The biblical information concerning the figure of Nimrod is scarce. Post-biblical tradition has added supplementary details that cannot be found in the biblical text, however much they may be presented as results of exegesis of this text. This article first examines the biblical data about Nimrod and sees whether he can be identified with an extra-biblical, a pre-biblical, prototype. Second, it investigates the ways in which the few biblical data have given rise to post-biblical haggadic developments. K. van der Toorn has written the first part of this essay, P. W. van der Horst the second.

New Testament interpreters have long puzzled over the meaning of the saying, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22; Luke 9:60), and although many ingenious solutions have been proposed, none has been generally convincing. It is surprising that Jewish burial practices have not been brought into this discussion. For the burial practices of first-century Jews in Palestine are well known: many tombs have been carefully excavated, and several rabbinic texts explicitly discuss the care of the dead. Yet this information has never (to my knowledge) been brought to bear on Matt 8:21–22. In this paper, I propose that secondary burial, a widespread burial custom among Jews in first-century Palestine, can solve the riddle of these verses. Against the background of secondary burial, both the meaning of the disciple's question and the force of Jesus' response become clear. In particular, it is not necessary to suppose, as many interpreters do, that Jesus was talking about the “spiritually” dead. On the contrary, if the references to the dead are taken literally, the saying sounds both ironic and eschatological.

Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century Mormon founder, is often accounted for in one of three ways. Either he was a prophet in the almost fundamentalist sense that many Mormons hold him to have been, or he was a charlatan as many others have judged, or else he was a mentally deranged charismatic. In what has been the most influential study of Smith during the last half-century, Fawn Brodie bridged the latter two categories. Brodie alleged that Mormonism's founder was initially a conscious fraud who fabricated his first visionary experience; only gradually, by a series of wondrous psychological acrobatics, did he later come to take himself seriously as one called of God.

In a lecture in Horticultural Hall in Boston on Sunday 3 March 1872 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the social reformer and religious radical, praised “The Character of the Buddha.” He ended his very sympathetic portrait by alluding to King Asoka's discovery of the tomb of the Buddha. Those who opened the tomb, so the story goes, found the lamps that had been lighted two hundred years earlier still burning and the flowers that had been offered in homage still fresh and fragrant. Higginson saw a parallel to his own age: “More than two thousand years have now passed, and we are opening this tomb again; the lights still burn, the flowers are still fresh, the perfume of that noble life, yet remains immortal.” In some ways, Higginson's comment seems appropriate: literate Americans of his generation were learning more and more about Buddhism and its founder; and, although most interpreters during the 1860s and 1870s struggled with its distinctiveness, some found Buddha's life and teachings praiseworthy. Yet Americans had begun to pry open “the tomb of the Buddha” decades earlier, and not everyone was as blinded by the sudden illumination or as overcome by the sweet fragrance as Higginson.