The ninth volume of this edition, translation, and commentary of the Jerusalem Talmud contains two Tractates. The first Tractate, "Documents", treats divorce law and principles of agency when written documents are required. Collateral topics are the rules for documents of manumission, those for sealed documents whose contents may be hidden from witnesses, the rules by which the divorced wife can collect the moneys due her, the requirement that both divorcer and divorcee be of sound mind, and the rules of conditional divorce. The second Tractate, "Nazirites", describes the Nasirean vow and is the main rabbinic source about the impurity of the dead. As in all volumes of this edition, a (Sephardic rabbinic) vocalized text is presented, with parallel texts used as source of variant readings. A new translation is accompanied by an extensive commentary explaining the rabbinic background of all statements and noting Talmudic and related parallels. Attention is drawn to the extensive Babylonization of the Gittin text compared to genizah texts.

There is a divine pronouncement among the Akan that all human beings are children of God (Nana Nyame), none a child of the earth (mother); meaning that human beings are spiritual in origin, descending directly from God via the Abosom (gods and goddesses). Every person then has a deity as father ( gya-bosom), recognition of which existentially enables a person to fulfil one's career or professional blueprint (Nkrabea). Intrinsically, therefore, human beings embody the very essence of the Abosom, which manifests itself behaviorally and psychologically in a manner identical to those of the gods and goddesses. African Personality and Spirituality: The Role of Abosom and Human Essence therefore addresses ultimate existential concerns of the Akan, revealing the essence of the primeval gods and goddesses and how they transform themselves into human beings, as well as the psychology of personality characteristic attributes, the phenomenon of spirit alightment, and other manifestations of the gods and goddesses, and the imperative of ethical existence and generativity ( bra bO) as basis of eternal life.

The present volume is one of the first to concentrate on a specific theme of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely the book of Genesis. In particular the volume is concerned with the links displayed by the Qumranic biblical interpetation to the inner-biblical interpretation and the final shaping of the Hebrew scriptures. Moshe Bar-Asher studies cases of such inner biblical interpretative comments; Michael Segal deals with the Garden of Eden story in the scrolls and other contemporary Jewish sources; Reinhard Kratz analizes the story of the Flood as preamble for the lives of the Patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible; Devorah Dimant examines this theme in the Qumran scrolls; Roman Viehlhauer explores the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; George Brooke and Atar Livneh discuss aspects of Jacob's career; Harald Samuel review the career of Levi; Liora Goldman examines the Aramaic work the Visions of Amram; Lawrence Schiffman and Aharon Shemesh discuss halakhic aspects of stories about the Patriarchs; Moshe Bernstein provides an overview of the references to the Patriarchs in the Qumran scrolls.

This volume collects an international body of voices, as a timely response to a rapidly advancing field of the natural sciences. The contributors explore how the disciplines of theology, earth and space sciences contribute to the debate on constantly expanding ethical challenges, and the prospect of humanity's future. The discussions offered in this volume see the 'community' as central to a sustainable and ethical approach to earth and space sciences, examining the role of theology in this communal approach, but also recognizing theology itself as part of a community of humanity disciplines. Examining the necessity for interaction between disciplines, this collection draws on voices from biodiversity studies, geology, aesthetics, literature, astrophysics, and others, to illustrate precisely why a constructive and sustainable dialogue is needed within the current scientific climate.

This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa 1:10-17; 43:22-28; and 58:1-14 and concludes that, even though the role of cult and ethics in each part of the book varies significantly, the underlying principles behind the teaching about ritual and social justice in the various parts of the book of Isaiah are the same. Furthermore, these principles are cultic in nature, and in accord with priestly teaching. Far from being anti-ritualistic, the studied texts are concerned with what can be labelled The Ethical Dimension of Cult. The reason behind the variations of the role of cult and ethics in the book called Isaiah seems to be cultic as well, namely the purity or impurity of the people and the land before, during, and after the Babylonian exile.

This book describes Martin Bucer (1491-1551) as a teacher of theology, focusing on his time as Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge between 1549 and 1551. The book is centered on his 1550 Cambridge lectures on Ephesians, and investigates them in their historical context, exploring what sort of a theologian Bucer was. The lectures are examined to find out how they represent Bucer's method of teaching and "doing" theology, and shed light on the relationship between biblical exegesis and theological formulation as he understood it. Divided into two interconnected parts, the book first sets the historical context for the lectures, including a broad sketch of scholastic method in theology and the biblical humanist critique of that method. It then closely examines Bucer's practice in the Cambridge lectures, to show the extent to which he was a theologian of the biblical humanist school, influenced by the method Erasmus set forth in the Ratio Verae Theologiae in which true theology begins, ends, and is best "done" as an exercise in the exegesis of the Word of God.

This is the first volume of Robert Cumming Neville's magnum opus, Theology as Symbolic Engagement. Neville is the premier American systematic theologian of our time. His work is profoundly influenced by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the American pragmatists John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce. From Tillich he takes the notion of religion, art, and morality as symbol, and the notion that religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion. Thus, theology is symbolic engagement with cultural forms, and Neville explores the ways that such engagement occurs among various religious traditions. One of the most important tasks in theology is to devise ways of testing, correcting, or affirming claims that we had been unable to question before. This book will argue that "system" in theology is not merely correlating assertions, but rather building perspectives from which we can render the various parts of theology vulnerable for assessment. In fact, one of the unique features of this book is its engagement with other religions. Such dialogue has been a feature of Neville's work from the beginning. Theology as Symbolic Engagement breaks the boundaries of systematic theology and moves away from the static character that characterizes such enterprises from Barth onward. Instead, Neville's book showcases the dynamic character of all theology. The hallmark of this entire project is its effort to show theology to be hypothetical and to make it vulnerable to correction.

David Emerton argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ecclesial thought breaks open a necessary 'third way' in ecclesiological description between the Scylla of 'ethnographic' ecclesiology and the Charybdis of 'dogmatic' ecclesiology. Building on a rigorous and provocative discussion of Bonhoeffer's thought, Emerton establishes a programmatic theological grammar for any speech about the church. Emerton argues that Bonhoeffer understands the church as a pneumatological and eschatological community in space and time, and that his understanding is built on eschatological and pneumatological foundations. These foundations, in turn, give rise to a unique methodological approach to ecclesiological description - an approach that enables Bonhoeffer to proffer a genuinely theological account of the church in which both divine and human agency are held together through an account of God the Holy Spirit. Emerton proposes that this approach is the perfect remedy for an endemic problem in contemporary accounts of the church: that of attending either to the human empirical church-community ethnographically or to the life of God dogmatically; and to each, problematically, at the expense of the other. This book will act as a clarion call towards genuinely theological ecclesiological speech which is allied to real ecclesial action.

What if there is no strong evidence that God exists? Is belief in God when faced with a lack of evidence illegitimate and improper? Evidentialism answers yes. According to Evidentialism, it is impermissible to believe any proposition lacking adequate evidence. And if any thesis enjoys the status of a dogma among philosophers, it is Evidentialism. Presenting a direct challenge to Evidentialism are pragmatic arguments for theism, which are designed to support belief in the absence of adequate evidence. Pascal's Wager is the most prominent theistic pragmatic argument, and issues in epistemology, the ethics of belief, and decision theory, as well as philosophical theology, all intersect at the Wager. Other prominent theistic pragmatic arguments include William James's celebrated essay, 'The Will to Believe'; a posthumously published and largely ignored pragmatic argument authored by J.S. Mill, supporting the propriety of hoping that quasi-theism is true; the eighteenth-century Scottish essayist James Beattie's argument that the consoling benefit of theistic belief is so great that theistic belief is permissible even when one thinks that the existence of God is less likely than not; and an argument championed by the nineteenth-century French philosopher Jules Lachelier, which based its case for theistic belief on the empirical benefits of believing as a theist, even if theism was very probably false. In Pascal's Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God, Jeff Jordan explores various theistic pragmatic arguments, and the objections employed against them. Jordan presents a new version of the Wager, what he calls the 'Jamesian Wager', and argues that the Jamesian Wager survives the objections hurled against theistic pragmatic arguments and provides strong support for theistic belief. In addition to arguing for a sound version of the Wager, Jordan also argues that there is a version of Evidentialism compatible with a principled use of pragmatic arguments, and that the Argument from Divine Silence fails. Objections found in Voltaire, Hume, and Nietzsche against the Wager are scrutinized, as are objections issued by Richard Swinburne, Richard Gale, and other contemporary philosophers. The ethics of belief, the many-gods objection, the problem of infinite utilities, and the propriety of a hope based acceptance are also examined.

The collection of essays contains nineteen contributions that aim at locating the Song of Songs in its ancient context as well as addressing problems of interpretation and the reception of this biblical book in later literature. In contrast to previous studies this work devotes considerable attention to parallels from the Greek world without neglecting the Ancient Near East or Egypt. Several contributions deal with the use of the Song in Byzantine, Medieval, German Romantic and modern Greek Literature. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the collection new perspectives and avenues of approach are opened.