Bücher veröffentlicht von Eisenbrauns

Following the great periods of national leadership by Moses and Joshua, the book of Judges depicts the stewardship of various judges that rose to power to solve local religious and military challenges in the premonarchic period. This volume provides a close reading of the entire book of Judges, taking seriously the distinct elements of the book and how they are interconnected.Elie Assis explores the ways in which the ideology and theology of Judges unfold through a careful literary analysis. Moving beyond the cycle of sin, punishment, and salvation, Assis demonstrates how differences in the descriptive language applied to each judge, as well as the evaluations in the opening and concluding chapters, provide clues as to the organization and message of the text. Most works on Judges focus on the historical background of the period or the historical process of the book's composition and seek to dissolve its stories into component parts. In contrast, Before There Were Kings points to the deep underlying unity of Judges and the function of the individual stories within the whole.New and carefully drawn insights related to the purpose of each section and the themes that shape the book as a whole make this a groundbreaking, programmatic contribution to research on the book of Judges. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible.

This study uses modern linguistic theory to analyze a frequently recurring syntactic phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible that has thus far resisted explanation: ¿¿ ¿¿.The combination of the two particles ¿¿ and ¿¿ produces a construction that is notoriously difficult to describe, analyze syntactically, and translate. Dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew offer a dizzying variety of translations for this construction, including "that if," "except," "unless," "but," "but only," and "surely," among other possibilities. In this book, Grace J. Park provides a new approach that strives for greater precision and consistency in translation. Park argues that ¿¿ ¿¿ is used in three patterns: the "full focus" pattern, the "reduced focus" pattern, and the less common "non-focus" pattern. Her syntactic analysis of all 156 occurrences of the ¿¿ ¿¿ construction in the Bible lends greater clarity to the contested passages.Drawing on recent linguistic research into the typology of clausal nominalization as well as previous work on contrastive focus, this innovative project provides important new insight into the syntax of Biblical Hebrew. It will be especially valuable for scholars seeking to translate ¿¿ ¿¿ more consistently and accurately.

A collection of essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible providing recommendations for how Jews and Christians can think theologically about the challenge of similarities between YHWH and other ancient gods.

¿esed (steadfast love, loyalty, devotion) denotes an important concept in the Hebrew Bible that is relevant to interpersonal relationships in every generation. In this book, Karen Nelson investigates New Testament approaches to that concept and the exegetical value of recognizing such engagement.This investigation employs an original hybrid of two methodological approaches: intertextuality, used to consider whether and how the concept corresponding to the Hebrew term ¿esed is appropriated in the New Testament, and categorization, used to analyze and compare instances of the categories ¿sd and ¿syd within those corpora. Nelson's work challenges assertions that the concept corresponding to ¿esed in the New Testament is agap¿ (love) or charis (grace). Rather, she contends that the parallel meaning is more likely to be evoked by eleos (the usual LXX rendering of ¿esed) or hosios (the usual LXX rendering of ¿asid). Nelson rereads selected New Testament pericopes in light of ¿esed, concluding that the presence of the categories ¿sd and ¿syd highlights the fulfillment and development of scriptural tradition, the enduring devotion of God, and the exemplary ministry of Jesus. In this rendering, ¿sd and ¿syd critique the contemporary socioreligious situation and encourage belief, enduring commitment, and appropriately changed lifestyles.Addressing a topic that spans the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, this study will be of interest to New Testament scholars and to biblical scholars more widely, especially those who are interested in semantics.

Do shifts in material culture instigate administrative change, or is it the shifting political winds that affect material culture? This is the central question that Shlomit Bechar addresses in this book, taking the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (seventeenth-fourteenth centuries BCE) in northern Canaan as a test case.Combining archaeological and historical analysis, Bechar identifies the most significant changes evident in architectural and ceramic remains from this period and then explores how and why contemporary political shifts may have influenced, or been influenced by, these developments. Bechar persuasively argues that the Egyptian conquest of the southern Levant--enabled by local economic decline following the expulsion of the Hyksos and the fall of northern Syrian cities--was the impetus for these changes in ceramics and architecture. Using a macro-typological approach to examine the ceramic assemblages, she also discusses the impact of the influx of Aegean imports, suggesting that while "attached specialists" were primarily responsible for ceramic production in the Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age ceramics were increasingly made by "independent specialists," another important result of the new administrative system created following Thutmose III's campaign.An important contribution to our understanding of the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, this original and insightful book will appeal to specialists in the Bronze Age Levant, especially those interested in using ceramic assemblages to examine social and political change.

This book introduces the evocative but largely unknown tradition of Samaritan religious poetry from late antiquity to a new audience. These verses provide a unique window into the Samaritan religious world during a formative period.Prepared by Laura Suzanne Lieber, this anthology presents annotated English translations of fifty-five Classical Samaritan poems. Lieber introduces each piece, placing it in context with Samaritan religious tradition, the geopolitical turmoil of Palestine in the fourth century CE, and the literary, liturgical, and performative conventions of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, shared by Jews, Christians, and polytheists. These hymns, composed by three generations of poets--the priest Amram Dara; his son, Marqah; and Marqah's son, Ninna, the last poet to write in Samaritan Aramaic in the period prior to the Muslim conquest--for recitation during the Samaritan Sabbath and festival liturgies remain a core element of Samaritan religious ritual to the present day.Shedding important new light on the Samaritans' history and on the complicated connections between early Judaism, Christianity, the Samaritan community, and nascent Islam, this volume makes an important contribution to the reception of the history of the Hebrew Bible. It will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, early Judaism and early Christianity, and other religions of late antiquity.