After a defense of the reading that Jesus was “angry” in Mark 1:41, this investigation explores the nature of anger in light of ancient and contemporary conceptions of emotion, what causes Jesus’s anger in the context, and what results from Jesus’s anger in the story. Jesus’s anger is aroused because the (“leprous”) man’s public request for an amazing act of cleansing comes right on the heels of Jesus’s attempt to avoid notoriety about his deeds of power and preach the kingdom more broadly (1:38). Jesus mercifully cleanses the man but then cleverly issues a strict command that the man leave the region, go to Jerusalem, and spend several days there (1:43–44). However, the man and Jesus do not share enough context for him to grasp Jesus’s anger, and so he goes out and proclaims the deed, resulting in what initially troubled Jesus—he can now no longer enter towns to preach (1:45).

This article reassesses the influential article by Ben Zion Wacholder and Sholom Wacholder which repudiated the hypothesis of Annie Jaubert that an ancient 364-day year calendar exists in the Hebrew Bible. Jaubert argued that in the Hexateuch events took place on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday and that activities on the sabbath were avoided. This study shows that Wacholder and Wacholder’s objections are weak and that they did not falsify her theory. However, I accept the authors’ suggestion that other calendars may exist in the Bible. I re-analyze the chronology of the deluge narrative from Qumran, in 4QCommentary on Genesis A (4Q252), which was not published during Jaubert’s lifetime although, strikingly, she anticipated similar contents in her hypothesis. Accordingly, I propose that there may be more than one biblical calendar, and that Jaubert’s theory remains relevant to this scholarly discourse.

This article argues that the two different uses of nepeš in Psalm 42–43 (one metonymic. the other apostrophic) are integral to the psalm’s rhetoric and ritual function. Like other poetic prayers, Ps 42–43 expresses longing for God and, through the recitation of the psalm, produces the kind of encounter for which the speaker longs. At the same time, however, the psalm betrays the speaker’s doubts about the possibility of such an encounter. While she longs to meet God in God’s temple, she finds herself distanced from God and needs to remind herself to trust in her relationship with God. Psalm 42–43 gives voice to this tension between desire and doubt, and the distinct uses of nepeš play a vital role in this discourse. The ritual language associated with the apostrophic nepeš even begins to resolve the psalm’s tension by creating the experience of worship she longs for.

Scholars often find Luke’s depiction of the Temple conflicting and paradoxical, and various solutions have been proposed to account for this perceived tension. In this article, I attempt to elucidate Luke’s treatment of the Temple by considering it from a different angle: how is Luke, in light of the recent siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple, responding to those events, and what type of response does he hope to engender in his readers? Considering Luke’s treatment of the Temple as a “response” to its destruction clarifies the rhetorical goals of his narrative and accounts for the range of themes that have proved confounding for many interpreters.

How should New Testament scholarship theorize enslavement, mainly when the victim’s experience is both linguistically unrepresentable (the very essence of pain) and, more relevantly, when primary sources do not contain first-person testimonies? Specifically, how does historiography account for the plight experienced by victims of enslavement when the historical archive is empty of the victims’ voices and, in many cases, mystifies, allegorizes, or erases the victims’ agony? I study the figure of the captive in Galatians 4:1–9 from the perspective of recent historiographical insights in the study of the Middle Passage. This article argues that the binary captive/free-person is foundational to important theological concepts in Paul, such as filiation and inheritance.

Judas Cyriacus appeared in liturgy, hagiography, iconography, and vernacular literature from late antiquity until the early modern era, enjoying wide popularity across Christian traditions. While the Finding of the Holy Cross has been well-studied, the invented saint, Judas Cyriacus, and his martyrdom have not received comparable attention. His legend’s entanglement with liturgical and vernacular traditions around the veneration of the cross, especially in the West, influenced Western Christian attitudes towards Jews for over a thousand years, warranting further study. This article examines the Judas Cyriacus legend, revealing the complexities of Christian identities and truth claims in late antiquity, especially in inter-religious contexts with contemporary rabbinic texts. It also explores the significance of Judas Cyriacus’ pseudo-Hebrew prayers, which both adapted intercultural magical practices for Christian use and marked his Jewish identity as indelible even during his Christian martyrdom, highlighting tensions in the perceived efficacy of Christian baptism for Jews.