In Uncovering Jewish Creativity in Book III of the Sibylline Oracles, Ashley L. Bacchi reclaims the importance of the Sibyl as a female voice of prophecy, revealing intertextual references and political commentary on second-century events in Ptolemaic Egypt.

This dissertation on Book III of the Sibylline Oracles uncovers how the author made creative narrative transformations and how these inter-textual and inter-cultural references shed light on the author's context. It demonstrates the unique quality of the Sibylline Oracles as not only appropriating a known Greek figure into Jewish history, but also choosing a female voice as a conduit for prophecy.

Published in Open Access with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Historical criticism of the Bible emerged in the context of protestant theology and is confronted in every aspect of its study with otherness: the Jewish people and their writings. However, despite some important exceptions, there has been little sustained reflection on the ways in which scholarship has engaged, and continues to engage, its most significant Other. This volume offers reflections on anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism and anti-Judaism in biblical scholarship from the 19th century to the present. The essays in this volume reflect on the past and prepare a pathway for future scholarship that is mindful of its susceptibility to violence and hatred.

The academic disciplines of Biblical Studies and Systematic Theology were long closely linked to one another. However, in the modern period they became gradually separated which led to increasing subject specialization, but also to a lamentable lacuna within the various branches of Divinity. As the lack of dialogue between Biblical Studies and the various theological disciplines increased, a minority-group of scholars in the past few decades reacted and sought to re-establish the time-honoured bonds between the disciplines. The present volume is part of this intellectual response, with contributions from scholars of various professional and denominational backgrounds. Together, the book's 25 chapters seek to reinvigorate the crucial cross-disciplinary dialogue, involving biblical, narrative, historical, systematic-theological and philosophic-theological perspectives. The book opens the horizon to contemporary research, and fills a lamentable research gap with a number of fresh contributions from scholars in the respective sub-disciplines

The contributions in this volume are focused on the historical origins, religious provenance, and social function of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, including so-called ‘Gnostic’ writings. Although it is disputed whether there was a genre of ‘apocalyptic literature,’ it is obvious that numerous texts from ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and other religious milieus share a specific view of history and the world to come. Many of these writings are presented in form of a heavenly (divine) revelation, mediated through an otherworldly figure (like an angel) to an elected human being who discloses this revelation to his recipients in written form. In different strands of early Judaism, ancient Christianity as well as in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Islam, apocalyptic writings played an important role from early on and were produced also in later centuries. One of the most characteristic features of these texts is their specific interpretation of history, based on the knowledge about the upper, divine realm and the world to come. Against this background the volume deals with a wide range of apocalyptic texts from different periods and various religious backgrounds.

The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras.

Offers an interdisciplinary account of prophecy as a topic of discourse among various late antique Near Eastern communities. Against assumptions that prophecy ceased in the past, this book argues that it remained a topic of discourse among various Near Eastern communities.