History

The diversity of the known YHWH names and the fact that there is no specific YHWH iconography lead to the thesis that there were different origins of YHWH and regional manifestations of this god before the exile. The polyyahwistic and polyiconographic approach to Yahwism reveals a mosaic of regionally diverse, religiously non-homogeneous clusters that were only harmonised with each other by Judean and Samarian interpretive authorities in the post-exilic period.

Thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany's Peaceful Revolution of 1989 is today either largely ignored, lamented, or partially denied. Yet could remembrance of it not help guard against the current political resignation and pessimism instead? This was the question posed throughout an interdisciplinary series of lectures held at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the results of which are documented here.

This feminist commentary on Massekhet Shevuʿot examines the role of gender in legal oaths. Tanja Hidde analyzes women's participation in court and their exclusion as witnesses, while Tal Ilan explores how the Babylonian rabbis connect the oath-swearing of the suspected adulteress in Numbers 5 to other oaths taken by both men and women.

The Apocalypsis Nova fascinated readers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its call for a reform of the church, its fascinating theology, and its paradoxical narratology of veiling and revealing guaranteed its popularity in Italy, but also far beyond the European continent. Mirjam Wulff sheds light on this text as an example for the complexity of theological ideas and their literary presentations around 1500.