Religious Studies

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.

This volume sheds light on the intellectual engagement with wealth in the various literary genres of the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophical and Greek poetic literature, Jewish writings from the Hellenistic-Roman period, Qumran, the writings of the New Testament and the Early Church.

Research is currently discovering the Letter to the Ephesians as an independent voice on other topics than ecclesiology that were also of interest to Paul. The contributors to this volume take this increased interest into account and discuss Deutero-Paul's Christological design, his revision of the Corpus Paulinum and the Letter to the Colossians, his early Christian interpretation of Greek philosophy and science, and his anthropological concept.

For Christian authors of the second century, Paul's criticism of wisdom (1 Cor 1-4) stands in a tense relationship to the positive image of wisdom from the book of Proverbs, as well as to their own self-image as intellectuals. Johanna Brankaer analyses how they dealt with this criticism.