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Crisis is endemic to capitalism. But can it be proved that capitalism will bring about its own terminal crisis? This article frames this question in light of ongoing debates in theories of crisis and value by polemically comparing two related but divergent perspectives. The first, that of Robert Kurz and several Wertkritik authors, argues that cyclical crises of capital necessarily lead to a terminal crisis – and that this terminal crisis is already underway. The second, that of Michael Heinrich, argues that there is no way to demonstrate that capital will not continue reinventing new sites and forms for creating surplus value. Through this comparison, this article achieves two aims: first, it establishes the general point that how we understand value determines how we understand crisis; and, second, it shows limitations of the ‘terminal crisis’ hypothesis, and concludes that Kurz’s terminal crisis theory risks making crisis a transhistorical concept.

The 1970s energy crises was a decisive point in US culture and in the development of neo-liberal geographies. After the post-war period of rapid economic growth, Western economies sputtered and stalled. Cutting across political, economic, and cultural spheres, the discourse of energy crisis brought narrative coherence to what was, in fact, a heterogenous historical moment. In doing so, energy crisis discourse facilitated dramatic social and economic restructuring, as well as shifts in the distributions of lived spaces and times. More broadly, energy crisis discourse played a significant role in configuring the emerging processes of neo-liberalization and bringing about a set of historical outcomes, herein elucidated in three figures: the suburb, energy, and the entrepreneur.

The understanding of trauma in sociology as the group’s creation of meaning for horrific events has been highly influential in the study of the Hebrew Bible. This sociological approach is very different than that of literary criticism, where trauma is understood through the lens of psychoanalytical analysis as that which has not been fully experienced by victims and is not truly known by them, as “unclaimed experience,” in other words. The sociological understanding of trauma has helped scholars understand potential social benefits of biblical texts, but scholarship often fails to clearly distinguish this approach from that of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, and this has led to problematic claims that texts which create meaning for traumatic events will prove to be therapeutic for individual trauma sufferers. The use of texts to create meaning and explanation actually forces trauma victims to repress the speech about their trauma that they need to engage in therapy.

The study of trauma in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis concluded that trauma survivors have been overwhelmed by traumatic events and so are unable to experience them and form memories of them, and thus unable to know the trauma. Trauma is thus relived rather than remembered, repetitively and uncontrollably forcing itself into victims’ lives through literal dreams of the events, flashbacks, and so on, appearing to the survivor as a foreign body that stands outside of the self. The study of trauma within the field of literary criticism developed out of psychoanalytical conclusions about it, and points out that literature of trauma reflects these psychological effects. In such literature, then, we find trauma continually repeating and, since it cannot be known, refusing to be controlled by narrative explanation. Trauma, in short, is anti-narrative. The study of trauma within sociology, however, is based on an understanding of trauma as something created by a society in order to explain past events and solidify social bonds. A sociological reading of trauma in the Deuteronomistic History (Dtr) focuses on the ways in which Dtr’s narrative makes the exiles’ traumatic experience of defeat and exile understandable and meaningful. This kind of explanation, however, has no real interest in healing the exiles’ psychological wounds. A literary reading of trauma in Dtr reveals trauma to be present in absences of explanation, deconstructing Dtr’s narrative certainty. It appears as intrusions into Dtr’s totalizing narrative, intrusions that put the writing’s explanatory certainties of divine justice on trial while refusing to provide a verdict.

Expiation refers to a ritual attempt to deal with sin, and while in the Hebrew Bible it can include such things as prayer and acts of mourning, we most frequently find it manifested in sacrifice. Biblical texts rarely explain how sacrifice functions in relation to sin, but sacrifice is described at greatest length in the Priestly writing, particularly in Leviticus 1–7, which has been described as a manual of sacrifice. Even here, however, P does not provide a theory of sacrificial expiation—does not, that is, explain how or why sacrifice functions as the proper ritual response to sin. Jacob Milgrom’s re-creation of the worldview that stands behind P’s understanding of sacrifice claims that the Priestly tradents understood sin as creating a miasma of impurity that polluted the sancta, and saw the blood of the sin or purification offering as a ritual detergent that cleansed the sanctuary. If we read the Priestly narrative without trying to reconstruct this worldview, but look rather for the ways in which P portrays sacrifice and expiation, we see that sacrifice functions as a way for Israelites to publically acknowledge their sin and to signal that they have no intentions of violating God’s commandments again. Part of this ritual message involves honoring God as sovereign, thus also acknowledging God’s right to command and indicating the sacrificers’ awareness that they must act as loyal subjects to their divine sovereign.

The prayer of Neh 9:6–37, and particularly its final two verses, presents the imperial monarchy in a very negative light. This portrayal is far different from the depictions of the Achaemenids found everywhere else in Ezra-Nehemiah, where the Persian kings are great benefactors of the Judean assembly. The presence of this anti-imperial language points to the existence of a group that hoped that God would grant them independence from Persia. In Neh 8–13 as a whole, however, the inclusion of the prayer functions not to promote this view but to present it as terribly misguided. The prayer includes a description of the people that is drawn from Achaemenid ideology, a picture used by the Persian kings to contrast the beneficence bestowed on loyal subjects and the tortures inflicted on the disloyal. Nehemiah 8–13 demonstrates that independence from the Achaemenid king, the figure responsible for sending proper leadership to Judah in order to keep the people faithful to the law, would lead to divine destruction of the community. Here as elsewhere in Ezra-Nehemiah, God permits the continued existence of the assembly only because the figures sent by the king force the people to remain loyal to the law. The best possible life is one under Achaemenid rule, and life without it would be a disaster, which is precisely the claim of Achaemenid imperial ideology.

The article draws on Achaemenid royal inscriptions in a postcolonial investigation of Ezra-Nehemiah’s portrayal of the community of immigrants from Babylon. The book presents the community’s identity as a hybrid of the way imperial hegemony portrays the colonized who live in the Persian Empire and of aspects of the community’s own Judean heritage that is strongly influenced by Yahwism. In Ezra 1–6, the community is portrayed as a group of colonists sent from the imperial center by the king, but, in these chapters, loyalty to the king amounts to loyalty to Yhwh, since it is the community’s God who commands the Persian king to act. In Ezra 7-Nehemiah 13, however, this loyal group of colonizers becomes a colonized people disloyal to their God and king. These chapters present the community as a group who has ceased to be the loyal imperial subjects of Ezra 1–6 and who have declined to the state of their ancestors, congenitally unable to keep Yahwistic and Persian law, and thereby justifying the colonized state of the community and imperial exploitation of its resources. In this section of the narrative, the community is just what Persian hegemony defines its colonized peoples to be: They are a group of “slaves” to the Persians, and rely utterly on individuals commissioned by the Persian king and sent from the center of the empire – that is, Ezra and Nehemiah – to lead them and to keep them loyal to their God and, therefore, a loyal colonized people to Persia.

The primary purpose of the genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9 is to construct a monument to the pre-exilic dead of Judah and Israel, reflecting the important cultural value Judeans placed on the preservation of one's name after death. Ancient Near Eastern and archaeological evidence suggests that the preservation of ancestral names for many generations was something available only to the elite; by opening the work with a monument to the pre-exilic ancestral dead, the Chronicler implies readers would raise their cultural status by supporting a restoration of the pre-exilic polity. The Chronicler used the genealogies to reflect important themes of the work, but the one thing they do that narrative cannot is to create a literal monument to the dead.

This article argues that David orders Solomon in 1 Kgs 2.5–6 to kill Joab because of Joab's pattern of assassinating rivals in order to benefit his master. David's point in 2.5 is that Joab killed Abner and Amasa, two potential enemies of David, without warning, and since Joab supported Solomon's brother's claim to the throne, Solomon might be his next victim. The Septuagint and the Lucianic recension have altered the more difficult text that appears in the Masoretic text in order to make it seem as if Joab and harmed David, and so provide a legal and religious basis for David and Solomon's conspiracy to kill Joab not present in the original text.

The double redaction theory of the Deuteronomistic History has its roots in the claim that there are logical discontinuities in the narrative from Manasseh to the end of 2 Kings. This article argues, however, that it is possible to see a coherent narrative in a synchronic reading of the final chapters of Kings once we recognize them as presenting a series of lessons to the Davidide in exile. Among the important lessons in 2 Kings 18–25 for Jehoiachin to learn is that, although he has received a negative evaluation from the narrative, the past sins on the parts of Josiah (for initially continuing Manasseh's sin) and Hezekiah (for initially failing to trust Yhwh to deliver Jerusalem) are ignored by Yhwh once they act rightly, and so are erased from their evaluations. It is still possible for Jehoiachin to earn an impeccable evaluation himself if he trusts Yhwh to deliver as Hezekiah eventually learned to do, and leads the nation in repentance as Josiah eventually did.

The portrayal of the fates of the dynasties of the North in Kings shows that, in Deuteronomistic theology, only one king in a royal house need cause the people to sin to mandate the destruction of the entire house. Since Manasseh also causes the people to sin, we might assume that the Deuteronomic History (Dtr) intends the same fate for the Davidides. However, Dtr is deliberately ambiguous in regard to the future of the Davidides following the exile—besides the specific reference to Manasseh's sin, it also includes (but does not explicitly annul) the unconditional covenant with David, and includes a conclusion that permits readers to interpret the narrative as forecasting either hope for Davidic restoration or annulment of the Davidic covenant. This ambiguity suits the exilic period of composition of Dtr, when the fate of the Davidides was unknown, and so should not be taken as evidence for redaction.

For unimodular semidirect products of locally compact amenable groups N and H, we show that one can always construct a Følner net of the form (Aα × Bβ) for G, where (Aα) is a strong form of Følner net for N and (Bβ) is any Følner net for H. Applications to the Heisenberg and Euclidean motion groups are provided.

The field of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament has come to no consensus on the meaning of sacrifice in ancient Israel. The most influential theory of the meaning of biblical sacrifice, at least in the Priestly Writing (P) of the Pentateuch, is that of Jacob Milgrom. Milgrom argues that the purification sacrifice, as presented by P in Leviticus 1–7, is key to understanding P's sacrificial system, as its blood provided a ritual detergent on the altar for Israel's unintentional sins and impurities, thus permitting the continued presence of God in the sanctuary. Milgrom's theory has recently come under challenge, and a reading of P's narrative throughout the entire Pentateuch, and not only in Leviticus 1–7, shows that, for the Priestly Writing, sacrifice seems to draw Israel's attention to the differences between the divine and human realms, and thus points to Israel's moral failings in relationship to the divine law, as well as to the punishment Israel will suffer for this failure.

In response to Thomas Römer’s assertion that the story of Jephthah’s sacrifice is a Hellenistic insertion into the Deuteronomistic History, this articleargues that the presence of the story is best explained as an original part of the history. The portrayal of the sacrifice fits the pattern of moral decline in the book of Judges, and it forms an integral and interconnected part of thestory of Jephthah as a whole. Moreover, as part of this whole it reflects animportant theme stressed elsewhere by the history: when Israel sacrificeslike foreigners do, it will act like foreigners, as well. This is why the story of Jephthah’s sacrifice is followed immediately by the story of the tribe of Ephraim, which acts just like the Ammonites, the foreign nation in thisaccount, by invading Gilead.

The author argues that the Matthean use of the term porneia in the divorce excep tion clauses of 5.32 and 19.9 is best understood by reference to the notion of divorce withjust cause, an idea present throughout the ancient Near East and in first- century Judaism. Just cause includes actions on the part of the woman that con stitutes the man's right to divorce without repayment of the dowry. Matthew excludes the possibility of divorce without just cause, and limits just cause to porneia, sexual intercourse during betrothal or marriage with someone other than the wife's husband.

This conversation with Melody D. Knowles, Centrality Practiced: Jerusalem in the Religious Practices of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period (Atlanta, SBL, 2006) began in a special session of the Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah section that was held at the national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November 2006 (Washington, DC). It includes an introduction by the editor and contributions by Deirdre N. Fulton, David Janzen, Ralph W. Klein and a response by Melody D. Knowles.