Legalists, Visionaries, and New Names: Sectarianism and the Search for Apocalyptic Origins in Isaiah 56–66

This essay re-examines the difficult questions concerning the origins of apocalyptic literature and the rise of Jewish sectarianism. Since the publication of O. Plöger’s Theokratie und Eschatologie and P. Hanson’s The Dawn of Apocalyptic, the search for proto-apocalyptic origins in early post-exilic period sectarian conflict has generated a fair amount of debate. The most cogent and sustained response to Hanson’s and Plöger’s theories, S. Cook’s Prophecy & Apocalypticism (1995), attempted to purge the influence of “deprivation theory” from the field of biblical studies, and, more broadly, social anthropology. The present essay makes a fresh study of some central lines of thought in these works, especially as they relate to the issue of sectarianism and the social framework used for drawing exegetical conclusions. In particular, one prominent theory of the symbolic—in this case, textual—expression of sectarian groups, that of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, is applied to a series of enigmatic and highly debated texts in Trito-Isaiah in order to show the continued viability of the “sectarian” interpretation of these passages

Book Review: The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods

In this short, engaging, and learned book, Susan Niditch takes readers into the world of sixth–fifth century BCE Judah/Yehud to understand what it might have meant for religion during this period to have become “personal.” Books like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs, and Zechariah, among others, take center stage as examples of the turn toward the individual’s relationship to God and the personal psychology of discrete actors in the process of figuring out their place in the world. Though biblical scholars have often correctly emphasized the “group identity” of ancient Israelites, rallying around symbols like temple, land, and king, the era under Niditch’s focus saw many fascinating expressions of a singular person, a “self” in the making, forging an autobiographical relationship to the deity. Not limited purely to biblical texts, Niditch illuminates this phenomenon through the sociological study of religion as well as archaeology. Her simple but convincing argument is that during the exilic and post-exilic periods in Israel authors turned toward complex descriptions of the self, and in doing so ushered in a new period in which religiously creative expressions of personality entered the world of “lived religion” as never before

Book Review: Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World

Mark Smith’s Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World is a tour de force of philological commentary, comparative religion, and historical reconstruction that ultimately focuses its attention on the way warriors and their concerns appear in the Hebrew Bible. After an introduction posing the question of warrior poetry’s broad cultural appeal (1–12), Smith devotes part 1 to “the literary commemoration of warriors and warrior culture” (15–47), in which he lays out a glossary of heroic terminology and literary practice in the Hebrew Bible, highlighting the problem of finding cultural reality within literary representations. Part 2 (51–67) explores “three warrior pairs in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Israel” (i.e., Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroklos, and David and Jonathan) and then “gender inversion in the poetry of heroic pairs” (68–95). Part 3 undertakes a detailed study of “human and divine warriors in the Ugaritic texts” (99– 208), focusing on the Aqhat and Baal epics as well as the Rephaim texts, and part 4 arrives at “Israelite warrior poetry in the early Iron Age” (211–332), where the focus is on Judges 5 and 2 Sam. 1:19–27. The book is replete with maximal citation to the secondary literature, featuring nearly 250 pages of endnotes (333–576) as well as a detailed set of indexes

Book Review: The God Ezekiel Creates

This deftly edited volume is a collection often essays on Ezekiel’s unique presentation of God. Indeed, as Joyce and Rom-Shiloni write in the preface, “[F]ew, if any, books of the Bible . . . have a more distinctive presentation of the deity than the book of Ezekiel, or are more dominated by the central place taken by the divine figure” (p. xiii). This core focus on Ezekiel’s God organizes the topics and (most of) the titles in the volume, all of which were written by presenters in the Society of Biblical Literature’s section on “Theological Perspectives on the Book of Ezekiel” (in 2010, 2011, and 2012): Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, “The God Ezekiel Envisions”; John T. Strong, “The God That Ezekiel Inherited”; Madhavi Nevader, “Creating a Deus Non Creator. Divine Sovereignty and Creation in Ezekiel”; Dexter Callender Jr., “The Recognition Formula and Ezekiel’s Conception of God”; Ellen van Wolde, “The God Ezekiel 1 Envisions”; Corrine L. Carvalho, “The God That Gog Creates: ‘Drop the Stories and Feel the Feelings’”; Stephen L. Cook, “Ezekiel’s God Incarnate! The God That the Temple Blueprint Creates”; Marvin A. Sweeney, “The Ezekiel that G-d Creates”; Daniel I. Block, “The God Ezekiel Wants Us to Meet: Theological Perspectives on the Book of Ezekiel”; and Nathan MacDonald, “The God That the Scholarship on Ezekiel Creates.” The volume ends with indexes of primary sources and authors

Smith\u27s Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Book Review)

A review of Smith, Mark S. Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. xxiv1636 pp. $55.00 (paper)

Written with the Finger of God: Divine and Human Writing in Exodus

The presence of writing in the book of Exodus must be considered not only for its contribution to the narrative as story, but also as a witness to several key socio-political issues (such as the interplay of textuality and orality in ancient Israel), for the role of writing in the history of Israel\u27s religion, and for the struggle to define, through several centuries and editorial layers, the nature of YHWH\u27s true image\u27\u27 in the world

The Giant in a Thousand Years: Tracing Narratives of Gigantism in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond

This essay is an attempt to organize the Bible’s giants by category and to continue to elevate these figures as a rightful object of scholarly attention