"Scott C. Ryan investigates divine conflict motifs in select Jewish literature and places the findings in dialogue with Paul's Letter to the Romans. Paul emerges as a writer who participates in Jewish divine conflict traditions even as he modifies the motifs in light of the Christ-event." --back cover.

Dive into the captivating story of Indrani, hailed as the queen of gods, yet harboring an untold secret—a warrior of unparalleled strength. But this tale isn't just about Indrani's valor; it's a revelation of the often-overlooked strength of the wives of Agni Dev, Pawan Dev, Varun Dev, and the nine planets. In this compelling narrative, witness not only Indrani's remarkable bravery but also the untold saga of these divine heroines. This is the chronicle of Indrani: the divine warrior, where queens and goddesses reveal their warrior spirits, standing united in an epic battle against unseen adversaries.

There are many ancient West Asian stories that narrate the victory of a warrior deity over an enemy, typically a sea-god or sea dragon, and his rise to divine kingship. In The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition, Debra Scoggins Ballentine analyzes this motif, arguing that it was used within ancient political and socio-religious discourses to bolster particular divine hierarchies, kings, institutions, and groups, as well as to attack others. Situating her study of the conflict topos within contemporary theorizations of myth by Bruce Lincoln, Russell McCutcheon, and Jonathan Z. Smith, Ballentine examines narratives of divine combat and instances of this conflict motif. Her study cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries as well as constructed time periods, focusing not only on the Hebrew Bible but also incorporating Mesopotamian, early Jewish, early Christian, and rabbinic texts, spanning a period of almost three millennia - from the eighteenth century BCE to the early middle ages CE. The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition advances our understanding of the conflict topos in ancient west Asian and early Jewish and Christian literatures and of how mythological and religious ideas are used both to validate and render normative particular ideologies and socio-political arrangements, and to delegitimize and invalidate others.

How did Paul understand time? Standard interpretations are that Paul modified his inherited Jewish apocalyptic sequential two-age temporality. Paul solved the conundrum of Christ's resurrection occurring without the resurrection of the righteous by asserting that the ages are not sequential but rather that they overlap. Believers live in already-not yet temporality. In this groundbreaking book, Ann Jervis instead proposes that Paul did not think in terms of two ages but rather of life in this age or life in Christ. Humans apart from Christ live in this age, whereas believers live entirely in the temporality of Christ. Christ's temporality, like God's, is time in which change occurs--at least between Christ and God and creation. Their temporality is tensed, but the tenses are nonsequential. The past is in their present, as is the future. However, this is not a changeless now but a now in which change occurs (though not in the way that human chronological time perceives change). Those joined to Christ live Christ's temporality while also living chronological time. In clear writing, Jervis engages both philosophical and traditional biblical understandings of time. Her inquiry is motivated and informed by the long-standing recognition of the centrality of union with Christ for Paul. Jervis points out that union with Christ has significant temporal implications. Living Christ's time transforms believers' suffering, sinning, and physical dying. While in the present evil age these are instruments purposed for destruction, in Christ they are transformed in service of God's life. Living Christ's time also changes the significance of the eschaton. It is less important to those in Christ than it is for creation, for those joined to the One over whom death has no dominion are already released from bondage to corruption. Scholars and students will profit from this lively contribution to Pauline studies, which offers big-picture proposals based on detailed work with Paul's letters. The book includes a foreword by John Barclay.

This monograph interprets the theme of election in the book of Sirach. Previous scholarship has often understood Ben Sira’s worldview to be dualistic, and has approached the sage's correlation of Wisdom and Torah as either a nationalization of Wisdom or a universalization of Torah. By probing Ben Sira’s ideas about election, this book suggests that Ben Sira does not collapse the traditional sapiential dichotomy wisdom/folly into a dualistic worldview, and that his understanding of the relation between Wisdom and Torah proves to be far more subtle than previous interpretations have allowed. The study demonstrates that the concept of election enables a profitable discussion of the relation of Wisdom and Torah in the thought of this pivotal Second Temple sage.

Antagonistic imagery has a striking presence in apocalyptic writings of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. In these visionary accounts, the role of the divine warrior fighting against demonic forces is often taken by a human adept, who becomes exalted and glorified as a result of his encounter with otherworldly antagonists, serving as a prerequisite for his final apotheosis. Demons of Change examines the meaning of these interactions for the transformations of the hero and antihero of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic accounts. Andrei A. Orlov traces the roots of this trope to ancient Near Eastern traditions, paying special attention to the significance of conflict in the adept's ascent and apotheosis and to the formative value of these developments for Jewish and Christian martyrological accounts. This antagonistic tension plays a critical role both for the exaltation of the protagonist and for the demotion of his opponent. Orlov treats the motif of the hero's apotheosis in the midst of conflict in its full historical and interpretive complexity using a broad variety of Jewish sources, from the creational narratives of the Hebrew Bible to later Jewish mystical testimonies.

Originally worshipped by the people of a small and politically insignificant eastern Mediterranean community, the Hebrew God rose to become the monotheistic deity of the entire Western tradition. Indeed, the God of Israel ranks as the most distinguished deity in human history. In this text, biblical scholar Bernhard Lang draws upon the available evidence, including ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian texts and art, to provide a portrait of the ancient Hebrew God.

This book constitutes the second volume of a three-volume study of Christian testimonies to divine suffering: God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, vol. 2, Evil and Divine Suffering. The larger study focuses its inquiry into the testimonies to divine suffering themselves, seeking to allow the voices that attest to divine suffering to speak freely, then to discover and elucidate the internal logic or rationality of this family of testimonies, rather than defending these attestations against the dominant claims of classical Christian theism that have historically sought to eliminate such language altogether from Christian discourse about the nature and life of God. This second volume of studies proceeds on the basis of the presuppositions of this symbol, those implicit attestations that provide the conditions of possibility for divine suffering-that which constitutes divine vulnerability with respect to creation-as identified and examined in the first volume of this project: an understanding of God through the primary metaphor of love (God is love); and an understanding of the human as created in the image of God, with a life (though finite) analogous to the divine life-the imago Dei as love. The second volume then investigates the first two divine wounds or modes of divine suffering to which the larger family of testimonies to divine suffering normally attest: (1) divine grief, suffering because of betrayal by the beloved human or human sin; and (2) divine self-sacrifice, suffering for the beloved human in its bondage to sin or misery, to establish the possibility of redemption and reconciliation. Each divine wound, thus, constitutes a response to a creaturely occasion. The suffering in each divine wound also occurs in two stages: a passive stage and an active stage. In divine grief, God suffers because of human sin, betrayal of the divine lover by the beloved human: divine sorrow as the passive stage of divine grief; and divine anguish as the active stage of divine grief. In divine self-sacrifice, God suffers in response to the misery or bondage of the beloved human's infidelity: divine travail (focused on the divine incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth) as the active stage of divine self-sacrifice; and divine agony (focused on divine suffering in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth) as the passive stage of divine self-sacrifice.

The Beloved Son as Tantalizing Teacher is a contribution to the study of the "historical Jesus." It is meant for anyone interested in Jesus as a person as well as part of the academic project of discovering his humanity and his place in history. To truly uncover him in this way, the facts of his Jewish historical context are foundational. The context is in terms of six dynamics or factors: the history of late antiquity of the Mediterranean world from Alexander to the destruction of the temple and how people in the land of Israel interacted with that history; Israel's economic, social, religious, and political structures; and the ecology of the land of Jesus' time. In particular we understand Jesus and the movement he initiated as part of other renewal movements of his time and place that arose to confront what most of his contemporaries perceived as the corrosion of Jewish society. So the Jewish people of the first century, living in their patrimonial land of Israel, were embroiled in a crisis that threatened to overwhelm the nation. The Beloved Son as Tantalizing Teacher sums up the situation, with the pithy phrase borrowed from one scholar, as a people whose "backs were against the wall."