This study examines the laws concerning divination and sorcery which are found in the three major law codes of the Pentateuch, with the goal of shedding fresh light on why there are forbidden to Israel, and how the teaching concerning these practices is related to the overall th…
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This study focuses on divination arts of Toussiana, a community of southwestern Burkina Faso. Using both formal analysis, and documentation from scholars and local informants, it examines and interprets the implements and practices associated with a variety of divination systems…
Why is bone sometimes used instead of ivory in Yorùbá carving? Bone objects are often mistaken for ivory, which is not surprising since the two materials look similar, although they are not identical. During interviews with Yorùbá practitioners carried out in Nigeria in the summ…
Numerous questions put to oracles on papyri survive from Egypt. When considered as a corpus, these provide the opportunity to observe the extent to which religion entered into the Roman administration's relations with the provincial population. Divination had a long and politici…
Building upon the work of J. Lindblom, A. Caquot, W. Z. Lauer and H. B. Huffmon, the study addresses the following questions: What was the function of priestly divination? In what situations was it practiced? What was the role of the practitioner? What process did it follow? Cha…
This dissertation aims to show how literacy has impacted religion, in particular by examining the invention of the concept of prophecy by Judean scribes around the 6th century B.C.E. Belief in prophecy, which is a form of communication with superhuman agency, has been one of the…
This dissertation explores the working of the organizational apparatus evinced in the Old Babylonian Mesopotamian divination collections from the divinatory technique known as extispicy (the examination of a sacrificed sheep's exta, or entrails: in the main the liver, but also t…
Humans have long sought knowledge of the future, and in their seeking have turned to rocks, sticks, stars, and even the body for answers. Divination is one of humanity’s oldest spiritual practices and its cultural significance reveals much about the lived experience of people an…
Both Augustine of Hippo and Maximus the Confessor would agree that when God created Adam, he had a plan—a plan that would have allowed Adam, over time, to live into the fullness of his being, true being. Adam, being created in the image and likeness of God, had the potential for…