Incest (“revealing the nakedness of the flesh of one’s flesh”) and slavery are presented in the Triteuch (Gen 1 through Lev 26) as twin threats to kinship creation (becoming “one flesh”) as the uniquely human matrix for fulfilling the commandment “be fruitful and multiply.” The serpent’s duplicitous nakedness symbolizes incestuous reproduction; the Tower builders, who seek to preserve their “one lip,” acquire one name, and avoid fragmentation into distinct kinship groups, “imagine” (zāmam, suggesting incest) a new way to reproduce themselves and their name; Pharaoh attempts to efface Israelite kinship and its “names” with the selective genocide of the males. The divine name YHWH, glossed as “I will be,” represents the freedom to give names to one’s children—the expression of the continuity of kinship creation (antitype of slavery)—and also the indexical uniqueness of each “I”-sayer—the interlinguistic basis of the oneness of humanity (antitype of the Tower).

This article argues for a new interpretation of Ephesians based on its self-referentiality. Taking as my starting point the standard view that Eph 3:3–4 refers to the preceding portion of Ephesians, I explore how the text works rhetorically. I argue that in Ephesians 3:3–4 the author reflexively authorizes Ephesians as a revelatory text that provides privileged access to “the mystery” and to “Paul” as its mediator figure. Eph 3:3–4 thereby commends its readers to approach the epistle as textualized revelation. I advance this thesis through a contextual examination of Eph 3:2–13 with attention to three sets of comparanda. First, the Pesharim and Hodayot provide relevant witnesses to the textualization of revelation in early Judaism. Second, Quintilian’s depiction of ideal reading and the reception of Eph 3:3–4 by Origen and Jerome provide an opportunity to reimagine the epistle in light of ancient readerly landscapes. Third, depictions of inspired individuals endowed with divinely granted “insight” provide a revelatory framework for understanding σύνεσις in Eph 3:4. To conclude, I suggest further avenues of research that the present interpretation of Ephesians might open, including light it sheds on Ephesians’s pseudepigraphy.

Luke 14:26 has commonly been viewed as an example of hyperbole. This article applies modern studies on hyperbole that hold as its principle criteria both a scalar property and an evaluative/expressive function. We apply these criteria, analyzing Luke 14:26 in terms of encoded language, co-text, and context. We argue that hyperbole arises from the choice to use “hate” rather than “love more than” but also that the hyperbolic usage relies on a cause for effect (emotion for emotional response) metonym.1 In terms of language, we show that “hate” has variant meanings that may be different in their degrees of encoding. In terms of co-text, we argue that Luke’s use of “hate” and Matthew’s use of “love more than” are relevantly chosen; in other words, they are suited to and to be interpreted against their co-texts.

What role has the “Old Testament” played in the self-understanding of Christians over the centuries, and what can we learn from the fact that Israel’s scriptures are often cited in early Christian texts? Using the Acts of Philip as a case study, this article argues that we should not assume all early Christian writers thought of these as “my own scriptures.” When we encounter citations from Israel’s scriptures in Christian texts, a variety of interpretive options should be considered, including the possibility that some writers saw Israel’s scriptures as “other people’s scriptures, not ours,” or would have consigned them a limited role in the Christian life, treating them as relevant for apologetics and evangelism—or for talking about apologetics and evangelism—but not for ongoing Christian discipleship. The article offers a new interpretation of Acts Phil. 5–7 and also examines Qur’anic citations in the Dialogue of Timothy I and the Caliph.

This article proposes that Jonas’s understanding of gnosticism differs substantially from the account typically associated with him. That standard account takes the basic tenets of existentialism as the foundation to its discussion of alienated individuality, whereas Jonas’s system uses neo-Kantian epistemology to construct both alienation and individuality out of a unified field of human interaction. Within his framework, gnosticism is a single historical-philosophical episode of inauthenticity, highly influential yet isolated in time, unlike the ubiquitous understanding of it. This article reviews Jonas’s system, elements of its early and later acceptance, along with selected issues raised by critics, from Heidegger and Scholem to Colpe, Yamauchi, Williams, and King.

This article traces the incorporation of the modern state and the notion of sovereignty into Jewish Orthodox thought, culminating in the idea that the role of Orthodoxy is to establish a statist theocracy. Unlike narratives that emphasize the continuation of theocratic thought from ancient to modern Judaism on the one hand, and the relationship between religious Zionism and contemporary forms of Jewish theocracy on the other, my research reveals a fundamentally anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox layer in the doctrine of statist theocracy, through a novel reading of the early writings of one of the leaders of Agudath Israel, Isaac Breuer (1883–1946). During the 1920s, Breuer coined terms such as Gottesstaat and Torastaat, which informed broader theocratic discussions into the 1930s. The article examines the intellectual history of this discourse and the grammar of this doctrine, identifying in it ultra-Orthodox reasoning such as an aversion to secularism and modern nationalism, resistance to a redemptive, kookian philosophy of history, and adherence to the “Rule of Torah.”

The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights doctrine emerged from interreligious contacts and conflicts between Judaism and Christianity, particularly in the context of the decolonizing Middle East. This article retraces this interreligious encounter through the writings of Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, diplomat and theologian Charles Malik, and rabbi and activist Maurice Perlzweig. Together they represent three different theopolitical responses to the problem of religious pluralism after global empire: minoritarian human rights, majoritarian human rights, and cosmopolitan human rights. Recovering these interrelated human rights conceptions exposes the frames of religious difference embedded in the modern Western human rights imagination.