Vol 92 (2011)

This study continues a line of inquiry from the author’s previous essay regarding the 12^th century BCE battle traditions embedded in the Song of Deborah (Judg 5) as the basis for a nascent Exodus ideology surfacing in the Song of the Sea (Exod 15). Exod 15 is identified as developing an agrarian ideal into a basis for national identity: Israel’s successful struggles against competing Canaanite military forces echoing earlier Egyptian imperial hegemony is liturgized into a myth where YHWH defeats the Egyptian foe and then settles his own sacred agrarian estate.

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Si 38,1-15 illustrates how Sirach understands the initially disputed institution of the Hellenistic physician. Against the background of traditional Old Testament beliefs and some Stoic concepts of world order, medicine is seen as part of God’s work of salvation. Rejecting it would even amount to a sin. The Hebrew text of Sirach is astonishingly universalistic. There, the physician’s work is similar to that of Moses, and the physician’s prayer, either Hebrew of Hellenistic, is addressed to the one God. By contrast, the Greek text is more traditional, and presents a more negative view of the physician.

Within Johannine scholarship, the assumed differences between Jesus’ teaching in John and in the Synoptics have frequently led to a negative judgment about Johannine authenticity. This article proposes a comparative approach that distinguishes between different levels of similarity in wording and content and applies it to John 5,31-47. What we find in this discourse section corresponds conceptually to a significant degree with the picture offered in the Synoptics, though couched in a very different idiom. Thus, the comparative evidence does not preclude us from accepting this particular part of Johannine speech material as an authentic representation of the actual content of Jesus’words.

In Q 12,22b-31, a kingdom-saying functions as the climax to a sapiential collection, but it is not self-evident that this message is sapiential. Q 12,31 uses traditional wisdom structures and forms to advance what appears to be an «eschatological» message. In this study, I re-examine the nature of the wisdom in Q 12,22b-31 and argue that the theme of God’s providence can be understood in relation to eschatological ideals of the restoration of creation and a «Son of God»/Adamic christology.

This essay proposes to read Eph 1,23, as follows: the plh/rwma is Christ, the fullness of all God’s graces. And the participle plhroume/nou is a neuter passive, whose content is the actual blessing brought by God to its fullness in all the believers. Eph 1,23 can then be translated like this: «Christ is the fullness of what is fully accomplished in all the faithful».

Nadav Na’aman has recently proposed that the Judean appropriation of Israel’s identity occurred as a result of the struggle for the patrimony of ancient Israel. This paper locates textual evidence for such a struggle in the Judean reworking of the Jacob tradition, particularly the Bethel account (Gen 28,10- 22), and argues that taking over the northern Israelite shrine myth after the fall of northern Israel was part of the ongoing Judean reconceptualization of their identity as «Israel» that continued to be developed afterwards.

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Why has the Aramaic translator rendered the mysterious «sound of subdued silence» (hqd hmmd lwq) in 1 Kgs 19:12 by «the sound of those (= the angels) praising quietly» (y#Oxb Nyxb#Omd lq)? It can be that, with the root Mmd «to be silent, quiet» in front of him, the meturguman has thought of the synonym I xb#O «to calm» and from there has «skipped» to the (mainly Aramaic) homonym II xb#O «to praise». This connection between Mmd and I xb#O + II xb#O would thus explain the Aramaic translation, which in its own peculiar way stays quite close to its Hebrew model.