More than 800,000 people entered Treblinka, and fewer than seventy came out. Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, fifty years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation and discovered in his briefcase after his suicide. It is reproduced here for the first time.In Treblinka Survivo...

Foreword by Patrick D. MillerIn this remarkable, acclaimed history of the development of monotheism, Mark S. Smith explains how Israel's religion evolved from a cult of Yahweh as a primary deity among many to a fully defined monotheistic faith with Yahweh as sole god. Repudiating the traditional view that Israel was fundamentally different in culture and religion from its Canaanite neighbors, this provocative book argues that Israelite religion developed, at least in part, from the ...

According to the Bible, ancient Israel's neighbors worshipped a wide variety of gods. In recent years, scholars have sought a better understanding of this early polytheistic milieu and its relation to Yahweh, the God of Israel. Drawing on ancient Ugaritic texts and looking closely at Ugaritic deities, Mark Smith examines the meaning of "divinity" in the ancient near East and considers how this concept applies to Yahweh.

This groundbreaking volume presents a new translation of the text and detailed interpretation of almost every word or phrase in the book of Judges, drawing from archaeology and iconography, textual versions, biblical parallels, and extrabiblical texts, many never noted before. Archaeology also serves to show how a story of the Iron II period employed visible ruins to narrate supposedly early events from the so-called "period of the Judges." The synchronic analysis for each unit sketches it...

Walter Cardinal Kasper has written, “It is time, it is the right time, to speak of God.” This book invites readers to use their God-given ability to work through important questions that many people have about God today: Why is God so angry in the Bible? Is the biblical God male or female (or what)? Who is Satan? Why do people suffer?By exploring the Bible’s answers to these and other biblical questions, people can come to understand better their living and loving God.

While many Christians recognize the abiding value of the Old Testament as God's Word they stay away from studying it because they see it as a difficult and forbidding subject. In this completely revised and expanded edition of God’s Word to Israel Joseph Jensen incorporates the latest scholarship using a combination of the historical, literary, and thematic approaches to present a unified treatment—one that with even a modest degree of effort will produce rich rewards.By s...

For centuries, the Garden of Eden story has been a cornerstone for the Christian doctrine of the Fall and original sin. In recent years, many scholars have disputed this understanding of Genesis 3 because it has no words for sin, transgression, disobedience, or punishment. Instead, it is about how the human condition came about. Yet the picture is not so simple. The Genesis of Good and Evil examines how the idea of the Fall developed in Jewish tradition on the eve of Christianity....

The issue of how to represent God is a concern both ancient and contemporary. In this wide-ranging and authoritative study, renowned biblical scholar Mark Smith investigates the symbols, meanings, and narratives in the Hebrew Bible, Ugaritic texts, and ancient iconography, which attempt to describe deities in relation to humans. Smith uses a novel approach to show how the Bible depicts God in human and animal forms—and sometimes both together. Mediating between the ancients’ theories and...

The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils examines the role that appeals to Nicaea (both the council and its creed) played in the major councils of the mid-fifth century. It argues that the conflict between rival construals of Nicaea, and the struggle convincingly to arbitrate between them, represented a key dynamic driving--and unsettling--the conciliar activity of these decades. Mark S. Smith identifies a set of inherited assumptions concerning the role that Nicaea was exp...

So resounding is its message that echoes of the Exodus are heard throughout the Old and New Testaments and the present. Exodus names and terms permeate our biblical and liturgical vocabularies: Pharaoh, Moses, Aaron, burning bush, I AM," plagues, Passover, manna, Ten Commandments, forty days and forty nights, Ark of the Covenant. The Exodus experience, indeed, is central to both Jewish and Christian traditions. Exodus is, as Mark Smith reminds us, not only an ancient text but also "today's...

Fifteen-year-old Hanna Berkenski journeys from her family's tiny apartment in the Warsaw Ghetto through an awful night spent in a cattle-car with her mother and sister to the welcoming orchestra at Auschwitz where she was to be a violinist for three years.As the train arrives at Auschwitz, flowers, sunshine and music feel like warm welcomes to her. She's been told she'll be spending the next few weeks in a "work camp" until her family can be reunited and relocated. Even the snowfla...

When Charlotte escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport, she carried more than memories of Nazi persecution—she bore the wound of her mother's ultimate betrayal. Through twenty-five years of Friday lunches in Montreal, this remarkable Holocaust survivor finally reveals to author Leon Berger the devastating secret that shaped her entire existence. From Kristallnacht to the London Blitz to building a new life in Canada, Charlotte's story shows how trauma echoes across decades and continents. A ...