One of the most frequently occurring terms in Paul Tillich's theology is meaning (in his English writings) or Sinn (in his German writings). But Tillich used both in multiple senses, without acknowledging or even appearing to be aware that he was doing so. He wrote only in German till he immigrated to the United States at the age of forty-seven. He used the German Sinn abundantly in his native tongue, and with a variety of meanings: a universal medium for understanding the world; “sense,” as in “making sense” or what is missing in “senseless” (sinnlos) statements; “the unconditional” (“das Unbedingte”); a “thing pointed at” (in Tillich's theory of symbols and signs); a grand metaphysical quality of some undefined sort; the object-correlate of an act of cognition; and “God.” He drew on the German Sinn when he began to write in English but, because of the grammatical status of meaning as a verbal noun, the English term allowed Tillich to ascribe agency to things that in his view bear meaning, for example the thing that grasps us when we are in the state of faith. In addition, the English word meaning for Tillich meant “comprehensibility,” “value,” “direction,” from existential philosophy (what is missing when life is meaningless); “ultimate concern” (the “meaning which gives meaning to all meanings”); in the plural, something undefined that the human person “lives in”; and “God.” The change from German to English accompanied a change in his conception of faith, raising the possibility that the new language moved Tillich's theology in a new direction.

According to Numbers 35:9–34, someone who had killed an innocent person intentionally was to be killed by an avenger of blood. However, someone who had killed an innocent person inadvertently was allowed to take up residence in a city of refuge where he (the legislation appears to be focused on males) would be shielded from being killed by this avenger. After the death of the high priest, the inadvertent killer could leave the city and return home safely.

This paper analyzes the six most common and substantial explanations for why an inadvertent killer could leave a city of refuge and return home after the death of the high priest, and shows why they cannot be correct. Another explanation is then offered, the basic elements of which are as follows.

An inadvertent killer was confined to a city of refuge in order to equalize the circumstances of the killer and his family/kin group with the circumstances of the victim and his family/kin group: specifically, the confinement of the killer in a city of refuge removed his presence and labor from his family/kin group just as the death of the victim had removed his presence and labor from his family/kin group. The legists behind Numbers 35:9–34, however, deemed it right and fair to limit the duration of that equalization to what the victim and his family/kin group had actually lost: the unfulfilled balance of the victim's natural lifespan. Since there was no way to know when the victim's natural lifespan would actually have come to an end, the legists availed themselves of the high priest's representational function, and used his death to represent when the natural death of the victim would have taken place. An inadvertent killer was, therefore, released from confinement after the high priest died, and his circumstances were normalized.

In Book Two of De Specialibus Legibus (Special Laws), Philo of Alexandria presents his readers with a “festival manual”: a list of ten holidays, their origins, and the practices associated with each one. Philo names the first festival in his list ἡμέρα πσα, “every day,” about which he muses: “If all the forces of the virtues remained unvanquished throughout, then the time from birth to death would be one continuous feast.” In what historical, intellectual, and literary context might we best understand Philo's “every day festival”? And how can we understand Philo's view of quotidian time in the context of his conception of time and temporality more generally? In this paper, I argue that Philo's presentation of this festival of the every day, and, more generally, his perspective on daily time, is an engagement not only with biblical texts but also with contemporaneous Stoic perspectives about time, especially those articulated by the philosopher Seneca the Younger. I thus read Philo's De Specialibus Legibus in conversation with Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life), analyzing their similar perspectives on daily time and suggesting several ways of understanding the connections between the two texts. I conclude by explaining how appreciating the similarities between Philo and Seneca's ideas about quotidian time also allows us better to understand Philo's exposition of the other festivals, especially his presentation of the Sabbath.

The Hollywood Jesus epics re-visualize the gospel story against the anxious backdrops of secularization, cultural pluralism, and moral skepticism. While these epics are often derided for their lack of theological insight, cultural awareness, or aesthetic taste, this article argues for a re-appreciation of the genre's internal pluralism and hermeneutical significance. Focusing on Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927) and Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), it reflects on the epic as a tradition-forming moment in the Jesus story's reception. Both DeMille and Ray offer competing interpretations of Jesus, thus illustrating how the genre functions as a site of christological and hermeneutical reflection. Against this backdrop, I argue for a reinterpretation of the genre and, further, proffer a hermeneutical exploration of cinema more broadly as a central moment in the dialogue between Christianity and popular culture.

In this essay, the Rosh Hashanah Shofar service poems by the Jewish poet Yose ben Yose (fourth or fifth century CE, Land of Israel) are read through the lens of the Late Antique practice of acclamation. Yose's surviving body of works is limited, but he was influential within the Jewish tradition, and his poems have long been noted for their use of formal features such as fixed-word repetitions and refrains—features which align not only with poetic norms from the biblical period to Late Antiquity but also with the practice of acclamation. Jews attended (and performed in) the theater and games; they were familiar with rhetorical and oratorical training and related literary norms; and they were integrated socially, commercially, and politically into diverse and varied communities. The affinity of Jewish liturgical poetry from antiquity for other forms of poetic composition reflects Jews’ general embeddedness in Late Ancient culture. Reading Yose's poetry as shaped by the conventions of acclamation highlights how Yose and his congregants were not only distinctly Jewish but also thoroughly Roman.

This article presents a reading of the story of the Patriarch's meeting with the Emperor Diocletian as it appears in the late antique midrashic compilation, Genesis Rabbah. The story encapsulates the complexity of the relationship between the rabbis and Roman political, cultural and religious hegemony, showing the rabbis as both in eternal conflict with the Roman Empire and its culture and, yet, in many ways, very Roman themselves. In the second half of the article, I argue that this story presents a unique perspective on rabbinic views of both “demons” and the Olympian gods themselves. I conclude by comparing and contrasting these views with the approaches of early Christian thinkers.

At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call “the reflexive turn,” in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. Where did the very concept of “religion” come from? Whose interests are served by this apparently modern, European, and Christian way of categorizing practices? One way to think about the effect of the reflexive turn is to think of the conceptual vocabulary in religious studies as a window or lens through which scholars had previously been examining the world. What had been taken as natural and transparent now becomes itself the object of study. Richard King calls this “the Copernican turn,” that is, as he nicely puts it, a turn to focus on the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. The goal of this turn is to “denaturalize” the concept of religion (King, 1). The reflexive or Copernican turn, in my judgment, is a crucial aspect of social inquiry that scholars of religion should not ignore. But it clearly leads to the question: once one denaturalizes the concept of “religion,” what does the academic study of religion study?