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While many books are written on Jesus's death, a gap exists in writings about the theological significance of a believer's death, particularly in imitation of Jesus's. Paul, as a first apostolic witness who talked frequently about his own death, serves as a foundational model for how believers perceive their own death. While many have commented about Paul's stance on topics such as forensic righteousness and substitutionary atonement, less is written about Paul's personal experience and anticipation of his own death and the merit he assigned to it. Paul and His Mortality: Imitating Christ in the Face of Death explores how Paul faced his death in light of a ministry philosophy of imitation: as he sought to imitate Christ in his life, so he would imitate Christ as he faced his death. In his writings, Paul acknowledged his vulnerability to passive death as a mortal, that at any moment he might die or come near death. He gave us some of the most mournful and vitriolic words about how death is God's and our enemy. But he also spoke openly about choosing death: \"My aim is to know him . . . to be like him in his death.\" This study seeks to show that Paul embraced death as a follower and imitator of Christ because the benefits of a good death supersede attempts at self-preservation. For him, embracing death is gain because it is honorable, because it reflects ultimate obedience to God, and because it is the reasonable response for those who understand that only Jesus's death provides atonement. Studying mortality is paradoxically a study of life. Peering at the prospect of life's end energizes life in the present. This urgency focuses on living with mission in step with God, the Creator and Sustainer of life, who is rightly referred to as Life itself. By focusing on mortality, we focus on Paul's theology of life in its practical aspects, in particular, living life qualitatively, aware of God's kingdom and mission and our limited quantity of days.

The series Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies (DCLS)is concerned principally with research into those books of the Greek Bible (Septuagint) which are not contained in the Hebrew canon, and into intertestamentary and early Jewish literature from the period around the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE. The series was launched in 2007 in collaboration with the \"International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature\". It provides a logical extension to the Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook, which has been published since 2004.

This article examines how the references to death and dying in Gen 2-3 should be understood. Here I bring the scholarly discussion up to date by summarizing significant views from the last decade. I then present a threefold argument for the conclusion that the type of death with which YHWH threatens the man in the story is imminent physical death-not metaphorical death or the loss of immortality. First, YHWH's statement to the man prohibiting any eating from the tree of knowledge fits the model of Neo-Babylonian conditional verdicts issued in an administrative context. Such verdicts contained penalties that were to be imposed very soon after the commission of any wrongdoing and that could be reduced in severity. Second, other biblical occurrences of expressions like Л01Г1 ЛЮ (\"you will die\") show that the expression in Gen 2:17 most likely represents an ordinary death sentence. Third, the text's treatment of knowledge and immortality, the two chief characteristics of divinity in the story, supports this overall understanding. The death penalty is not carried out, but the possibility that the original penalty could be changed was part of the nature of conditional verdicts. Thus, in the end, YHWH imposes on the man and the woman punishments less severe than death.

Habakkuk is unique among books in the Twelve in its criticism of foreign cultic practices. Instead of condemning Israel and Judah for the worship of other gods, it criticizes the worship offered to a foreign deity by that deity's own people. This article examines Hab 2:18-19, arguing that the reduction of the pesel or massēkâ to a lifeless object is intelligible in moral rather than ontological terms. The integration of this cultic criticism into a more standard denunciation of a foreign nation's non-cultic transgressions yields a distinctive form of opposition to idolatry. What Habakkuk shows is that disbelief in the reality of idols may owe less to a mocking, debunking rationalism than to a cynicism regarding the uses of ritual.

Die anthropologischen Konzeptionen im Judentum der hellenistisch-römischen Zeit bilden ein wichtiges Bindeglied zwischen den entsprechenden Traditionen der älteren Texte der Hebräischen Bibel und denjenigen des Neuen Testaments sowie der rabbinischen Überlieferungen. Sie als einen konstitutiven Faktor religiöser Identität wahrzunehmen, ist für die religionsgeschichtliche Erforschung des antiken Judentums wie auch für eine an Traditionslinien orientierte Biblische Theologie unabdingbar. Trotz zahlreicher Forschungen zur Antropologie der biblischen Überlieferungen im Alten und Neuen Testament bzw. zu den anthropologischen Konzepten ihrer Nachbarkulturen stellt eine Aufarbeitung dieser Thematik aber ein Forschungsdesiderat dar. Vor diesem Hintergrund versammelt dieser Band 20 einschlägige Aufsätze international bekannter Wissenschaftler zum Thema „Sünde und Tod“ . Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Einbeziehung des Materials aus den benachbarten Kulturen, wobei auch ägyptische Quellen zu Wort kommen. Der Band bietet so exemplarisch wichtige Grundlagen für die weitere Erforschung der antik-jüdischen Anthropologie in ihren kulturellen Bezügen.

For Paul, Jesus' death is vicarious. But in what way, precisely? The author critically reviews the various possibilities, offering evidence that in Paul's thought Jesus is understood as fulfilling a martyr's role rather than as a cultic sacrifice or as patterned after biblical models such as the Suffering Servant or the Isaac figure. The essential aspects of the concept of the Noble Death, found in the martyr stories of 2 and 4 Maccabees and in Graeco-Roman literature, are clearly discernible also in Paul's interpretation of the death of Jesus. Paul was very much a man of his time, and the concept was a natural one for him to use in relation to Jesus' death.

Sanctified Aggression allies itself neither with the easy assumption that religions are by definition violent (and that only the secular/humanist/humane can offer a place of refuge from the ravages of religious authority) nor with the equally facile opposing view that religion expresses the \"best\" of human aspirations and that this best is always capable of diffusing or sublating the worst. Rather, it works from the premise that biblical, Jewish and Christian vocabularies continue to resonate, inspire and misfire.Some of the essays here explore how these vocabularies and symbols have influenced, or resonate with, events such as the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland (1941), the Rwandan Massacre (1994), the tragedy at Columbine High School (1999) and the emergence of the \"Phineas Priesthood\" of white supremacists in North America. Other contributors examine how themes of martyrology, sacrifice and the messianic continue to circulate and mutate in literature, music, drama and film. The collective conclusion is that it is not possible to control biblical and religious violence by simply identifying canonical trouble-spots, then fencing them off with barbed wire or holding peace summits around them. Nor is it always possible to draw clear lines between problem and non-problem texts, witnesses and perpetrators, victims and aggressors or \"reality\" and \"art\".