The Revelation of the Name YHWH to Moses : Perspectives from Judaism, the Pagan Graeco-Roman World, and Early Christianity /
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The revelation of YHWH's name to Moses is a momentous event according to the Old Testament. The name 'Yahweh' is of central importance in Judaism, and 'Yahwism' became tantamount to Jewish monotheism. As such, this designation of God also attracted the attention of pagan writers in the Graeco-Roman period. And early Christians had to deal with this divine name as well. These three perspectives on YHWH constitute the framework for this volume. It appears that the Name of God and its revelation to Moses constitute a major theme which runs from the book of Exodus through the Old Testament, early Judaism, and early Christianity. It also attracted pagan philosophical interest, both positive and negative. The Name of God was not only perceived from an insider's perspective, but also provoked a reaction from outsiders. The combined perspectives show the fundamental importance of the divine Name for the formation of Jewish and Christian identities.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047411031
9789004153981
Divine images and human imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome /
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The polytheistic religious systems of ancient Greece and Rome reveal an imaginative attitude towards the construction of the divine. One of the most important instruments in this process was certainly the visualisation. Images of the gods transformed the divine world into a visually experienceable entity, comprehensible even without a theoretical or theological superstructure. For the illiterates, images were together with oral traditions and rituals the only possibility to approach the idea of the divine; for the intellectuals, images of the gods could be allegorically transcended symbols to reflect upon. Based on the art historical and textual evidence, this volume offers a fresh view on the historical, literary, and artistic significance of divine images as powerful visual media of religious and intellectual communication.
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Paperback version published 2015. :
1 online resource (xvi, 437 pages) : illustrations, map, plans. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-359) and indexes. :
9789047441656 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Roman gods : a conceptual approach /
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The book is concerned with the question of how the concept of \'god\' in urban Rome can be analyzed along the lines of six constituent concepts, id est space, time, personnel, function, iconography and ritual. While older publications tended to focus on the conceptual nature of Roman gods only in those (comparatively rare) instances in which different concepts patently overlapped (as in the case of the deified emperor or hero-worship), this book develops general criteria for an analysis of pagan, Jewish and Christian concepts of gods in ancient Rome (and by extension elsewhere). While the argument of the book is exclusively based on the evidence from the capital up to the age of Constantine, in the concluding section the results are compared to other religious belief systems, thus demonstrating the general applicability of this conceptual approach.
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1 online resource (219 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-209) and index. :
9789047428480 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Lucretius and the late Republic : an essay in Roman intellectual history /
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The crisis Rome experienced in the last decades of the Republic was intellectual as well as political, social and military. This crisis was marked by conflicts over values and a growing dichotomy between words and things, as a result of which the key words of the Roman tradition lost their anchor in the inherited, commonly-held percepetion of reality known as the mos maiorum . The crisis was therefore also one of the Latin language itself. The monograph explores this thesis in discussions of the background and character of Roman intellectual history, the nature of the mos maiorum , the relationship of the Late Republic to the Mediterranean world, the roles of Julius Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, and Lucretius in the crisis, and its Augustan and later consequences. The major portion of the discussion is devoted to Lucretius, because the De Rerum Natura is the clearest example of the extent and nature of the crisis, from which it took its origin and gained its form and purpose. A principal goal of the essay is to relate Lucretius to the structure of Roman literary and intellectual history. It finds the explanation for his work in the nature of that history and the characteristic Roman modes and categories of thought rather than in the general history fo Greek philosophy. It also offers a new explanation of the relationshiop of the authors of the Late Republic to each other. In so doing, it indicates the foundation for a new history of Roman literature and a new conception of the reality and importance of the intellectual history of Rome.
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1 online resource (viii, 87 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-83) and index. :
9789004328259 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Inventaire bibliographique des Isiaca (IBIS). Répertoire analytique des travaux relatifs à la diffusion des cultes isiaques, 1940-1969 /
: 1 online resource (xii, 276 pages) : illustrations. : Includes bibliographical references and index. : 9789004296213 : Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Cybele, Attis, and related cults : essays in memory of M.J. Vermaseren /
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This volume brings together articles on the cult of the mother-goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, from the emergence of the religion in Anatolia through its expansion into Greece and Italy to the latest times of the Roman Empire and its farthest extent west, the Iberian Peninsula. It combines the work of established scholars with that of young researchers in the field, and represents a truly international perspective. The reader will find treatment inter alia of Cybele's emasculated priests, the Galli; the dissemination of Cybele-cult through the harbour city, Miletus; the cult of Cybele in Ephesus; the rock-cut sanctuary of Cybele at Akrai in Sicily; the competition between the Cybele-cult and Christianity; and the role of Attis in Neo-Platonic philosophy.
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1 online resource (ix, 441 pages) : illustrations, maps. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004295889 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Der letzte Kampf des Heidentums in Rom /
: Includes Latin texts of Relatio III of Symmachus and Epistles 17, 18, and 57 of Ambrosius with German translation. : 1 online resource (xiii, 387 pages, [12] leaves of plates) : illustrations. : Includes bibliographical references (p. ix-xiii) and index. : 9789004295292 : Available to subscribing member institutions only.
La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell'Impero romano : atti del Colloquio internazionale su la soteriologia dei culti orientali nell'Impero romano, Roma, 24-28 settembre 1979 : p...
: 1 online resource (xxv, 1025 pages, [3] folded leaves of plates) : illustrations. : Includes bibliographical references and indexes. : 9789004295704 : Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Ancient angels : conceptualizing angeloi in the Roman Empire /
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Although angels are typically associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Ancient Angels demonstrates that angels (angeloi) were also a prominent feature of non-Abrahamic religions in the Roman era. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study uses literary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence to examine Roman conceptions of angels, how residents of the empire venerated angels, and how Christian authorities responded to this potentially heterodox aspect of Roman religion. The book brings together the evidence for popular beliefs about angels in Roman religion, demonstrating the widespread nature of speculation about, and veneration of, angels in the Roman Empire
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1 online resource (xviii, 181 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-177) and index. :
9789004210899 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Mantikê : studies in ancient divination /
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This book thoroughly revisits divination as a central phenomenon in the lives of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. It collects studies from many periods in Graeco-Roman history, from the Archaic period to the late Roman, and touches on many different areas of this rich topic, including treatments of dice oracles, sortition in both pagan and Christian contexts, the overlap between divination and other interpretive practices in antiquity, the fortunes of independent diviners, the activity of Delphi in ordering relations with the dead, the role of Egyptian cult centers in divinatory practices, and the surreptitious survival of recipes for divination by corpses. It also reflects a ranges of methodologies, drawn from anthropology, history of religions, intellectual history, literary studies, and archaeology, epigraphy, and paleography. It will be of particular interest to scholars and student of ancient Mediterranean religions.
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1 online resource (322 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789047407966 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The imperial cult in the Latin west : studies in the ruler cult of the western provinces of the Roman Empire /
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This volume focuses on the headquarters of provincial cults and the principal features of the worship offered there on behalf of the province. Evidence for provincial centres survives in various forms of varying degress of reliability but, while no standard pattern emerges, it seems clear that every province established a permanent base that served similar cultic, administrative, recreational and ideological purposes. Traces of provincial worship are more fleeting but a rough picture can be reconstructed of priestly regalia and of the calendar, rites and associated liturgy and ceremonial that marked the differing cults of individual provinces. Both studies conclude with an overview of the main conclusions and are profusely illustrated with over a hundred plates or diagrams.
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1 online resource (xxiii, 397 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 371-397). :
9789047412762 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Romanising oriental Gods : myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras /
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The traditional grand narrative correlating the decline of Graeco-Roman religion with the rise of Christianity has been under pressure for three decades. This book argues that the alternative accounts now emerging significantly underestimate the role of three major cults, of Cybele and Attis, Isis and Serapis, and Mithras. Although their differences are plain, these cults present sufficient common features to justify their being taken typologically as a group. All were selective adaptations of much older cults of the Fertile Crescent. It was their relative sophistication, their combination of the imaginative power of unfamiliar myth with distinctive ritual performance and ethical seriousness, that enabled them both to focus and to articulate a sense of the autonomy of religion from the socio-political order, a sense they shared with Early Christianity. The notion of 'mystery' was central to their ability to navigate the Weberian shift from ritualist to ethical salvation.
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1 online resource (xx, 486 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 423-444) and indexes. :
9789047441847 :
0927-7633 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Empire and religion : religious change in Greek cities under Roman rule /
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This volume explores the nature of religious change in the Greek-speaking cities of the Roman Empire. Emphasis is put on those developments that apparently were not the direct result of Roman actions: the intensification of idiosyncratically Greek features in the religious life of the cities (Heller, Muñiz, Camia); the active role of a new kind of Hellenism in the design of imperial religious policies (Gordillo, Galimberti, Rosillo-López); or the locally different responses to central religious initiatives, and the influence of those local responses in other imperial contexts (Cortés, Melfi, Lozano, Rizakis). All the chapters try to suggest that religion in the Greek cities of the empire was both conservative and innovative, and that the 'Roman factor' helps to explain this apparent paradox.
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1 online resource (xvii, 221 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004347113 :
1572-0500 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.