Weltkonstruktionen

Religion has to do with God and the world. This volume contains an interdisciplinary discussion on the interpretation of the world by religions in the Ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, the Old and New Testament, and by late ancient Christianity and Islam. The basic categories for interpreting the world are chaos and cosmos, creation and eschatology, heaven and earth or the world of the living and the netherworld. The ten case studies in this book examine the topography of such world structures, and in doing so show the differences as well as the similarities between patterns of religious hermeneutics. The authors make it clear that whoever asked about the world and the powers that ruled it between the second millennium BC and the first millennium AD was also asking about the power of God - and thus about the purpose and meaning of the world.