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

Paperback edition 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.

Slight revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--Pontifical Gregorian University, 2008.

The Cornerstone Biblical Commentary series provides students, pastors, and laypeople with up-to-date, accessible evangelical scholarship on the Old and New Testaments. Presenting the message for each passage, as well as an overview of other issues relevant to the text, each volume equips pastors and Christian leaders with exegetical and theological knowledge so they can better understand and apply God’s Word. This volume includes the entire NLT text of 1 and 2 Chronicles. Mark J. Boda (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) has authored numerous articles and books in addition to editing several collections of scholarly essays on various topics related to the Old Testament and Christian Theology. He taught for nine years at Canadian Theological Seminary before joining McMaster Divinity College in 2003. Mark enjoys mentoring students and teaches with enthusiasm about the Old Testament and its continued relevance to the Christian life today.

"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."

The volume contains papers read at the International Conference of the ISDCL, held in Budapest in 2015. The contributors explore various aspects of worship as reflected in the literature of Judaism from the Second Temple period to Late Antiquity. The volume provides a fresh reading of various crucial issues especially within Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Rabbinic literature, Gnostic traditions, and the emerging synagogue. The papers analyse texts and artefacts that reveal how various groups of Judaism understood the concept of worship—a pre-eminent form of expressing religious identity and interpreting fundamental traditions.

Understanding Judaism and the Jews in the Gospel of John: Polemic, Tradition, and Johannine Self-Identity reopens the perennial question of the Fourth Gospel’s perplexing characterization of “the Jews.” According to the reigning paradigm, the Gospel of John witnesses to a community’s burgeoning sense of religious distinctiveness. Ethnically Jewish believers in Jesus had begun to forge a new identity in contrast to the Jews. Nathan Thiel assesses the weaknesses of the prevailing model, arguing that the fourth evangelist still saw himself as living and working within the Jewish tradition. Yet if the Gospel of John is the literary product of a self-consciously Jewish author, why would he speak so often and so critically of “the Jews”? Thiel considers the factors which have conditioned the evangelist’s choice of terminology: the Gospel’s setting, its intended audience, and, above all, John’s indebtedness to Scripture. As a first-century Jew well-versed in Israel’s sacred texts, the evangelist has modeled his story of Jesus after patterns familiar to him from the Scriptures—Scriptures in which Israelite authors consistently portray their ancestors as faithless despite God’s powerful work on their behalf. John is a relentless critic, but such cutting theological assessment had long been part of Israel’s counterintuitive way of telling its history.