This volume contains twelve articles that shed new light on the Book of Isaiah, one of the most central books of the Old Testament canon. The essays collected in this volume cover a wide array of different topics, from historical and linguistic issues to a number of theological "hot-topics." Among the topics covered in this volume are the following: - Salvation in both its spiritual and political dimensions; - God's loving self-limitation; - The function of the spirit in God's redemptive work; - The shaping of a new world of peace through God's intervention; - The question of the identity of...

This book explores the role of the biblical patriarch Abraham in the formation and use of authoritative texts in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. It reflects a conference session in 2009 focusing on Abraham as a figure of cultural memory in the literature of these periods. Cultural memory is the shared reproduction and recalling of what has been learned and retained. It also involves transformation and innovation. As a figure of memory, stories of Abraham served as guidelines for identity-formation and authoritative illustration of behaviour for the emerging Jewish communities.

This book examines the Old Testament language about Israel's relationship with God in the light of Assyrian royal propaganda. Unpacking this language's meaning in both Assyrian and biblical contexts, it shows Israel borrowed language from Assyrian vassal treaties to describe its covenant with God, and this book reveals what "covenant" meant, and that it is not "covenant" at all, but "grace." The broader theological implications of this discovery are explored in dialogue with contemporary theologians. The book takes seriously the study of text in its ancient context in order to highlight the...

This eclectic collection contains 16 articles on a variety of topics within Qumran Studies from a conference held in memory of the late Professor Alan Crown. Essays cover the impact of the Qumran discoveries on the study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to the study of the scrolls themselves and the community organizations presupposed in them, focusing as well on topics as diverse as sexuality, scribal practice and the attitude to the Temple in the scrolls.

Divine and Human Hate in the Ancient Near East studies lexemes for ‘hate’ in Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Akkadian. Riley conducts a lexical study of three ‘hate’ terms, along with comparative analysis of divine and human hate in biblical, Ugaritic, and Mesopotamian literature.

The Unremembered Dead examines the motif of non-burial in the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern contexts. Mansen proposes a new typology for analyzing these references, and demonstrates the range of functions that the non-burial motif served as a literary weapon in both biblical and extra-biblical texts.

King Jehoiachin, the last Judahite king exiled to Babylon, became the focus of conflicting hopes and fears about a revived Davidic kingship after the exile. As Sensenig demonstrates, this conflict stemmed from a drastic oracle from Jeremiah that seemed to categorically reject Jehoiachin, while the canon records that he not only survived but thrived in exile.

The biblical apocalyptic books of Daniel and Revelation are, for better or worse, polarizing. Interpreters have long read and searched these books for clues about how their worlds will "end," which each new interpreter promising to have "unlocked" how Daniel and Revelation work together to uncover a divine plan for prophetic fulfillment. Redding uses the Vision of the Fourth Beast from Daniel 7 as a case study to consider how interpretations of texts take on lives of their own, eventually wedding interpretation with text and prompting the question: what even is a text? Is it what is on the...