David Wright

If one may combine hypothesis and anachronism, I reckon that John Calvin would be highly uncomfortable in the pluralist society of the West at the end of the second Christian millennium. Even if we do not find him enunciating in so many words Zwingli's bold axiom that ‘a Christian city is none other than a Christian church’, nevertheless the central thrust of the reform in Geneva is clear – that the whole city be united in the honour and service of God. All children should be baptized, and no open dissent or defiance of the Christian order to which the city was corporately committed should go unchallenged. This, at any rate, is the conventional account of a fundamental platform of the Genevan Reformation, shared in large measure by Zūrich, Strasbourg and other cities, but not by Lutheran territories.

This article argues that any action performed by an individual or group can only be properly understood in the context of the larger range of similar activity performed by the individual or group. It builds on Mary Douglas's syntagmatic structural analysis of action within such a broad context and moves to Catherine Bell's similar contextualization of ritualization within a larger framework of action. This type of analysis allows for formulating a clearer definition of ritual and a more precise identification of the strategies employed to create ritual. It also provides a method for the study of ritual, in which any given performance may be evaluated by its relationship to other similar actions, including non-ritual actions. As an example, the paper looks at the story of the feast held by Joseph for his brothers in Genesis 43 and suggests how this may be used for elucidating the understanding of biblical sacrifice.

The Culture of War in China argues that ``an intense focus on military affairs was one of the Qing state's most distinctive features'', and it captures well some of the distinctive ways that this martial ethos was expressed. [...]Joanna Waley-Cohen challenges us to take Qing military culture seriously, and in doing so, she presents a view of early modern China that may better prepare us for a twenty-first century People's Republic that is also unified and confidently well-armed. Chapter 4, ``Science and the Protestant mission'', gives a balanced account of the work of the London Missionary Society missionaries Alexander Wyle 444 R E V I E W S and Alexander Williamson, and of John Fryer and Xu Shou in setting up the Shanghai Polytechnic and Reading Room and The Chinese Scientific and Industrial Magazine. The resulting narrative is thus much less vivid and exciting than the subject deserves. [...]with the exception of the Prize Essay contributions, there is given the emphasis of the sinocentric narrative) surprisingly little indication of what the Chinese themselves thought of all these new ideas, technologies and inventions, despite a wealth of relevant material in journals, memorials and correspondence. [...]it was Zeng Jize, not his father Zeng Guofan who had died some five years earlier), who presented John Fryer with an inscribed fan in 1877 p. 171).

I thank Bruce Wells for his carefully considered response to my paper, “The Laws of Hammurabi as a Source for the Covenant Collection,” published in
Maarav in 2003. He raises issues that must be contemplated in evaluating the historical significance of correspondences between the Covenant Collection (CC) and the Laws of Hammurabi (LH) and other Near Eastern law collections and documents. On the whole his response seeks to demonstrate that CC is too dissimilar toLH to be dependent upon it. Specifically, in sections I and II of his re-sponse, he proposes and employs a method for evaluating the degree of similarity between laws. This involves grading the likeness of individual motifs within compared laws in order to judge the overall similarity of a particular law.