In 1962, papyri of the fourth century B.C. were discovered by Beduin in a desolate canyon north of Jericho on the rim of the Jordan rift. These documents, known by their place of discovery as the Wâdī Dâliyeh Papyri, were inscribed in Samaria during the half century before the conquest of Alexander the Great. The papyri are without exception legal documents, not a few executed before the governor and prefect of Samaria. Among the surprises to be found in the new documents is the appearance twice of the name Sanballat, or more properly Sin'uballiṭ. In each instance Sanballat is listed as father of the governor of Samaria, once on an official sealing inscribed in Palaeo-Hebrew script, once in Aramaic in the context of a document of about the mid-fourth century.

What is the proper “object” for theological attention? It was the overwhelming judgment of Protestant thinkers in the 19th century that for theology God and faith belong inseparably together. Theology deals with God, but in so far as God is the object for theology, man as believer is also always given in his concrete choosing and affirming and apprehending that is faith. God is available as an “object” only from and with the point of view of a subject.

Philosophers have long debated the question of the existence of God. This is one of many philosophical issues in which the motivation for inquiry has come more perhaps from the side of human feeling than from disinterested scientific curiosity. Powerful emotions appear to prompt thinkers to devote effort to the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God. The urgency of this task has made some of these philosophers pay less than adequate heed to the concepts they employ. It appears to have escaped the attention of many of them that the word “God” does not have a single meaning either in religious language generally or in philosophical theology. It is obvious that one of the important ways in which religious traditions differ is in their conceptions of the Deity. But a considerable number of different God-concepts may be distinguished in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition itself, and not even in Christian theology proper is the word “God” free of ambiguity.

King Creon had, for political reasons, forbidden the burial of Polyneices. But Antigone, for religious ones, defied Creon and buried her brother. She justified her act by drawing a distinction between the changing regulations of a human ruler and the eternal laws of heaven. Creon speaks: “Knowest thou the edict that forbade this deed?” Antigone answers: I knew it. Why, how else? for it was public. Creon: And such laws thou couldst dare to overstep? Antig.: Yes; for it was not Zeus that published them … I did not deem your edicts of such force That a mere mortal could o'erride the Gods' Unwritten, never-failing ordinances. For these live not today nor yesterda But always; none knows when they first came forth.

The Hebrew originals of the above-mentioned Psalms have been recently published by J. A. Sanders from a scroll containing approximately the last quarter of the Psalter which was found in the Eleventh Cave at Qumrân. In his preliminary notice on the unrolling of this scroll Sanders had already written:

There are seven non-canonical compositions, aside from Ps 151, interspersed among the psalms. One of these is a prose account of the psalms and songs composed by David and the purposes for which he wrote them. The total number of musical compositions attributed to David is 4050.

This short work was published by S. Hovsepceancc, and the present translation is made from that text. The only previous English translation is that of J. Issaverdens, from which this rendering differs at a number of points. A German translation based on three MSS was published by E. Preuschen. Since he offers neither an Armenian text nor any information at all about his MSS or their location, use has been made as far as possible of his translation and notes. Significant variants reflected in his translation have been recorded in the notes on the translation offered here. For convenience a system of verse numbering was introduced.

Whenever Western Semitic people, i.e., primarily Phoenicians and Hebrews, and later Jews, considered it advisable or faced the necessity to adjust their social groupings to virtually superior institutions of the Greek-speaking realms of the Eastern Mediterranean, they were soon confronted with the problem of how to reproduce the respective Greek sociological terms in their native tongue.

Regarding this kind of Semitization of terms as a consequence of Hellenization, my interest was recently drawn to the relationship of hayyaḥad and to koinon. This apparently deserves further examination.