“Divine Dependency” in Ancient Judaism and Emerging Christianity

Abstract

This paper provides insights into the author’s current project, which looks at “divine dependency” in texts of ancient Judaism (from the Second Temple period) and emerging Christianity. The first part identifies aims and research approaches before discussing fundamental aspects of the underlying categories and methodology. There are a number of reasons why the project requires a sophisticated set of tools for textual analysis and interpretation: in particular the fact that our sources are in numerous ancient languages, the multilingual nature of the period being studied, and the distinct, but terminologically and genealogically interconnected, orders of knowledge in antiquity and the present respectively. The second part of the paper will briefly outline three case studies with different but interconnected methodological foci: one semantic, one narrative and one discourse analysis.