Drawing on a wide array of historical and contemporary corpora, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of the intricately related functional changes that -ish underwent in the course of English language history. By investigating the distribution of -ish formations, the analysis sheds light on the productivity of the suffix, which does not only become evident in the numerous hapax legomena, but also in the trajectory of change itself in which -ish occurs with ever new base categories and new functions. Moreover, the article revisits theoretical claims made in the literature about the diachronic development and synchronic properties of -ish and reassesses them in the light of the corpus-based observations.

What happened to biblical law when transferred into late antique Christianity? How can answering this question provide a paradigm that helps us understand the rise and development of late antique Christian legal traditions? In the first centuries of the Common Era, the Christian legal tradition began to evolve in Roman, Greek, rabbinic, and biblical contexts. Focusing on the biblical institution of levirate marriage, this article offers a paradigm that elucidates how Christians might have adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected their legal heritage; it may illuminate the overall development of Christian legal discourse. Following a short survey of the rabbinic adaptation of biblical levirate marriage and the Roman and Christian rulings regarding this practice, I analyze the Christian exegetical and theological discourse on levirate marriage, focusing on the acceptance or rejection of levirate marriage as a whole and adaptations to the biblical institution. This analysis demonstrates the disparity between the rabbinic discourse, the Christian and Roman rulings, and the theological and exegetical discourse. It shows how Christians remodeled their biblical heritage according to Greek and Roman legal concepts, namely the Roman adoption and the Greek epiklerate, and treated it as part of inheritance law and child-parent relationships, whereas the rabbis used different adaptations and treated it as part of matrimonial law and sexual relationships. This discussion therefore recontextualizes the legal discourse, positioning the Christian approach to levirate marriage as a complex case of legal transplant and adaptation of a legal heritage.

This article surveys the evolution of the Catholic Church's official response to same-sex relations over the last two centuries. While the church has not altered its condemnation of same-sex relations, the justifications it offers for this negative judgment have shifted substantially, and they have moved, especially recently, in a direction that makes possible the acceptance of same-sex relations at some future—and perhaps not too-distant—date. This article explores the manualist tradition of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries; twentieth-century developments in canon law; and the period of retrenchment and reaction under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Its final section looks at developments under Pope Francis. It closes by considering the way the church's teaching shifted over the course of its history—penance and the forgiveness of sins; anti-Semitism; and the sin against natural-law of taking interest on a loan (usury). It proposes that we might witness the church undergo a similar shift on same-sex relations.

Decorated helmets fitted with a metal mask in the form of a human face have been found throughout the lands of the Roman empire, and sometimes beyond it. Despite the significant number of examples (whole or in part) surviving from the 1st to the 3rd c. A.D., these helmets remain an enigma to students of the Roman army. They have usually (though not exclusively) been found either at or close to forts garrisoned by cavalry or in hoards or graves containing other military equipment, often cavalry-specific such as horse-chamfrons. Most have therefore been identified as cavalry helmets, and it is widely accepted that many are of the type referred to by the 2nd-c. general Arrian in his treatise Tactica whilst describing cavalry exercises (hippika gymnasia):

Rough Cilicia is well-known for the number of wine-presses found,1 which shows that viticulture was important locally as well as wine being a likely candidate for export.2 Excavation and survey here has generally lagged behind other regions,3 and work at Antiochia ad Cragum (Güney Köyü, Gazipaşa) in particular is relatively recent, starting with the Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project (RCSP) and continuing with its offshoot, the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project (ACARP).4 The city, founded by Antiochus IV of Commagene in the Julio-Claudian period, lies on an important road along the S coast with direct links to settlements of the central Anatolian plateau;5 it also lies on the maritime trade route extending from Syria and Palestine to Constantinople and the area of the Black Sea, with another going to central and W Mediterranean lands.6 Occupied continuously from the Imperial to the Byzantine period,7 it achieved a considerable size.

Synagogue chronology has been the subject of scholarly debate for decades, especially in the Galilee, where synagogues have been dated both to the Roman and Byzantine (= late-antique) periods.1 For the Golan,2 the consensus has been that there is no evidence for them in the Roman period, and especially not in the 2nd-3rd c. The c.30 synagogues there, nearly all in the W central Golan, have always been precluded from the debate since, with the exception of an Early Roman one at Gamla,3 the accepted dates for their construction and use are between the 4th and the 7th c. (fig. 1).4