Rainer Albertz Livres

The work offers an extensive exploration of Israelite religion, tracing its evolution from early beginnings to the Hellenistic period. It emphasizes the interplay between historical events, religious experiences, and theological responses, highlighting the tensions among various groups regarding appropriate worship and social practices. Additionally, it contextualizes Israelite beliefs within the broader framework of ancient Near Eastern religions and incorporates insights from Israelite social history, filling a significant gap in scholarly literature.

Covering the evolution of Israelite religion from its early roots to the Hellenistic period, this encyclopedic two-volume work emphasizes the interplay between historical contexts, religious experiences, and theological responses. It examines the influence of surrounding Near Eastern religions and incorporates Israelite social history, highlighting the ongoing struggles among various groups to define appropriate worship and social practices in response to divine expectations. This comprehensive approach addresses a significant gap in the historical understanding of Israelite faith.

The formation of the Book of the Twelve is one of the most vigorously debated subjects in Old Testament studies today. This volume assembles twenty-four essays by the world’s leading experts, providing an overview of the present state of scholarship in the field. The book’s contributors focus on questions of method, history, as well as redactional and textual history.

The period of the Babylonian Exile (597/587-520 B.C.E.) is one of the most enthralling eras of biblical history. During this time, Israel went through what was probably its deepest crisis; at the same time, however, the cornerstone was laid for its most profound renewal. The crisis provoked the creation of a wealth of literary works (laments, prophetic books, historical works, etc.) whose development is analyzed in detail by the methods of social history, composition criticism, and redaction criticism. The history of this era is hard to grasp, since the Bible has almost nothing to say of the exilic period. The author nevertheless attempts to illuminate the historical and social changes that affected the various Judean groups, drawing heavily on extrabiblical and archaeological evidence. His study also includes the treatment of the exile in later biblical material (Daniel, Tobit, Judith, apocalyptic literature). Thirty-five years after Peter Ackroyd's classic "Exile and Restoration," this book summarizes extensively the results of recent scholarship on this period and builds on them with a number of its own hypotheses. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

The question of why the cooperation of Jews with the Persian and Ptolemaic empires achieved some success and why it failed with regard to the Seleucids and the Romans, even turning into military hostility against them, has not been sufficiently answered. The present volume intends to show, from the perspectives of Hebrew Bible, Judaic, and Ancient History Studies, that the contrasting Jewish attitudes towards foreign powers were not only dependent on specific political circumstances. They were also interrelated with the emergence of multiple early Jewish identities, which all found a basis in the Torah, the prophets, or the psalms.

Nur sechs Kapitel des Alten Testaments berichten vom Propheten Elia, dennoch stieg er im frühen Juden- und Christentum zum wichtigsten aller Propheten auf. Neben dem Gesetzgeber Mose repräsentiert er nunmehr die gesamte Prophetie Israels. Das Buch untersucht die Gründe für diese beispiellose Wirkungsgeschichte und zeichnet deren Stadien im Einzelnen nach. Die Erwartung, dass der Prophet, den Gott zu sich entrückte, am Ende der Zeiten noch einmal wiederkommen würde, hatte auf Johannes den Täufer und auch auf Jesus von Nazareth einen prägenden Einfluss. So ist von Elia im Neuen Testament häufiger die Rede, als von allen anderen Propheten. Die Faszination, die von diesem Propheten ausgeht, zog bis heute Maler, Musiker und Schriftsteller wie Lukas Cranach, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und Paulo Coelho in ihren Bann.

Die Untersuchung der Josephsgeschichte im Kontext der Ursprungsgeschichte Israels beleuchtet die Spannungen zwischen politischer Herrschaft und den Herausforderungen des Lebens in der Diaspora. Rainer Albertz analysiert die Komposition und Redaktion dieser biblischen Erzählung, beginnend mit ihrer ursprünglichen Form bis hin zur Verbindung mit der Jakobs- und Vätergeschichte. Seine Ergebnisse ermöglichen eine präzisere Bestimmung der Thematik und Datierung und liefern neue Perspektiven auf die Entstehung des Pentateuchs.