes of Roman rule wrapped up in a series of social strategies in which the moves made by Jews were never isolated from those of their peers.

The book of Jeremiah survives in two different forms—a shorter and presumably earlier form found in the Septuagint, and a longer form attested by the Masoretic Text. A comparison of the two forms provides relatively empirical evidence for how scribes expanded biblical books. Like the divining, scholarly scribes in the ancient Near East who formulated secondary interpretations of omens, the Jewish scribes responsible for transmitting the book of Jeremiah frequently expanded the book through the reapplication of existing oracles. In the case of Jeremiah, scribes reapplied oracles through a process of duplication, i.e. by copying an existing oracle and inserting it into a new section of Jeremiah. The earlier form of Jeremiah includes at least twenty-nine occasions of duplication, each of which marks a moment of reapplication. The later form of Jeremiah contains seven additional doublets. This paper analyzes the location of these doublets in Jeremiah and makes two significant observations. First, in several cases, the practice of duplication corresponds with what we could call repository building. This is to say, the book of Jeremiah contains several collections or repositories of similar material that are constructed by scribes in part out of duplicated material. Second, scribes use duplication to reinforce literary structures of the book. The expanding scribes were both attentive to the book’s structural markers and were aware of existing literary fault lines. These structural and revisional seams provided scribes suitable contexts in which to insert their duplicated material. In short, the placement of doublets in Jeremiah illustrates the role scribes played in the structuring and organization of the book. Duplication both assisted in the process of repository building and in the reinforcement of literary seams and structures.

Questions surrounding the existence of “free will” have often been considered central to early Christian competition, particularly in the second and third centuries. These explorations, however, have often been undertaken without adequate attention to different ways in which philosophically-oriented authors understood self-determination. This paper will consider how Tertullian and Bardaisan of Edessa offer two alternative ways of conceptualizing human autonomy, which themselves differ significantly from those of other heresiologists in the second and third centuries. While Clement and Origen of Alexandria articulated their theories of autonomy in the context of their polemic against gnosticizing Christians such as Basilides, Valentinus, and Heracleon, Tertullian and Bardaisan argued for the existence of free will in their disputes with Marcion. So much is commonly known; yet what, exactly, was at stake in these disputes is a question this paper will revisit. In what we know of Marcion’s writings, there is no evidence that Marcion himself participated in technical debates about the nature of autonomy. If, however, Marcion understood the origin of evil to derive from the demiurgic God, as our patristic sources maintain, then Marcion belongs, in certain respects, to a larger constellation of authors in antiquity, including the Stoics and the Platonists, who likewise understood evil to derive from non-human sources while nonetheless maintaining the existence of human autonomy. Both Tertullian and Bardaisan, in their anti-Marcionite polemic, offer different versions of articulating how moral evil has its origins in human, rather than divine, causes. Where they differ from other Christian authors who participated in debates about the relationship between human autonomy and divine providence is in the fact that they do not understand human autonomy to require that individual human beings be ultimately responsible for the fact that they have the characters they have. While Clement and Origen, in different respects, argue that the ascription of what modern philosophers refer to as “ultimate responsibility” is a requisite for the ascription of autonomy, Tertullian and Bardaisan have different ways of maintaining that human characters are formed by human beings without maintaining that any individual human being is ultimately responsible for the fact that he or she has the character that he or she has. Considering these different authors in their broader context helps us to appreciate the diverse views on self-determination early Christian authors argued for, and therefore move past the standard contrast of “free will versus determinism” that has often dominated explorations of early Christian heresiology.

This paper will offer some further reflections (and opportunity for discussion) of my recent book, A Journey of Two Psalms: The Reception of Psalms 1 & 2 in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) in the light of a further publication Psalms through the Centuries Volume Two, which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell some time in 2017. The latter is a reception-history commentary of the entire Psalter, psalm by psalm. In the first half of the SBL paper I shall consider the methodological challenges in writing about reception history of biblical texts, and in the second half, I shall consider some of the fruits of these labours with reference to the Psalms.

For centuries biblical texts have inspired artists to create and shape their own works. The way these works refer to biblical texts ranges from hidden allusions to explicit references, from references to biblical characters to re-narrations of biblical stories. Once readers recognize such references they will engage in an intertextual reading, were the texts unfold in a dialogic way. The discussion of intertextuality frequently focusses on the intertextual disposition of texts, that is recognizing and categorizing text-signals triggering an intertextual reading (e.g. Ben-Porat 1976; Edinburg 2010), and also on classifying the different kinds of intertextual relations (e.g. Genette 1983) and their function (e.g. transformation, transposition, imitation). However, such approaches usually do not pay particular attention to the intertextual reading process and the way texts overlap and dynamically create new meaning (Lachmann 1984). Hence, in this paper I will focus on the interactions of texts in reading processes. There are various ways biblical texts can interfere with literary works. Occasional allusions and quotations raise the readers’ awareness for biblical texts, they may perceive both texts side by side (cf. Bakhtin’s dialogism and heteroglossia) and constitute new meaning from this juxtaposition. They may, for example, take the biblical text as an argument and thus be convinced of resp. doubt a specific aspect, or they may appreciate the combination as an additional thought or just a flash of insight. The dialogic reading intensifies when the literary works draw more elaborately on biblical texts. Such works recreate the biblical texts for the eyes of their contemporary readers offering them a new approach to the biblical texts. The intertextual reading stimulated by such works bridges the chronological distance between their own time and biblical times, thus enabling the readers to see the biblical stories becoming transparent for their contemporary questions, and, vice versa, interpreting the artwork’s time in the light of the biblical text. In this way the worlds of the Bible and the literary work merge. There are no longer two distinct voices but they blend in the reading process. In order to (re)construct the process of such intertextual readings I will use blending theory (Fauconnier/Turner). This approach allows to parse complex figures of thought into single “mental spaces” and to describe their different interactions — based on frames, characters, or identities — in order to explain the new proposition (the blended space) such figures provide. If blending theory is applied to intertextual reading processes, it can provide new insights into how these processes develop. Subsequently, such an analysis will also help to reveal the blended space(s) intertextual readings create. On several examples from the literary reception of king Solomon I will show how this theory can be applied to describe the reader’s (re)constructions of Solomon in between the biblical and literary texts.

This paper focuses on the peculiar generic features observable in the four texts from the Nag Hammadi Codices that exhibit the characteristics, in whole or in part, of a letter: Letter of Peter to Philip, Eugnostos the Blessed, Treatise on the Resurrection, and the so-called Apocryphon of James. The character and extent of these texts’ involvement with the literary form of the “letter” (at least as we have heretofore understood it) appears varied and, at times, even haphazard: The most manifestly epistolary text is called a “treatise” (logos), the only text labeled explicitly as a “letter” looks something like an excerpt from an apocryphal Acts narrative, and the epistolary framework of James’ “secret book,” seems like an afterthought compared to the actual secret revelatory content. In what sense, then, are all of these texts “letters”? I argue that these texts make the most sense as “letters” when situated within the literature of late antique Egyptian monasticism. I focus on three aspects of the “letter” form in this milieu: (1) the remarkable extent of textual and generic instability within Egyptian monastic letter collections, as illuminated in recent studies: attribution is often in flux, letters are broken apart and recombined in various ways, excerpts from letters float into Apophthegmata and vice-versa, and texts labeled as “letters” also carry along with them paratextual information about the occasions on which they were spoken by the attributed writer; (2) the somewhat enigmatic use of the term epistolê as a title in corpus of Shenoute’s writings; and (3) the flexibility of the genre in more lengthy continuous texts, as illustrated by several “generic hybrids” from late antique Egypt that combine embedded letters with narrative and dialogue in ways very similar to the Letter of Peter to Philip and the Apocryphon of James. Against this background, the eclectic literary forms of these four Nag Hammadi texts become far less peculiar, and it becomes clear that certain epistolary features in these texts function to rhetorically delimit a privileged in-group.

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The photo of the body of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy, has springboarded an extraordinary level of global awareness about the contemporary refugee crisis and has galvanized Christian communities in Western nations to ask, what is our responsibility to refugees around the world. After the publication of that photo on September 2, 2015, as scholars researching forced displacement, my wife and I began receiving emails from friends asking, “what can we do?!” This paper is a partial response to their questions, focussing on an exegesis of Deut 10:17-19, read through the lens of a missional hermeneutic. The figure of the ger in Deuteronomy refers to a vulnerable person who is from outside of the core family: the ger is a dependant stranger. Typically in the ancient Near East displaced people were exploited as cheap labour and were often bonded as indentured-labourers or enslaved. In contemporary discourse Deut 10:17-19 is perhaps the most popular text for displaying the rich ethic of inclusivism for refugees and immigrants that is held within in the Hebrew Bible. “Love,” ’hb, appears three times in related assertions: Yahweh loves Israel, Yahweh loves the stranger, and Israel is to love the stranger. “Love” references covenant and kinship. Israel is to love the ger because Yahweh loves the ger, even as Yahweh loves Israel. The significance of these stipulations is that the stranger is included within the kinship grouping of Israel and of her divine kinsperson. Israel’s love for the stranger is to be conceived of in terms of a permanent covenant commitment, of living together as family, and of emotional connection. I am not aware of any writing, whether popular or scholarly, that probes into the contribution of Deut 10:17-19 to Deuteronomy’s corpus of judicial law for the stranger. Deut 10:17b-18 characterises Yahweh as the guarantor of just judicial processes for the vulnerable stranger. This observation is especially relevant in light of contemporary efforts of some western governments to hamper refugee application processes, in contravention to international conventions, e.g. Australia and Canada. A missional reading of scripture highlights how Deuteronomy’s ethic of inclusivism aimed to shape the Old Covenant people as a contrast society (Gehard Lohfink) that enfolded the vulnerable stranger. We ourselves read Deut 10:17-19 as a community that is caught up in God’s story for his world. Deut 10:17-19 prompts Christ followers to shift the question from “what can we do to fix the refugee crisis?” to “what needs fixing in Christian responses to refugees?” We need to change our conceptual framework from churches engaging in random acts of charity to sustained encounters of mutual transformation amongst sojourners and to public advocacy. The church must inquire: in what ways can we be family for the displaced? And in how can we mobilise our society to offer a radical welcome for asylum seekers? This study reflects some of the results of my PhD dissertation, “Family for the Displaced: a New Paradigm for the Ger in Deuteronomy.”

Resurrection is a fundamental theme of the Koran, which it mentions explicitly in a very large number of verses. But it also makes to this subject many allusions that never had been highlighted to the present day, either by scholars or specialists. These subtle informations are related to all aspects of the phenomenon, but they focuses in particular on the manner among which humans will be 'awakened' from the sleep of death for the last Judgment. Several biblical passages are put in contribution to this subject, among others the episode of back to the life of the birds of Abraham (Koran 2, 262, in reference to Genesis XV, 7-15), as well as many passages of the New Testament (in particular the Gospel of John). Indeed, this issue cannot be dealt with in depth without taking account of the role of Jesus as fulfilling the true contents of the Torah (Quran 3: 50; 5: 46, in reference to Matthiew 5, ) and constituting by his own person "a science for the Hour" (Koran 43, 61). Apart from this reading, it is unthinkable to grasp the scope of the Koranic arguments according to which some of these human beings, after they returned to consciousness are going to move themselves towards the ineffable light of the Resurrection in which they will be recreated for living in the world of future, in other words for their entry to paradise, while others, under a deliberate choice, will remain captives to an already shattered world, as advocated by I Enoch 58, 3. Such an approach implies involvement of all the Koranic processes of Intertextuality: allusions, use of hermeneutical thresholds, puns between Arabic and Hebrew or some other ancient languages (especially Syriac). In addition, it allows us to take the true measure of the place taken by Resurrection in the Koranic text and to understand how it intends to show that this subject was already present, despite appearances, in several key passages in the Old Testament in the light of the life of Jesus, thus solving one of the most important causes of dissension between Jews and Christians in its day.

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Recently, many scholars have attempted to detail the nexus between Jews and Syriac Christians through careful readings of the Babylonian Talmud. While this approach has proven fruitful, there remains a corpus of texts that is untapped, a body of literature with more explanatory power. This artificial corpus consists of the textual artifacts of Jewish-Christian interaction in Late Antique Mesopotamia. It includes the Targum of Proverbs, a Jewish version of Aesop’s Fables, an alphabetized medical treatise, and a collection of deuterocanonical biblical literature. All of these texts originate in a Christian Syriac original, and were read, redacted, and recirculated in the Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities of Babylonia. In addition to these texts, the corpus of Jewish and Christian magic bowls provides points of illumination not only with regard to the contact between their producers, but between their consumers as well. That is, the magic bowls (both physically and textually) furnish us with insight into Jewish-Christian interaction and perception among both elite and popular strata. In this paper, I shall investigate the social milieu in which the authors of these texts worked. In this enquiry, I will utilize both information provided by the texts themselves (linguistic and contextual), and the information provided us by outside sources regarding these texts. Unlike the constructed parallels between pericopae in the Babylonian Talmud and Syriac Christian literature, these texts and magic bowls are concrete touchpoints at which Christians and Jews, living side by side in Late Antique Mesopotamia, met, read, and influenced one another.

This lecture reviews the new Genesis fascicle of the Biblia Hebraica Quinta and evaluates its representation of the text of Masoretic manuscripts. The Tiberian Masoretic text as presented in manuscripts is not a uniform body but offers a wide range of grammatical and orthographic variations, which constitute a challenge for the new edition. The perception of these issues allows a new perspective at the Hebrew grammar and the text of the Hebrew Bible. The lecture suggests ways of representation of peculiarities of the Masoretic text which are worth to be considered for the BHQ Manual Edition.

The Qur’an mentions a change in Mu?ammad’s qibla (2:142), which early traditions understand as replacing Jerusalem as the site toward which Muslims should orient for prayer with the Ka‘ba in Mecca. In the Qur’an, the qibla serves as an identity marker that separates between the ahl al-kitab (People of the Book) and Mu?ammad’s community (2:145). Some ?adith even see in the change a shift from facing the liturgical direction of the Jews towards that of Abraham (e.g. Ibn ‘Abbas in al-?abari). Jurists would come to see the incident as one proof of the doctrine of naskh (abrogation), namely that God can exchange one ruling for another (e.g. Abu Ubayd al-nasikh wal-mansukh). However, the changed qibla also entered Muslim exegetical and theological polemics as a regular symbol of God’s abrogation of the prior dispensations (those of the peoples of the book) for that of Islam. 10th century Jewish writers expended great energy to reject the notion that God’s law would ever change (e.g. Sa‘adya kitab al-amanat; al-Qirqisani Kitab al-Anwar), and the debates around the qibla left their impression in this Judeo-Arabic corpus. This paper will explore the qibla as a marker of identity-boundaries between Muslims and Jews in the polemical writings of Saadya Gaon, Yefet b. ‘Eli, Daniel al-Qumisi and other 10th c. Jewish figures. Special attention will be paid to refutations of the claim that Jews, too, changed their qibla before the building of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Ultimately, it will be argued that Muslim-Jewish conflict over the qibla in the 10th c. reflects the dual nature of polemical literature: it indicates both a divide between two groups, but also a shared epistemic and cultural context.

The structure of a double introduction for the book of Judges has been widely accepted by critics using historical-critical and synchronic approaches. This framework divides the introduction into two parts—1:1-2:5 which narrates Israel’s military failure and 2:6-3:6 which expounds their religious failure. Nevertheless, there have been recent moves away from this standard division. This paper seeks to assess the arguments for and against the double-introduction structure. Important issues in resolving the structure are discussed such as, (1) whether to include 2:1-5 with 1:1-31 or with 2:6-3:6; (2) at what point Yahweh’s speech ends in 2:11-23; and (3) the function of the repetition of material from Joshua in this section. An alternative structure for Judges 1:1-3:6 is proposed which revolves around the problem of the persistent presence of “the remaining nations.”

Determining the date and setting of New Testament documents is fraught with difficulty and frequently yields radically different results. The problems are even more evident when the authorship is uncertain or contested. In the case of the Epistle of James, proposals have ranged all the way from viewing it as a pre-Christian, Jewish document to regarding it as a composition of the second century CE designed to serve as an introduction to the other general epistles. The standard approach to determining date and setting is to examine external and internal evidence and then work from a process of deduction. Most elements, however, are open for considerable debate and, typically, one or two items are seized upon and regarded as decisive. At that point, the process usually shifts from deduction to seeking to support the preferred answer, and very rarely is any serious effort made to oppose that preferred answer. This often has a great deal to do with the very human desire to seek confirmation of our opinions. I propose to approach the problem from the other end: posing a hypothesis and then testing it to determine how robust it may be and, especially, where its break points are. The hypothesis I propose to put “on the rack” is a quite radically early one: that the Epistle of James was written in the context of the very early years of the Jerusalem church and that it is, therefore, the earliest of the New Testament writings. In seeking to “break” the hypothesis, important insights about the setting of the epistle can be gained.

The narrative of the temptation and fall of Adam (and Eve) in Genesis, chapters 2 & 3 formed the basis for at least three separate interpretations in the recently disputed set of ‘Donatist’ sermons, all part of the ‘Escorial’ collection (Leroy 1994). In this paper, I wish to examine critically these three homilies, under a provisional ‘Donatist’ interpretation. Based in part upon the work of Maureen Tilley (1997) and especially Alden Bass (2014, 2016), I acknowledge the prevailing motif of ‘spiritual warfare’ present in the three homilies, which they share with the entire set. In addition, however, I consider two elements worthy of recognition that notably appear in the three homilies at issue: first, the legal-moral framework established by way of precise biblical citations chosen (Gen 2:15-17, 3:15) as well as Latin terminology at work; and second, the alternating use of typology, including the Christological (hom. 2) and the moral or parenetic-matryological (hom. 3-4). These three homilies on the Genesis account of Adam and Eve demonstrate a consistent interpretative outlook within the homiliarum, and could well be identified as ‘Donatist’ in origin based upon available evidence, notwithstanding the recent doubts as to their authenticity advanced by François Dolbeau (2016). Yet even within a broadly Donatist perspective, some variation at the level of typology nevertheless may be detected. I aim primarily to identify the parameters established within these typologies, and in a final section to offer comparison of these ‘Donatist’ readings of Genesis with that of Augustine of Hippo, specifically on the question of peccatum originale and the Pauline text Rom 5:12-21 as it appeared during his anti-Donatist exegesis and polemics. Although the Christological typology of hom. 2 resembles Augustine’s own appropriation of Christ as the New Adam, the moral typology of hom. 3 and 4 appears to diverge considerably.

Dung (domen) symbolizes utter destruction, reduction and flattening of nations, rulers and populations to an excreted substance, cast out of the body as a symbol of revulsion. But when associated with God’s will, it serves as a powerful metaphor of God’s rejection and condemnation of evil-doers. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. What can be worse than dogs devouring the flesh of a former Queen, Jezebel (Izevel), with her carcass “thinged” into excrement! Cognitive Metaphor Theory helps us understand the four direct references to dung in Jeremiah (8:2; 9:21; 16:4; 25:33) and in II Kings (9:37). Since dung can be used as fertilizer (zevel) one could posit that Jeremiah prophesizes a similar fate for King Jehoiakim of Judah whose line will end and whose corpse also be exposed (Jer. 36:30), dragged out and left lying outside the gates (22:19). This will be the fate of the nation, depicted often as female, with the earth strewn with slain bodies, turned into dung (Jer. 25:33). The metaphors that Jeremiah uses often refer to Israel/Judah as a woman who will be flattened, like Jezebel as punishment for worshipping other gods/lovers (Jer. 22). Jeremiah conflates the sinning temptress/ woman with the fate of Jehoiakim, the people and the land. By using the metaphor of dung, which alludes to Jezebel, associated with Jezreel, the prophet makes clear that these sinners deserve their fate for having betrayed the male god, and therefore are to be rejected/ejected as dung is from a body.

In Rom 3:4, Paul cites Ps 50:6 (LXX), posing an interpretive difficulty for scholars. The problem centers upon how Paul uses Ps 50:6 within the argument found in Rom 3:1-8. Scholars propose two views. The first view holds Paul is defending God’s right to judge the Jews (Thomas R. Schreiner, Douglas J. Moo, Mark Seifrid, William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam), while the second maintains Paul is affirming God’s faithfulness despite Israel’s unfaithfulness (N. T. Wright, Robert Jewett, James D. G. Dunn, Joseph A. Fitzmyer). In this paper, I propose a third option. Paul is alluding to the Davidic Covenant in order to account for the judging and saving features of God’s faithfulness in his current dealings with Israel and the Gentiles. I will defend my thesis by demonstrating that first, this reading best answers the four questions posed by the interlocutor in vv. 1,3, 5, and 9. Second, this reading is supported by the context of the passages Paul uses in vv. 10-18 as well as second temple texts which address similar concerns. Third, this reading is supported in Romans 3:21-26, which expounds what was said elliptically in Romans 3:4.

The paper attempts to offer a methodological and factual discussion of Judaean religion in the Persian period, using the Aramaic documents from the Judaean community at Elephantine, the recently published documents of Judaean exiles in Babylonia (the so-called Al-Ya?udu documents) and Aleida Assmann’s article “Canon and Archive” (2008) as points of departure. The paper builds on the presupposition that many discussions of Judaean religion in the Persian period are, in one way or another, centred around Jerusalem and the Second Temple. In my opinion, the “Jerusalem centeredness” has become a somewhat canonised part of the history of Judaean religion. In the religio-historical canon, Jerusalem and the Jerusalem temple are in the centre. In my opinion, one of the canonised presuppositions often serving as the foundation for discussions of Judaean religion is the idea that Jerusalem was important for all Judaeans in the Persian period. ¶ The canonised “Jerusalem centeredness” may be observed in several ways. i) Mostly, both biblical and religio-historical studies use the biblical narratives as the “Great Code” for presenting and discussing biblical-theological and religio-historical issues. The “Great Code” emerging from the HB / OT is often reflected in the overall interpretative framework of Judaean religion of the Persian period. Thus, works on the history of Judaean religion do not seldom present the religious characteristics of the Persian period on the basis of theological concepts, thought patterns, periodizations etc. that ultimately stem and are coined by the biblical literature. ii) In general, the use of Jerusalem as “the point of departure” and “lookout point” does not seem to be in need of any positive arguments, but is very often simply taken for granted. It is part of the mindset of quite a few scholars. ¶ In this paper, I will argue that the Aramaic documents from Elephantine offer evidence for the religio-historical “facts on the ground”, meaning the actual religious practice of a group that identified itself as Judaean. Similarly, although to a much more limited degree, the Al-Ya?udu documents do potentially the same. In biblical scholarship these corpora of texts can and should function as (historical) archives in A. Assmann’s sense of the word. As she shows, an archive has the potential to correcting or even revising the canon. In my opinion, the Elephantine and Al-Ya?udu documents represent corrective archives to the “canonised” presuppositions of the history of Judaean religion—the “Jerusalem centeredness”—that we often find in scholarly contributions to the topic. Assmann introduces a dichotomy between canon, i.e. the actively circulated memory that keeps the past present, and archive, represented by the information that preserves the past as past. Up against the Jerusalem-centred and canonised image of Judaean religion, the documents from Elephantine and Al-Ya?udu have the potential of correcting the canonised presuppositions reflected in many scholarly discussions on the history of Judaean religion of the Persian period—or even revising it somewhat by showing that the worship of the god YHW(H) indeed was possible outside of and even without Jerusalem as its centre.

This paper uses three of Gregory of Nyssa’s bioi (biographical narratives) to examine how a fourth century Christian author creatively adapts stock narrative features of the biographical thanatos scene to a particular didactic purpose: training readers to perform complex interpretive tasks, ultimately preparing them to interpret Scripture. The paper concentrates on close readings of short scenes in De Vita Moysis, De Vita Sanctae Macrinae, and De Vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi and briefly compares the narrative structure and thematic content of these scenes to representative examples from classical, Hellenistic Jewish, and other early Christian texts. With reference to recent work by scholars of classical biography and scholars of Gregory’s theology, I argue that Gregory uses retrospective storytelling after each thanatos (death)-scene to reflect on the Christian interpreter’s ability to perceive traces of eschatological, resurrected life in the earthly life of a spiritual exemplar. Modeling such retrospection and insisting on perceptible continuity between earthly and resurrection life, Gregory tackles the larger paradox of physical corruptibility and the incorruptibility of the soul, an issue central to the concept of a blessed Christian afterlife that follows a life of virtue. In each text, he brings the readers’ focus onto the importance of symbols and allusions for interpreting an exemplar’s death in the context of resurrection and incorruptibility. The paper concludes with some remarks on the parallels between interpretive strategies modeled in the post-thanatos scenes and strategies Gregory recommends for Scriptural interpretation in the bioi and his wider corpus. In the course of the paper, I engage with both ancient biographical texts and contemporary scholarship. Turning first to the handbooks of rhetorical exercises (progymnasmata) that would have shaped the education of Gregory and other elite Christians of the fourth century, I begin by laying out the typical structure of a narrative thanatos-scene. A brief survey of examples from Plato’s Phaedo, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Jewish testamentary literature, the canonical gospels, and Athanasius’ Life of Antony helps to illustrate that Gregory’s bioi use an atypical pattern of narration and help justify the study: why is his narrative form different, and how does it relate to the intended function of his bioi? Then, alongside my own close readings, I refer to recent works by Derek Krueger, Virginia Burrus, and Michael Stuart Williams, who all engage with Gregory’s biographical technique and address possible functions of his biographical writing. I recognize their helpful contributions but argue that we gain additional insights that help to explain his atypical thanatos scenes if we connect the post-thanatos passages in Gregory’s bioi to the clearly defined didactic function of the texts (which he lays out in each biographical prooemium) and to principles of Scriptural interpretation he describes in the De Vita Moysis, in his wider corpus, and which are discussed by Gregory scholars Ilaria Ramelli and Morwenna Ludlow. The paper will contribute to a larger scholarly discussion about early Christian biography’s pedagogical and/or catechetical role.

Excavations in the peripheries of the Assyrian empires have brought to light a large number of archaeological remains directly linked with the Neo-Assyrian (c. 900-611 BCE) presence in these areas. However, to read societal change and transformation, and individual customs and habits becomes even more speculative, when written records are missing. To help shed light on this issue, this paper will focus on the faunal remains from cremation burials and various rooms excavated from the Neo-Assyrian palace at Tušhan, a provincial capital city located in southeastern Turkey. Cremated human remains were deposited in rectangular pits in the open palace’s courtyard while the palace was still in use. Equipped with a rich inventory of Assyrian luxury goods, the deposition of these animal bones is a direct reflection of ritual behaviour in connection to funerary rites, rituals and sacrifice. Additionally, several rooms in the palace revealed faunal remains that highlight elite dietary preferences. Unsurprisingly, the faunal assemblage from the graves stands apart from the assemblage throughout the rest of the Assyrian building, however new insights were made from both analyses that were unexpected. This paper will examine the nature of the faunal remains from these different contexts and highlights consumption patterns, sacrifices and overall cuisine within an Assyrian Imperial palace.

Scholars have long sought evidence of interaction and clashes between late antique Jews and Christians. Many early Christians criticized Jews and Judaism, though their writings offer scant evidence of direct engagement. References in classical rabbinic literature to Jesus or Christianity are rare and murky, and suggest only rudimentary knowledge. Reconstructions of even indirect clashes have often been speculative. For example, I. Yuval, E. Kessler, and others have highlighted biblical verses about which Jews and Christians seemed to disagree. This approach presumes some in each group had detailed knowledge of the others’ texts. However, the approach is weakened by a focus on minor exegetical details, a lack of plausible means by which competing interpretations might have been learned, and unlikely assumptions of knowledge of outsiders’ theology. By contrast, in order to demonstrate the possibility of clashes I propose a methodology I call theological apologetics. I will illustrate this with selections from the Midrash on Lamentations, Justin, and Origen. These evince a shared interest in a place and an event—the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE—and they emerged from a shared place and period of time—the land of Israel in the second to the fourth centuries. All grapple extensively with the devastation of this sacred space, interpreting it in order to defend their competing claims to be the sole people of God. A theological apologetic requires that the authors have been willing and able to engage (even indirectly) the views of outsiders. These rabbis and early Christians were powerfully motivated to defend the interpretations they gave to the epochal event because nothing less than their respective self-identities were at stake. They viewed the meaning of the destruction as a zero-sum dispute. In particular, these Christians, more than nearly any others, argued that the destruction manifested divine wrath against sinful Jews, and constructed defenses of Gentile Christianity’s legitimacy upon it. These claims may have prompted some midrashic rabbis’ striking defensiveness, in rejecting an otherwise common rabbinic belief that Jewish suffering is evidence of Jewish transgression. Also, theological apologetics require a plausible historical and geographical context. These arguments predicated on the destruction, which are comparatively extensive and at times without precedent, suggest exposure not just to the physical evidence of the destruction but to others with competing explanations of it. One need not carefully read another community’s texts or understand their sophisticated internal arguments or interpretations to feel compelled to respond. It may have been enough to hear public preaching or informal reports to ascertain the threat of competing views. Thus, by focusing on theological claims I do not presume that outsiders were conversant with members of the other religious community or their texts. Because of the profound significance of the destruction to these early Christians and rabbis, their interpretations of the event offer an opportunity for demonstrating a more rigorous and convincing methodology of late antique apologetics. After illustrating one such application, I will conclude with reflections on applying this methodology to other contexts.

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Students today are digital natives. Most have spent significant time immersed in video games, smart devices, and engaging technologies. These students are inherently comfortable and capable of navigating complex visual and spatial environments while processing vast amounts of information. Most academic teaching today, however, relies heavily (and at times, exclusively) on textual and logical argument to engage the learners. This can lead to an inordinate focus on WHAT we are teaching while disregarding WHO we are teaching or HOW we are teaching them. As educators, we can do a better job of bridging the technological gap between academic content and our students' learning preferences. Immersive technologies can help bridge that gap to increase a “sense of time and space” for the students of the Bible. This presentation will “practice what it preaches” by demonstrating examples of a free and easy-to-use interactive 3D New Testament Jerusalem tool that can enhance learner engagement and understanding of various New Testament passages, with specific emphasis on passages centered on the Herodian temple.

This paper will consider the silence of Susanna in the Greek versions of Daniel, and the relationship between her silence in the textual tradition and her infamous history as an object of sight outside it; I also draw on the long history of interpretation which parallels Susanna’s silence to the silence of Joseph and of Jesus. I argue that Susanna’s oral agency in the story is achieved through her own deployment of silence, and that her timed silences even allow her to control the visual fields of the text.

Abstract In the Hebrew Bible, Leviticus 21:16-24 and Exodus 4:10-17 involve the issue of disability and religious leadership in ancient Israel. In this paper, I argue the narrative in Exodus 4 offers a more helpful and ethical perspective for addressing disability and leadership in faith communities today. The legal material in Leviticus 21 is an ablist approach, operating on the binary of “abled” and “disabled” bodies. This text lists conditions that constitute “disabled” bodies and disqualifies such persons from service as priests in ancient Israel. God is shown as limiting religious service to male descendants of Aaron with “abled” bodies, thus privileging a particular class. On the other hand, the narrative in Exodus 4:10-17 offers an ethical approach to the challenge of disability and religious leadership today. This text holds that conditions socially constructed as “disabilities” are actually different kinds of human bodies. Since these bodies are created by God, all humans are qualified for divine service. God is depicted as open and accommodating with Moses, providing necessary tools and support for Moses to serve as a leader for Israel. After exploring these two texts, I examine their ethical and theological implications for today. The U.S. Supreme Court case, Hosanna Tabor v. EEOC, focused on issues on disability and religious leadership. I propose that the Exodus 4 text is a more just model for involving persons with disabilities in the leadership of faith communities.

The scrolls sectarians imagine themselves as living lives of “holy perfection,” and they present themselves as “the perfect of the way.” A variety of “perfection structures” appear in the sectarian scrolls, especially including the penal codes, the calendars, and rules for ritual purity. The Qumran cemetery, too, can be examined in terms of the concept of perfection and material structures in support of such perfection. Given the inevitable infelicities of real life, these imagined states of perfection offer interesting food for thought: what does it mean to live perfectly in an imperfect world? How much of the imperfection of everyday life must be ignored, reprocessed, or transformed, in order to exist in a state of holy perfection? What would a sectarian see, think, hear, or feel with respect to perfection, and how might such perceptions jostle with other significant cognitive modes (for example the sectarian self-consciousness articulated in the Hodayot and other sectarian texts and so vividly identified by Carol Newsom as the “masochistic sublime”)? From a cognitive perspective, the binary “perfect/imperfect” offers opportunities to think about valuation and binaries themselves, as well as about notions of completeness and incompleteness as they are (or might be perceived to be!) hardwired into human consciousness. A variety of inference systems (Boyer, Religion Explained) may underlie this particular binary. The experiment of bringing cognitive approaches to bear on these notions of perfection in the scrolls has both conceptual and highly practical implications. In and of itself a cognitive approach is interesting. In more practical terms, this paper seeks to explore the possibility that cognitive science may help scrolls scholars to address the perennial and frustrating gap between the literary/material evidence and our own conceptions of the social world in which they developed. What tools and explanations might cognitive science provide to help us better understand these “perfection structures” and their place in sectarian thought? Do these explanations help us to close the problematic gap between what the scrolls texts say and what we imagine scrolls sectarians might have actually been doing? Or does their contribution instead lie in explanations that are more sweeping and perhaps less pragmatic?

Aland and Aland's "Twelve Basic Rules for Text Criticism" include in part that "Criticism of the text must always begin from the evidence of the manuscript tradition" and "Internal criteria can never be the sole basis for a critical decision". These rules, however, are inconsistent with the practices of text criticism in the study of the texts of other religious traditions and other text-interested academic disciplines. Using manuscript evidence as the sine qua non of establishing the oldest text virtually assure the acceptance of corrupted readings that have been influenced by interpolations that have not left a mark on the manuscript tradition. Building on the work of William Walker, I consider not only the implications of this limited view of the reconstruction of texts, but also compare how internal evidence is weighed in New Testament scholarship to methodological positions in other textually interested fields. Having established a double-standard for the acceptance of internal evidence as a basis for establishing an oldest reading of the text, I consider how conscious and subconscious biases have led scholarship to treat similar problems differently and have injected the study of the New Testament with a (crypto)theological methodological framework. Primary materials used for this critique will include Pauline materials and their subsequent treatment in the literature.

Priestly literature is a major component of the Torah. Crucial issues in the current debate on the formation of the Torah and the Prophets are the existence or inexistence of a Priestly Document, whether or not it is a continuous and self-contained narrative or merely a number of redactional layers. Taking a maximalist position to the Priestly Document (Pg Priesterschrift Grundschicht), I use the Book of Joshua to demonstrate the existence of a full-blown Pg, arguing that Joshua transmits the conclusion of the grand narrative from Creation to Canaan. As such, Joshua is a source for the history of the Torah as a cultural artifact of the Persian era.

How should we interpret the image of Jonah reclining naked under the vine as it appears on third and fourth century sarcophagi? This is a question that has haunted the exegesis of early Christian visual representation for years. Episodes from the story of Jonah are among the earliest recognizable Christian images and often appear in a narrative cycle consisting of three scenes: 1) Jonah standing on or cast off the ship; 2) Jonah being swallowed or regurgitated by the big fish; 3) Jonah reclining under the vine. This paper addresses the iconography of the last scene. Jonah, as he is depicted under the vine, assumes a recumbent position, naked, with one arm crooked over his head. There is general consensus among scholars that Jonah’s posture is modeled on a classical prototype from Roman art, the figure of Endymion as he lies asleep awaiting his lover, Selene. It is curious, however, given the intensely erotic mise en scène of Endymion sarcophagi, that early Christians would appropriate an overtly sexual figure to represent a prophet from the Hebrew Bible as a type for Christ. Yet the romance of Endymion and Selene is not the only scene that would have been recognizable in the iconography of recumbent Jonah. Ariadne assumes the same position when Dionysus finds her and makes her his lover after she is abandoned by Theseus. Similarly, images of Bacchic revelry and so-called erotic art, which betoken the act of lovemaking, also feature individuals in this same pose. In this course of this paper I assess possible meanings of the Jonah typology as it appears on fourth century Christian sarcophagi. More specifically, I plan to examine ways of looking at this image by casting a focused eye toward the inherent eroticism of the iconography. Previous interpretations of recumbent Jonah have taken care to tone down or dismiss the eros inherent in the image, yet the figure of Jonah emulated a Roman cultural expression of eros previously manifest in the visual representation of the erotic scene between Endymion and Selene and/or Ariadne and Dionysus. However, this is not to suggest that there is an unbroken continuity between these representations, but to note that the earliest representations gave way to an organic development of meaning and visual exegesis. The pose, as it appears on sarcophagi, whether typified by Jonah, Endymion, or Ariadne, signals a relationship between mortals and the divine, which expresses a divine love as eschatological fulfillment. Like both Dionysus and Ariadne, the scene of recumbent Jonah also implies a divine lover. This lover, I will argue, is Christ.

The purpose of my paper is to offer a reading of the Lord’s Prayer through a particular perspective of beggars in the 1st century Roman Empire and to demonstrate how beggars could have negotiated with this text and could have perceived it as both dehumanizing and dignifying. Such reading allows me to explore how someone, whose life was shaped by the conditions of extreme poverty in the Roman Empire, could have constructed ambiguous meanings of this gospel text. This paper challenges our construct of “the poor” as a homogenous group and makes room for the interpretative voice of some among the poor, i.e. the beggars, in our academic discourse.

Typology in the Matrix of Biblical Interpretation in Second Temple Judaism

The issue of scriptural colonialism has been widely discussed in terms of Christian missionary movements as part of the Western colonial project, as represented by Sugirtharaja who demonstrates how the Bible has been utilized to serve the Western colonial project in Asia. Rethinking the conjunction of missionary activities, colonialism, and the Bible, this paper will explore how the biblical prophetic tradition that claims imperial powers as God’s agents has been exploited for American colonialism through missionary activities in Korean modern history and attempt to reinterpret the related biblical texts through postcolonial biblical criticism.

In Matthew 12.22-37 (and pars), the confrontation between the Pharisees and Jesus reaches fever pitch and Jesus pronounces over them the judgment of the unforgivable sin; namely, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. This saying has perplexed biblical commentators and theologians alike, as evidenced by the myriad conflicting interpretations of the episode in the literature. Reading this text through the lens of a biblical and Trinitarian Spirit-Christology provides a key interpretive paradigm by which to make full sense of this Messianic disclose episode within the Gospel narratives as a whole.

The paper will investigate the role of the nations in the Book of the Twelve. Using a decidedly diachronic perspective we will investigate how both, individual nations will be used in the shape of the biblical book (and of the Book of the Twelve in general). As several of the oracles against foreign nations originate on the basis of actual historical knowledge and will later be transformed these passages from the prophetic books offer a “literary anchor” for the reconstruction of the biblical book as well as for the shape of Judean identity.

The Kebrä Nägäst (‘The Glory of Kings’), essentially a compendium of material(s) circulated in different forms in the medieval period, is a highly respected book that is regarded as a kind of national epic giving the official version of the origin of the ‘Solomonic dynasty’ in Ethiopia. Notwithstanding its discussion of 10th c. BCE events, its Coptic source and other scholarly assumptions proposed so far regarding its dates and origin, this short paper proposes the argument that both internal and external evidence suggests the final compilation and appropriation of the book is more properly located during the reign of negus Amdä ??yon (1314–44) and not, as has been previously argued, in the era of Yekuno Amlak (1270-85). The paper also argues that the K?brä Nägäst is primarily designed and compiled in the northern T?gre area in the 14th c. AD as a political propaganda of legitimacy in the struggle against the contesting Zag?e and the newly emerging ruling class of Amhara chieftains. The study strengthens its argument by identifying important historical and political changes that support this claim as analysed from sources like D?gg?a, the Gädlä Täklä Haymanot and the Chronicles of Amdä ??yon.

In his thorough analysis of petitions and litigation in Roman Egypt, Benjamin Kelly argues that Roman legal practice in the provinces exercised a kind of informal social control over the population by promoting—and forcing the populace to engage with—certain ideologies that reinforced Roman authority. In these Egyptian petitions to Roman officials one finds with frequency two kinds of discourse: (1) “rule of law” language which attempts to constrain the official by reference to binding precedent and (2) euergetic language which depicts the official as a patron or saviour of the community. These discourses no doubt influenced provincial populations, even if they did not adopt them wholesale (Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chapter 5). In this talk, I locate tannaitic texts (written during this same time period of more ad hoc Roman provincial courts) which debate these ideologies from the perspective of imagining the ideal (rabbinic) judge. I argue that when placed in its Roman context, these debates are revealed to be less about abstract notions of legal formalism vs social justice and more about the possibilities and limits of legal power from the perspective of those who are politically disempowered.

In this paper, I use DATR to model network morphology at the paradigm level in Koine Greek. In particular, I focus my attention on adjectives in order to demonstrate how this form of computing can create a host of paradigms in a relatively short amount of time. Along the way, I discuss concepts central to DATR such as hierarchy, inheritance (default and multiple), generalizations, classes, and overrides. I show that DATR has the potential to not only to save time, but to also reveal morphological connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.

“Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of Hosts” (Mal 3:7). Except for minor variations the same oracle can be found in Zech 1:3 as well. In the book of Zechariah the prophet’s own generation is said to have returned to the Lord (Zech 1:6b), thus preparing the way for the Lord to return and to come to his people (cf. Zech 1:16; 8:3, cf. also, e.g., Zech 2:14). In contrast to the book of Zechariah, in the book of Malachi the present generation has not returned to the Lord yet, and the imperatives in Mal 3:10 show that the Lord is awaiting the future return of the children of Jacob. Read against the background of First Zechariah (Zech 1–8) the fact that the people’s and the Lord’s return is (again) a future matter indicates that the situation of hopeful expectations, as expressed in First Zechariah, has changed. Comprising different aspects, the issue of the Lord’s return also includes the question of the Lord’s presence. In the preceding disputation speech (Mal 2:17–3:5) the question of the Lord’s presence is addressed explicitly: “Where is the God of justice?” (Mal 2:17). While God is apparently experienced as being absent, the following speech of God gives the answer that he is sending his messenger to clear the way before him and that the Lord will suddenly come to his temple (Mal 3:1). Whereas Mal 3:1 is related to the nearby future (cf., e.g., the use of a futurum instans participle in Mal 3:1aa), proclaiming the coming of the messenger of the covenant and the coming of the Lord, the next verses (Mal 3:2–5) resonate with the theme of the Day of the Lord, thus opening up a further, eschatological dimension. The last two units of Malachi (Mal 3:13–21, 22–24) elaborate on this topic. Being concerned with synchronic and diachronic aspects, this presentation seeks to examine different facets of the issue of the Lord’s presence and absence in the book of Malachi and its theological and historical background.

The paper will present the preliminary notes on a papyrus recently discovered in a Library. The Greek text preserves a passage relating to the Book of Watchers: 1Enoch 17:1-5. The discussion will be focused on the decipherment.

Joel Hamme’s paper argues that there is a consistent rhetoric that gives unity to Pss 52-63 that claims that the slanderous enemies are wicked and worthy of punishment, whereas the supplicant trusts in the LORD. Because of this trust, the LORD should destroy the supplicant’s enemies. This could indicate that a major concern of The Second Davidic Psalter was to protect the faithful from the negative effects of slander, also a major concern in a number of Mesopotamian ritual prayers. Psalms 52-55 depict the supplicant’s enemies as evil-doers who not only do not trust God, but are in active opposition to God, and are thus worthy of destruction. In contrast, the supplicant trusts in God in whom they find refuge. Psalms 54-55 form a bridge between 52-55 and 56-63, as the characterization of the enemies as ones who do not trust in God disappears, and they focus on the supplicant’s trust of God in the face of personal and national enemies. The prevalence of language that describe the enemies’ tongues and swords and brandishing weapons (52:2; 55:21; 57:4; 58:7; 59:7) is suggestive that one of the supplicant’s concerns is slander, as is the prevalence of deceit, reproach and gloating. This brings this collection of laments and prayers of retribution into the orbit of Mesopotamian prayers that call for protection from slander and the destruction of its perpetrators on the one hand, and “Sins of the Tongue,” mentioned in šurpu.

Iconographic representations of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus, usually display deep sadness on her face, as famously illustrated in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Mater Dolorosa is integral to the narrative of the passion of Christ in the gospels and continues to be an important of theological tradition for Catholics and Protestants a like. When she is not depicted as explicitly grieving, she displays a solemn posture as a virgin mother based on Isa 7:14 LXX or as the Savior’s bearer based on 45:8 Vulg. This weighty Marian iconography provides a backdrop against which a gentle smile on her face never fails to attract attention. Since the nineteenth century the smiling Virgin Mary has been attested with a greater frequency than before, inviting a possible connection with changing perspectives on womanhood. However, a close look reveals that the idea of a smiling Mary has been a steady traditum from the beginning. The Visitation in Luke features a pronounced mention of “exuberance” (agalliasis; 1:44), and it is hard not to imagine smiles on the faces of Elizabeth and Mary, the two expecting mothers greeting each other (vv. 39-45). May’s smile is adoringly mentioned in Dante, Paradiso 31.133-38 and can be postulated in John Milton, Paradise Regained, 1.227-28. The so-called Gothic smile is featured on an early thirteenth century sculpture at Bamberg Cathedral, Fürstenportal, which depicts the Virgin Mary accompanied by a group of smiling saints who rise from the dead although one cannot see her face directly. One can see a round smile on her face in the ivory statuette of Mary and Christ Child from the mid-thirteenth century, now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago. This paper traces the manifestations of smiles attested in various contexts of reception history and argues that the smiling Virgin is a persistent undercurrent in the Marian tradition.

In Book XIII of Augustine’s _City of God_, he tries to put death into words. As he soon finds out, it is far from easy to express the experience of dying in everyday language. This is not some vague sense Augustine has. Rather, he provides detailed examples of how our language falters when speaking of death. Specifically, it is linguistic tense that struggles most when trying to account for the temporality of death. According to Augustine, the punctual nature of the moment of death is what we have trouble putting into words. We can speak quite easily of those who are “before death” (_ante mortem_) or “after death” (_post mortem_), but not of those who are “in death” (_in morte_) or “dying” (_moriens_). (_City of God_, XIII.9-11) Is there, indeed, any moment in time during which someone is “dying?” Or can we only speak of a prior and posterior state—living and dead, with no proper word for what comes in between? Already in Book XI of the _Confessions_, Augustine had critiqued the tense structure of language. To be sure, we do break our verb tenses down into past, present, and future. But how can we be sure that such a tripartite distinction actually maps onto the nature of time itself? Augustine is not so sure that the map fits the reality. In the _City of God_, then, he returns to this awkward point of intersection between time and language. Yet now we have moved from the potentially abstract problem of time proper to the visceral aporia of the time of death. If it bothers us that language is inadequate for describing pure temporality, it bothers Augustine even more that our words fall short at the instant of our own deaths. In addition to his general critique of linguistic tense, Augustine adds here a series of specific remarks about the verb _mori_ (to die). A deponent, _mori_ is already laden with grammatical peculiarities. Augustine latches on to these in order to speculate on how the grammar of the verb for dying may help us think about the confusing grammar of death itself. Pointing out that the past passive participle of _mori_ is irregular (because it redoubles the ‘u,’ giving us _mortuus_ rather than simply _mortus_), Augustine argues that the verb itself suggests something is awry with the time of death. _Mortuus_, he argues, is not in fact a past passive participle at all, but rather simply an adjective. Because of that, it admits of declension, not conjugation. Grammatically speaking, it—perhaps like the elusive instant of death—is _sine tempore_. This paper, then, will show how Augustine delves into these grammatical depths in order to reveal the inadequacy of everyday language in the face of death. In the wake of that failure, he concludes, we can perhaps turn only to a mode of language that takes us far beyond the quotidian. To speak of death, in other words, we may have to arrogate the voice of Scripture.

The discrepancy between the likeliest original meaning of the symbolic visions of the book of Daniel, as reconstructed using the accepted tools of historical criticism, and the meanings put forward by various modern proponents of prophecy belief is nothing if not striking. The question I wish to pose here is: what is it about the nature of the text that makes possible such a striking discrepancy? I wish to argue that a historical apocalypse such as Daniel 10-12 is, in Umberto Eco’s terms, a “closed” text: that is, it belongs to a category of texts “that obsessively aim at arousing a precise response on the part of more or less precise empirical readers,” yet are in fact “open to any possible ‘aberrant’ decoding” (Eco 1979: 8) when they fall into the hands of the sorts of reader unanticipated by the author of the text. As an example, I will offer a detailed analysis of chemdath našîm in Dan 11:37. This term, “the desire of women,” is usually taken by historical critics to refer to a deity supposedly rejected by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, most commonly Tammuz-Adonis (e.g. Newsom and Breed 2014: 355, by comparison with Ezek 8:14), but occasionally Dionysus (see the somewhat convoluted argument of Bunge 1973). Yet modern prophecy belief bears witness to a rather different scenario, in which Dan 11:37 contains a prediction that the future Antichrist will be homosexual (see Boyer 1992: 234; Runions 2014: 191), that is, he will be a man who rejects the desire for women. This interpretation, which connects the rejection of chemdath našîm with male same-sex eroticism, is not new—it was certainly known to Luther, who compared Dan 11:37 with Rom 1:27—but it does diverge significantly from the broad consensus among historical critics as to the kind of entity to which chemdath našîm refers, and this discrepancy requires to be explained. The answer begins with the polyvalence of the Hebrew term. Despite the fact that a precise referent was in all likelihood originally intended, the construct chain can be construed in at least two different ways: “the desire for women” (objective genitive) and “that which women desire” (subjective genitive). Early modern translations into German (Luther: Frawenliebe) and English (KJV: “the desire of women”) have generally been taken in the former sense, whereas historical critics tend to favour the latter. As the text came to be read in light of social, political, and religious concerns the ancient author could not have anticipated, this cryptic term came to refer, strangely, to the sexuality of the Antichrist, and Dan 11:37 became part of the history of Christian homophobia.

An assessment of the key questions of continuity and discontinuity with the Pauline scholarship and legacy of J. Louis (Lou) Martyn. Martyn has frequently been criticized for overemphasizing discontinuity as God irrupts into history in the figure of Jesus. Is this criticism fair? And what is at stake in Martyn's sustained emphasis on discontinuity?

This paper asks the question: how did prayers function in the Second Temple period? We will look back at traditional scholarly approaches to the study of prayers and also look ahead to how integrative approaches can help us to understand these texts and their function in the Second Temple period.

Since the late 19th century studies of Crucifixion iconography have traditionally begun with some reference to the 3rd century drawing of a mock-crucifixion excavated on Rome’s Palatine hill in 1856. The graffito has been used by historians to illustrate how the Christian worship of a crucified messiah was open to misinterpretation by outsiders; and has become a key piece of evidence in supporting the theory that visual representations of the Crucifixion were consciously avoided before the 5th century. Setting the graffito into its Roman cultural context, and in particular drawing on evidence for the depiction of comic actors in Roman art, this paper will argue that for the author and viewer of the image in third century Rome it was humour rather than shame that was integral to the iconography. Reviving a theory of the 19th century Italian scholar Raffaele Garrucci, it will suggest that the graffito may witness not to the avoidance of images of Crucifixion by early Christian communities in Rome, but to the existence and circulation of such images in that city in the 3rd century.

When Return from Exile is more than a Return: Paul's Use of the Isaianic Exile and Return Motif in Galatians

Typology, Allegory, or a Bit of Both? Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4

This paper argues that Matthew’s Gospel presents a possible world in which there is a good God who cares for at least some human beings despite great evidential tragedy and horror. Matthew’s perspective on the God-world relationship offers the potential and means for meaningful human life and hope despite the presence of evil. The conversation partners for this work include Eleonore Stump, Marilyn McCord Adams, and J. Schellenberg.

At first glance, the Gospel of Mary is not one of the most violent early Christian texts. Although there are severe differences of opinion among the disciples, they still discuss their conflicts and neither use direct violence nor violent polemic. On the other hand, Mary tells the disciples about an ascent of a soul that is confronted with hostile powers but overcomes them. The soul is called “killer of men” and “conqueror of space” and its release from bondage is depicted using terms of violence. The soul seems to act rather more aggressively than in parallel texts. In my paper, I will compare the ascent of the soul in the Gospel of Mary with related texts, particularly the Book of Allogenes (CT 4), the closest parallel known so far. Paying special attention to the violence used by the powers as well as by the one ascending (the soul respectively Allogenes himself) might help to grasp the differences in the texts about the ascent. Furthermore, I will try to explore the connection between the (quite violent) portrayal of the ascent of the soul and the (rather nonviolent) intercourse among the disciples in the Gospel of Mary. This might offer clues for the function of the story about the ascent in its broader context and with regard to the situation of the intended readers.

The Gospel of Matthew’s curious account of the raising of the righteous dead after Jesus’ death (Mt. 27:52-53) has been the subject of consternation and debate among scholars for centuries. For Ephrem of Nisibis (ca. 307-73), however, this episode is central to his understanding of the significance of the death of Jesus. Ephrem alludes to this event on numerous occasions across his writings, making it perhaps his most-referenced passage from the Passion narratives. In particular, Ephrem tends to link the “loud voice” of Jesus’ final cry (v. 50) with the opening of the tombs (v. 52). Thus we find examples like the following, from the eighth Mêmrâ on Nicomedia: “When your voice split the tombs, / The dead came out of Sheol.” With his dying cry, Jesus brings life to the dead. In most cases, Ephrem relies on a Diatessaronic reading of this passage that is distinct from the canonical Greek. In place of “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised” (NRSV), this version likely read: “tombs were opened and the dead were raised.” As I will demonstrate, this more straightforward textual variant sheds further light on Ephrem’s use of the passage. For Ephrem, this passage functions as a crucial illustration of the central purpose of the death of Jesus: to bring life to “the dead,” both physically (in the final resurrection), and spiritually (in overcoming sin—the “second death”). The dramatic visible display of the dead rising attests to the crucified Jesus’ “hidden power” as the Creator, and confirms his invisible conquest of Death and Sheol. Although many early Christian sources portray Jesus’ death and resurrection as a victory over death and a source of life, it is striking that Ephrem identifies the death of Jesus (and not his resurrection) as the moment of that triumph. As I will argue, for Ephrem, the Matthean episode is a dramatization of his larger understanding of salvation, which is rooted in the Syriac New Testament’s consistent translation of the Greek soteria (“salvation”) as h?ayyê (“life”). This distinctly Syriac context shapes a unique reading of the Passion narrative which highlights one of its most obscure and peculiar passages. Ultimately, this paper will explore links between these Syriac biblical textual variants and Ephrem’s understanding of the Passion drama, with an eye to how his Bible informed his theological vision.

This paper analyzes the potential contribution of Sabbath observance to the formation of a creation-centered spirituality that generates a biophilic relationship between faith commitment and the state of the earth. While Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all honor the Genesis account of the world's creation and their combined adherents comprise the critical mass need to play a decisive role in the earth's preservation, these faith communities have not garnered reputations as friends of the earth. This paper reflects on how care for the earth is a necessary response to the Genesis creation story and the Sabbath given to memorialize it.

Biblical Hebrew (BH) has what we may refer to as ‘the double infinitive-absolute construction.’ In addition to a finite verb, sentences may contain two occurrences of an infinitive-absolute, where the first occurrence is a copy of the finite verb, such that it is of the same root and binyan as the finite verb but deprived of temporal and agreement features, while the second is of a different root and (maybe) binyan. Hebraists are in disagreement about the meaning/function of this construction. Most believe that it functions as an adverbial, expressing mainly continuance, repetition or some other qualification of the action expressed by the finite verb (Blake 1951; Williams 1976; Gesenius 1910; Waltke & O’Connor 1990). Joüon (1947) suggests that it represents actions simultaneous (or quasi-simultaneous) with the situation depicted by the finite verb. It seems to me that Joüon’s observation is adequate, but does not provide the full picture. I suggest that BH makes use of this construction as one of the devices for secondary predication. Crosslinguistic Studies on secondary predication discuss mainly three kinds: subject oriented depictives, as in the English sentence (1) below, object-oriented depictives, as in (2), and resultatives (3): (1) John drove the car drunk.(subject-oriented depictive) (2) Mary ate the fish raw. (object-oriented depictive) (3) Sharon painted the house red. (resultative) The (boldfaced) adjectives in sentences such as (1)-(3) are considered to be secondary predicates depicting situations that involve either the subject (1) or the object (2)-(3) of the primary predicate and, moreover, overlap in time the situation reported by the primary predicate. A number of syntactic and semantic analyses have been suggested to account for this phenomenon. I adopt the approach of scholars such as Rothstein (2004, 2012) and Kratzer (2005) who consider it as a complex predicate created by putting together the primary- and secondary predicates. While it seems that only adjectival phrases may be used for secondary predication in English, it has been shown that there are languages such as Walpiri that may use a converb, i.e. a verb deprived of temporal features (see, e.g., Schultze-Berndt and Himmelmann 2004). In this paper, I will show that BH is a good example of such language. In particular, I will show that in addition to adjectival phrases, BH makes use of the double infinitive-absolute construction to form complex verbs with primary- and secondary predicates.

This paper, co-authored by Milton Acosta, examines the social theory of collective trauma (sometimes called “cultural trauma”) in relation to the humanitarian crisis of forced internal displacement in Colombia, in order to discuss how biblical texts can be incorporated into Colombian collective trauma narratives. Collective trauma theory describes how cultural agents (e.g. politicians, popular media, artists) transform discrete experiences of suffering by group members into meaning-making narratives for the group as a whole. These narratives—which are performed (through speeches, film, parades, music, etc.) rather than just transcribed—both make sense of past tragedies and help shape the group’s future actions. While collective trauma narratives are often polarizing, they can also be occasions for reconciliation and healing after a tragedy. The nation of Colombia has suffered from three generations of internal armed conflict and that violence has generated a massive crisis of forced displacement. How the displaced Colombians make sense of what is behind them, and how they are reintegrated into society, will depend in no small part on the sort of collective trauma narratives (polarizing or reconciling) that are constructed. The present paper explores how biblical texts might be interpreted to provide a Christian trauma narrative that conduces to post-conflict flourishing for displaced persons. After outlining collective trauma theory and the Colombian displacement crisis, we will explore how neuralgic biblical texts can be appropriated for Christian collective trauma narratives. Specific attention will be dedicated to Judges 19-21 and Acts 12, as both texts incorporate accounts of previous traumas into larger collective narratives. The story of the rape of the Levite’s concubine, and the resulting escalation of violence, bears striking resemblances to Colombia’s history; this presentation will describe how the book of Judges incorporates those events into a trauma narrative for the people of Israel. Likewise, in Acts the murder of James and the foiled execution of Peter are incorporated into a reconciling trauma narrative. Without glossing over the evils suffered, Luke elaborates an account of divine sovereignty and future hope, even in the wake of tragedy. The way that Judges and Acts construct larger collective meanings from discrete traumas may illuminate the efforts of later religious communities elaborating redemptive narratives in the wake of tragedy. In Colombian society, religious leaders such as pastors are important cultural agents, and the sermon is a potent medium for performance of cultural trauma narratives. Thus, we will bring our presentation full circle by discussing what sorts of biblical interpretations could generate a healthy Christian post-conflict trauma narrative for displaced Colombians.

The history of scholarship on the “Song of the Vineyard” (Isa 5:1–7) indicates ongoing uncertainty regarding the exact genre of this pericope and the specific way one should interpret the meaning of the clearly metaphorical text. I propose that the traditional ANE woman-vineyard tradition association coupled with the presence of love song elements in the text encourages an interpretation of Isaiah’s vineyard as a woman. Furthermore, resonances with key aspects of the Zion tradition and conceptual links with Lady Zion passages in Isa 1—4 suggest that the woman-vineyard in Isa 5:1–7 is, in fact, Lady Zion. This reading of the text illuminates both Isa 5:1–7 and the Lady Zion tradition in three primary ways: placing the Song of the Vineyard in the tradition of ANE love poetry and woman-vineyard imagery heightens the intimacy of the YHWH-Zion relationship, communicates the responsibility Zion has to contribute to the YHWH-Zion relationship, and—through the layering of imagery for Jerusalem in the opening chapters of Isaiah—permits the rhetorical strategy of the juridical parable in Isa 5:1–7 to have its full effect. The self-interpretation of the parable in Isa 5:7 coupled with the following series of woe oracles renders the text’s basic meaning clear: YHWH will punish his people. Reading the Song of the Vineyard as part of the larger story of Lady Zion in Isaiah, however, sheds greater light on the relationship between YHWH and the people YHWH has chosen.

The aim of this paper is to consider the role and function of personal greetings within the approximately 400 letters dated between 200BCE and 200CE published so far in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Clearly greetings serve to connect the writer (and very often a group around the writer) with the recipient (and a corresponding group around the recipient). A previous paper (presented in 2011 and published in 2014) on P. Mich. 467-480 discovered correlations between the physical layout of the letters and the extent of greetings, as well as elongated and marked introductions to greetings. So it is hoped that a fuller investigation of the greetings in a large collection of documentary private letters may clarify how widespread these particular practices were. In addition, epistolary greetings in early Christianity serve a variety of purposes and it is hoped that a thorough survey of such a large papyrological resource may be helpful in comparing early Christian epistolary greetings with the papyrological strand of the Umwelt.

The Holy Spirit and Christ’s Ongoing Priesthood in Hebrews

In both the introduction and the conclusion to their groundbreaking study Toying with God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls (Baylor University Press, 2010), Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris noted that “[m]ost religious board games are simply religious versions of familiar games like Monopoly or Risk, with churches and missions replacing railroads and hotels” (177–178; cf. 2). In the years since then, several new Bible-themed board games have appeared, including Genesis (Gigantoskop, 2010), Kingdom of Solomon (Minion Games, 2012), Kings of Israel (Funhill Games, 2014), Commissioned (Chara Games, 2015). Each of these games seeks to provide a kind of religious edutainment in which players experience biblical narratives and themes by way of engaging game mechanics. In general, these games exhibit better game design and production values than previous attempts. Moreover, despite clear family resemblances to existing secular games, they depart from the trend noted by Bado-Fralick and Norris of reskinning prior exemplars. Like their forebears, however, these games are “expressions of religiosity growing out of contemporary modes of communication and exchange,” each with “layers of culture, relationship, and identity embedded in [it]” (Bado-Fralick and Norris, 175)—not to mention layers of exegesis, theology, and ethics. This presentation peels back some of those layers with respect to Genesis, Kingdom of Solomon, Kings of Israel, and Commissioned, and the presenter’s own work co-developing a fifth such game, Crossroads (Trivium Studios, 2016). Coherence and/or incoherence between the games’ implicit theologies and those held by the presumptively evangelical Christian audience, supportive and/or subversive approaches to the biblical source material, and representations of divinity, ethnicity, and gender in each game will receive special attention.

In this paper I will first survey some of the suggestions proposed by scholars as to whether the Tiqqune Sopherim at Genesis 18:22 indicates a Masoretic textual tradition or should be seen as midrash for theological purposes. I will then collate the extant textual witnesses as well as the pertinent texts from rabbinic literature in order to draw a conclusion, and to posit as well what motivated this text to be listed among the Tiqqune Sopherim and what would have been gained by a midrashic “correction” in this text.

The author is preparing a critical edition of the Ethiopic Book of Jeremiah. First results of a full collation of Jeremiah 1-3 will be presented. Observations and evaluations of the various manuscripts, their interdependence, and their ultimate Vorlagen, will be offered. Conclusions for the task ahead will be drawn. Sample collations of other verses from Baruch or Lamentations will be investigated in the light of the full collation of Jer 1-3.

As Philo, Origen referred Gen 1:1-5 to the creation of the incorporeal world. Especially Gen 1:2 is of crucial importance of his understanding. The fragments and homilies on Genesis will be taken into consideration as the newly discovered homilies on Psalms ascribed to Origen. Final abstract will be inserted soon.

This paper will explore resistance—both historical and contemporary—to military occupation in Palestine. First, we consider the apocalyptic mission of Jesus as herald of God’s coming kingdom. Though Jesus’ execution by Roman authorities fit no known “messianic” script per se, New Testament writers made sense of such a destiny by finding redemptive power in Jesus’ suffering destiny as subversive resistance of imperial power. What is more, they consistently affirm that those who constitute the “messianic community” established in his wake, too, will participate in his suffering by “taking up a cross”—that is, by so aligning themselves with God’s kingdom that they grow vulnerable to the principalities and powers. Though such a call to self-sacrifice has often been coopted by those who have “taken up a cross” as sanction for state or vigilante violence, the biblical call has also proven central for many seeking justice on behalf of the oppressed: Gandhi took up a cross; so did Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. In each case, the redemptive power of the cross is unleashed by those who deliberately align themselves with justice and, in turn, suffer the consequences of the threat they pose. Today, examples abound within beleaguered Christian community in Palestine of those who continue to bear witness to the way of cross. The Nassar family’s “Tent of Nations” farm, positioned precariously between two expanding settlement blocks, replants olive trees demolished by Israeli bulldozers and lives by the claim, “We refuse to be enemies.” The Wi’am Center for Peace and Conflict Transformation in Bethlehem equips children living in fear of military raids with sound strategies to live in hope, rather than fear. Dar Al-Kalima University trains Palestinian youth in the arts and culture, preserving vestiges of Palestinian identity that are often a casualty of life under stress. In each instance, biblical reflection on the death of Jesus helps to reclaim God’s power to reframe suffering as an agent of hope for others. The resistance in view here has often been called “non-violent” resistance. And while it is true its advocates do not resist evil by harming others, it does often elicit a violent response. More fitting, I propose, is the term “humanizing” resistance. It is by identifying with both the victims and the perpetrators caught in the snares of systemic oppression that this approach channels God’s redemption, even if in fits and starts. [This paper grows out of a forthcoming book called The Cross in Contexts (Orbis), co-written by an American biblical scholar (Henderson) and a Palestinian theologian (Mitri Raheb). If this session’s conveners are interested in this topic, we would offer the possibility of joining our two voices in the presentation.]

The usage of gospel quotations for magical amulets in the ancient world is a well-attested and well-studied phenomenon. Most notable, of course, are gospel incipits, recently catalogued and studied by Joseph Sanzo in his Scriptural Incipits on Amulets). Less recognized by modern scholars, due to its equally rare occurrence, is the amuletic usage of quotations from the Pauline corpus. This paper collects six amulets (five on papyrus and one on parchment) that utilize Greek quotations from the Pauline corpus as their voces magicae. Aside from simply bringing these amulets together, this paper also considers the role of, and views regarding, magic within the larger literary tradition that developed around Paul. Finally, in light of the preceding discussion, this paper attempts to propose some possible theoretical models by which these Pauline amulets would have been understood to work by their creators and bearers.

This presentation describes some of the most crucial witnesses to the Acts of Thomas and Passio Thomae in Late Antique and Medieval codices. We will briefly look at three codices containing all or part of the Acts of Thomas either upon, under, or adjacent to palimpsest pages—including a Syriac witness from Sinai, a possible liturgical attestation in an early Irish manuscript, and the most complete Greek manuscript—all of which give us insights into the use and usefulness of the Acts of Thomas within these three different monastic settings. Next we will consider some of the Latin versions, especially looking at the task of illuminators working beside scribes, and we will likewise consider one of the oldest witnesses of the Passio, a manuscript likely produced by the hand of a nun. The information gleaned from these material investigations will help us better understand some of the meaning and functions of the so-called Apocryphal Acts of Apostles in Christian settings of the past, which will in turn contribute additional accuracy and depth to our contemporary scholarly work.

The talk provides an introduction to volume 2 of the Textual History of the Bible, "The Deutero-Canonical Scriptures"

Arthur Danto, the prominent philosopher and art critic, theorized about the effect an Ideal Chronicle would have on the historical guild. For Danto, the Ideal Chronicle would completely and accurately record every historical event as it happened. This would not be a narrative account, for it would merely list every event according to a time index. Clearly such an account cannot exist, but Danto uses this concept to make historians reconsider the goal of their historical work. Even if we had a perfect account of everything that happened in history, he argues, we would still not have a historical account, for history involves more than just a listing of events, it involves creating a narrative. Although *Virtual History and the Bible* is full of counterfactuals for individual historical events or stories, this paper will broaden that scope and consider what biblical studies would become if all historical questions had been clearly answered by the Ideal Chronicle. Was there an Exodus? Was Galatians written before or after the Jerusalem conference in Acts 15? And most controversially, did Jesus rise from the dead? For all of these, check the Ideal Chronicle. This paper will argue that a few conclusions can be drawn from such a counterfactual thought-experiment. First, it reveals how much of current, biblical scholarship is merely historical inquiry about biblical texts and the communities surrounding them. Such a characterization would then challenge the status of biblical studies as an independent field of investigation from history. Perhaps we should all be members of the AHA and not the SBL. Second, to remain a discipline, biblical studies would need to change its historical focus to one that speaks to modern concerns. This could look something like theological, postcolonial, black, or womanist readings of Scripture. For each of these, the primary goal is not a historical reconstruction but a reading that adheres to other criteria relevant to modern interpreters. Third, biblical studies could still ask hypothetical questions, such as whether Paul would have circumcised his children or what he would have thought about modern ethical issues such as homosexual marriage, gender identity, and immigration. Applying the information contained in the Ideal Chronicle to new situations and cultural contexts would offer grist for much work. The challenge here, however, is whether biblical studies could distinguish itself from theology. Fourth, the Ideal Chronicle would show that the answer to historical questions do matter. If Jesus rose from the dead, if Jesus walked on water, then a Humean understanding of the world would collapse. Or conversely, if it showed that miracles did not happen and Jesus remained in the grave, then many understandings of Christianity would no longer be tenable. Although the Ideal Chronicle is merely a hypothetical, considering the ramifications of its existence gives us insights into the field of biblical studies.

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To what do the handful uses of tôrah in Isaiah 1–39 refer? Are they acknowledgement of a growing pre-exilic sense of Torah as covenant obligation? Is the critique of moral failure in First Isaiah connected to the Pentateuchal material in those places where tôrah is used (esp. e.g., 5:24; 30:9)? Does the mention of tôrah going out to the nations in 2:3 reflect a growing Isaianic sense of YHWH’s universal sovereignty? This paper will argue that Isaiah 1–39’s understanding of tôrah is independent of the Pentateuchal narrative and reflects, rather, the authority of prophetic teaching as binding tôrah.

The pseudo-Pauline letter of Ephesians imagines an end to alienation in the bridging of ethnic difference through membership in the household of God that is also God’s dwelling (2:15-22). The letter then offers a vision of this divinely ordered household (Ephesians 5:21-6:9), which has all too often been a resource for teachings of subordination and domination within modern Christian communities. The legacies of this hierarchal household imagination that attempts to inscribe and subordinate gendered and class differences remain persistent and palpable loci of struggle in Chicana feminist thought. Chicano nationalist imaginations and practices of the 1960s and 1970s too often rendered Mexican American communal citizenship as the management of difference within a fictive household and bodily frame. At the same time, Chicana feminists could be rhetorically cast as alien to the communal body precisely because of their refusals of household hierarchies. Chicana feminists in turn responded through their own disidentificatory practices, taking up household and bodily metaphors while also scrambling their Chicano masculinist hierarchal meanings. For instance, scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, in her landmark text Borderlands/La Frontera, portrays home as a site of fear and desire, imagining the mingling of bodies within Borderlands spaces as messy, violent, and revelatory. This paper examines the legacies of the fictive household imaginations of Ephesians and broader Pseudo/Pauline rhetorics of communal bodies as loci of imaginative struggle and disidentificatory practice in Chicana feminist thought. At the same time, Chicana feminist thought perhaps helps us to perceive the role of disidentificatory practices in shaping the rhetorical imaginaries of the body of Christ and the household of God.

The concept of nationhood in the Ancient Near East was always attenuated by the relative strength of one’s neighbors. As the early city-states unified or conquered one another – and this continued into the empire-building throughout the eastern Mediterranean – the identity of one’s people was characterized by the culture of the “great men” who ruled the land. In light of this broad phenomenon, the repeated mention of Israel as a “great nation” in Deu 4:6-8 is intriguing. With the exception of the Solomonic rhetoric, Israel was never a major player in the Levant militarily unlike its regional neighbors – so is this instance conceit? To examine this, Deu 4 will be viewed in light of its relative position to the patriarchal narratives, in which the great nation of Israel was the numerous descendants of one family, and the exilic message of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in which Israel is viewed in light of the great imperial nations of Babylon and Assyria. This paper seeks to discern the source and intention of the “great nation” rhetoric as it plays a role in the message of Deuteronomy as a whole.

Is it possible to gain a more accurate idea of the place of extracanonical sources in the construction of Tatian’s “Diatessaron gospel”? Some experts maintain there was little to no such influence, while others find it coming from at least three written sources. Over the years Diatessaron scholarship has mounted several attempts to identify a “fifth source,” answering to a comment of Victor of Capua’s that Tatian was reported (by Eusebius) to have called his creation “Diapente.” This paper intends to offer a fresh review of the extracanonical gospel influence and seeks to set it within the larger context of Tatian’s selection and arrangement of content. In the process, comparisons will be made to other early attempts to organize and arrange the contents of the gospels, namely by paragraphing and the numbering of sections.

For more than a century, scholars have labored under the belief that the Hellenistic era author Artapanus possessed and interpreted the LXX. While this assumption offers a useful terminus post quem for his work, it is Artapanus’s ostensibly liberal treatment of his scriptural source that has inspired the most research. But how strong is the evidence for his knowledge of the LXX? This presentation analyzes the arguments for Artapanus’s use of the LXX, highlighting the paucity of decisive verbal links and the inadequacies of even the strongest linguistic correspondences before linking the origin of similar naming conventions to the shared Egyptian provenance. The reconsidered evidence thus problematizes the scholarly consensus on his source for the Jewish traditions. Since this source is ultimately unknown, the Artapanus composition might conceivably be an earlier effort at translation, the sort of text which was ultimately supplanted by the LXX.

1 Peter is replete with emotion terms. They occur throughout the entire letter, often at pivotal points. Yet, one emotion is markedly absent: anger. This is surprising for two reasons: firstly, anger is a prominent emotion in ancient philosophical and rhetorical discourse; and, secondly, 1 Peter is written to an audience undergoing unjust persecution. Therefore, one would expect that anger would be a perfectly reasonable and socially acceptable response to the injustice the believers are experiencing. Instead, the author calls the hearers towards non-retaliation, exhorting them not to ‘repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse’ and instead to ‘seek peace’ (3.9, 11). But, anger is not always problematic in the ancient world. In fact, it can be seen as providing a positive role in that it directs one towards actions aimed at restoring what has been unduly lost. Thus, this paper will assess philosophically 1 Peter’s omission of anger and promotion of non-retaliation. It will do this through comparison with ancient discussions on anger such as Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Seneca’s De Ira, and Philodemus’ De Ira. It will answer the following questions: What is the philosophical/theological framework in which 1 Peter’s approach both makes sense and is therapeutically and ethically viable? How does this compare with other contemporaneous philosophical views on anger and their understanding of the place of anger in human flourishing? Lastly, what does this say about how the Christian emotional life is to relate to larger issues of oppression and justice?

This paper brings the Samson saga into conversation with Jasbir K. Puar’s theory of sexual exceptionalism, using as an intertext the shocking images of sexualized torture from Abu Ghraib, which Puar employs as an example of sexual exceptionalism and the blurred boundaries between torture and BDSM. I will show how Samson and Delilah’s encounter in Judges 16:4-21 portrays such ambiguous boundaries as “sexually exceptional” practices as a strategy for negotiating the border between Israel and its rivals. In conversation with gender/queer readings of Judges (e.g., Exum, Stone, Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska), I expand upon Lori Rowlett’s analysis of the power relations and dynamics that occur among Delilah, Samson, and the Philistines as compared with such practices and dynamics within S/M sexuality. In terms of such dynamics, the scene in 16:4-21 appears to be an S/M scene “gone wrong” when Delilah allows the scene to become all-too-real by actually bringing the Philistines into the sexual scenario. Since S/M practices involve the negotiation and the controlled crossing of boundaries, though Samson never seemingly says the safe-word, what boundaries are being navigated, crossed, or defied in this scene? Drawing then from work on cultural and political boundaries in Judges (especially Weitzman’s notion of Samson as “border fiction”), I probe further the ways in which political borders can also be established, navigated, and tested through exploration of and experimentation with sexual boundaries. Along these lines, Puar’s work on torture and sexual exceptionalism considers the ways in which certain “deviant” sexual practices become “exceptional” with regard to nationalist rhetoric and political boundaries. In a horrific parody of the consensual intimacy of BDSM sexual practices, the torture inflicted upon detainees at Abu Ghraib polices American boundaries of normative (homo)sexuality by inflicting deviance upon those deemed terrorist outsiders. This policing defines geopolitical boundaries in sexualized terms through the relegation and regulation of sexual deviance as the purview and punishment of national enemies. Given that the scene of “deviant” erotic play in Judges 16:4-21 quickly transforms into a scene of public bondage, torture, and humiliation in 16:23-26 (a scene that is not devoid of its own sexual innuendo), it appears that Judges contains similar strategies of using sexuality’s “excessive” significance to enforce Israel’s borders. Thus connecting Puar’s theoretical analysis to Samson’s bedroom bondage and betrayal, I argue that Samson figures as a sexually exceptional example of the perils of experimenting with and crossing boundaries.