The perplexing arrangement of the laws in Leviticus 19 invariably invites comment about their seeming lack of order. Scholars have used the miscellaneous character of the laws as evidence for their originating in different sources, times, and places, before finding a common location in Leviticus 19. Thinking that delineates source after source depends upon a misunderstanding of how lawgivers formulated biblical laws. A different picture emerges once one takes stock of a process of legal formulation; this process, which is deeply implanted in every part of the Pentateuch, accounts for the Pentateuch's unique integration of law and narrative.

Josephus's version of Numbers 22–24 is a significant source for ascertaining his understanding of the divine spirit. On the one hand, this story contains the highest concentration of references to the divine spirit in the Antiquities. Josephus regularly omitted references to the divine spirit, leaving, apart from this passage, a mere five. In marked contrast to this tendency, his version of Numbers 22–24 has three references to the divine spirit (Ant. 4.108, 118, 119), while the biblical version has but one (Num 24:2). The result is that one third of Josephus's references to the divine spirit are concentrated in the tale of Balaam and the ass.

In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul directly addresses only the Galatian churches; through them, however, he is engaged in a polemic against rival missionaries who had influenced the churches with another gospel. If one intends to analyze Paul's argumentation in Galatians 1–2, it is necessary first to ask about the characteristics of these missionaries and their gospel. In the history of research, many different pictures of the opponents and their gospel have been drawn. These reconstructions result partly from the method of so-called mirror reading; this method infers the position of the opponents by reversing the negations and affirmations in Paul's argumentation. Recently and with good reason this method has been criticized. In my analysis I confine myself to what can be said with certainty about the opponents: First, the opponents shared with Paul the belief in Jesus as the messiah; otherwise Paul could not have termed their message a “gospel” (Gal 1:6). Second, for the opponents the gospel of Paul was incomplete, because it lacked part of the commandments of the covenant, particularly the commandment of circumcision as a prerequisite for full membership among the people of God (Gal 5:3–4; 6:12–13). Although Paul himself did not mention it, we can safely assume that on this point the opponents referred to scripture. Gen 17:10–11, for example, states clearly that without circumcision no one can be a member of the covenant.

If one can trust the testimony of modern biblical scholarship, the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 is leading a double life. According to some, Deuteronomy 32 represents a lawsuit in which God summons witnesses to the stand (Deut 32:1), issues a formal indictment (Deut 32:15–18), takes an oath (Deut 32:40), and, finally, pronounces punishment (Deut 32:19–29). For others, Deuteronomy 32 represents a wisdom text that identifies itself as a teaching (Deut 32:2), chastises Israel for its intellectual shortcomings (Deut 32:6, 28), and repeatedly exhorts Israel to remember and understand (Deut 32:7, 29). Thus Deuteronomy 32 seems to have two literary identities: one as an act of indictment drawing on legal language; the other as an act of instruction belonging to the sphere of wisdom.

Christianity always expressed the necessity of the proclamation of the gospel. During the second century, however, the different groups and churches were not able to agree on the nature of this proclamation. For some, the apostolic witness was constituted by a memory of fundamental salvific events, namely, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. For others, particularly the author of the Acts of Andrew, preaching the gospel meant communicating divine wisdom and proclaiming life-giving words.

Since his 1972 study of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures, provocatively entitled In Man We Trust, Walter Brueggemann has challenged the settled verities of Christian communities of faith and the orthodoxies of biblical scholarship. In over two dozen books and numerous popular and academic articles on the texts and themes of the Hebrew scriptures, Brueggemann has explored and articulated his growing thesis that the Bible is a powerful, critical, and energizing resource for human and social transformation in our times. Concentrating on the prophetic corpus since his programmatic 1978 book, The Prophetic Imagination, as well as giving significant attention to the historical books and the psalter, Brueggemann himself has become an important prophetic voice, calling the contemporary church to fidelity to Yahweh's uncompromising claims as these are articulated in the Mosaic, covenantal, and prophetic traditions of the Hebrew scriptures.

In histories of the formation of the Christian biblical canon, the thirty-ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius of Alexandria, written for Easter 367, holds a justifiably prominent place. Not only is this letter the earliest extant Christian document to list precisely the twenty-seven books that eventually formed the generally accepted canon of the New Testament, but Athanasius is also the first Christian author known to have applied the term “canonized” (κανονιςόμενα) specifically to the books that made up his Old and New Testaments. Athanasius's canon is explicitly closed: “In these books alone,” the bishop declares, “the teaching of piety is proclaimed. ‘Let no one add to or subtract from them’ (LXX Deut 12:32).” The significance of this document goes beyond these formal and terminological issues, however, for the extant fragments of the letter provide a glimpse into the social and political factors that accompanied the attempted formation of a closed canon of the Bible in one ancient Christian setting. Christianity in fourthcentury Egypt was characterized by diverse and conflicting modes of social identity and spiritual formation: study groups led by charismatic teachers, Melitian communities centered around the veneration of martyrs, and the emerging structure of imperial orthodoxy headed by Athanasius all presented themselves as legitimate expressions of Christian piety. Within this complex setting, the formation of a biblical canon with a proper mode of interpretation was an important step in the formation of an official catholic church in Egypt with its parish-centered spirituality.

During the 1960s, a consensus slowly emerged in New Testament scholarship, especially in Germany, that the canonical letter of Paul to the Philippians is likely to be a compilation of fragments of originally separate letters. The case for this partition hypothesis was built almost exclusively on internal evidence, which centered around the abrupt shift in tone and topic at Phil 3:2: βλἐπετε τοὺς κύνας, βλἐπετε τοὺς κακοὺς ἐργάτας βλἐπετε τὴν κατατομήν (“Look out for the dogs, look out for the workers of evil, look out for the incision!”). This section of the letter, which runs from Phil 3:2 to Phil 4:1, is marked by a tone of polemic and personal apologia absent from the rest of the epistle. Some of the most persuasive partitioned of the letter, whom we may call the “fragmentarians,” have identified this section as a letter fragment, sometimes called a Kampfbrief and sometimes a testament, which is now found in Philippians 3.

This article argues that early and later rabbinic texts, as well as Babylonian and Palestinian sources, express different attitudes toward minim (“heretics”) and Christians, and that these differing attitudes are useful in reconstructing the histories of diverse rabbinic communities. In evaluating the historicity of the rabbinic sources, it is important to bear in mind that early sources do not necessarily provide reliable information about early periods, nor do Palestinian materials necessarily depict Palestinian reality more accurately than do Babylonian materials. Portrayals of minim and Christians in talmudic sources may tell us much about relations between Jews and Christians in the Persian and Roman empires of late antiquity, but they perhaps tell us more about the desires and prejudices of rabbinic authors and editors.

One of the central aspects of Jewish theology, and Jewish mysticism in particular, is the conception of the nature of God's being and the appearance of the divine before humanity. No one view has dominated the spectrum of Jewish interpretations, since the biblical text is the only common frame for the wide variety of speculations. At issue is whether the one God depicted in the Hebrew Bible is manifest to humans directly or through the agency of a divine, semidivine, or created power. Even the nature of angelic figures in the Bible remains a matter of debate, both in its original context and through later interpretations. Does the angelic figure physically represent God's form, or is it a literary device that metaphorically describes God's presence? The same is true of divine anthropomorphism in the Bible. Do the descriptions of God's hands or feet imply that God possesses a definite shape similar to that of human bodies, or should these descriptions also be viewed metaphorically, reinforcing a similar view to that expressed about angelic figures: no physical characteristics can be attributed to anything heavenly or divine? Finally, how does this accord with the spatial manifestation of God in the tabernacle through his kavod or glory?

Lactantius, in his shrill polemical pamphlet De mortibus persecutorum, made the following observation while attacking his principal adversary, the emperor Galerius: “There was no mild punishment with him, not islands, not mines, not prisons; but fire, the cross, and wild beasts were daily and ready at hand.” More than a sign of the times, it is also a measure of his fury that Galerius could make exile, hard labor, and imprisonment seem to be lenient sentences. While one must resist succumbing immediately to credulity, one also must admit that even such hyperbole may have a kernel of truth in it. Lactantius probably assumed—as did many others—that the myriad adjustments to the complex relations between the church and the empire, which were in the process of being engineered by Constantine and his associates, would eliminate the need to inflict such punishments on Christians for religious reasons.

Few themes so dominate the homilies of John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407 CE) as the plight of the poor and the necessity of almsgiving. His picture of the poor, however, is always set against the prosperous marketplace of late antiquity. It seems therefore scarcely surprising that his sermons on almsgiving resound with the language of investment. With such imagery, Chrysostom tried not only to prod wealthy Christians into acts of charity but also, and perhaps more importantly, to dislodge his rich parishioners from their conviction that an uncrossable social gulf separated them from the poor. The rhetorical strategy he used is typical of all his polemical attacks. On the one hand, he denigrated the pursuit of money and social status as fundamentally unattractive; it is both unchristian and unmasculine. On the other hand, he insisted that real wealth and lasting prestige should indeed be pursued, but more effectively through almsgiving. I shall first examine how Chrysostom effected this recalculation of wealth, and then I shall turn to the question of whether there may have been some advantage for him in pleading so eloquently on behalf the poor.

The liberation of rabbinic theology from the reins of medieval theology is still underway. One of the central issues that sets rabbinic theology apart from later medieval developments is the attribution of body or form to the godhead. Even though the anthropomorphic tendency of rabbinic thought is widely recognized, it is still early to speak of a learned consensus on this issue. The standard work on the topic remains Arthur Marmorstein's Essays in Anthropomorphism, written in 1937. Marmorstein recognized the anthropomorphic tendency of rabbinic thinking. His way of dealing, both theologically and scholastically, with the issue was to suggest the existence of two schools in the tannaitic period. According to Marmorstein, the schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael were divided on the question of the literality of the understanding of the biblical text. Rabbi Akiva's literal reading gave rise to an anthropomorphic understanding of God. Rabbi Ishmael's nonliteral, or allegorical, reading brought about an opposition to anthropomorphism. This description of rabbinic anthropomorphism has informed the discussions of many scholars, including those who have dealt with our present topic—the image of God. I would, therefore, state my differences with this presentation.

The story of Amalek's deed occurs twice in the Bible: in Exod 17:8–16 and in Deut 25:17–19. The account in Exodus is quite succinct: “Then came Amalek and fought with Israel in Refidim” (Exod 17:8); in contrast, the description in Deuteronomy paints a broader and more detailed picture: “Remember what Amalek did to thee by the way, when you were come out of Egypt: how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were feeble in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deut 25:17–18). The Exodus version, although sparing in its description of the particulars, offers the more dramatic account of the war between Israel and Amalek.

One of the more troublesome issues facing Protestant reformers after the abolition of the Roman Catholic purgatory in the early sixteenth century was the need to explain the status of body and soul in the interim between death and resurrection. Eager to identify the precise destination of the whole person after bodily expiration but before the general judgment, preachers sought to bring comfort to bereaved survivors of the recently departed by formulating an acceptable counterpoise to the centuries-old Roman Catholic geography of the other world. Unlike the authors of learned theological treatises on the nature of the soul and body, eulogists faced the unenviable task of interpreting the experience of death and its sequel to an audience that often lacked the sophistication required for the rigors of sustained exegesis. The task of the eulogist was to attempt to make plain the contours of postmortem existence in a manner designed both to warn and to reassure. In their efforts to define an emotionally satisfying alternative to the Roman Catholic story, however, English Protestants formulated an increasingly wide variety of disparate—and sometimes contradictory—accounts of life after death, each of which was normatively based upon a personal understanding of scripture. By the late seventeenth century, even as English funeral sermons that treated the afterlife began to reflect a broad consensus regarding the separate destinations of body and soul, there remained much confusion over the precise condition of those eternal partners before Christ's promised return. The failure to resolve this dilemma in a satisfactory manner and the inability to arrive at an acceptable consensus on a matter of central concern to believing Christians contributed to the growth of mortalist and annihilationist theories by the close of the century. Conceptual disarray within the orthodox camp, then, provided an opportunity for more innovative thinkers to step forward, persons whose understanding of eschatological time, anchored in their own unique interpretation of the Christian scriptures, negated any need for continued debate about a putative “middle place”.

Within the large collection of ancient manuscripts at the University of Michigan there is a group of Coptic papyri which appears to have been a hoard or library of ancient magical texts. Produced by five copyists sometime in the fourth through seventh centuries and originating from a now unknown location in Egypt, the collection was brought to the British Museum by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge in February 1921 for restoration by C. T. Lamacraft; in August of that year, it underwent philological examination by the Coptic lexicographer Walter E. Crum, and was later forwarded to the University of Michigan.

The fact of religious plurality and how to interpret this fact have in the last decade become central issues in contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. The discussion in recent years has been focused on the debate between the pluralists and the inclusivists, as represented respectively in the volume edited by John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions and that edited by Gavin D'Costa, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions.

No single term has been so misunderstood or so debated in the history of Schleiermacher interpretation as Gefühl (“feeling”). The intensity of the controversy surrounding this term is testimony to the critical role it plays in Schleiermacher's entire theological program. Indeed, as evident in his magnum opus The Christian Faith (1830/1831), where Gefühl attains its final formulation as “the feeling of absolute dependence” (das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl), few other terms play as important a role in his account of religious experience and his doctrine of God. Not only is Schleiermacher's theological system at stake, but also the foundations of modern theology itself. Ludwig Feuerbach's assessment of the consequences of emphasizing Gefühl was unequivocal; most critics of Schleiermacher, Karl Barth foremost among them, have followed Feuerbach's pattern of interpretation:

If, for example, feeling is the essential organ of religion, the nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling.…

But the object of religious feeling is become a matter of indifference, only because when once feeling has been pronounced to be the subjective essence of religion, it in fact is also the objective essence of religion,…feeling is pronounced to be religious, simply because it is feeling.

Fifty years ago, Charles C. Torrey, writing about Esther, asked on the pages of this journal, “Why is there no Greek translation of the Hebrew text? Every other book of the Hebrew Bible, whatever its nature, has its faithful rendering (at least one, often several) in Greek. For the canonical Esther, on the contrary, no such version is extant, nor is there evidence that one ever existed.” It is common knowledge that the extant Greek versions of Esther, both the longer Septuagint text and the shorter A-text, are textually distant from the Hebrew Masoretic version. Indeed, the distance is so great that when a passage in the Complutensian edition (5:1–2) does correspond to the Masoretic text, Robert Hanhart confidently labels it as “newly translated.” His characterization seems justified in this case; the two verses required a new translation because the original Septuagint text had been removed, along with the apocryphal addition D, and put at the end of the book in accordance with the Latin tradition. Hanhart correctly states, “It is improbable that such an intervention, which sacrifices the inner coherence of the Greek text to the benefit of the Masoretic text, belongs to old Greek tradition,” indicating “a scholarly re-working according to the Masoretic text in the period of the Renaissance”; his confidence, however, rests on the fact that scholarly literature contains nothing about a Greek Esther that resembles the Masoretic text.

In his introductory essay on the philosophical sources of The Guide of the Perplexed, Shlomo Pines points out a well-known contradiction between two conceptions of God in Maimonides' theology. On the one hand, Maimonides borrowed the Aristotelian definition of God as the intellect that cognizes itself; on the other, in line with Avicenna's Neoplatonic theory of attributes, Maimonides denied the possibility of saying anything positive about God. Pines proposes two possible solutions; first, that Maimonides was well aware of the contradiction, or, second, that he fell into the contradiction inadvertently. As Pines himself admits, however, neither solution is satisfactory.