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]

This paper publishes a ceramic bowl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicting a Parthian shot. Although it lacks archaeological provenance, the bowl can be dated to the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE, and probably comes from northwestern Iran. It is, therefore, one of the few possible instances of a Parthian shot from the Arsacid Empire.

Replaces previous deposit, which was in error (contributor’s agreement rather than manuscript)