Current Issues in Priestly and Related Literature PDF Download

Author: Roy E. Gane
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 1628371226
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
New directions and fresh insight for scholars and students The single greatest catalyst and contributor to our developing understanding of priestly literature has been Jacob Milgrom (1923-2010), whose seminal articles, provocative hypotheses, and comprehensively probing books vastly expanded and significantly altered scholarship regarding priestly and related literature. Nineteen articles build on Milgrom's work and look to future directions of research. Essays cover a range of topics including the interpretation, composition and literary structure of priestly and holiness texts as well as their relationships to deuteronomic and extra-biblical texts. The book includes a bibliography of Milgrom's work published between 1994 and 2014. Features: Comparisons with Mesopotamian Hittite texts Essays from a diverse group of scholars representing a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and methodologies Charts and tables illustrate complex relationships and structures

Author: Adi M. Ophir
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531501435
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book explores God’s use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Pentateuch, it reads biblical narratives and codes of law as documenting formations of theopolitical imagination. Ophir deciphers the logic of divine rule that these documents betray, with a special attention to the place of violence within it. The book draws from contemporary biblical scholarship, while also engaging critically with contemporary political theory and political theology, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and Michael Walzer. Ophir focuses on three distinct theocratic formations: the rule of disaster, where catastrophes are used as means of governance; the biopolitical rule of the holy, where divine violence is spatially demarcated and personally targeted; and the rule of law where divine violence is vividly remembered and its return is projected, anticipated, and yet postponed, creating a prolonged lull for the text’s present. Different as these formations are, Ophir shows how they share an urform that anticipates the main outlines of the modern European state, which has monopolized the entire globe. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in revisiting the deification of the state, unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.

Author: Perry Yoder
Publisher: MennoMedia, Inc.
ISBN: 1513802461
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
God is gracious, holy, and present. As a book about how to worship and how to live, Leviticus unfurls these critical characteristics of God in relation to humanity. In the thirty-third volume in the Believers Church Bible Commentary series, Old Testament scholar Perry B. Yoder argues that the oft-neglected book of Leviticus discloses valuable truths, symbols, and practices of the New Testament. Traversing difficult interpretive territory such as the sacrificial system, purity laws, and priestly instructions, Yoder writes with a clarity and nuance that will interest a wide swath of readers. He eloquently poses for readers the focal question of Leviticus: how to live in the presence of God.

Author: Ehud Ben Zvi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110547147
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description
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.

Author: Thomas Hieke
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647534714
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Writing a commentary on a biblical book is not limited to the scholar's study and desk. Hence, several experts in the field of Hebrew Bible currently writing a larger commentary on the book of Leviticus followed the invitation of Christian Eberhart and Thomas Hieke to meet between 2014 and 2016 at the Annual SBL Conference. They shared their experiences, discussed hermeneutical and methodological considerations, and presented their ideas about particular themes and issues in the third book of the Torah. The results of these consultative panels had significant impact on the production of the commentaries. The first part of this volume features essays reflecting on the process of writing a Leviticus commentary, including boosts and obstacles, while suggesting innovative insights on particular problems of the book. The second part identifies certain themes of Leviticus, especially sacrifices and rituals ("the cult"), the notion of unintentional and deliberate sins and purity/impurity ("the bad") and how to eliminate them, and the relationship to the sphere of God ("the holy"). This section demonstrates how commenting a biblical book highly depends on the perspective a scholar takes, and how different commentaries on the same biblical text come to different conclusions because of a diversity of methodological and hermeneutical approaches. These are issues innate in the subject matter; in the end the variety of approaches bears witness to the complexity, intricacy, and richness of the biblical text. This volume, therefore, offers a fascinating inside view into the studies and onto the desks of several prolific biblical experts who share their reflections and concepts about their commentaries on Leviticus with an interested audience.

Author: Ada Taggar Cohen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567710564
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This volume utilizes Catherine Bell's ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating ritual and practice. Only recently, however, has Bell's theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This cross-disciplinary examination assesses the utility of Bell's theorizing for studying the textual evidence for rituals of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and other early Christian literature. The contributors to this volume illustrate a path away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behaviour. In this volume, as each scholar works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts are consciously employed to guide or challenge the investigation, pushing beyond previous conclusions about ancient rituals. The contributors' attention to theory, and especially the social context, practical function, and symbolic interpretation, set this collection apart from studies that consider the rituals in more traditional textual ways.

Author: G. Geoffrey Harper
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646020545
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The well-known parallels between Genesis and Leviticus invite further reflection, particularly in regard to the rhetorical and theological purpose of their lexical, syntactical, and conceptual correspondences. This volume investigates the possibility that the final-form text of Leviticus is an indirect reference to Genesis 1–3 and examines the rhetorical significance of such an allusion. The face of Pentateuch scholarship has shifted dramatically in the last forty years, resulting in the questioning of many received truths and the employment of a host of new, renewed, and often competing methodologies by biblical scholars. This study sits at the intersection of these recent interpretive trends. G. Geoffrey Harper uses insights from the fields of intertextuality, rhetorical criticism, and speech act theory to create a methodological framework, which he applies to three Leviticus pericopes. Chapters 11, 16, and 26 are examined in turn, and for each the assessment of potential parallels at lexical, syntactical, and conceptual levels reveals a complex web of interconnected allusion to the creation and Eden narratives of Genesis 1 and 2–3. Moreover, Harper probes the theological and rhetorical import of these intertextual connections and explores how Leviticus ought to be understood in its Pentateuchal context. This comprehensive study of the connections between these two sections of the Hebrew Bible sheds light on both the literary artistry of these ancient texts and the persuasive purposes that lie behind their composition.

Author: Daniel Nessim
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
ISBN: 0718896610
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Dating from the first century, the Didache offers a unique window into early Jewish Christianity. Its Jewish-Christian author seeks to mediate the Torah for the text's gentile recipients, steering diplomatically between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Law-observing church in Jerusalem and Paul's more open teaching. The Didache is thus very clear that gentile believers do not need to convert to Judaism, but at the same time its author argues that the Torah - particularly the second table of the Decalogue - is universal. The Deuteronomic paradigm of the 'Way of Life' against the 'Way of Death' applies to all. In Torah for Gentiles? Daniel Nessim explores this juxtaposition in depth. How is Jesus' 'easy yoke' to be held alongside the strenuous commands of Mosaic Law? What does it mean to attain perfection? The path the Didache offers is not as straightforward as one might suppose, yet both Jews and Christians would recognize its moral basis as largely the same as that which underpins Judaeo-Christian values today. Moreover, the Christian community it describes, from a time when that community still looked very much to its Jewish forebears, makes it a fascinating example of the origins of Christian life and worship.

Author: Ming Him Ko
Publisher: Langham Publishing
ISBN: 1783684526
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
The Asia Bible Commentary Series empowers Christian believers in Asia to read the Bible from within their respective contexts. Holistic in its approach to the text, each exposition of the biblical books combines exegesis and application. The ultimate goal is to strengthen the Body of Christ in Asia by providing pastoral and contextual exposition of every book of the Bible. The book of Leviticus has a two-fold mission. Leviticus 1–16 symbolizes the order of the world through sacrifices, purity law, and sacred boundaries, so that God’s people can acknowledge his presence and lordship in their different aspects of life. The second part of the book, from Leviticus 17–27, extends the belief of holiness through moral laws of sex and social justice, so that God’s people can be holy, as he is holy. This commentary helps believers to integrate God’s holiness into their daily lifestyle with particular attention to Asian contexts.

Author: Roy E. Gane
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493410229
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
The Old Testament law is foundational for our understanding of the Bible, but for many it remains some of the Old Testament's most foreign and exotic material. This book by a leading evangelical expert in biblical law helps readers understand Old Testament law, how it functioned in the Old Testament, and how it is (and is not) instructive for contemporary Christians. The author explicates the often confusing legal system of ancient Israel, differentiates between time-bound cultural aspects of Israelite law and universally applicable aspects of the divine value system, and shows the ethical relevance of Old Testament law for Christians today.