4qinstruction

In spite of the amount of literature on the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, no consensus among the scholars has emerged as yet on how to explain both the similarities and the differences among the two corpora of religious writings. This volume contains a revised form of the contributions to an experts meeting held at the Catholic University of Leuven on December 2007 dedicated to explore the relationship among the two corpora and to understand both the commonalities and the differences between the two corpora from the perspective of the common ground from which both corpora have developed: the Hebrew Bible.

In 4QInstruction: Divisions and Hierarchies, Benjamin Wold challenges the interpretation of 4QInstruction as a deterministic and dualistic document by offering new reconstructions and translations of key fragments.

This volume is devoted to 4QInstruction, the last lengthy text of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be officially published. The central concern of this study is how it should be understood in relation to the sapiential and apocalyptic traditions.

This book brings together fifteen articles representing the major thrusts of Prof. Wright's work over the last decade. They focus on three interrelated themes in the study of Early Judaism. (1) Translation. Several essays treat Jewish translation strategies as well as some of the social frameworks within which translation took place. (2) Social Location. The effort to locate texts in their social landscapes has helped to break down many traditional scholarly categories. Especially pertinent are the ways that wisdom and apocalyptic relate to each other, and he explores how specific wisdom and apocalyptic texts relate. (3) Transmission of Tradition. Several articles focus on how traditional material was shaped and framed in order to ensure its successful transmission to subsequent generations.

Drawing together two divergent approaches to 4 Ezra, this book combines a fresh analysis of the dialogues as a wisdom debate with a literary-psychological interpretation of the book, arguing that the author’s theological solution is found in the symbolic visions.

This study examines educational motifs in 1 Corinthians 1-4 in order to answer a question fundamental to the interpretation of 1 Corinthians: Do the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians contain a Pauline apology or a Pauline censure? The author argues that Paul characterizes the Corinthian community as an ancient school, a characterization Paul exploits both to defend himself as a good teacher and to censure the Corinthians as poor students.

"Discerning Wisdom" provides an overview of all the Qumran wisdom texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer crucial evidence for understanding the wisdom of the late Second Temple period and the reception of traditional wisdom in Early Judaism.

The volume publishes papers read at the tenth International Conference on the Deuterocanonical Books, Budapest, 2013. The authors explore various aspects of this literature, with pre-eminent emphasis on their relation to diverse early Jewish texts and traditions; their reactions on Hellenism; and the way they treated as a canonical collection within their history of interpretation.