Hebrew for Biblical Interpretation teaches elementary Hebrew with a specific focus on the tasks of biblical exegesis. This innovative textbook combines the features of a traditional grammar with exercises in reading and interpreting the Hebrew Bible. Grammatical descriptions are clear, concise, and systematic, and vocabulary is introduced in descending order of frequency. All words occurring more than 100 times in the Hebrew Bible are taught, and attention to grammatical indicators reduces the need for rote memorization of paradigms. The integration of grammar and exegesis helps to motivate students and makes the textbook well-suited to seminary courses, while those who teach in university settings will find the textbook useful because the focus is on scholarly biblical exegesis, not theological interpretation.

New research that transforms how to understand food and eating in literature

Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms hierophagy, a specific type of transformational eating where otherworldly things are consumed. Multiple ancient Mediterranean, Jewish, and Christian texts represent the ramifications of consuming otherworldly food, ramifications that were understood across religious boundaries. Reading ancient texts through the lens of hierophagy helps scholars and students interpret difficult passages in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, Revelation 10, and the Persephone myths, among others.

Features:

• Exploration of how ancient literature relies on bending, challenging, inverting, and parodying cultural norms in order to make meaning out of genres
• Analysis of hierophagy as social action that articulates how patterns of communication across texts and cultures emerge and diverge
• A new understanding of previously confounding scenes of literary eating

An essential introduction for scholars and students of New Testament Greek

With the publication of the widely used 28th edition of Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece and the 5th edition of the United Bible Society Greek New Testament, a computer-assisted method known as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) was used for the first time to determine the most valuable witnesses and establish the initial text. This book offers the first full-length, student-friendly introduction to this important new method. After setting out the method’s history, separate chapters clarify its key concepts, including genealogical coherence, textual flow diagrams, and the global stemma. Examples from across the New Testament are used to show how the method works in practice. The result is an essential introduction that will be of interest to students, translators, commentators, and anyone else who studies the Greek New Testament.

Features

• A clear explanation of how and why the text of the Greek New Testament is changing
• Step-by-step guidance on how to use the CBGM in textual criticism
• Diagrams, illustrations, and glossary of key terms

This volume explores the rhetorical role that miracle discourse plays in the argumentation of the New Testament and early Christianity. The investigation includes both the rhetoric within miracle discourse and the rhetorical role of miracle discourse as it was incorporated into the larger works in which it is now a part. The volume also examines the social, cultural, religious, political, and ideological associations that miracle discourse had in the first-century Mediterranean world, bringing these insights to bear on the broader questions of early Christian origins. The contributors are L. Gregory Bloomquist, Wendy Cotter, David A. deSilva, Davina C. Lopez, Gail O'Day, Todd Penner, Vernon K. Robbins, and Duane F. Watson.

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Deuteronomy. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Deuteronomy, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.

A result of John Wevers’s twenty-five-year association with the Göttingen LXX, this work records his textual notes on the Greek Exodus. The Greek text of Exodus departs in places radically from the Hebrew of the Masoretic tradition. These Notes presuppose that the Hebrew parent text was not all that different from the Masoretic tradition text and that the Greek translator throughout tried to formulate an understanding of the Hebrew from an Alexandrian-Jewish perspective. Included in the Notes are assessments of major textual variants by later readers. This volume is intended for serious students interested in using the LXX text, rather than for the professional LXX scholar.

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Genesis. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Genesis, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Levitcus. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Leviticus, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.

This volume of notes on the Greek texts of the Pentateuch focuses on the book of Numbers. John William Wevers's volume includes verse by verse notes for each chapter, sigla, proposed changes to Numbers, and indexes of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases.

The first Greek text of the Epistle of Aristeas published in more than a century

The Greek text Epistle of Aristeas is a Jewish work of the late Hellenistic period that recounts the origins of the Septuagint. Long recognized as a literary fiction, the Epistle of Aristeas has been variously dated from the third century BCE to the first century CE. As a result, its epistolary features, and especially those in which the putative author, Aristeas, addresses his brother and correspondent, Philocrates, have largely been ignored. In light of more recent scholarship on epistolary literature in the Greco-Roman world, however, this volume presents for the first time a complete Greek text and English Translation with introduction, notes, and commentary of the Epistle of Aristeas with key testimonia from Philo, Josephus, and Eusebius, as well as other related examples of Jewish fictional letters from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.

Features

• Relevant excerpts from Eupolemus, 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees, and the Greek Additions to Esther with translations and introductions
• A critical introduction to ancient Greek letter-writing
• An outline of epistolary features in the text

Six important documents for scholars of early church history

This volume includes English translations of several documents concerning the Luciferians, a group of fourth-century Christians whose name derives from the bishop Lucifer of Cagliari. Documents include a confession of faith written for Emperor Theodosius I and a theological treatise written for his wife by Luciferian clergyman Faustinus, the first English translation of a Luciferian petition to Theodosius that focuses on the persecution the community has suffered, Theodosius’s imperial law in response to the Luciferians, two letters composed by Luciferians that purport to represent correspondence from the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria to Lucifer, and the priest Jerome’s Dialogus adversus Luciferianos. These texts highlight connections between developments in Christian theology and local Christian communities in the course of the fourth century.

Features:

• The first English translation of Faustinus’s Libellus precum
• An overview of the development of late antique theology and Christianity
• An introduction to Luciferian beliefs and the translated texts

Critical and creative studies that offer fresh perspectives on ancient ideas and practices

The contributions to this volume deal in various ways with the cult at the Jerusalem Temple that epitomized the religious, cultural, and socio-political identity of Judaism for many centuries. Some essays examine ancient constitutive practices and concepts, such as purification rituals, sacrifices, atonement, or sacred authorities at the temple, with the goal of interpreting their meanings for modern readers. Other essays explore alternatives to ancient cultic meaning and practice. Essays critique established traditions, attempt to renegotiate them, or use metaphor and spiritualization to expand the potential of these phenomena to serve as terminological and ideological resources. Thus they examine and affirm the continuing relevance of ancient Jewish cultic notions long after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

• An international group of scholars representing different fields and diverse religious backgrounds
• A thorough examination of traditions as through the lens of contemporaneous interpretive traditions such as Jewish prophecy, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Early Christian literature
• Examination of topics such as purification, sacrifice, and atonement, and the depiction and development of sacred authority throughout the Bible

Now in Paperback!

Epiphanius, monastic founder and bishop of Salamis on Cyprus for almost forty years of the fourth century, threw heart and soul into the controversies of the time and produced the Panario or Medicine Chest, a historical encyclopedia of sects and heresies and their refutations. Book I deals with material that is also found in Nag Hammadi, other Gnostic writings, and in such patristic authors as Irenaeus and Hippolytus. Students of Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism, patrologists, historians of religion, church historians, and Judaism have found this translation useful.

Features:

• Paperback format of an essential Brill reference set
• Coverage of Gnostic and Jewish Christian groups
• Documents not available elsewhere in paperback

Described by Origen as a writing that “even the masses of believers have read,” the Sentences of Sextus offers unique insights into popular Christian thought during the late second century C.E. Although it draws extensively on canonical texts for the composition of its sayings, it is especially fascinating for the manner in which it integrates these texts with material derived from two generically similar collections of Pythagorean maxims. This volume provides a critical edition including evidence from the Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic versions; a new translation; and the first commentary for the Sentences, an important document for investigating the history of early Christian wisdom, asceticism, and ethics.

Explore how empire is a crucial foreground for reading and interpreting the New Testament

In the last three decades, significant attention has been given to the way in which New Testament texts engage and respond to the imperial world in which they were written. The purpose of the present volume is to introduce students and non-specialists to the growing subfield of New Testament studies known as empire studies. Contributors seek to make readers aware of the significant work that has already been produced, while also pointing them to new ways in which this field is moving forward. The contributors are Bruce W. Longenecker, Richard A. Horsley, Warren Carter, Adam Winn, Eric D. Barreto, Beth M. Sheppard, Neil Elliot, James R. Harrison, Harry O. Maier, Deborah Krause, Jason A.Whitlark, Matthew R. Hauge, Kelly D. Liebengood, and Davina C. Lopez.

Features:

Essays from a diverse group of interpreters who at times have differing presuppositions, methods, and concerns

Articles introduce students and non-specialists to the Roman imperial realities regularly encountered by first and second century Christians

Contributions explore the strategies employed by early Christians to respond to the Roman empire

Explore a tale of two sisters

Beyond Mary or Martha: Reclaiming Ancient Models of Discipleship dives into the complicated reception history of Mary and Martha of Bethany, who have been at the center of many debates for almost two thousand years. Jennifer S. Wyant begins her study with a close reading of the sisters’ first encounter with Jesus in Luke 10:38-42, then moves on to patristic, medieval, and modern interpretations of that narrative. Wyant tracks how Mary and Martha both became paradigms of discipleship, revealing the inherent tension within Christianity between contemplative practices and acts of service. By placing ancient debates alongside more modern ones, she argues that, contrary to discussions today within academic and religious circles, gender is not the most important aspect of their story.

Features:

• A thorough examination of the textual variants in the passage to show how variants affected interpretation throughout history
• Interpretations from medieval women and their contributions to interpretation of Mary and Martha
• A visual exegesis of the art representing the passage throughout history