David Wright

Modern academic biblical scholarship has observed a range of correlations between biblical texts and other texts from the larger ancient Near Eastern world. The observed correspondences have been used phenomenologically and interpretively to raise questions for investigation and offer insights for understanding the biblical texts, especially by contrasts between the texts. A more dynamic and controversial mode of comparative analysis, the focus of this survey, is to ask whether similarities point to a genetic relationship between cultures with the goal of historical reconstruction and placing the Hebrew biblical texts and ideas in their Near Eastern context.

What is the historical basis for today’s atonement theology? Where did it come from, and how has it evolved throughout time? In Atonement, a sterling collection of renowned biblical scholars investigates the early manifestations of this core concept in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. Rather than imposing a particular view of atonement upon these texts, these specialists let the texts speak for themselves so that the reader can truly understand atonement as it was variously conceived in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, and early Christian literature. The resulting diverse ideas mirror the manifold perspectives on atonement today. Contributors to this volume—Christian A. Eberhart, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Martha Himmelfarb, T. J. Lang, Carol A. Newsom, Deborah W. Rooke, Catrin H. Williams, David P. Wright, and N. T. Wright—attend to the linguistic elements at work in these ancient writings without limiting their scope to explicit mentions of atonement. Instead, they explore atonement as a broader phenomenon that negotiates a constellation of features—sin, sacrifice, and salvation—to capture a more accurate and holistic picture. Atonement will serve as an indispensable resource for all future dialogue on these topics within Jewish and Christian circles.

Writing a commentary on a biblical book is not limited to the scholar’s study and desk. Hence, several experts in the field of Hebrew Bible currently writing a larger commentary on the book of Leviticus followed the invitation of Christian Eberhart and Thomas Hieke to meet between 2014 and 2016 at the Annual SBL Conference. They shared their experiences, discussed hermeneutical and methodological considerations, and presented their ideas about particular themes and issues in the third book of the Torah. The results of these consultative panels had significant impact on the production of the commentaries.

The first part of this volume features essays reflecting on the process of writing a Leviticus commentary, including boosts and obstacles, while suggesting innovative insights on particular problems of the book. The second part identifies certain themes of Leviticus, especially sacrifices and rituals (“the cult”), the notion of unintentional and deliberate sins and purity/impurity (“the bad”) and how to eliminate them, and the relationship to the sphere of God (“the holy”). This section demonstrates how commenting a biblical book highly depends on the perspective a scholar takes, and how different commentaries on the same biblical text come to different conclusions because of a diversity of methodological and hermeneutical approaches. These are issues innate in the subject matter; in the end the variety of approaches bears witness to the complexity, intricacy, and richness of the biblical text. This volume, therefore, offers a fascinating inside view into the studies and onto the desks of several prolific biblical experts who share their reflections and concepts about their commentaries on Leviticus with an interested audience.

Laws of Heaven - Laws of Nature; Legal Interpretations of Cosmic Phenomena in the Ancient World. Konrad Schmid, Christoph Uehlinger (eds.). Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016 Himmelsgesetze - Naturgesetze; rechtsförmige Interpretationen kosmischer Phänomene in der antiken Welt. Konrad Schmid, Christoph Uehlinger (eds.). Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016 Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 276

Of the various problems that drive study of the Covenant Code (cc), questions of the text's origin, its development, and with this, its relationship to other legal texts, both biblical and from elsewhere in the ancient Near East, have priority. Two divergent hypotheses compete with one another. The prevailing hypothesis is one of gradual redactional growth. The casuistic laws were created first, out of Israelite practice and tradition. Later the apodictic laws were added. The Covenant Code was inserted into a narrative context when or after the apodictic laws were added. The other hypothesis claims that cc as a whole arose as a relatively unified composition from the revision or recasting of sources, mainly the Laws of Hammurabi (lh). This chapter outlines these two hypotheses with emphasis on evidence for the source theory and offers some additional evidence for this view.