The article explores the question of how to understand the experience of the simultaneity of life and death expressed in the Gregorian chant Media vita in morte sumus, which preoccupied the ancient cultures in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Syria -Palestine, and Greece. A particular focus is placed on the Northwest -Semitic myth of the weather god and his battle against chaos in the form of the sea and death, both attested to in the Ugaritic Baal epic and in the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. The article shows the relation of the myth to the reality of human experience in the cultic practice of ancestor worship and the ritual of lamentation and thanksgiving, as well as in the older tradition of Wisdom. Furthermore, it traces the later transformations under new theological auspices that both the myth itself and the religious practice and teaching of wisdom have undergone in the context of the biblical tradition of the Old and New Testaments.

Die Entstehung der jüdischen Religion ist eng mit den Propheten verbunden. Der renommierte Bibelwissenschaftler Reinhard G. Kratz rekonstruiert die Geschichte der biblischen Prophetie von ihren Ursprüngen in der altorientalischen Mantik über die Entstehung prophetischer und apokalyptischer Schriften bis hin zu ihrer Rezeption in Judentum, Christentum und Islam. Sein konziser Überblick auf dem neuesten Forschungsstand bietet einen einzigartigen Schlüssel zum Verständnis der abrahamitischen Religionen.

This contribution introduces the archives of the two Jewish colonies of Elephantine and Al-Yahudu and deals with two questions, drawing upon Julius Wellhausen: first, whether the two colonies represent a type of "unreformed Judaism" that knows nothing of the Torah of Moses and is untouched by the reforms of Josiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah; and second, whether this form of Judaism represents only a "fossilized remnant" or a living species that was more widespread than the biblical tradition would have us believe, and also more widespread than the modern "histories of Israel" - themselves based on the biblical narrative - suggest.

No AccessIsaiah and the PersiansReinhard G. KratzReinhard G. Kratzhttps://doi.org/10.13109/9783666560354.155SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous chapter Next chapter FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverForschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen TestamentsVolume 277 1st editionISBN: 978-3-525-56035-8 eISBN: 978-3-666-56035-4HistoryPublished online:November 2020 PDF download

Elephantine is a name well-known to scholars of Israelite religion and early Judaism: an island in the Nile River, supposedly elephant-shaped, it has for millennia marked the southern border of Egypt.As such, it was also the site of a fortress in antiquity.From at least the seventh century BCE, the Egyptians staffed the fortress with a garrison, or perhaps a cleruchy, made up of expatriate soldiers.When the Persian Empire conquered Egypt in 525 BCE, they kept these same soldiers in their employ.A trove of Aramaic documents from this time period witnesses to the everyday life and community challenges of this military outpost.But the interest of these materials to research on Israelite religion and Judaism lies in this: that the military community on the island called themselves yehudayya-Jews or Judeans-and they worshipped the Jewish God YHW(H) in their own temple there.These Aramaic documents generated intense academic discussion when they were first recovered in the early twentieth century.They have also received increased attention here in the early twenty-first: several largescale research projects have attracted substantial funding and promise to change the field. 1 A series of monographs-"almost one book a year" 2 -have in-1.These projects are, first: "

This article discusses the relationship between the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament and the New Testament as well as that between Judaism and Christianity from the perspective of an exegete and historian of ancient Judaism. After a short examination of the common definitions of this relationship within Christian doctrine and theology, the article takes its point of departure from the historical situation at the turn of the eras in order to propose a new self-understanding of Christianity as an offshoot and a part of Judaism. The author does not plead for 2000 years of Christian history to just be skipped over, but rather that the resulting undesirable developments, which still have an impact today, be overcome through a consistent historisication of this history and one's own current Christian perspective.

Celebrating 2017's 500th anniversary of the Reformation and the discovery of Qumran 70 years ago, this contribution aims to reveal the connection between these two biblical interpretations originating from vastly different epochs. Taking Psalm 37 as an example, the discussion of exegetical techniques and hermeneutics profits by comparing Qumran and Martin Luther as well as Luther with Luther, while special attention is also paid to identifying "the righteous" and "the wicked" in the psalm and its later interpretations. Beginning with a short analysis of the biblical psalm itself, the essay investigates the ancient Judaic interpretation found in Qumran's psalm pesher, goes on to look at Luther's early lecture on the psalm from 1513-1515, and is rounded off with an assessment of his fresh interpretation of it in 1521. Comparing these two readings of Psalm 37 reveals a turning point in the identification of "the righteous" and "the wicked" : while the 1513-1515 lecture featured the traditional Jewish-Christian confrontation, this was replaced in 1521 with the historically-founded view that the conflict arose from within the own Christian community itself. In a sense, Luther thus reverted to Qumran's pesher hermeneutics, whose identification of the two groups had mirrored internal Jewish clashes in the first century BCE. In conclusion, how such historical interpretations of biblical statements from pre-critical times can be dealt under modern conditions is reflected on.