Faith in a powerful God who creates the world and revives the dead is one of the fundamental axioms of the Jewish faith, and it is echoed in the first benedictions of the daily prayer (Amidah) at least since the first century. The conceptual and verbal similarities between 2 Macc 7 and one of the oldest known recensions of the Amidah (in Greek) indicate that the origin of this conviction goes back at least to the second century BC. The repeated connexion of these same formulas and concepts in different Jewish corpora of the first century AD-particularly in the NT-indicates that, at that time, it was already part of the collective commonplace in a wide range of the Jewish world.
YHWH's repentance in Jonah 3-4 is twofold: sometimes it is described as a divine reaction to human conversion, sometimes it is linked to YHWH's merciful being. A comparison of Jonah 3-4 with Exodus 34:6-7 and Jeremiah 18:7-11 shows that the book of Jonah differs from the doctrine of retribution: a debate about retribution emerges in Jonah 3-4. The identification of such a debate provides a further argument in favour of dating the book of Jonah to the very end of the third century BCE.
This article attempts to assess the money supply and monetarization of Judea in the Persian, Macedonian and Ptolemaic eras. The results show that by the end of the Persian period, the money supply was sufficient in relation to the region's GDP for monetarization. The texts in the Hebrew Bible that presuppose monetarization in Judea must therefore be dated to the last years of the Persian era or, more probably, to the Hellenistic period. In addition, this article shows that the annual quantity of silver beaten decreased during the Hellenistic period, which is explained by the difficulty in sourcing silver.
Scholars agree that the root (sic)N superset of conveys both physical and mental distress, with the exception of 2 Kgs 3:19 where it signifies "to ruin". These semantic shifts, however, remain unexplained hitherto. This paper contends that (sic)N superset of usually foregrounds bodily affliction, and extends to inner suffering and even all-encompassing suffering due to metonymic processes that can be explained via recent research in pain studies and cognitive linguistics. In 2 Kgs 3:19, (sic)N superset of should be rendered by "to afflict", since this is a case of personification that the Blending Theory of metaphor helps to understand.
