"Isaiah Chapters 7 and 8, deal with the oracles, or prophetic messages that were attributed to Isaiah during the Syro-Ephramite crisis. These chapters present structural, literary, and philological problems. The many scholars, who have attempted to interpret the meaning of the oracles, their bearer, and their historical setting, have offered widely diverse solutions involving both higher and lower criticism. In this paper, following an independent critical literary analysis of the two chapters, together with an evaluation of the scholarship, the writer reached the following conclusions: 1) The oracles found in chapters 7 and 8 covered a period from the onset of the siege, through the rejection of God's word, to the description of the destruction of Judah by Assyria. 2) While both chapters share a common event, the focus of each of them is different. Chapter 7 focuses on Ahaz, the king of Judah. Chapter 8 focuses on the people of Judah. The interaction between Ahaz and the people of Judah is obvious both in the dilemma that they faced during the crisis and in the mutual destiny they suffered in its aftermath. 3) The underlying theme (the theopolotical perspective), is underscored by the use of the chiastic form shared by Isaiah 7:3-9 and all of Chapter 8. The repetition of the key phrase, wlo' yagum (7:7 and 8:10), supports this. And, 4) The catchword "Immanuel" (7:14, 8:8, and 8:10) unifies both chapters and serves to evaluate the crimes and punishments of both Ahaz and the people as being essentially the same."

The author reveals a new dimension to Isaiah's prophecies that uses Israel's ancient history as an allegory of an end-time scenario, preempting the New Testament by teaching the path through which God empowers his children to ascend to the highest heaven.

Building on recent developments in biblical studies, this book introduces the prophetic literature of the Old Testament against the background of today's postmodern context and crisis of meaning. Pulsating with anxiety over the empire--Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian--the prophet corpus is a disturbing cultural expression of lament and chaos. Danger, disjunction, and disaster bubble beneath the surface of virtually every prophetic text. Sometimes in denial, sometimes in despair, and sometimes in defiance, the readers of this literature find themselves living at the edge of time, immediately before, during, or after the collapse of longstanding symbolic, cultural, and geo-political structures. These written prophecies not only reflect the social location of trauma, but are also a complex response. More specifically, prophetic texts are thick meaning-making maps, tapestries of hope that help at-risk communities survive.

Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.

King Josiah of Judah is a figure of extraordinary importance for the history of Israel. Using synchronic and diachronic analyses of the Deuteronomistic History, Deuteronomy, and selected prophetic books, Marvin Sweeney reconstructs the ideological perspectives of King Josiah's program of religious and national restoration.