Search

The secular interest of the Christians for Jewish literature, known under the name of Christian Hebraism, shaped in many ways not only the Christian attitude towards Jewish books but also the perception of the Jews themselves of their own literary and religious tradition. The best way to appreciate how deep the impact of the sustained efforts of the Christians - often dominated by polemical preoccupations, to appropriate the heritage of Judaism, especially in the form of books - has been,…

Hebrew language and script have often been linked to esoteric secrecy and, at least from an historical point of view, a peculiar relationship between the two is hardly deniable. The following brief theoretical clarification and rapid historical sketch will help ascertain the legitimacy of this claim and verify its implicit assumptions. There is, in actual fact, no special link between any natural language and cryptography. The encoding and decoding of information is an intrinsic feature of language as such, especially in its written form, and th…

The first half of the 16th century is considered the blossoming age of Christian Hebraism; the first grammars and lexica of the Hebrew language appeared in print during this period, and the knowledge of the language enjoyed unprecedented popularity among Christian scholars. This growth in interest has been linked by some historians to an unparalleled change in the attitude of Christian scholarly elites toward Judaism—from hostility and mistrust to a new spirit of ‘humanistic’ collaboration and e…

[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. Judaism I. Old Testament 1. Name The anthroponym Jacob (יַעֲקוֹב/ yaʿaqôb) is attested as a common name throughout the ancient Near East from Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium as ia( ḫ) qub-( ēl) to late 1st-millennium Palmyra as yʿqwb. As a sentence name it derives from the verbal root ʿqb (Old South Arab. and Eth.: “protect”; Ug.: “be near”), so that the theophoric form may be translated “God protects” or “God is near.” In the Hebrew Bible, only the hypocoristic form without a theophoric subject ¶ occurs. The Hebrew Bible derives the n…