Oudtestamentische Studi N Casting Down The Host Of Heaven The Rhetoric Of Ritual Failure In The Polemic Against The Host Of Heaven

Proceedings of meetings of the Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts Group of the Society of Biblical Literature held in 2007 in Washington, D.C. and in 2008 in Boston, Mass.

In The Sons of God in Genesis 6:1–4, Jaap Doedens offers an overview of the history of exegesis of the enigmatic biblical text about the ‘sons of God’, the ‘daughters of men’, and the ‘giants’.

Richard-Jude Thompson investigates Martin Noth's conclusion about the Deuteronomistic History (DH) that the people of Israel had committed apostasy ceased to obey the law code of Yhwh, and thus lost their land. Scholars have challenged Noth's hypothesis and even the existence of such a history. The present study adopts a thematic reading of the DH as a coherent corpus of writing with a consistent message. A close reading reveals a god, Yhwh, who declares war on other gods and commands his followers to conquer and to sanctify the mountain of the Emorites and the land of Canaan to Yhwh. The sanctification includes the killing of the people living there: "When you attack them, you shall annihilate them entirely. Do not make a treaty with them and do not show mercy to them". Throughout the DH, Yhwh and his spokespersons reward obedience and punish disobedience. Because the disobedient people of Israel fail to enforce Yhwh's command to remove the nations of Canaan, Yhwh enforces imperial law and sentences them to national death and exile. The author hypothesizes that the DH depicts an imperial, military covenant. After a survey of the inscriptions of the second-millennium b.c.e. Levant, the Hittite empire, the Neo-Assyrian empire, and the first-millennium b.c.e Levant, the study concludes with a hypothesis that the evidence points to the ideology of the Neo-Assyrian empire as the historical precedent for the Dtr covenant. The study challenges two presuppositions that underlie both the DH and its scholarship: that of the torahas law and that of Yhwh as a unique god.

An international team of prominent Jewish and Christian scholars focus on the historical and theological importance of the presence or absence of the term "Messiah" and messianic ideas in the Hebrew Scriptures, New Testament, Philo, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, and Dead Sea Scrolls. This volume stems from the First Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins.

The Oxford Handbooks series is a major new initiative in academic publishing. Each volume offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Biblical studies is a highly technical and diverse field. Study of the Bible demands expertise in fields ranging from Archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and Linguistics through textual, historical, and sociological studies to Literary Theory, Feminism, Philosophy, and Theology, to name only some. This authoritative and compelling guide to the discipline will, therefore, be an invaluable reference work for all students and academics who want to explore more fully essential topics in Biblical studies.

Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity offers a collection of essays that deal with perceptions of wisdom, femaleness, and their interconnections in a wide range of ancient sources, including papyri, Nag Hammadi documents, heresiological accounts and monastic literature.