The Spirit in Isaiah

This study employs an “elect” concept to frame the diverse nature and work of the Spirit in Isaiah. God created humans in his image and enlivened them by his to “rule over” the whole of creation. This makes God’s elect a “charismatic” figure: chosen or called to be his possession and to stand between God and the recipients of the elect’s ministry, and to perform God-given tasks with his enduring and equipping presence through the Spirit. For the “tasks,” the Spirit equips or empowers the elected entity. However, the book of Isaiah also contains references to the Spirit without a human agent, revealing God’s character and work. This study will examine key passages of the Spirit in Isaiah to identify the Spirit’s role over the recipients with a focus on its “charismatic” function upon the “elect.”

Burn the Witch! A Comparison between the Portrayal of Sorceress Babylon in Isaiah 47 and the Figure of the Witch in Maqlû

In chapter 47 of the Book of Isaiah the fall of Babylon is described in metaphorical language: the arrogant queen Babylon is condemned for having practiced witchcraft since her youth. The evil which she inflicted on her victims will befall herself, and her downfall will be swift and without warning. Her dire fate follows that of her fellow sorcerers, who have perished in fire and flames. This article compares the portrayal of Babylon and her demise in Isa 47 with the Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft series Maqlû and discusses the shared terminology and the striking similarity of themes, such as the indictment of the witch, the gender-stereotype, the reversal of fate, and the condemnation to death by burning. The thematic, and sometimes lexical, overlap may indicate that Deutero-Isaiah incorporated Mesopotamian ideas about (counter-)witchcraft in his own composition, being exposed to local magico-religious thought whilst maintaining a critical stance towards it.

A spring of living waters in a pool of metaphors: The metaphorical landscape of 1QHa 16:5–27

This research article focuses on the use of the water metaphor in column 16 of the Hodayot. Previous scholarship has often concentrated on the garden metaphor in this section, particularly on its intertextual links with the book of Isaiah. By drawing on contemporary metaphor theory, in particular blending theory, I show how the author of the Hodayot creates poetry through a multiple blended network of garden and water metaphors, and how aspects of the linguistic form of the poem, in particular the phrase מבוע מים חיים‘well of living waters’, can be read as an expression of this blend. The aim of this study is to contribute (1) to the study of the Hodayot and its poetic practices, against older dismissals of the poetic quality of the Hodayot, and (2) to our understanding of semantic constellations and the conceptual world of ancient Judaism.Contribution: This article fits within the scope of HTS’s theme ‘Historical Thought and Source Interpretation’ as it contributes to our insights into ancient Jewish thought through the interpretation of a religious source text using metaphor theory.

Gudar och människor bland texter och paratexter

It is a well-known fact that the books of the Hebrew Bible are, to a great extent, anonymous and that the individuals long identified as their authors (Moses, Isaiah, David, Solomon, and so on) are not the ones who have penned them. How, then, should the few paratexts that do, in fact, relate texts explicitly to named individuals be understood? In this article, I argue that such a question is essentially related to the historical contingency of author concepts. After introducing the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault as a contrast to the Romantic author ideal, I provide an outline of two diverging author concepts in the ancient world: (1) a Mesopotamian trajectory where texts often circulated anonymously and where authorship was distributed across several agents, with a divine-human interaction at its core, and (2) a Greek trajectory, where authors were regularly named and given prime place in the interpretive activity. By arguing that there are clear overlaps in the way authorship is conceived in the Mesopotamian trajectory and in the Hebrew Bible (more specifically in the book of Isaiah), I provide a new framework in relation to which the formation of the literature of the Hebrew Bible can be understood.

Did the Syriac Translators of the Old Testament Peshitta Regard ‮ܫܡܝܐ‬‎ as Singular or Plural?

In recent literature, the noun ‮ܫܡܝܐ‬‎ has been described as a singular in the book of Isaiah, ostensibly on the basis of the lack of syame. I will argue to the contrary, demonstrating that it should be described as a plural in this corpus. The key to proper interpretation of the form is agreement with other clausal and phrasal constituents, not the presence or absence of syame.

Chosen Peoples

On July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion that the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which the South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from the Arab and Muslim Sudanese to the north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines within South Sudan, belying the liberation theology that had supposedly reached its climactic conclusion with independence. In Chosen Peoples, Christopher Tounsel investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan and the inability of shared religion to prevent conflict. Exploring the creation of a colonial-era mission school to halt Islam's spread up the Nile, the centrality of biblical language in South Sudanese propaganda during the Second Civil War (1983--2005), and postindependence transformations of religious thought in the face of ethnic warfare, Tounsel highlights the potential and limitations of deploying race and Christian theology to unify South Sudan.