This volume incorporates all the articles and reviews published in Volume 8 (2008) of the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.

A volume of collected essays that explores what we can learn about the producers and readers of biblical books by looking into matters of language, rhetoric, style, and ideology. What do they teach us about these literati’s world of knowledge and imagination, about the issues they had in mind and the ways they came to deal with them through authoritative literature? The book includes essays on such issues as whether linguistic theories can solve literary-critical problems, on what is “late biblical Hebrew,” on parallelism and noun groups in biblical poetry, and the communicative meaning of some linguistic choices.

This book is a reproduction of Philoxenos Dolabani’s handwritten catalogue of the Syriac, Karshuni, and Arabic manuscripts located in St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem, one of the most important Christian manuscript collections in the Middle East.

Taking a wider historical scope, this booklet examines the auditory environment and the temple of Herod as well as first century synagogues. Music in borrowed spaces and house churches of early Christianity conclude the study.

The 1989 Kenyan eucharistic text has had much publicity, including its use at the opening service of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, but has had little in the way of introduction or commentary. These two authors, with much Kenyan experience and with encouragement from the key persons in Kenya, here provide the text with a valuable contextual exposition.

Studies in Preparation for the 1995 Dublin Consultation.

In the Anglican Communion, the medieval practice, which certainly had some earlier roots, continued—that ordination came to any one individual in this 'sequence': deacon, presbyter, bishop. The Anglican ordinal was so committed to this pattern at the Reformation that Cranmer's text prayed that deacons 'may so well use themselves in this inferior office, that they may be found worthy to be called unto higher ministries in thy Church.' Latterly, however, Anglicans have not only sought to develop the calling of a deacon in his or her own right, but have in some places and cases promoted the idea that the true calling of a deacon and of a presbyter would be best clarified by a separate 'direct' ordination. John Gibaut, a liturgical theologian of the Anglican Church of Canada, presents the case for 'direct' ordination—rooting it in the patristic era, and spelling out its implications in the present day.

An homage to Anton Baumstack and his comparative liturgy. This brief study includes an intellectual biography and his method and comparative practice in regards to liturgy.

The division between the 'Usagers' and the 'Non-Usagers' is fairly well known, but is here clarified and charted in detail but within a view of the overall non-juring situation.

This concise study considers the Anaphoras of the Apostles and the Liturgy of John Chrysostom. Also included is the relationship between these pieces and the Anaphora of the Apostolic Constitutions book viii.

This is a Study which will open windows galore for Westerners, for not only is the history as recorded likely to cover ground untrodden by most English-speaking liturgists, but equally the surrounding field of study and its other scholarly occupants (who are laid heavily under contribution) will also be largely unknown.

Issues associated with ecumenism and the reception of other Christians in Anglicanism and other associated concerns form the topic of this brief examination.

The Teaching of Addai is a Syriac document convincingly dated by some scholars in the fourth or fifth century AD. I agree with this dating, but I think that there may be some points containing possible historical traces that go back even to the first century AD, such as the letters exchanged by king Abgar and Tiberius. Some elements in them point to the real historical context of the reign of Abgar ‘the Black’ in the first century. The author of the Doctrina might have known the tradition of some historical letters written by Abgar and Tiberius.

Paul Haupt's introduction, translation, and commentary on the controversial book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.

An emerging consensus maintains that the exile was not as extensive as the Old Testament claims. However, that it held singular importance for the book of Jeremiah is beyond question. Modine argues that Jeremiah represents a range of options for understanding and responding to the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. This volume reads the diverse contents of Jeremiah as a kind of dialogue between competing perceptions of the exile. The author argues that coherence is to be found precisely in the incoherent, as it reflects the communal trauma of exile.

The Malabar Independent Syrian Church is the smallest of the jurisdictions into which the St Thomas Christian community is divided today. It has, however, played a crucial role in the development of the Syrian Churches, whose stories can not be told without it. The present work shows how the bishops of this tiny, one-Diocese Church, now largely forgotten, once stood at the centre of the events that shaped the present ecclesiastical situation.