Sacred Institutions With Roman Counterparts

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

Review: zu Israel and Hellas II und III: These volumes bring to completion a magnificent and unparalleled resource for biblical scholars, the first volume having appeared in 1995. The fruit of four decades of engagement with primary sources from Israel, Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia, Israel and Hellas presents an egregiously learned storehouse of cross-cultural parallels in vivid prose, with an amazing assemblage of quotations.

If one is interested in how justice is personified, in rain and dew, in triumphal processions, in the end of the earth, in paradises and better lands, in transport by asses, or the shared vocabulary of Hebrew and Greek, or even Iranian cultural terms in the Aramaic sayings of Jesus, it is all here, and hundreds of other topics besides.

D.J.A. Clines in: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2002