This chapter shows how the Laudians conceived the history of the church as a succession of sacrifices and altars stretching from Adam or Abel through the actual sacrifices of the Jews, under first natural, and then Mosaic law, and then through the spiritual sacrifices offered up by and in Christian churches. Where there were sacrifices there also altars and priests, and so the history of the church was conceived as a succession of consecrated persons and spaces, centred on altars, and then on episcopal chairs, stretching from the apostles to the present. The chapter shows the Laudians attempting to trace the presence in the primitive church, and then in the church of England, of the basic triad of priest, sacrifice and altar. They encountered some issues in so doing in the post-reformation church of England and the chapter shows some of their critics, most notably Bishop Williams, pointing that out and the Laudians responding with difficulty to those criticisms.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

This chapter shows that Davidic traditions were closely connected to the temple. It looks at the way the Jesus tradition broadly, and Matthew specifically, ties Jesus’s activity in the sanctuary to Davidic imagery, arguing that this likely reflects memories that have their origin in Jesus himself. Among other things, special attention is given to the account of Jesuss triumphal entry and to Matthews accounts of Jesuss activity in the temple.

The book’s final chapter draws on recent scholarship on cultic imagery in the New Testament to demonstrate that Jesus likely used temple and priestly imagery in his teaching, yet without the intention of repudiating the validity of the temple. Among other narratives, the Last Supper traditioins are given special attention.

This chapter investigates how Faulkner uses the figure of eyes as inkwells in his depiction of Temple Drake in his sensationalist 1931 novel Sanctuary where she is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. The ink represents the various narratives men imagine themselves drawing from her – she is either too sexual or not sexual enough, the victim of a crime or its instigator. Faulkner wrote Requiem for a Nun (1951) as a sequel to Sanctuary that in many ways recapitulates this sadism, but he suggests the possibility that Temple herself could achieve a new kind of agency as a paperback writer in the manner of Faulkner penning these salacious novels and eventually profiting from them. The topic of masculinity in Faulkner’s work is also fraught terrain. In Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Margaret Powers surprises the young Robert Saunders swimming naked; his body, the narrator says, looked like the color of old paper. This marks on Robert’s body a female gaze. Throughout his career, Faulkner wrestled with the idea that writing connotes effeminacy over and against masculine action, but spiritually and physically strong women become connected with writing in ways that defy a strict gender binary.

Michael C. Legaspi examines ‘Wisdom’s Wider Resonance’. It has been common to find the influence of wisdom literature across the canon, but Legaspi outlines the problems with this, and takes an alternative approach. He examines the ḥ-k-m (‘wisdom’) root in parts of the Bible not usually associated with wisdom literature to find overlooked resonances of the concept. Specifically, he examines the idea that wisdom concerns the relationship between human and divine realms (common in Greek and Jewish thought). This understanding is evident in biblical descriptions of sacred spaces, for the lead craftsmen who construct the tabernacle and temple (Bazalel and Hiram respectively) are divinely endowed with wisdom. Equally, wisdom (albeit a corrupted wisdom) proliferates in Ezekiel 28, associated with proximity to and specialist knowledge of the divine, and construction of sacred spaces. A similar understanding may also underlie Jeremiah’s descriptions of Jerusalem’s degraded wisdom. This analysis encourages us to understand ‘wisdom’ more capaciously than traditional delimitations of ‘wisdom literature’ allow.

With his ‘Solomonic Connection’, David Firth observes the man Solomon as he appears in Kings and Chronicles. Solomon is ‘paradigmatic’ for understanding wisdom in both of these books and yet he is not treated identically therein. Kings and Chronicles offer different portraits of the exceedingly wise king, whether that be his foundational role for wisdom or his problematic relationship with it. Matters of the temple, Solomon’s behaviour, torah, and the very conception of wisdom itself all have a place in biblical presentations of Solomon. Firth looks closely at 1 Kings 1–11 and 2 Chronicles 1–9 with a literary and theological reading that does not let one account determine the other or allow the Solomonic portraits in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to have all of the attention.

In 2:4-10, the author weaves together the source domains of house/household, family, temple, priesthood, stone, and nation to describe believers’ identity and relationship to Christ, each other, and those who do not believe. This chapter first examines the οἶκος language in 1 Peter 2:4-6 (§7.2-3). At 2:5, the author simultaneously actives two meaning of οἶκος to transition smoothly from the semantic domain of the house to that of the temple, the house of God. Next, this chapter briefly surveys “community-as-temple” language at Qumran and the New Testament in order to trace the some of the streams of tradition which may lie behind 1 Peter (§7.4-5). Finally, this chapter looks at 1 Peter 2:4-10 in detail to examine how the construction of Christian ethnic identity concludes the author’s theme of divine regeneration (§7.6-9).

This chapter probes how old, conflicted, and fragmented social units in an island settlement came to be integrated after the era of military control ended, and how they formed a new community through the process of temple building.

Chapter 5 describes the rhetorical and theological relationship between the Elijah/Elisha narratives and the greater book of Kings, both the Solomon stories on one hand (1 Kings 1–11) and the episodes dealing with Israel’s and Judah’s political demise on the other (2 Kings 9–25). It argues that Elijah and Elisha become the “hereditary carriers” of two theological concepts introduced through Solomon: the hope that children might surpass their ancestors in life-giving wisdom and that the temple might provide a durable paradigm through which to imagine Yhwh’s ongoing care for Israel’s land and people together. In this sense, Elijah and Elisha “prophetize” the Davidic promise of 2 Samuel 7, showing that Yhwh responds to sin with a power capable of reversing death. The chapter likewise maintains that a series of Davidic kings – Joash, Hezekiah, and Josiah – “re-royalize” the two prophets’ characteristic acts of resurrection and other forms of life preservation as depicted in 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 8. Because Elijah functions as their typological ancestor, these prophet-kings become the seeds through which Israel’s redemption after catastrophe might be imagined.

Chapter three examines Mesopotamian conceptions of human nature. I argue that Mesopotamians viewed the human as a composite nondivine-divine space. Having been created from slain deities, the physical body participated in the divine nature. For some Mesopotamians, participation in the divine state was not wholly positive. The aspect of the deities that influenced them to rebel in heaven in fact formed part of the body’s constitution. Thus humanity’s propensity to disrupt the ordered cosmos stemmed from its share in the divine nature. The human was also conceived as a microcosm of the temple. As a microcosm of the cosmos, the temple was originally created to be the meeting point between divine and nondivine. Likewise, the deities created the human self as a physical space in which they could install themselves. The human was therefore a physical embodiment of the divine on a general level, just like the temple, and like the cosmos before that. Divine embodiment in a human context was clearest in ideas surrounding the royal self. The king participated in the divine nature to the point that, like true deities, he could install himself within multiple bodies at the same time.

Chapter 3 assesses the built archaeological remains of the Third Intermediate Period and establishes the locations of preserved Third Intermediate Period domestic settlement remains to assess the different regional built environments of settlements and the way in which settlements developed spatially over time. The settlements are further analysed to define the way in which Late Period urban policies affected the development and preservation of Third Intermediate Period urban topography within the archaeological record. The maintenance of or changes in urban topography of the Third Intermediate Period are discussed in the light of the top-down policies of a new political regime in a re-unified government and state in Late Period Egypt. The chapter assesses whether the settlements in the Third Intermediate Period developed as independent entities within specific regions or if there was a general pattern of settlement policy across different political boundaries and geographical regions. It also assesses characteristics of new ideologies, both political and religious, and the economic limitations of different regions through the construction of monumental architecture (walls, temples, and palaces), the nucleation of domestic architecture around monumental constructions, the development of architectural design in both administrative, religious, and domestic architecture, and the self-sufficient nature of local populations.

The city of Hibis, located at the junction of the caravan roads passing through the northern part of the oasis, is often depicted as the capital city of the Great Oasis. In fact, little is known about the administrative organization of the district, and especially about the history of Hibis. Because areas now under cultivation have not been excavated, the chronology and the topography of the city, apart from the temple, are far from certain: Was there even a city before and independent of the temple? When did it become the capital city of the Great Oasis and what was the status of the oasis of Kharga within the Great Oasis ? The formation of the city of Hibis is studied in relation to the growing importance of the northern part of Kharga Oasis, from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and through the lens of the shifting relationships with the central powers and the political and religious institutions in the Nile Valley. The role played by other oasis metropoleis such as Mothis and Trimithis during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods is also questioned in order to provide a better understanding of the overall administrative structure of the Great Oasis.