Job 38:8-11 plays an important role in the first divine speech at the end of Job. This article makes a text-critical and literary argument that the stanza primarily emphasizes God’s powerful control over the Sea, in continuity with the preceding poetic unit whose theme is God’s singular power and Job’s incommensurability. However, vv 8-11 also…[Read more]

An online article comparing the Mesha Inscription and its deity Kemosh with the Hebrew Bible and Yhwh.

What happened to Kemosh in the era after Moab’s loss of political independence? The present article first argues that this question is of interest to scholarship on the Hebrew Bible because Kemosh and Yhwh were initially twinlike: both were patron deities of Iron Age Levantine kingdoms and shared various similarities of profile. As such, c…[Read more]

The Christian community characteristically confesses the constancy of God. But historians of religion know by contrast that the deity Yhwh evolved over time. How might scholars who belong to both these camps negotiate the disconnect? This essay seeks an answer by staging a moment of complementarity between Religionsgeschichte and OT theology.…[Read more]

A revisitation of the Yeb archives with an eye to the question of cult statuary. The present article inventories the state of the question and makes several constructive suggestions. Its primary contributions are: to address the Yeb evidence, even preliminarily, to the debate over Yhwh statuary in the Jerusalem temple; to make a fresh…[Read more]

A review of Gard Granerød’s title, Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period.

A review of Angela Rohrmoser’s book, Götter, Tempel und Kult der Judäo–Aramäer.

This is a study about the Protevangelium of James (PJ), an “infancy gospel” that recounts the birth and childhood of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is also a study about authors, readers, texts, meaning, and how they are interrelated. In it I aim to take seriously the insights of “intertextuality,” not as a matter of source criticism but as an…[Read more]