The Biblical World is a comprehensive guide to the contents, historical settings and social context of the Bible. It presents the fruits of years of specialist study in an accessible form, and is essential reading for anyone who reads the Bible and would like to know more about how and why it came to be. Written by an international collection of experts, the volumes include a full overview of the full range of biblical material, before going on to more detailed discussions of myth and prophecy to poetry and proverbs. Explorations of the historical background are complemented by the findings of archaeology, and the book explores language, law, administration, social life and the arts as well. Major figures of the Bible - including Abraham, Jesus and Paul - are studied in detail, as are the main religious concepts it contains, such as salvation and purity. Also including an examination of how the Bible is viewed today, this monumental work will be an invaluable resource for students, academics and clergy, and for all to whom the Bible is important as a religious or cultural document.

"Books for New Testament study ... [By] Clyde Weber Votaw" v. 26, p. 271-320; v. 37, p. 289-352.

The issue of capital city relocation is a topic of debate for more than forty countries across the world. In this first book to discuss the issue, Vadim Rossman offers an in-depth analysis of the subject, highlighting the global trends and the key factors that motivate different countries to consider such projects, analyzing the outcomes and drawing lessons from recent capital city transfers worldwide for governments and policy-makers. Capital Cities studies the approaches and the methodologies that inform such decisions and debates. Special attention is given to the study of the universal patterns of relocation and patterns specific to particular continents and mega-regions and particular political regimes. The study emphasizes the role of capital city transfers in the context of nation- and state-building and offers a new framework for thinking about capital cities, identifying six strategies that drive these decisions, representing the economic, political, geographic, cultural and security considerations. Confronting the popular hyper-critical attitudes towards new designed capital cities, Vadim Rossman shows the complex motives that underlie the proposals and the important role that new capitals might play in conflict resolution in the context of ethnic, religious and regional rivalries and federalist transformations of the state, and is seeking to identify the success and failure factors and more efficient implementation strategies. Drawing upon the insights from spatial economics, comparative federalist studies, urban planning and architectural criticism, the book also traces the evolution of the concept of the capital city, showing that the design, iconography and the location of the capital city play a critical role in the success and the viability of the state.

David Weisberg became fascinated by Assyriology as an undergraduate at Columbia University. Already endowed with a strong background in Hebraica, he soon came to know that he needed the deeper immersion of a graduate program, and he enrolled at Yale to pursue it. David’s interests soon focused on the Chaldean Dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar and the Achaemenid Dynasty of Cyrus the Great. Weisberg’s thesis succeeded in illuminating the wider significance of some previously unpublished cuneiform texts from this period?as well as earning him the doctorate. The thesis appeared in the recently established Yale Near Eastern Researches (1967) under the somewhat daunting title Guild Structure and Political Allegiance in Early Achaemenid Mesopotamia, and David’s career was launched. Weisberg’s oeuvre, as exemplified by the nearly three dozen essays conveniently assembled in this volume, attest both to his prodigious industriousness and to the loss that the field of Assyriology has suffered in his untimely demise. As is clear from the Table of Contents, he continued to make major contributions to the study of the Neo-Babylonian period (especially regarding political and military history and the doings of ancient royals) but he also offered seminal insights in other areas, including Masoretic studies, rabbinics, social and economic life of the ancient Near East, as well as the interface between modern culture and study of the ancient world. —Based on W. W. Hallo’s “Introduction”

Moshe Weinfeld’s contributions to the study of the Bible and its literature, as well as the social and political situation of the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context, are well known. In this volume, 35 colleagues and students contribute essays organized according to four subjects: (1) Exegetical and Literary Studies on the Bible; (2) Studies on Biblical Hebrew, History, and Geography; (3) Ancient Near Eastern and Amarna Studies; and (4) Studies on Qumran, Post biblical Judaism, and the Jewish Medieval Commentaries. A bibliography and biography of the honoree round out the volume.

The history of archaeology is generally told as the making of a secular discipline. In nineteenth-century Britain, however, archaeology was enmeshed with questions of biblical authority and so with religious as well as narrowly scholarly concerns. In unearthing the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, travellers, archaeologists and their popularisers transformed thinking on the truth of Christianity and its place in modern cities. This happened at a time when anxieties over the unprecedented rate of urbanisation in Britain coincided with critical challenges to biblical truth. In this context, cities from Jerusalem to Rome became contested models for the adaptation of Christianity to modern urban life. Using sites from across the biblical world, this book evokes the appeal of the ancient city to diverse groups of British Protestants in their arguments with one another and with their secular and Catholic rivals about the vitality of their faith in urban Britain.