Percy Van Keulen – författare

The present volume contains a collection of essays on the Book of Isaiah offered as a tribute to Arie van der Kooij on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, which coincides with his retirement as Professor of Old Testament at Leiden University. The twenty-four contributions, written by leading scholars in the field of Old Testament studies, focus on the Book of Isaiah within the context of Hebrew and ancient near-eastern writings, particularly those from the Neo-Assyrian period, as well as on the book's reception history , particularly in its Greek and Syriac translations. Together these studies offer a rich and original contribution to the study of the Book of Isaiah in its Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Greek, Syriac, and Dutch contexts.

Over the years the use of computers for research has become increasingly important in Biblical Studies. However, a combination of computational linguistics with diachronic text-critical and text-historical approaches has hardly ever taken place. Quite often, there is mutual misunderstanding between computational linguistics and more traditional approaches in the field of linguistics and textual analysis. For example, in computer-assisted research of modern text corpora it is common to treat the text as an unequivocal and unidimensional sequence of characters. In Biblical Studies, however, either text is considered an abstraction, the result of a scholarly reconstruction based on the extant textual witnesses. Here a fundamental difference in approach reveals itself.The present volume tries to overcome the misunderstanding between the various disciplines and to establish how a fruitful interaction of information technology, linguistics and textual criticism, can contribute to the analysis of ancient texts. It addresses questions concerning the confrontation between synchronic and diachronic approaches, the role of linguistic analysis in the interpretation of texts, and the interaction of linguistic theory and the analysis of linguistic data.The first section of this volume contains the papers presented at the CALAP seminar 2003. In the second section different aspects of the interdisciplinary analysis are applied to a selected passage from the Peshitta of Kings.

This study deals with the intricate problem of the deuteronomistic composition of the book of Kings. Its particular aim is to reconstruct the compositional process underlying the final chapters of Kings. The literary-critical assessment of these chapters is a central issue in various theoretical models on the composition of the Deuteronomistic History.The author draws attention to the - often crucial - importance assigned to the Manasseh pericope and related passages in this assessment. He notes that in many models the appraisal of these texts appears to result from general theoretical concerns rather than from an independent literary-critical analysis. This study fills the need for such an analysis. The results lead the author to advance a fresh view on the composition of the last section of the Deuteronomistic History.