Even though the theme of return migration is specific to Ezra–Nehemiah, the concept of social displacement appears throughout the Old Testament from the banishment from Eden, through ancestral journeys and multiple exiles from Samaria and Judah. Thus, the multivalent theology of Ezra–Nehemiah engenders a broader dialogue with the rest of the Old Testament.

This chapter follows Baeck’s thought after his arrival to Theresienstadt Ghetto in January 1943, and his relationship with Germany and the Germans in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The chapter reconstructs Baeck’s imperial imagination while in the ghetto. Despite the harsh conditions, Baeck insisted that hope was possible and in fact necessary. He made this point by contrasting the prophets with the Western historiographical tradition, which he identified as espousing historical pessimism. Evil empires that thrived only on power and violent means, he comforted his audience in the camp, would eventually collapse and be left in ruins. Following liberation, Baeck returned to earlier ideas, identifying Marcionism as well as the historical pessimism as giving rise to Nazism. Baeck initially expressed skepticism about the possibility of a re-emergence of Germany, later he seemed to have slightly amended his position, leaving space for a tentative reopening of the conversation between Jews and Germans.

Since late antiquity, bishops have been regarded as possessing the highest authority among Christians. But there was no linear path leading there. Rather, there were different bearers of authority among Christians: James, as the respected brother of Jesus, was a key figure at the beginning; intellectuals were able to gain importance as teachers, prophets also appeared after Jesus, among them many women; widows and virgins attained a special position; finally, the authority of ascetics increased. Basically, authority could be derived from an office within the church or from personal charisma, which was considered God given. Good bishops tried to combine both, but charismatics could always challenge them and would continue to do so throughout the history of Christianity.

Early critical scholarship focused on the prophets as people. Recent scholarship, however, focuses more on the prophetic texts as literary works. Redaction criticism identifies likely literary layers behind the final form of the text. This volume employs redaction-critical methodology and comments on the various literary layers identified within each text. Some scholars consider that the twelve books of the Minor Prophets should be read as one Book of the Twelve. This volume, however, comments on each book in its own right, while recognising that there are links between them and other biblical books.

Mark Sneed introduces readers to the world of scribes. Drawing first on some of the earliest developments of Sumerian scribalism, he gives an overview of how scribes trained and worked in the ancient Near East more broadly. In Egypt and elsewhere, scribal training began at an early age and involved a wide range of curricula, including wisdom literature, which scribes copied and memorized, as it played a significant role in scribal education. Although concrete evidence for Israelite schools is lacking, Sneed finds reason to believe that similar scribal practices existed there, where wisdom literature too served technical and ethical purposes. Scribes, then, existed in ancient Israel, and for Sneed could be identified in various ways: priests, prophets, and sages. Behind each of these lies the “scribe” as one who composed the texts themselves. Thus Sneed finds far more that is common than different among the biblical materials, wisdom texts included, and conceives of the scribe as holding a wide-ranging professional role in Israel that was not tied down to a single genre of literature.

David VanDrunen ties the natural law concepts found in both the Old and New Testaments to a sense of conscience. The notion of natural law appears early in the Old Testament, in God’s covenant with Noah. God instructs Noah that, for example, the killing of an innocent must be recompensed (thereby indicating that innocent people must not be wantonly killed). While there is not one Hebrew word for conscience in the OT, it does identify the “heart” (leb) and “kidneys” (kelayot) as the mechanisms by which the wise and discerning person applies what he knows to be true about the way the world works. In the New Testament, conscience is the “subjective human faculty that recognizes right and wrong and thus bears witness to a person’s standing before the law.” The Apostle Paul’s discussion of natural law in Romans chapters 2 and 3 reveals that although not all receive God’s express law (as did God’s people on Mt. Sinai), all people everywhere have an innate sense of moral rectitude to which their consciences testify. All persons everywhere therefore are subject to God’s righteous judgment.

Chapter 6 outlines a political theology of monotheism using Assmann’s concepts of the Mosaic distinction, supplemented by other scholars like Mark S. Smith, Robert Gnuse, Rainer Albertz, et al. We dwell closely here on Israel’s political conditions of sovereignty, subjugation, and exile that all help illuminate – as we saw in Gans’ critique – what historical peculiarities constitute the Hebrew discovery of monotheism. I explore how monotheism could be composed of polytheistic building blocks – first in state-based religion and political symbols, like monolatry and despotic vassal treaties – but transform among an exiled people into a division of God from political representation.

Many of the customs of kingship used by Muslim rulers were inspired by practices found outside of Islamic traditions. These came most directly from the Sasanian Empire and in the development of intellectual traditions that were inspired by Persian ideas of kingship. The rule of Jamshīd, Farīdūn, Khusraw I, and the “Persian” Alexander served as a model for many Muslim rulers who sustained dynastic successes in very different political and social contexts. What made the Persian ideal of kingship thrive, even after the defeat of the Sasanian Empire, and how was Persian imagery of rule mobilized by Muslim rulers to create imperial polities in South Asia? These are two of the central questions addressed in this chapter.

Chapter 3 examines three progressively related chapters whose main character is Ahab, not Elijah, and thus whose connection with the Elijah narratives (or lack thereof) has attracted much scholarly discussion. It demonstrates that an agrarian hermeneutic generates new insight on the unit’s rhetorical coherence alongside 1 Kings 17–19. In contrast to Elijah’s theological submission to and physiological dependence on Yhwh, 1 Kings 20–22 dramatizes Ahab’s corresponding theological autonomy from Yhwh, leading to the material loss of life and land. Ahab’s story – interwoven with Elijah’s (see 1 Kings 21) but also remaining separate from it (1 Kings 20 and 22) – therefore pre-enacts the Exile in which the book of Kings resolves.

This chapter shows how the story-cycles of Elijah and Elisha use royal illness to provide a Yahwistic perspective for the political and cultic crises of the ninth century. In 1 Kgs 22:52–2 Kgs 1, Elijah uses Ahaziah’s illness as an opportunity to emphasize the superiority of Yahweh as the national god of Israel. In a similar vein, we witness in 2 Kgs 8:7–15, how Elisha uses the illness and death of Ben-Hadad to anticipate the disastrous effects of Hazael’s reign, which leads to a temporary period of hardship for the Israelites and can be interpreted as a punishment for Baal-worship. In both instances the oracles associate the king’s illness and premature death with the cultic misconduct of dynasties and people.

This chapter demonstrates how the oracles provoked by the illnesses of Abijah and Hezekiah work in combination to structure the presentation of Judah’s and Israel’s monarchic past as envisioned in the Book of Kings. Royal illness frames prophetic oracles which are used to confirm the validity of the Davidic dynasty and to condemn the dynasties of the North. Eventually, however, the oracles are expanded through a later redaction to frame the destruction of both Israel and Judah. This chapter concludes with an excursus on Hezekiah’s illness as it is featured in the Isaianic tradition, where the focus shifts to highlighting the link between the king and his people rather than the king and his dynasty.

The Bible contains competing maps of Israel’s homeland, and these maps bear directly on questions of belonging and status for communities that affiliated with Israel. This first chapter of Part II compares the conceptions of the conquest that inform these maps.

This second chapter of Part I continues the thread of the preceding chapter, with a focus on the case of the Edomites. Using both texts and archeological data, it treats the role of the Edomites in the biblical narrative, from Genesis to the fall of Jerusalem. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for theories of the Pentateuch’s formation.

Genesis-Kings stands amid three key approaches to the Bible: quest for symbolic/allegorical meaning (Philo to Middle Ages); quest for factual history (Luther to ca. 1970s and “the collapse of history”); quest for literary artistry/meaning (esp. since James Muilenburg, 1968). Gen-Kgs emerges as a narrative with historical components, and triple focus: (i) human origins, (ii) Israel and Judah, a narrative matching that of other nations, and (iii) primarily a narrative of the human heart. Following literary convention, explicit emphasis on the heart occurs at the beginning (hearts estranged, Gen 6:5-6; 8:21), middle (listen with total heart, Deuteronomy, esp. 6:4-6), and end (Josiah’s total heart, 2 Kgs 23:25). Biblical accounts present diverse human dimensions, whether, for instance, God-like (Gen 1) or made of clay (Gen 2). Both are necessary. Abraham is more God-like than Jacob; Elijah more than Elisha. The first five books (Gen-Deut) build up towards the need to choose. The other books (Josh-Kgs) show pairs of contrasting choices: Joshua/Judges; Samuel/Saul; David/Solomon; prophets/kings; Hezekiah/Manasseh; Josiah/other kings.

Together, the three biblical books Judges, Samuel, and Kings tell the larger part of the story of Israel and Judah as more-or-less independent nations on their own land. Their principal focus is on “rule,” good rule and bad rule: mostly royal rule (by kings), but also “rule” by judges and deliverers, and even by prophets. David is the key human ruler. God too “rules” in these books, but as “judge” rather than as “king.” Together with the book of Joshua, they constitute the sub-set of the Hebrew Bible called Former Prophets and the start of the historical books in an English Bible.

The Christian tradition has regarded Mani as the arch-heretic and seducer of the faithful. His memory has been profoundly shaped by a fascinating counter-biography known as The Acts of Archelaus. This circulated from circa 340 CE and dominated Western knowledge until the reading of new sources from the Islamicate world in the nineteenth century and then the recovery of texts written by the Manichaean community in the twentieth century. The most remarkable of these has been the miniature Mani-Codex written in Greek that preserves an entirely different narrative of Mani’s youth and upbringing in a sectarian Jewish–Christian community of southern Mesopotamia. This chapter discusses and compares various pictures of Mani, including topics such as his origins, name and the religious experiences that he claimed.