Focusing on the structure, genre, setting, and intention of Old Testament literature, this series offers a comprehensive commentary aimed at revealing the deeper meanings of Scripture. Each volume provides a unique examination of biblical texts, making it a valuable resource for understanding the complexities of the Old Testament.
Focusing on form-critical analysis, this volume provides an in-depth examination of the book of Hosea within the Hebrew Bible. It explores the structure, genre, and historical context of the text, while also addressing the evolution of form-critical discussions. The work aims to standardize terminology related to biblical genres and formulas, facilitating a deeper understanding for students and pastors. By revealing the exegetical process, it empowers readers to conduct their own analyses and interpretations of Old Testament literature.
Focusing on the Persian period, this collection features influential biblical scholars who explore how prophecy and prophetic books were constructed. The contributors analyze the historical and cultural contexts that shaped these texts, offering insights into their significance and development within the biblical tradition.
Ehud Ben Zvi has been at the forefront of exploring how the study of social memory contributes to our understanding of the intellectual worldof the literati of the early Second Temple period and their textual repertoire. Many of his studies on the matter and several new relevant works are here collected together providing a very useful resource for furthering research and teaching in this area. The essays included here address, inter alia, prophets as sites of memory, kings as sites memory, Jerusalem as a site of memory, a mnemonic system shaped by two interacting ‘national’ histories, matters of identity and othering as framed and explored via memories, mnemonic metanarratives making sense of the past and serving various didactic purposes and their problems, memories of past and futures events shared by the literati, issues of gender constructions and memory, memories understood by the group as ‘counterfactual’ and their importance, and, in multiple ways, how and why shared memories served as a (safe) playground for exploring multiple, central ideological issues within the group and of generative grammars governing systemic preferences and dis-preferences for particular memories.
„Centre and periphery“ frameworks have been particularly helpful for research on systems whose dynamics are strongly influenced by a substantially unequal distribution of qualities. But what can these frameworks, in all their present diversity and in their various „re-conceptualizations,“ contribute to the study of the early Second Temple period? The essays in this volume address this question through the prism of, for instance, the location of Jerusalem, diasporic communities, Torah, roles of temples and royal courts, Jerusalem/Gerizim, the Zion tradition, the universal kingdom of YHWH, the literary history of some texts, socio-linguistic choices, and gender.
Water is a vital resource and is widely acknowledged as such. Thus it often serves as an ideological and linguistic symbol that stands for and evokes concepts central within a community. This volume explores ‘thinking of water’ and concepts expressed through references to water within the symbolic system of the late Persian/early Hellenistic period and as it does so it sheds light on the social mindscape of the early Second Temple community.
This volume collects revised versions of essays from a 2011 workshop held in Munich on Remembering and Forgetting in Early Second Temple Judah. The authors of the essays address these issues from both general methodological perspectives and through case studies emerging out or associated with a wide range of texts from the prophetic literature, the Pentateuch, the historical books, Psalms and Lamentations. All these texts share one main feature: they shape memories of the past (or future) and involve forgetting. Contributors: Bob Becking, Ehud Ben Zvi, Kåre Berge, Diana Edelman, Christina Ehring, Judith Gärtner, Friedhelm Hartenstein, Michael Hundley, Jörg Jeremias, Sonya Kostamo, Francis Landy, Christoph Levin, James Linville, Zhenhua Meng, Bill Morrow, Reinhard Müller, Urmas Nõmmik, Juha Pakkala, Hermann-Josef Stipp
In ancient Israelite literature Exile is seen as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts “the Exile” is a central ideological concept. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms that YHWH punished Israel/Judah for having abandoned his ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain “Return”. As the Exile comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH’s proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. The concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.
There has been much interest in the Book of Chronicles in recent years. A book long considered marginal has become one of the most central in current studies. This is due, in part, to the increased and increasing emphasis on Persian period Yehud (and Samaria), and to the fact that Chronicles may provide a window for understanding how other books that later became biblical were understood at the time. In addition, Chronicles is also a second „national“ history and as such it served to reconfigure and reimagine the past/s communicated by other books. This commentary makes use of (social) memory (and other social-anthropological) approaches, examines the ongoing construction of meaning at the level of the separate units in the book, that of the book as a whole, and that of the book as part of a extant „library“ within which it constantly interacts and modifies. Explorations of the influence of the book and its images of the past over time round off the analysis.