A reexamination of the people and movements associated with Qumran, their outlook on the world, and what bound them together

Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat examines the identity of the Qumran movement by reassessing former conclusions and bringing new methodologies to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The collection as a whole addresses questions of identity as they relate to law, language, and literary formation; considerations of time and space; and demarcations of the body. The thirteen essays in this volume reassess the categorization of rule texts, the reuse of scripture, the significance of angelic fellowship, the varieties of calendrical use, and celibacy within the Qumran movement. Contributors consider identity in the Dead Sea Scrolls from new interdisciplinary perspectives, including spatial theory, legal theory, historical linguistics, ethnicity theory, cognitive literary theory, monster theory, and masculinity theory.

Features

• Essays that draw on new theoretical frameworks and recent advances in Qumran studies
• A tribute to the late Peter Flint, whose scholarship helped to shape Qumran studies

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.

Using a cognitive-functional linguistic framework and cross-linguistic research on discourse markers, Christopher J. Fresch investigates the use of five discourse markers in the documentary papyri of the third to first centuries BCE and the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. Through this analysis, Fresch proposes linguistically grounded descriptions for how each discourse marker uniquely functions to guide readers in how they process and comprehend the text. Based on these descriptions, he examines the instances of these discourse markers in the Greek translation of the Minor Prophets and how the translator used them to render the Hebrew text. Fresch presents a picture of a translator who selected discourse markers based on their own understanding of the structure, flow, and meaning of the underlying Hebrew text. Their use attests to a translator who was contextually aware and who desired to produce a translation in idiomatic Koine.

A fresh literary analysis of political polemic in the Bible

The Book of Judges ends with a bizarre narrative of sex and violence that starts with a domestic tiff and ends with the decimation of a tribe that is restored by means of abduction and rape. Cynthia Edenburg applies a fresh literary analysis, recent understandings of historical linguistics, and historical geography in her exploration of the origin of the anti-Benjamin polemic found in Judges 19–21, the growth and provenance of the book of Judges, and the shape of the Deuteronomistic History. Her study exposes how Judges 19–21 function as political polemic reflecting not the pre-monarchic period but instead the historical realities of the settlement of Benjamin during the Babylonian and Persian period.

Features:

• Methodological discussions that open each chapter
• Charts and tables
• Engagement with current research produced by scholars from around the world

This volume brings together scholars from New Testament studies and classics, whose fields of study have much in common but are not often in in conversation. The contributors explore how the ancient works they study can be resources for thinking critically and creatively about issues that matter today. The essays address our obligation to take positive moral stands on divisive issues of both the past and the present, including empire, racial/ethnic and religious difference, economic inequality, gender and sexuality, slavery, and disability. Contributors include Douglas Boin, Denise Kimber Buell, Gay L. Byron, Allen Dwight Callahan, Joy Connolly, Jennifer A. Glancy, Shelley P. Haley, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Katherine Lu Hsu, Timothy Joseph, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Dominic Machado, Joseph A. Marchal, Thomas R. Martin, Candida R. Moss, Laura Salah Nasrallah, Jorunn Økland, and Abraham Smith.

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception

How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

The essays in Dreams and Visions in the Bible and Related Literature focus on how the reading community interprets dreams or visions and what is at stake for whom in a dream or vision’s interpretation. Contributors explore the hermeneutics of readership, the relationship between reading and intertextuality, and the interplay of affect and emotion within dreams and visions in religious texts. A variety of methodologies are employed, including rhetorical analysis, critical theory, trauma studies, the analysis of space and society, and the history of emotions. Contributors are Richard J. Bautch, Genevive Dibley, Roy Fisher, Gina Hens-Piazza, Joseph McDonald, Deborah Prince, Jean-François Racine, Andrea Spatafora, and Rodney A. Werline.