"Revised and edited version of a dissertation presented to the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome in October 1990" -- p. [5].

By means of a final-form consideration of the Chronicler's narrative, this study focuses attention on Chronicles' portrayal of the interactive relationship between the Jerusalem kings and the Jerusalem cultus. The Chronicler's development of ancient Near Eastern royal and temple ideologies is examined-a development that allowed the monarchical ideologies to be applied to Judah long after kingship had ceased. How the Chronicler's portrayal of the relationship between the kings and the Jerusalem cultus allowed monarchical ideologies to be applied to Judah long after kingship had ceased.

Starting with an exegesis of the book of Chronicles as a single corpus, Jozef Tino sees the king-temple relationship as the leitmotiv of Chronicles. He shows that the Chronicler expresses a specific attitude to the kingship ideology and examines the text from the perspective of its relations with the post-exilic theological traditions when only the Temple in Jerusalem was a living institution but the monarchy was a mere memory from the distant past. Thereby this study offers a new perspective on the whole of Chronicles.

This volume contains 20 articles by leading scholars on the king and Messiah, mostly in the Old Testament, but also in the ancient Near East and post-biblical Judaism and New Testament. This volume is a major contribution to the study of kingship and messianism in the Old Testament in particular, but also in the ancient Near East more generally, and in post-biblical Judaism and the New Testament. It contains contributions by 20 scholars originally presented to the Oxford Old Testament Seminar. Part I, on the ancient Near East, has contributions by John Baines and W.G. Lambert. Part II, on the Old Testament, has essays by John Day, Gary Knoppers, Alison Salvesen, Carol Smith, Katharine Dell, Deborah Rooke, S.E. Gillingham, H.G.M. Williamson, J.G. McConville, Knut Heim, Paul Joyce, Rex Mason, John Barton and David Reimer. Part III, on post-biblical Judaism and the New Testament, is by William Horbury, George Brooke, Philip Alexander and Christopher Rowland. This noteworthy volume has many fresh insights and is essential reading for all concerned with kingship and messianism.

In this book, Isabel Cranz offers the first systematic study of royal illness in the Books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. Applying a diachronic approach, she compares and contrasts how the different views concerning kingship and illness are developed in the larger trajectory of the Hebrew Bible. As such, she demonstrates how a framework of meaning is constructed around the motif of illness, which is expanded in several redactional steps. This development takes different forms and relates to issues such as problems with kingship, the cultic, and moral conduct of individual kings, or the evaluation of dynasties. Significantly, Cranz shows how the scribes living in post-monarchic Judah expanded the interpretive framework of royal illness until it included a message of destruction and a critique of kingship. The physical and mental integrity of the king, therefore, becomes closely tied to his nation and the political system he represents.

Are the Writings a miscellaneous collection of books, as is so often asserted, or do they have a purposeful design or arrangement? Over the past 35 years, there has been a significant amount of scholarly interest in the shape of the Law, Former Prophets, Twelve Minor Prophets and the Psalms, while examinations of the shape of the Writings were almost nonexistent until very recently. The 11 essays in this volume explore this often-neglected issue from a variety of critical perspectives—reader-centered approaches, canonical, structural-canonical, and redactional—made more robust by the mix of German- and English-language scholarship on this question, including 4 articles translated from German into English. Essays range from the historical development of the collection, to analysis of the collection’s different arrangements, to the relationship of books and subcollections within the Writings, to the reception of the collection in Jewish and Christian sources. Every book in the Writings is discussed, with particular attention given to Job, Ruth, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The volume closes with 3 critical responses from John Barton, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, and Christopher Seitz.

This work uses anthropological theory and field studies to investigate the social function and meaning of sacrifice. All rituals, including sacrifice, communicate social beliefs and morality, but these cannot be determined outside of a study of the social context. Thus, there is no single explanation for sacrifice - such as those advanced by René Girard or Walter Burkert or late-19th and early-20th century scholars. The book then examines four different writings in the Hebrew Bible - the Priestly Writing, the Deuteronomistic History, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles - to demonstrate how different social origins result in different social meanings of sacrifice.

In the first three Gospels, Jesus rarely travels to Jerusalem prior to his final week. The Fourth Gospel, however, features Jesus' repeated visits to the city, which occur primarily during major festivals. This volume elucidates the role of the Jewish feasts of Passover, Tabernacles, and Dedication in John's presentation of Jesus. Gerry Wheaton examines the Gospel in relation to pertinent sources from the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods, offering a fresh understanding of how John appropriates the symbolic and traditional backgrounds of these feasts. Wheaton situates his inquiry within the larger question of Judaism in John's Gospel, which many consider to be the most anti-Semitic New Testament text. The findings of this study significantly contribute to the ongoing debate surrounding the alleged anti-Jewish posture of the Gospel as a whole, and it offers new insights that will appeal to scholars of Johannine theology, New Testament studies, and Jewish studies.

The study of Ezra-Nehemiah has been revolutionized in recent years by a growing rejection of the long-established belief that it was composed as part of the Chronicler's work. That shift in scholarly paradigms has re-opened many questions of origin and purpose, and this thesis attempts to establish an answer to the most important of these: the question of authorship. Here, Kyungjin Min argues that Ezra-Nehemiah most likely originated in a Levitical group that received Persian backing during the late-fifth century BCE and that valued the ideologies of decentralization of power, unity and cooperation among social groups, and dissatisfaction with the religious status quo.