One of the daunting challenges facing the New Testament interpreter is achieving familiarity with the immense corpus of related literatures. Scholars and students alike must have a fundamental underst
Studies of ancient New Testament texts preserved into modern times often mention some details about the manuscripts, but here historians and scholars of religion focus on the manuscripts themselves to
This volume seeks to demonstrate, for the first time, that many Jewish and Christian texts in the ancient world were written as a direct response to an earlier situation of crisis that affected the au
The Library of New Testament Studies (LNTS) is a premier book series that offers cutting-edge work for a readership of scholars, teachers in the field of New Testament studies, postgraduate students a
In this book, Brett Maiden employs the tools, research, and theories from the cognitive science of religion to explore religious thought and behavior in ancient Israel. His study focuses on a key set of distinctions between intuitive and reflective types of cognitive processing, implicit and explicit concepts, and cognitively optimal and costly religious traditions. Through a series of case studies, Maiden examines a range of topics including popular and official religion, Deuteronomic theology, hybrid monsters in ancient iconography, divine cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical idol polemics, and the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. The range of media, including ancient texts, art, and archaeological data from ancient Israel, as well theoretical perspectives demonstrates how a dialogue between biblical scholars and cognitive researchers can be fostered.
Though it sounds odd to hear someone refer to himself or herself in the third person today, this odd phenomenon is reflected in the direct speech of both Jesus and Yahweh consistently and extensively.
While an individual referring to themselves in the third person may sound unusual, this phenomenon (known as illeism) is consistently and extensively reflected in the direct speech of both Jesus and Y
The campaign of Sennacherib against Judah is one of the most widely researched in biblical studies and Ancient Near East studies, and one that also poses scholarly challenges. Allusion to the event is found in Isaiah, Kings, and Chronicles, but there is no correlation between the Assyrian and biblical descriptions of the same event. Dan'el Kahn offers a text-critical analysis of these biblical passages that allude to the military events. Detecting repetitions, breaks in the narrative, and contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts, he traces and reconstructs different and discrete sources. Kahn demonstrates that the biblical passages are based on earlier sources that were later edited and revised by a third hand. Based on historical events that are found in non-biblical texts, he also offers new dates for the sources. He claims that the narrative was written for the book of Isaiah, arguing that it predates the version found in Kings.
