Features

Staging Jonah

22 For a long time, I wanted to write a play about the comic, contentious, absurd, salvific relationship between God and us—to present a comic Everyman locked in mortal (salvific) combat with Yahweh. But I got nowhere with the idea and let it lie, until one night I read through some of the Minor […]

Altar-Ed States
Incense theory goes up in smoke By Menahem Haran

31 Archaeological artifacts do not interpret themselves. Here’s a case in point: Some 40 relatively small altars were found in at least nine sites in Palestine. After most scholars agreed that they were intended for burning incense, they were designated “incense altars.” I too once subscribed to the belief that they were incense altars, […]

Multiple Judaisms
A new understanding of the context of earliest Christianity By Gabriele Boccaccini

38 The subject of this article—from Judaism to Judaisms—is not only about names, but about ways of looking at things. For nearly two thousand years both Jews and Christians have looked at Judaism as a single fixed thing—a kind of point. Paradoxically, each religious community had reasons to adhere to this image. For oppressed […]

Tracing the Evolution of the Hebrew Bible
What the Dead Sea scrolls teach us By Adam S. van der Woude

In some ways—oddly enough—the more than 200 biblical manuscripts in Hebrew found among the Dead Sea Scrolls have elevated the authority of the Greek Septuagint at the expense of the Masoretic text, the received Hebrew version preserved by the Jewish community for 2,000 years. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the received text […]

Departments

Where God Can Be Found: The Radical Message of Jesus’ Death
In Luke’s Gospel, the poor, those who weep, and those who are hated and excluded are called heirs to the Kingdom. By Helmut Koester
What Does God Require of Us?
What God demands is not fantastic but profoundly simple, indeed within anyone’s reach. By Bernhard W. Anderson