Job’s burnt offerings for his sons and daughters followed by their death (Job 1) resembles the sequence of Aaron’s burnt offerings for himself and his sons followed by the death of his oldest sons (Lev 8–10). Within this common sequence of events, the two stories share a cluster of important, identical lexemes. Although it is not impossible that these features could have resulted unintentionally from a shared scribal culture, the textual evidence is strong enough to indicate that the scribe of Job’s prologue alludes to the priestly inauguration story of Leviticus 8–10. By reading Job after Leviticus, one sees the sharp contrast between the divine silence following Job’s intermediary sacrifices (Job 1:5, 18–19) and the divine response both to Aaron’s and to Nadab and Abihu’s sacrifices (Lev 9:22–10:3). This study clarifies how the story of Job rejects a mechanistic understanding not only of traditional wisdom, but of the Priestly cultic tradition of ancient Israel and Judah.

The question of how to approach the Hebrew Bible as a source for the histories we write of ancient Israel continues to divide scholars. This study responds to such concerns by pursuing an approach informed by a historicized view of knowledge, or a framework in which the claims we make are understood to be reflective of the eras in which they are realized. What this line of research encourages, I argue, are historical investigations into the underlying modes of knowing that would have contributed to the stories told in the biblical writings. Since knowledge about the past is itself historical, this study contends that it is necessary to situate such claims in time, examining the normative assumptions of an era that establish the parameters by which this knowledge is organized and granted credibility. The epistemic conditions that gave rise to the stories recounted in the Hebrew Bible are as much an object of historical interest, on this view, as the stories themselves for assessments of what evidence they might offer.

Starting from the concept of divine patience in Rom 9:22, this article argues that Paul employs the potter/clay metaphor not (as often interpreted) to defend God’s right to arbitrary choice but rather as an appeal to what Abraham Heschel called divine pathos—the idea that God’s choices are impacted by human actions. The potter/clay imagery in Rom 9:20–23 thus serves to highlight the dynamic and improvisational way the God of Israel interacts with Israel and, by extension, all of creation.

This article examines the development and transformation of the holy spirit within Jewish mysticism. It begins with a brief analysis of primary trends concerning the holy spirit in biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish texts that served as crucial material for the holy spirit’s ascendence in sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. Following, it examines the writings of leading Jewish mystics: Moses Cordovero, Elijah de Vidas, and Ḥayyim Vital, who resided in the remote Galilean town of Safed. These luminaries each developed the concept of the holy spirit along a spectrum of pneumatic, fusionary, mystical, and revelatory experiences. Ultimately, they transformed the holy spirit into the peak experience of Jewish mystical life— experienced as prophecy, sanctification, and embodiment. This article highlights an important, yet understudied, Jewish mystical phenomenon.

This study examines the late seventeenth-century reception of enthusiasm in England in the context of the contemporary epistemological debate. Challenging characterizations of responses to enthusiasm as partitioned along the rationalist-empiricist divide, I show how parallel critiques of enthusiasm by natural philosophers and theologians suggest shared epistemic commitments across methodological and disciplinary boundaries, reflecting evolving concerns in the broader epistemological debate, rather than fixed, domain- or ideology-specific positions. By challenging a crude rationalist-empiricist division, this study aligns itself with previous literature, while also departing from it, in that it locates in the critique of enthusiasm a previously under-examined facet of that debate. By showing that both natural philosophers and theologians rejected enthusiasm for its irrationality, this work also sharpens the current understanding of the epistemic significance of enthusiasm, in that it identifies the crux of the critique of enthusiasm in its lack of reason, and not of an empirical foundation.

The American Puritan layman Samuel Sewall (d. 1730) is perhaps best known as a diarist and as a repentant judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. But he was also the author of Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica (first edition 1697), a work which argued that the New Jerusalem would arise in Mexico City. Sewall’s unusual millennial doctrine may seem undeserving of study, for no other American Puritan thought that the New Jerusalem would first appear in Mexico City or anywhere else in New Spain. Yet when properly contextualized, the Mexican millennium is worth investigating for two reasons. First, it accentuates what the American Puritan millenarian mainstream, best exemplified by John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, believed about the coming kingdom. Second, the Mexican millennium, like the mainstream position, challenges the academic claim that American Puritan millenarians characteristically believed that they were destined to inaugurate the millennial kingdom in New England.