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A series of large Persian Period buildings dots the Judean Mountains; they are usually located alone in prominent places without nearby villages or other remains. Their presence stresses the scarci...

In Reconstructing Jerusalem Ristau provides a thesis for the development of the centrality of Jerusalem while Yehud was within the Persian Empire. He constructs this picture on the basis of a revie...

Recurring themes and traditions within the biblical corpus have attracted much scholarship. This article uses P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) as a test case for the ways traditions may or may not interact, and what that means for ‘tradition history.’ While the film has many features which strike many viewers as biblical, the author-director denies prior knowledge of these connections. The film is analyzed in terms of structure, Anderson’s claimed sources, the American cultural context of the 1990s, and its biblical resonances. After assessing the import of these observations, the tradition history of Magnolia is compared to the tradition history of the exodus in the Hebrew Bible. Within the framework of attention to media contexts, the article concludes by noting the importance of authority, canon, and multiple lines of transmission. In so doing, our understanding of the transmission of traditions is problematized, and a broader, less text-centric paradigm is called for.

Biblical scholars often treat idealistic expectations – for kings or eras – as “eschatological” or “messianic” expectations. Yet this sort of analysis often elides the rhetorical nature of the source texts. This article seeks to analyze the rhetoric of Obama’s first presidential campaign as a recent comparator, using Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory and recent work on hyperbole. The results of this discussion are then applied to four sample passages from the context of Hebrew Bible to argue that idealistic or “utopian” language need not necessarily imply any of the ideas associated with messianism or millenarianism. In the final analysis this will mean that scholars must be more careful in delineating the diachronic development of ideas in ancient texts.

One of the striking features of Second Temple Judaism is the appearance of the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy. Intertwined with this phenomenon are the questions of authorship, fidelity to tradition, and the creative formation of new works. This paper attempts to bring to bear the debates on the “Auteur” in Film Studies to the understanding of authorial persona and voice in the Jewish writings of the Persian and Hellenistic Period. By focusing on a broader set of issues centered on creative production, this paper hopes to find new ways of viewing the old problems inherent in redaction theory.

The Book of Luminaries contains two enigmatic details which can be compared to Iranian ideas: the concept of astronomical solar “gates,” and a sevenfold mythical geography in chapter 77. Although the document overall is highly indebted to Mesopotamian traditions, the source of these two details can better be explained as Iranian. The ultimate Mesopotamian origin of the astronomy cannot be gainsaid, but the exact formulations of some of the details found in the extant book may have been in dialogue with or shaped by Iranian scholarship. If so, further work on what this means for the interaction of systems and communities in the ancient Near East (which of course already includes things Persian) may be justified.