Torah study is the definitive religious activity of Rabbinic Judaism. Earlier, Torah study did not enjoy preeminence, and this difference indicates that a dramatic shift took place in the conception of Torah. The emphasis on Torah study in Psalm 119 is unique within the Hebrew B…
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This dissertation is a systematic analysis of the language of ancient Jewish historical apocalypses. I investigate how the dramatis personae, i.e., deities, angels/demons, and humans (both individuals and groups) are described in the Book of Daniel (2, 7, 8, 10-12) the Animal Ap…
The story of the wedding at Cana in John 2:1-12 presents the reader with a curious response that Jesus (v. 4) makes to his mother's implied request (v. 3): ti emoi kai soi . There has been much discussion about the meaning of the idiom ti emoi kai soi and its Hebrew equivalent m…
This dissertation constitutes a comprehensive review and analysis of incantations of West Semitic provenience, extra-biblical and biblical, from the second and first millennia B.C.E. Recent discoveries and publications of texts from Syria-Palestine have furnished an ancient samp…
In this dissertation, I translate a selection of poems from Modern Hebrew that contain biblical allusions, and I present that selection in "chronological" order—that is, following the order of the biblical narratives they allude to, thereby creating a retelling of the Hebrew Bib…
This dissertation offers a new perspective in the study of biblical concepts of healing and restoration. It takes into account all kinds of healings/restorations, including physical, spiritual, and metaphorical. The first part of the research engages form critical scrutiny of th…
This thesis intends to focus on the text of the Decalogue in the Hebrew Bible, and to interpret it in the literary, cultural, and reader's contexts, and feminist perspective. In a broader horizon, the methods of literary criticism, historical criticism, reader-response criticism…
This dissertation explores the peculiarity that though the river term (nāru(m)/nhr/ nāhār) occurs 119 times, in the Hebrew Bible there are no rivers in Israel. The meaning of wadi (nahallu( m)/nhl/nahal), the torrential flow from winter rains or the gorge that remains when the w…
The presence of giants in the Hebrew Bible has puzzled commentators and scholars. Explication of these monsters has focused upon rationalizing the presence of such clearly mythological creatures or simply concluding that their presence is explained through religious syncretism. …
Material remains and textual sources from throughout the Mediterranean World (Greece, North Africa, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant) are examined in order to reconstruct ancient perspectives on the practice of human sacrifice. Chapter one begins the dissertation by present…
This dissertation investigates depictions of divine and human radiance in the Hebrew Bible and in Northwest Semitic and Mesopotamian literatures. It focuses specifically on the meanings of the following Akkadian terms: melammu; puluhtu; rašubbatu; namurratu; namrirrū; and šalumm…
In a (post)critical world, how can we read the Hebrew Bible as if it really matters? Contemporary Christian ethical discussions demonstrate a tendency to treat the Hebrew Bible in a somewhat limited, distanced, even dismissive way. The practices that lead to this tendency and th…
This project examines the translation of the biblical book of Deuteronomy into Greek, an undertaking set in 3rd century BCE Alexandria. Characterizing the various translations that make up the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) is an important prerequisite to…
The established interpretations of four biblical narratives--Lot's daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba--often reduce the women to stock characters who inform our ideas about biblical Israel (Rendsburg; Frymer-Kensky) or the line of David (Menn). When read for their gender infor…
This study examines interactive interpretation as shifts in framing structures of alignment by identifying patterns of quotation usage in sequentially emergent discourse. A structural and microanalytic analysis was performed on the video-taped discussions of Modern Orthodox Jews…
The first-person Hebrew narrative of the Persian courtier sent to be governor of Judah, the "Nehemiah Memorial" (or NM: Neh 1-2:20; 3:33-7:3; 13:4-31), is a crucial text for understanding how elements within ancient Judaism conceived of their relationship to the Persian Achaemen…
This dissertation attempts to show how texts from the Ancient Near East, texts in the Hebrew Bible, and one text from Qumran describe life-threatening crises by means of the Birth Metaphor. Can two concepts such as birth and crisis even be compared? Birth and crisis are existent…
This study reconceives Milton's Semitic studies as a paradigmatic example of "Christian Hebraism," a comprehensive intellectual movement involving many of the major figures of the seventeenth century. Utilizing the Hebrew Bible, along with lexicons, grammars, and the rabbinic co…
Islam is often viewed as the religion par excellence of divine transcendence. God is khilaf al-`alam , "the absolute divergence from the world" and this characteristically Islamic doctrine of mukhalafa "(divine) otherness" precludes divine corporeality. In as much as this latter…