Clarifying the text and geography of one of the oldest apocalypses, this study examines the travels of the patriarch Enoch. Coblentz Bautch also explores comparable and perhaps influential traditions from the ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible, and world of Hellenism.

This study brings together literary and philological criticism to offer a reading of Job 28 as poetry. The heart of the study consists of two major sections. The first is an interpretation of the poem against the heroic deeds of ancient kings described in Mesopotamian royal narratives, especially the Gilgamesh epic. The second is a thorough philological and textual commentary which employs an aesthetic rationale for restoring the text of the poem as a work of art. The study reveals a multileveled masterpiece whose complexity impacts how one reads Job 28 as poetry and theology.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.

This unique study of the theology of the book of Daniel examines the cultic motif within the book as it relates to space and time. Numerous references and allusions to cult are investigated with linguistic, literary, and contextual analyses. The findings are then related to the main theological themes of the book such as judgment, eschatology, kingdom, and worship. It is evident that the idea of cult plays a dominant role in Daniel, and that it demonstrates the intention of the author to present the issue of conflict of two opposing systems of cult and worship. For all who are interested in an exegesis of Daniel that pays dutiful attention to the theology of Daniel, The Cultic Motif in the Book of Daniel is a must-read.

During the past two generations, there have been many studies on the structure, organization, and "function" of the gods of the Levantine and ancient Near Eastern worlds. In this important study, Lowell Handy provides new directions for thinking on this crucial topic, arguing that the structure of the pantheon worshiped in Syria-Palestine mirrored the social structure of the city-states in that region. While many recent studies have investigated the relations of the gods in both biblical and extra-biblical texts from the area, Handy shows that the pantheon functioned as a bureaucracy. This perspective may well be the primary key for understanding hierarchy among the gods.

The influential scholar of religion Mircea Eliade envisioned a spiritually destitute modern culture coming into renewed meaning through the recovery of archetypal myths and symbols. Eliade defined this restoration of meaning as a "new humanism" of existential meaning and cultural-religious unity. Through a biographical exegesis of Eliade's life and writings from his earliest years in Romania to his final ones as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, Cave sets forward a structural description of what this "new humanism" might have meant for Eliade, and what it signifies for modern culture. Cave concludes by endorsing Eliade's radically pluralistic vision which, he argues, offers a key to the revitalization of our demythologized and material culture. This study repositions previous Eliadean studies and places the "new humanism" as the paradigm in relation to which future readings of Eliade should be evaluated.