Pieter W. Van Der Horst – författare

Bringing together as it does papers delivered at the 1986 and 1987 meetings of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas Pseudepigrapha Seminar, this collection takes as its theme the Testament of Job. For much of the modern period the Testament of Job has been one of the lesser-known pseudepigraphic products of early Judaism, and this book attempts to remedy the deficiency of scholarly material in the area with a well-balanced treatment of its central concerns. Approximately the length of the New Testament book of Romans, the Testament celebrates the virtue of patience through a folkloristic elaboration of the Biblical story of Job. Yet the Testament adopts from the Biblical story scarcely more than the framework, much of it highlighting themes unusual in both early Christian and early Jewish writings. From the viewpoint of the history of religions it is of interest for its image of Satan, its ecstaticism and its emphasis on magic; it sheds light on the Jewish background of the early Christian phenomenon of glossolalia; and it is intriguing because of the remarkable role it assigns to women. The contributors to this volume are all distinguished scholars, and they provide an accessible introduction to this relatively neglected ancient document.

During the past few decades a great amount of scholarly work has been done on the various prayer cultures of antiquity, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish and Christian. In Jewish studies this burgeoning research on ancient prayer has been stimulated particularly by the many new prayer texts found at Qumran, which have shed new light on several long-standing problems. The present volume intends to make a new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on ancient Jewish prayer texts by focusing on a limited set of prayer texts, scil. , a small number of those that have been preserved only in Greek. Jewish prayers in Greek tend to be undervalued, which is regrettable because these prayers shed light on sometimes striking aspects of early Jewish spirituality in the centuries around the turn of the era. In this volume twelve such prayers have been collected, translated, and provided with an extensive historical and philological commentary. They have been preserved on papyrus, on stone, and as part of Christian church orders into which some of them have been incorporated in a christianized from. For that reason these prayers are of great interest to scholars of both early Judaism and ancient Christianity.

During the past three decades Jaap Mansfeld, Professor of Ancient Philosophy in Utrecht, has built up a formidable reputation as a leading scholar in his field. His work has concentrated on the Presocratics, Hellenistic Philosophy, the sources of our knowledge of ancient philosophy (esp. doxography) and the history of scholarship.In honour of his sixtieth birthday, colleagues and friends have contributed a collection of articles which represent the state of the art in the study of the history of ancient philosophy and frequently concentrate on subjects in which the honorand has made important discoveries.The 22 contributors include M. Baltes, J. Barnes, J. Brunschwig, W.M. Calder III, J. Dillon, P.L. Donini, J. Glucker, A.A. Long, L.M. de Rijk, D. Sedley, P. Schrijvers, and M. Vegetti. The volume concludes with a complete bibliography of Jaap Mansfeld's scholarly work so far.

The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible is the single major work of reference on the gods, angels, demons, spirits and semi-divine heroes whose names occur in the biblical books. First published in 1995 and chosen by "Choice" as Best Reference Work of 1996, an extensively revised edition was published in 1998. Arranged in the order of the Latin alphabet, the more than four-hundred names are those found in the books of the Hebrew and the Greek Bible, Old and New Testament, including the Apocrypha. There are entries on divine names recognized as such by the biblical authors; divine names in theophoric toponyms and anthroponyms; secular terms which occur as divine names in neighbouring civilizations, conjectural divine names, at times based on textual emendation, proposed by modern scholarship; and humans who acquired a semi-divine status in tradition. A typical entry contains a discussion of the pertinent name, its meaning, the religio-historical background, relevant biblical passages and an up-to-date bibliography. Extensive indices and cross-references provide easy access to the rich information of the dictionary. The Dictionary of Deities and Demons is the fruit of a common effort of a group of more than a hundred international scholars from a variety of traditions.