Jewish Studies

Volker Henning Drecoll contextualizes Basil's Homilies on the Hexaemeron within the exegetical discourse on Gen. 1 in the mid-fourth century CE. Basil was influenced more by this discourse than he was by Origen. Basil's often assumed »Origenism« is questioned and contrasted with that of his brother, Gregory of Nyssa

What happens to the deliberate, defiant sinner? The Hebrew Bible prescribes kārēt / »cutting off«. Donald J. Wold's semantic-field analysis across Hebrew, Greek, Qumran, and rabbinic sources - bolstered by Akkadian and Egyptian parallels - reveals that only God enacts kārēt - a curse denying eternal life to high-handed offenders.

The contributors to this volume offer a fresh perspective on Jesus's parables, viewing them as persuasive tools rather than merely informative stories. They examine how these parables engaged audiences both emotionally and intellectually, aiming to persuade rather than simply teach, within their original Jewish and Greek cultural context.

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.