The Book of Jubilees uses the genre “apocalypse” to express a worldview that differs significantly from the cluster of ideas typically expressed by contemporary apocalypses. Jubilees has often been viewed as a borderline or ambiguous case among apocalypses. When viewed with the proper distinctions and definitions, Jubilees is indeed atypical but…[Read more]

The apocalypse literary genre creates a reader expectation of the apocalyptic worldview. The Book of Jubilees uses the apocalypse genre to express a worldview that diverges significantly from the cluster of views typically conveyed by the apocalypse genre. This paper focuses on one aspect of the genre and the worldview. The Book of Jubilees uses…[Read more]

An essay on the Greeks in Egypt during the Archaic and Classical periods.

The problem with using royal inscriptions as historical sources is their inherent bias. The interests of the king drive the narratives of royal inscriptions. Yet this essential feature reveals their underlying concept of history. In royal inscriptions, historical thought is defined by the life and experience of the king. This article will present…[Read more]

The problem with using royal inscriptions as historical sources is their inherent bias. The interests of the king drive the narratives of royal inscriptions. Yet this essential feature reveals their underlying concept of history. In royal inscriptions, historical thought is defined by the life and experience of the king. This article will present…[Read more]

The Samaria Ostraca contain a subset of receipts that record wine shipments from what were evidently royal vineyards. But this particular group of ostraca has been largely overlooked in the study of the Northern Kingdom, probably resulting from the fact that not all of the ostraca were published in the editio princeps. This article presents a new…[Read more]

The Samaria Ostraca contain a subset of receipts that record wine shipments from what were evidently royal vineyards. But this particular group of ostraca has been largely overlooked in the study of the Northern Kingdom, probably resulting from the fact that not all of the ostraca were published in the editio princeps. This article presents a new…[Read more]

The comparison of Qoheleth and Gilgamesh begins with the so-called carpe diem advice of Siduri and Eccl 9:7-9. Additionally, the rhetoric of kingship evoked through Gilgamesh’s narû (“stele”) at the beginning of the epic parallels the royal voice of Qoheleth beginning in Eccl 1:12. Yet these similarities raise several historical issues. First,…[Read more]

This essay explores the different ways parts of the Hebrew Bible have been described as historiography. It’s an old essay whose usefulness is limited to giving the reader a snapshot of the state of the question in biblical historiography at the height of the maximalist-minimalist debate.

This essay looks at how the Persian authorization to rebuild of Jewish temple at Elephantine reflects imperial policy and sheds light on post-exilic Judaism.

This paper takes a new approach to the contentious area of the etymology of Metatron, applying the lessons learnt from biblical folk-etymologies which have been shown to actively influence the writing of narratives. In the first section one such possible folk-etymology is proposed, based around the sequence TTR as a Divine Name in Metatron, along…[Read more]

In this essay I sketch an outline of how the book of Isaiah presents its politics, working from the assumption—based on the research of Peter Ackroyd and others—that the presentation of Isaiah, the prophet, in the book’s opening chapters is key. I end up arguing that the book advocates for Davidic politics, as others have claimed, but that its d…[Read more]

In this essay I sketch an outline of how the book of Isaiah presents its politics, working from the assumption—based on the research of Peter Ackroyd and others—that the presentation of Isaiah, the prophet, in the book’s opening chapters is key. I end up arguing that the book advocates for Davidic politics, as others have claimed, but that its d…[Read more]

Applies theory of literature as simulation speech to argue that knowledge of the Lord is not reflected in texts of the Hebrew Bible but created by them.

This dissertation proposes a social analysis of the Early Christian basilicas (4th-6th century) of Southern and Central Greece, predominantly those in the Late Roman province of Achaia. After an introduction which places the dissertation in the broader context of the study of Late Antique Greece, the second chapter argues that church construction…[Read more]

While the Met expedition to Ctesiphon, Iraq was in the field in winter of 1931/1932 they received word that Winlock, an archaeologist from the Egyptian department, a department to which some of the Ctesiphon staff belonged, had been promoted to the director of the Museum. Around the same time the Near Eastern Art department was being formulated as…[Read more]

This article discusses the concept of kissing as it appears in the Bible and in Rabbinic writings. Special attention is given to different motives for kissing and to different conjugations of the Hebrew verbs for kissing.

This article discusses rabbinic qualifications to the Biblical prohibition of verbally saying the names of foreign gods (typically represented by idols).

Published in The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in Honour of Michael E. Stone. Edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso, Matthias Henze, and William Adler (Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2017

This paper discusses an apparent contradiction in the Bible regarding east of the Jordan River, that lies between the rivers Arnon and Jabbok. In Numbers 21 it seems that this land belonged to the Moabites, while in Judges 11 (during an exchange between the Jewish judge Jephtah and the Ammonite king) it seems that this land belonged to the…[Read more]