Böcker i Forschungen zum Alten Testament-serien

In der vorliegenden Studie widmet sich Erasmus Gaß der Redaktionsgeschichte der Landeroberungserzählungen in Jos 9-12. Die in Jos 9-11 zugrundeliegende Tradition wurde mehrmals dtr. überarbeitet, wobei vor allem der südliche Eroberungsfeldzug in Jos 9-10 das Wachstum von Dtn reflektiert. Erst spät wurden priesterliche Ergänzungen in Jos 9 eingetragen, durch die das Bündnis mit den Gibeonitern vor einem priesterlichen Kontext erklärt wurde. Die Königsliste in Jos 12 verwendete zunächst eine Liste mit westjordanischen Orten. Erst später wurden die ostjordanischen Amoriterkönige Sihon und Og vorangeschaltet. Offenbar arbeiteten viele Redaktoren an Jos 9-12, worauf nicht nur der verwendete Idiolekt und die Bezüge zu Dtn, sondern auch die Überschüsse und Abweichungen der griechischen Texttradition hinweisen. In den untersuchten Texten zeigt sich, wie vor allem dtr. Redaktoren ihre theologischen Konzeptionen eingebracht haben.

Ironie und Ambiguität spielen in neueren Untersuchungen und Kommentaren zum Ijobbuch eine nicht unbedeutende Rolle. Tobias Häner macht diese beiden Aspekte des Texts zum Mittelpunkt seiner Studie. Übertreibungen und das Ausmaß an Wiederholungen stellen in der Prologerzählung Anzeichen von pragmatischer Unaufrichtigkeit dar, die auf Endtextebene die ironischen Gehalte in den weiteren Buchteilen vorbereitet. Im poetischen Teil des Buches sind ironische Sinnspitzen vor allem in den Ijobreden zu verorten. Intradiegetisch werden dabei durch teilweise leicht verfälschte Zitate und Anspielungen die Argumente der Freunde rhetorisch untergraben, extradiegetisch lässt sich eine Ironisierung der Gebetssprache der Psalmen ausmachen. In den Gottesreden wird dagegen umgekehrt Ijob zum Ziel der Ironie, die zusammen mit den Ambiguitäten auf die Begrenztheit menschlichen Erkenntnisvermögens verweist.

In dieser Studie befasst sich Franziska Ede mit dem Buch Habakuk und seiner Auslegung in Qumran, dem sog. Pescher Habakuk (1QpHab). Das übergeordnete Interesse gilt dem hermeneutischen Selbstverständnis der Verfasser, das die biblische Überlieferung mit ihrer außerbiblischen Rezeption verbindet. Im Prophetenbuch zeigen sich Spuren einer sukzessiven Aktualisierung von Prophetenwort, die in der Verheißung aus Hab 2,4b gipfelt: "Der Gerechte aber wird durch sein Vertrauen leben". An diesen Spitzensatz knüpfen die Verfasser des Pescher an und erheben das Vertrauen gerade angesichts einer anhaltenden Parusieverzögerung zum entscheidenden Heilskriterium. Es richtet sich indes nicht mehr direkt auf die göttliche Verheißung, sondern gilt dem "Lehrer der Gerechtigkeit". Er steht als leidender Gerechter stellvertretend für das "wahre Israel"; nur wer ihm nachfolgt, gehört zu Gott.

Achim Behrens befasst sich in der vorliegenden Untersuchung mit Grundfragen der alttestamentlichen Hermeneutik. Inwiefern kann die Sammlung vorchristlicher Schriften unter der Bezeichnung "Altes Testament" als Teil der christlichen Bibel gelesen werden? Signifikante Positionen zu dieser Frage, angefangen im Neuen Testament hin bis zur sogenannten "Slenczka-Debatte" werden dabei diskutiert. Vor allem aber geht der Autor der Frage nach, inwiefern sich alttestamentliche Texte selbst als "Wort Gottes" verstehen. Dabei ergibt sich ein intertextuelles Netz von Wort-Gottes-Aussagen, das alle Teile des alttestamentlichen Kanons miteinander verbindet. Daran anschließend zeichnet er das Bild des Gottes nach, der hier "Worte macht". Die große Vielfalt alttestamentlicher Gottesbilder lässt sich als aspektivische Einheit lesen. Insgesamt werden die Grundfragen alttestamentlicher Hermeneutik durch Perspektiven der Intertextualität und der Rezeptionsästhetik erweitert.

In this collection of essays, Markus Witte offers a survey of genres in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament as well as exegetical and thematic case studies of the books of Job, Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, and the Psalms of Solomon. The author focusses especially on reflections on the justice and power of God, on human knowledge, and on good and evil. He thereby demonstrates the contribution of early Jewish wisdom to the Hellenistic culture of knowledge and to biblical theology.

Research on the Book of Jeremiah has gained momentum in the past forty years and led to new results. The differences between the MT and the LXX have received more attention than ever. The extent of Deuteronomistic thinking and of redactions marks the debate on the composition of the book. It has become evident that the Book of Jeremiah intensively picks up earlier sources and offers a synthesis of them, comparable to a mosaic. It concentrates on the downfall of Jerusalem, conceives anew the prophet's role in the figure of Jeremiah and portrays the biblical God in a unique way. This collection of studies by Georg Fischer from the past ten years imparts insights into the recent discussions about the Book of Jeremiah.

The most important objects in the Hebrew Bible are a wooden box, styled in English "the ark" or "the ark of the covenant", and two statues of winged creatures, "the cherubim", that surmount it. Raanan Eichler attempts to understand these objects using the full gamut of data and tools available to the modern scholar. The study features an abundance of visual comparative material, much of it in colour, with a particularly close examination of the finds from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The author proposes solutions to a number of unsolved puzzles, such as the question of what cherubim looked like, and offers a new explanation of the nature of the ark and the cherubim, rejecting the prevailing scholarly view of them as having constituted an "empty throne" and footstool for the God of Israel. Rather, he argues, they constituted an empty frame, a unique cultic focus that surpassed all known systems in the ancient Near East in the extent of the efforts it represented to prevent an anthropomorphic conception of the deity in a cultic context.

In this work, Paul Michael Kurtz examines the historiography of ancient Israel in the German Empire through the prism of religion, as a structuring framework not only for writings on the past but also for the writers of that past themselves. The author investigates what biblical scholars, theologians, orientalists, philologists, and ancient historians considered "religion" and "history" to be, how they understood these conceptual categories, and why they studied them in the manner they did. Focusing on Julius Wellhausen and Hermann Gunkel, his inquiry scrutinizes to what extent, in an age of allegedly neutral historical science, the very enterprise of reconstructing the ancient past was shaped by liberal Protestant structures shared by dominant historians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this work, Karel van der Toorn explores the social setting, the intellectual milieu, and the historical context of the beliefs and practices reflected in the Hebrew Bible. While fully recognizing the unique character of early Israelite religion, the author challenges the notion of its incomparability. Beliefs are anchored in culture. Rituals have societal significance. God has a history. By shifting the focus to the context, the essays gathered here yield a deeper understanding of Israelite religion and the origins of the Bible.

Biblical books, which were transmitted on separate scrolls in antiquity, are not necessarily identical with books in the modern sense of a coherent and self-contained compositional unit. The books of the Primary History especially constitute a larger master narrative. This raises the question of how the distribution of the text to different scrolls relates to its compositional history. Were the respective books conceived as physically separate parts of a multivolume composition (whether Pentateuch, Hexateuch, Deuteronomistic History or Enneateuch) from the outset, or are we dealing with a more complex development of originally independent compositional units that were only connected or separated by later redaction? The present volume addresses these issues with respect to the transitions between the books of Genesis/Exodus and Joshua/Judges, which have obviously developed in dependency upon each other.

The figure Balaam has interested exegetes and scribes for millennia. Jonathan Miles Robker examines the different versions of the literary character Balaam as attested in biblical and epigraphic literature. By contrasting the distinct information about Balaam presented in the various sources (the plaster inscription from Della, Numbers 22-24; 31; Deuteronomy 23; Joshua 13; 24; Judges 11; Micah 6; and Nehemiah 13), the author seeks to trace the development of characterizations of Balaam from the oldest available material to the youngest in the Hebrew Bible. In this way, Jonathan Miles Robker advances discourse about the literary and tradition-historical development of the texts that became the Hebrew Bible. Beyond the text of the Hebrew Bible, he also traces the continued development of Balaam's characterization through the texts of Qumran and the New Testament. To this end, the author contributes discussions of the history of religion in Antiquity.

The political rhetoric of ancient Israel took several literary, architectural, and graphic forms. Much of the relevant material concerns kingship, but other loci of authority and submission also drew significant attention. Mark W. Hamilton illustrates how these "texts" interacted with other political rhetorics, especially those of the great Mesopotamian empires. By paying close attention to the argumentation of the Israelite literature as well as their function as epideictic oratory building solidarity with hearers he reveals the complexity of Israelite intellectual activity both during and after the period of the monarchy. By doing this he shows that this body of thought lies at the heart of Western political thought even today.

The studies by Devorah Dimant collected in this volume survey and analyze Jewish works composed in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek during the Second Temple period, and discuss their contents, ideas, and connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls. In particular, themes related to the Aramaic Tobit and 1 Enoch are elaborated as well as the links between Hebrew Qumran apocryphal writings and the later apocalyptic writings 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. A chapter on the apocalyptic at Qumran proposes a new conceptual framework for the subject. Together the studies offer a broad and fresh perspective of the Jewish literary scene at this time, developed in the land of Israel in the last centuries BCE and the first century CE.

Large-scale economic change such as the rise of coinage occurred during the Persian-dominated centuries (6th -4th centuries BCE) in the Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East. How do the biblical texts of the time respond to such developments?In this study, Peter Altmann lays out foundational economic conceptions from the ancient Near East and earlier biblical traditions in order to show how Persian-period biblical texts build on these traditions to address the challenges of their day. Economic issues are central for how Ezra and Nehemiah approach the topics of temple building and of Judean self-understanding, and economics are also important for other Persian-period texts. Following significant interaction with the material culture and extra-biblical texts, the author devotes special attention to the ascendancy of economics and its theological and identity implications as structuring metaphors for divine action and human community in the Persian period.

Brian B. Schmidt presents five case studies in which architectural spaces, artifacts, epigraphs, images and biblical manuscripts corroborate the existence of a robust daimonic realm in late pre-exilic Israel, along with an embryonic pandemonium. The material and epigraphic data from Kuntillet Ajrud, Ketef Hinnom, and Khirbet el-Qom, along with the manuscript evidence from Deut 32 and 1 Sam 28, indicate that pandemonium members wreaked havoc on the living and the dead. The same data also preserve a countervailing realm of apotropaism over which YHWH and Asherah, portrayed as the quintessential protective deities Bes and Beset, governed. In addition to Asherah's role in this realm as YHWH's mediatrix, various other material media including amulets, inscribed blessings, decorated jars served to convey apotropaism's empowerment to humanity.

In this volume Marvin A. Sweeney builds upon his former work "Form and Intertextuality in Prophetic and Apocalyptic Literature" (FAT 45, 2005). He introduces further studies that take up several key issues, including the reading of prophetic books in their final literary form and the significance of textual versions for this reading. He also observes the intertextual relationships between the prophets and other works of biblical and post-biblical literature, and the reception of the prophetic books. Following an introduction that lays out methodological perspective, it includes the title essay for the volume, "Reading Prophetic Books," as well as selections of papers devoted to Isaiah, Jeremiah in both its Masoretic and Septuagint forms, Ezekiel, individual books from the Twelve Prophets, and the reading of biblical texts in Qumran, Rabbinic, and Targumic literature.