This article reads Genesis 18-19 in the light of the principal of exchange at work in ancient religious belief concerning divine justice. Genesis 18.1-15 and 19.1-29, as examples of the well-worn tale of the divine visitor, are narrative expressions of confidence in a divine justice that rewards the kind and punishes the inhospitable. In the…[Read more]

his article looks at the repeated gnomic phrase in the Book of Qoheleth, “All is vanity and a chasing after wind” (NRSV) and reads it as a disjunctive parallelism in which the terms lbh and jwr denote mortality and the divine spirit, respectively, thus showing the sense of the phrase to be, “All is mortal, but strives for immortality”. Using R…[Read more]