This chapter documents the ways in which discourses of heresy and orthodoxy were anchored in wider social beliefs and mentalities about the sacred and profane nature of places, holy and unholy regions, the divine curse, and the devil’s role in society. To illustrate this connection between regionalism and heresy, the chapter analyses al-Fasawi’s ninth-century history which hosts a section dedicated solely to discourses of heresy against Abu Hanifa and the region he settled in, Kufa. We see vividly how proto-Sunni traditionalists established a link between unholy regions and heresies.

The present chapter explores maledictions.

Too little scholarly attention has been paid to the paradox that those from the southern kingdom of Judah wrote, collected, and edited a foundational narrative not of Judah but of Israel, the ethnonym more closely associated with the northern kingdom even within the biblical narratives. This chapter argues that, rather than staking their claim to be the sole heirs to the heritage of the covenant with YHWH, the Judahite biblical editors constructed a biblical narrative that emphasizes that Judah is only one portion of a larger Israel that is presently—from the perspective of the editors and their implied audience—incomplete and awaiting reunion and restoration. By constructing an Israel of the past and rhetorically situating the reader in exile, the editors of the Primary History (Genesis–2 Kings) and 1–2 Chronicles establish a perspective of restoration eschatology in which an idealized biblical Israel (of course under the leadership of Judah) does not presently exist, having lost its status due to covenantal disobedience and disunity, but remains a social and theological aspiration.

Through analysis of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the Psalms of Solomon, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, baruch, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and more this chapter argues that the eschatological or atemporal settings of wisdom and apocalyptic literature account for why these texts universally prefer "Israel" terminology. Moreover, these texts universally continue to show a striking concern for the fate of the northern tribes and expectations of a pan-Israelite restoration including all twelve tribes.

This chapter looks at a variety of early Jewish narrative texts, showing that "Israel" language is preferred in texts from the pre-exilic past or when explicitly referring to northern Israelites, while "Jew" (Ioudaios) language is avoided in these texts. The converse is true in texts set in the post-exilic past not explicitly dealing with northerners, where Ioudaios appears frequently and Israel language tends to be limited to prayer or cultic contexts. The chapter pays special attention to the book of Tobit, which tells the story of God's continued faithfulness in preserving the lineage of a faithful family from Naphtali, the first tribe to be taken into exile by Assyria. Tobit's concern for the continued existence of faithful Israelites to be included in the final restoration provides a critical witness for the continuation of pan-Israelite sentiments—and the continued distinction between Israel and Judah—well into the Second Temple period. Other books such as Judith, Jubilees, and the Letter of Aristeas further witness to the persistence of the distinction between Israel and Judah and pan-Israelite restoration eschatology.

Women’s social relations and mobility are the main focus of the fourth chapter. Ties of friendship and love, but also enmity and hate, figure prominently in the first part of the chapter. It includes inscriptions mentioning women setting up a statue for, or receiving one from, a male or female friend, providing for a friend’s burial or including friends in their own tombs (and vice versa), but also curse tablets in which women figured both as commisioners and as targets.The second part deals with women’s involvement in patronage, their various engagements with the voluntary associations (collegia) that shaped social life in Roman cities and their presence in the main centres of social gathering: the baths, the theatre and amphitheatre. The final part of this chapter deals with inscriptions testifying to women’s travels and migration, showing thatwomen travelled for various reasons, mostly with their families but sometimes on their own (with a retinue), over considerable distances. The chapter ends with foreign (non-Roman) women migrating to Rome and Italy.

Chapter 6 offers summary reflections on the conclusions and contributions of the present work, including its findings for the study of the royal palms, the study of Syro-Palestinian inscriptions, Hebrew Bible theology, and the history of Israelite religion. In addition to proposing a new analytic for royal psalms (i.e. psalms of defeat), the book adds depth and specificity to previous scholarship on the theology of the royal psalms. It draws in sharper silhouette the animating commitment of royal psalms: Yhwh’s loyalty to his one individual client king. The book also calls attention to the non-narrative and lyric qualities of inscriptions, and it emphasizes the rhetorical centrality of their closing curse sections. For the study of Hebrew Bible theology, the present work holds up the important and distinctive theological offer of royal psalms. Historically, Levantine memorial inscriptions reflect an earlier engagement with Neo-Assyrian royal ideology and its monuments than scholars have argued heretofore, and a deeper indigenization.

This chapter turns to our evidence for ritual practice at the site, in particular activity centred on the three hot springs. Rather than being curative in nature, the water is understood as primarily a medium for enabling ritual relinquishment of objects lost through theft or decay. The chthonic importance of the water is emphasized and linked to other aspects of ritual at the site, in particular reports from the ancient author Solinus that coal was burned on Sulis’s altars. Depositional practice at Aquae Sulis is compared to other watery sites in Britain and Gaul, and the Bath corpus of ‘curse tablets’ is placed into a wider context, with the sanctuary at Uley serving as a particularly important counterpoint to Bath.

Building on the themes of regionality in Chapter 4, and of empire in Chapter 3, this chapter focuses on Aquae Sulis’s place in the social, religious, and artistic networks of Britain, Gaul, and Germany specifically, and on how to put the site’s locally specific practices in dialogue with broader trends. It explores the significance of artistic connections seen in smaller iconographic works such as the ‘altar’ blocks, which can be linked to Viergöttersteine from the Rhineland, and the relief of Mercury with a local goddess, which is part of a regional cluster centred on Gloucester, and uses a series of case studies, in particular the ‘curse tablets’, to delineate the ways in which provincial religious knowledge may be characterized as a series of increasingly localized concentric circles of practice.