In many respects the inscription of Zakir, king of Luʻash and Hamath, is quite typical of the northwest Semitic documents of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. Like most of his royal counterparts, Zakir first introduces himself, indicating the extent of his domain; in this connection he claims that Baʻal-Shamayn stood by him and made him king. He then proceeds to the immediate occasion for the inscription, telling of a coalition of north Syrian and Anatolian kings united against him by Bar-Hadad of Aram, and the subsequent siege laid against his city of Ḥazrak. After an account of Zakir's appeal to Baʻal-Shamayn and the god's encouraging reply, which will be the main concern of this essay, the stele undoubtedly reported the raising of the siege (on the missing lower portion of Side A), for on Side B we find the king boasting of his building operations, again in the style of his time. The inscription closes with the traditional curses upon anyone who dares to damage the stele.

The explosive emergence of the so-called “writing prophets” in the history of Israel is one of the great historical mysteries of Old Testament scholarship. The first, and in some ways one of the greatest of these figures, Amos of Tekoah, can hardly be dated much before 750 B.C., and the beginnings of the prophetic careers of Hosea ben Beeri, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Micah of Moresheth all fall within the following decade and a half. From this time forward, with the single exception of the dark and bloody reign of Manasseh, there is a steady succession of prophetic literature, ending somewhere around the mid-fifth century B.C. Once initiated, this succession moves in what seems to the historian, operating with the full confidence of hindsight, to be an entirely logical and reasonably consistent fashion. Yet its origins are wholly obscure. Like Melchizedek, Amos seems to have been born without benefit of ancestors. (And it goes without saying that such an [apparently] “uncaused happening” in the historical sphere is as troubling to the modern historian as the thought of an ancestorless Jebusite king would be to the historian's colleague in the biology department.) But what sort of events would be deemed to constitute “sufficient historical causation” for the rise of the classical prophets of Israel?

From the fourth century on, whenever Church Fathers stressingly point to the distinction between the Word and the world as a distinction between that which was generated from God and that which was created from nothing, they aim, we may assume, not only at the Arian contention that the Word was created from nothing but also at the Plotinian view that the world was generated, that is, emanated, from God. It is this double target that is aimed at by Athanasius in a passage where he contrasts the Word with the world. The Word, he says, is a “generated being” (γέννημα) or a “son” and, as such, he is “the proper offspring (γέννημα) of the essence,” “not subject to will,” and hence is one who “must always be.”

For some decades now, Luther scholars have concentrated on the early “young Luther” (1513–16). He is being dissected month by month, year by year. It may be another decade or so, however, before any attempt can be made at a complete presentation of the theology of the young Luther. This study is intended to be a partial contribution to the construction of a full picture of the young Luther.

It is self-evident from a survey of the Calvin Corpus that the Reformer's polemic with the Roman Catholic Church was one of the most important and essential aspects of his labors. However, it is distressing to note that this area of Calvin's thought, which finds its fullest expression in the many tracts which he penned in the 1540's, has been all but neglected in recent Calvin scholarship. The purpose of this brief essay is to outline one aspect of Calvin's attack on Rome: his reactions to the Council of Trent. Nowhere in Reformation literature are the essential theological and ecclesiastical issues which divided Rome and the Reformers more lucidly delineated.

Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples fell under the suspicious attention of the Sorbonne in 1514 when he was implicated in the defense of Johannes Reuchlin before that body. Under the assiduous promotion of its Syndic, Natalis Beda, suspicion was soon transformed into an overt attack on Lefèvre's orthodoxy. In 1520 a turning point was reached. Whereas, before, he had been attacked because of deviations arising chiefly out of his own individual approach to the Bible, in this new stage he was to be charged with Lutheranism. It is the purpose of this article to examine these later charges, the grounds alleged in justifying them, and how they came to be preferred. It will be necessary at the same time to examine, or rather reexamine, the words of Lefèvre which evoked them.