Like religious leaders in any period, the prophets functioned within a religious world that was broader and more diverse than a surface reading might suggest. In “The Book of Isaiah in the History of Israelite Religion,” Christopher B. Hays analyzes various religiohistorical aspects of the book, such as the role of writing and symbolic action; the supernatural images of the divine throne room; the book’s role in developing ideas about death and afterlife; its central role in the formulation of biblical monotheism, including its polemics against idols; and its relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and its priests.

While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.

Livy not Polybius is the main source for Roman religion; Carthaginian is less easily grasped. Literary traditions represented Hannibal as an impious perjuror, whereas Scipio enjoyed divine help (Neptune) and privileged access (Jupiter). Neither picture is true. Both made youthful vows, Hannibal never to befriend Rome, Scipio (after Cannae) to continue the fight. Neither was regularly accompanied by seers on campaign; Hannibal was his own diviner and personally executed one violent animal sacrifice. He buried defeated enemy commanders respectfully, unlike Nero after Metaurus. Scipio, unlike Hannibal, took impious advantage of a truce. Hannibal was a priest only in the sense that ancient generals conducted campaign rituals. Scipio had been a Salian priest of Mars for many years (special dress, ceremonies, obligations). There was a Hannibalic legend (advice or warnings in dreams from Jupiter and Juno) as well as the famous Scipionic legend (supernatural snake-birth and Neptune’s help at New Carthage).

This chapter considers the ritual laws in the latter part of Exodus and throughout much of Leviticus and Numbers, which cover sacrificial activities, consecration of and rules for priests, permitted/forbidden foods, matters of purity, religious festivals, types of sins, the handling and disposal of blood, and vows and donations to the cult of Yahweh.

The second part of Volume Two starts with passages relating to the Black Death which ravaged the population in 1349. Knighton’s Chronicle records a series of facts about the impact of the plague. The Ordinance of Labourers, recorded in a Close Roll of 1349, states the new regulations governing the employment of rural and urban workers. These were aimed at curbing the increased power of workers now that many had died in the plague. The situation is seen from the perspective of the upper classes who needed servants but who did not wish to pay the higher wages demanded.

Chapter seven examines the political fallout that began in the 1570s, when the New Kingdom archbishop began to ordain dozens of mestizo priests in order to comply with the Crown’s mandate to place priests fluent in indigenous languages within native mission parishes (doctrinas), a change inspired by the Council of Trent’s encouragement for increased ministrations in the vernacular. Surprised to receive Crown instructions explicitly prohibiting the ordination of mestizos, in 1576 the archbishop emerged as a defender of the value and validity of the ordinations of individuals of mixed ethnicity. Yet the same archbishop resisted the promotion of a local mestizo to an elite position in the Santafé cathedral. This chapter examines how the complex motivations of the archbishop and elite ecclesiastics – as they sought to create a second-tier mestizo priesthood – were related to exclusivist discourses about “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre). The confrontation over the legal issue ultimately provoked the Crown into elaborating imperial law, which connected matters in the New Kingdom to concerns in Peru and elsewhere in the Indies.

This chapter discusses the absence from Longus of institutionalised community religion and of one of its central elements, priests, who (like priestesses) are found in the other four novels. A reason for this might be that some rural cults ran themselves and thus differed from polis-based religion. The only character within the story eligible for description as a holy man is Philetas: he has a very close relationship with Eros, who watches over him. The story’s narrator, however, relates in the preface how a shadowy exegetes explained the paintings in the Nymph’s grove: yet this exegetes, on whose say-so the novel’s four books are offered, lacks authority. Longus reverses the novelistic trope of supporting his story by a Beglaubigungsapparat: instead his exegetes’ interpretations of the painting’s scenes leave the reader quite uncertain about the reality of their world.

The Introduction notes that early critical scholarship paid scant attention to books deemed to be late, including the book of Joel. However, in recent years studies have proliferated. Literary study of the text reveals three sections: 1:1–2:27; 2:28–32; 3:1–21. The first section 1:1–2:27 describes a disastrous plague of locusts. The people are urged to call upon YHWH to have mercy. He hears, and promises restoration of the land. The second section foresees a time of future blessing in which YHWH’s spirit will be poured out. This section, which entered the text later than chapter 3, now introduces that chapter. The final chapter announces judgment on the nations and blessing for Israel. There are Closer Look sections (Fasting; The Day of YHWH; The Destiny of the Nations). A Bridging the Horizons section examines Joel 2:28–32 in the New Testament.

No other institution wielded comparable transnational power over such a large body of the Irish diaspora than the Catholic Church, yet it was riven with internal divisions over the questions of land and labour during the 1880s, and its grip on Irish popular opinion was increasingly strained and contingent. In this chapter, the relationship of the Church to questions of land reform is discussed, particularly its role in sustaining radical critiques of liberal modernity and capitalism. It discusses the importance of priests to the Land League, and the challenges faced by the Catholic hierarchy in both Ireland and the United States to contain and direct the force of Irish land and labour radicalism. The chapter also looks closely at Henry George’s relationship with the religiosity, his use of theological arguments, and his tensions with the Catholic Church in the United States.

The combination of violent crimes, gruesome and prolonged execution spectacles, and natural disasters created an atmosphere of tension and fear in late 1780s Mexico City. Scientists of the era identified the flaming clouds that Gómez described above as an aurora borealis. But most people in this era would not have read these scientific interpretations. Instead, shocking natural phenomena prompted a turn to their faith in the supernatural for explanations and remedies. This reaction drew from both European and Indigenous connections between the divine and the physical world. Gómez himself communicated a sense of the ineffable links between human acts and natural phenomena (perhaps caused by unseen supernatural entities) in the first quote by juxtaposing an earthquake with the execution of five men. The skepticism of the European Enlightenment did not diminish the Novohispanic belief in miracles.

By the 1970s, younger generations of Irish men and women were beginning to question the Church’s teachings in relation to contraception, and many others were exhibiting resistance in their contraceptive practices. It is evident, however, that for the older generations, Church teachings had a significant impact on their family planning choices, often resulting in guilt and shame if individuals chose to use contraception. Although it is clear that the encyclical Humanae Vitae caused considerable anguish for some members of the priesthood, speaking out against papal teachings could have significant consequences. Many priests toed the line and the confession box was an important sphere where priests could continue to exert power over women’s family planning choices. Yet, it is clear that some priests were also beginning to follow their own consciences, and used the confession box compassionately to assist individuals who were troubled by their decision to use contraception.

Several small towns in Hieradoumia received polis-status between the Augustan and Flavian periods. None of these communities seem to have had an especially dense or elaborate urban fabric, and all had a relatively limited roster of civic magistrates. There is little sign that the local civic elite was strongly distinct either in wealth or cultural horizons from the ordinary rural population, and Roman citizenship was not widespread before the constitutio Antoniniana; the largest private landholdings in the region seem to have been in the hands of wealthy non-resident landowners from Sardis, Philadelphia, or further afield. The polis remained a marginal phenomenon in Roman Hieradoumia, where the chief focus of communal life was instead the self-governing village. Villages overlapped strongly with cult-associations, and in a few cases, we have good evidence for segmentary organization of villages by kin-groups. The chapter concludes with a defence of the conception of Roman Hieradoumia as a fundamentally kin-ordered society.

Mark Sneed introduces readers to the world of scribes. Drawing first on some of the earliest developments of Sumerian scribalism, he gives an overview of how scribes trained and worked in the ancient Near East more broadly. In Egypt and elsewhere, scribal training began at an early age and involved a wide range of curricula, including wisdom literature, which scribes copied and memorized, as it played a significant role in scribal education. Although concrete evidence for Israelite schools is lacking, Sneed finds reason to believe that similar scribal practices existed there, where wisdom literature too served technical and ethical purposes. Scribes, then, existed in ancient Israel, and for Sneed could be identified in various ways: priests, prophets, and sages. Behind each of these lies the “scribe” as one who composed the texts themselves. Thus Sneed finds far more that is common than different among the biblical materials, wisdom texts included, and conceives of the scribe as holding a wide-ranging professional role in Israel that was not tied down to a single genre of literature.

Jewish status as citizens of the Roman Empire since 212 CE devolved during the three centuries from Constantine to Heraklios through political, legal, religious, social, and economic restrictions and suffered from mob pressures resulting in periodic pogroms. A complex Christian program led and implemented a state policy to convert the Jews to the dominant Christian religion in order to achieve the eschaton via the return of the crucified messiah, whom the majority now worshipped as God incarnate.

This chapter explores the foundation of poleis beyond the capital cities, as well as the alteration and renaming of settlements as marks of imperialism. Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey, the authors emphasize the methodological issues faced by historians of identifying and assessing new settlements – Mairs by focusing on the historiography and archaeology of the early Seleucid Far East, and Fischer-Bovet by offering a typology of Ptolemaic settlements. Seleucid settlements in Bactria can only be understood as a continuation of Alexander’s settlement policy. Their strong military character shows the early Seleucid interest in Central Asia and is not representative of the empire as a whole. The Ptolemaic empire was also connected through a network of either new or transformed settlements, whose variety was adapted to each region and actively shaped by local populations. The existing urban and administrative networks, moreover, did not create the need for new poleis – and complementary explanation to the question raised by Clancier and Gorre in the same volume – but the new and altered settlements reflect the Ptolemaic strategy of combining Greek and Egyptian elements.