Conscious of the dignity of this occasion and of the honor bestowed upon me to speak to this convocation, I prepared an address which, I hoped, responded to a major religious concern we Americans share. This weekend, when the Rosh Hashanah celebration ended, I learned of the massacre at Shatila and Sabra. The event and the response to it by Jewish leaders have filled me with such moral anguish that I find the text I have ready inadequate to this time of pain. But I have not found the wisdom, or the power, perhaps because I have not had the courage, to discard what I wrote and address myself to this spiritual calamity. I hope you will understand and that God will forgive my yielding to prudence rather than heeding my conscience. For I have decided to continue now with the address I wrote for this occasion.

The Temple Scroll (11 QTemple), the last of the known scrolls from Qumran to be published, is a heterogeneous document whose contents cover various topics of cult, architecture, ritual purity, and civil law. Nonetheless, most exegetes have treated the scroll as the work of a single author. The question whether there might be several independent literary sources behind the document will be the subject of this study.

Isa 52:13–53:12 has long served Jews and Christians as a source for the resolution of questions resulting from seemingly inexplicable human suffering and death. The fact that such suffering affected the primary links between God and humankind, the people Israel for the Jew and Jesus of Nazareth for the Christian, proved to be an especially perplexing problem that could have undermined fundamental religious beliefs. From the patristic age Isaiah 53 was interpreted so as to provide a rationale for Jesus' suffering on the cross. Medieval and modern Jewish exegetes saw in this prophecy an explanation for the tragedies which the Jews experienced in the exile. Interestingly, in adapting the so-called Suffering Servant passage for their own purposes, Jewish interpreters, of both the medieval and the modern periods, incorporated certain Christian concepts into their exegesis. This study will trace the transference of elements of a Christian exegetical tradition regarding Isaiah 53 into medieval and modern Jewish biblical interpretation.

In Frazer's Golden Bough the leading instance of the central figure whom he called “the dying god” was Adonis, famous from Greco-Roman literature and art but firmly localized in Semitic Phoenicia, Syria, and Cyprus. Since Frazer wrote, his other Near Eastern instances have been so transformed by increasing knowledge that it can be doubted whether they severally belong to the same type or indeed whether any general type exists. Adonis has hardly shared in these discoveries and debates, for research has emphasized instead the large developments which overtook his worship within the Greco-Roman world. Most of this research does not bear at all on the origins of Adonis, but scholars have sometimes been so bemused by the Greek elements as to forget or deny the Semitic. Everything has been called into question at different times. Such features of his myth as the boar and the myrrh tree and the incest are discounted as Greek embroidery; his peculiar festival, with mourning women and miniature gardens of lettuce, is traced to the preoccupations of Greek urban society; even the Semitic derivation derivation of his name is disputed. This Greek exclusivism cannot be sustained. All accounts of Adonis' life and lineage, and all analogies for his worship converge in the Levant — not in a single site or land, but in Phoenicia, coastal Syria and Cyprus together, lands which from the Late Bronze Age onward display a distinctive common culture, above all with respect to religion. This is where Adonis is at home, and where we may look for evidence to explain the figure of the dying god.

Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originality as a theologian. Apparently this New Englander's mind was no match for that of Jonathan Edwards: most of Taylor's theological ideas were not only orthodox, but commonplace. Yet the poet's religious anthropology would seem to be one notable exception. In both prose and verse, Taylor is continually breaking into chants of heartfelt wonder over the exalted state bestowed upon human nature by Christ's redemption: “The Highest Design of Divine Wisdom, and the richest, and the most Glorious Design of Divine Grace … is pitched upon Mankinde, and Humane Nature. For higher exaltation Created Nature seems utterly incapable of than to be made partaker of all the Fulness of the Godheads, bodily.”

It was demonstrated elsewhere that after a visit to Rome in 1886–87 a small group of American Catholic bishops, later known as Americanists, came to hold a number of religious convictions which accounted for the reformatory activity of these men between that visit and the papal condemnation of Americanism in 1899. Briefly, a faith or myth was born alongside the standard Catholic orthodoxy of the period, one which affirmed God as rearranging the world, determining the decline of Europe and the emergence of the United States of America as a “New World,” destined, as in the puritan dream, to shed its influence around the world. The unique features of this American Catholic reinterpretation of the puritan myth were that it was housed within an international religious institution, and its object was not exactly the spread of political liberty or a purified Christianity, but a modernized or Americanized Catholicism.