Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

This volume presents for the first time both the authoritative Sumerian text and an elegant English translation of four Sumerian epics, the earliest known in any language. The introduction discusses the intellectual and cultural context as well as the poetics and meaning of this epic cycle.

In Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Period Judaism Jeremy Penner provides an account of how daily prayer became entrenched within early Jewish religious traditions.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Jewish and early Christian authors discussed Abraham in numerous and diverse ways, adapting his Old Testament narratives and using Abrahamic imagery in their works. However, while some areas of study in Abrahamic texts have received much scholarly attention, other areas remain nearly untouched. Beginning with a perspective on how Abraham was used within Jewish literature, this collection of essays follows the impact of Abraham across biblical texts–including Pseudigraphic and Apocryphal texts – into early Greek, Latin and Gnostic literature. These essays build upon existing Abraham scholarship, by discussing Abraham in less explored areas such as rewritten scripture, Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, the Apostolic Fathers and contemporary Greek and Latin authors. Through the presentation of a more thorough outline of the impact of the figure and stories of Abraham, the contributors to this volume create a concise and complete idea of how his narrative was employed throughout the centuries, and how ancient authors adopted and adapted received traditions.

Jesus’ words of indictment and judgment in the Gospel according to Matthew have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Judaism. But what did those words originally mean within Matthew’s narrative? David L. Turner examines how Matthew has taken up Deuteronomic themes of prophetic rejection and judgment and woven them throughout the Gospel, culminating in Matthew 23:32. Matthew was engaged in a heated intramural dispute with other Jewish groups, Turner argues. The legacy of Christian anti-Jewish violence reflects a gross misunderstanding of Matthew by generations who have failed to recognize the author’s worldview and allusions.

"In The Forgiveness of Sins, Tim Carter examines the significance of forgiveness in a New Testament context, delving deep into second-century Christian literature on sin and the role of the early church in mitigating it. This crucial spiritual issue is at the core of what it means to be Christian, and Carter's thorough and erudite examination of this theme is a necessity for any professional or amateur scholar of the early church. Carter's far-reaching analysis begins with St Luke, who is often accused of weakness on the subject of atonement, but who in fact uses the phrase 'forgiveness of sins' more frequently than any other New Testament author. Carter explores patristic writers both heterodox and orthodox, such as Marcion, Justin Martyr and Origen. He also deepens our understanding of Second Temple Judaism and the theological context in which Christian ideas about atonement developed. Useful to both the academic and the pastoral theologian, The Forgiveness of Sins is a painstaking, clear-eyed exploration of what forgiveness meant not only to early Christians such as Tertullian, Irenaeus and Luke, but to Jesus himself, and what it means to Christians today."

Before the Bible reveals the landscape of scripture in an era prior to the crystallization of the rabbinic Bible and the canonization of the Christian Bible. Most accounts of the formation of the Hebrew Bible trace the origins of scripture through source critical excavation of the archaeological "tel" of the Bible or the analysis of the scribal hand on manuscripts in text-critical work, but the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of scripture formation. Judith Newman focuses not on the putative origins and closure of the Bible, but on the reasons why scriptures remained open, with pluriform growth in the Hellenistic-Roman period. Drawing on new methods from cognitive neuroscience and the social sciences as well as traditional philological and literary analysis, Before the Bible argues that the key to understanding the formation of scripture is the widespread practice of individual and communal prayer in early Judaism. The figure of the teacher as a learned and pious sage capable of interpreting and embodying the tradition is central to understanding this revelatory phenomenon. The book considers the entwinement of prayer and scriptural formation in five books reflecting the diversity of early Judaism: Ben Sira, Daniel, Jeremiah/Baruch, Second Corinthians, and the Qumran Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns). While not a complete taxonomy of scripture formation, the book illuminates performative dynamics that have been largely ignored as well as the generative role of interpretive tradition in accounts of how the Bible came to be.