Historians commonly agree that the understanding of the Bible as a supernatural text conveying both spiritual and historical truths came under devastating assaults from the natural sciences and German historical critics in the 1800s. According to this account, by the latter year…
From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these translations remained largely neglected by Biblical scholars and historians. In telling…
Since the emergence of disability studies over the last several decades, disability theorists have often settled for sweeping generalizations about "biblical" notions of disability. Yet, academic or critical biblical scholarship has shown that many texts involving disability in …
The Canon of the Bible and the Apocrypha in the Churches of the East features essays reflecting the latest scholarly research in the field of the canon of the Bible and related apocryphal books, with special attention given to the early Christian literature of Eastern churches. …
The volume contains studies on the genesis of the Hebrew Bible and its function in the framework of the Jewish religion. In addition, it presents papers on individual Bible passages, which deal mainly with the self-representation and self-assertion of Judaism. Some of the essays…
"Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalenc…
This volume explores a number of instances of unexpected but influential readings of the Bible in popular culture, literature, film, music and politics. The argument in all of them is that the effects of the Bible continues to have an effect on contemporary culture in ways that …
"The Bible is likely the most-edited book in history, yet the task of editing the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts of the Bible is fraught with difficulties. The dearth of Hebrew manuscripts of the Jewish Scriptures and the substantial differences among those witnesses creates d…
Throughout its first three centuries of existence, the Christian community, while new to the Roman world's pluralistic religious scene, portrayed itself as an historic religion. The early church community claimed the Jewish Bible as their own and looked to it to defend their cla…
This book provides an overview of select elements and considerations of retirement savings and security with a focus on Social Security financing and benefits under current law; eligibility requirements, contribution limits, tax deductibility of contributions, and rules for with…
"British Museum expert Dr Irving Finkel reveals how decoding the symbols on a 4,000 year old piece of clay enable a radical new interpretation of the Noah's Ark myth. A world authority on the period, Dr Finkel's enthralling real-life detective story began with a most remarkable …
'Canonical criticism' is now a recognized branch of biblical studies - granting new focus to questions of the authority and truth of the scriptural writings. Developed within a critical sense of the dominant historical-critical tone of biblical studies, canonical criticism as it…
Divination, the use of special talents and techniques to gain divine knowledge, was practiced in many different forms in ancient Israel and throughout the ancient world. The Hebrew Bible reveals a variety of traditions of women associated with divination. This sensitive and inci…
The book presents for the first time a critical edition of all the extant fragments of the Chronographiae by Iulius Africanus. This work is the first Christianworld chronicle - a wide-ranging attempt to combine Classical Hellenistic historiography with the Jewish Hebrew heritage…
A thorough examination of father-daughter depictions in the Hebrew Bible exploring a broad spectrum of metaphors, myths legal texts and narrative accounts and drawing on methodologies from the social sciences to investigate the Hebrew Bible portrayals of this key familial relati…
"These seven essays offer fresh perspectives on beauty's role in revelation. Each essay features a hermeneutical approach informed by the contemporary study of aesthetics. Covering a series of texts in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, from Adam and Eve in the garden to Jesus …
What does it mean to be human? Pointing beyond human-centric ideologies, the essays in this collection explore biblical texts from Genesis to Revelation in conversation with the critical theories of posthumanism.
Events in Oceania - earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, shipwrecks, oil spills, movement of political and ecological refugees, resettlement of displaced people, and changing political structures - challenge the authors to reflect on the practices of biblical interpretation and to con…
