Search

Your search for 'dc_creator:( "Niehr, Herbert" ) OR dc_contributor:( "Niehr, Herbert" )' returned 8 results. Modify search

Sort Results by Relevance | Newest titles first | Oldest titles first

Sanchuniaton

(126 words)

Author(s): Niehr, Herbert
[German Version] The Phoenician personal name Sanchuniaton (“Sakun has given”) appears in Greek in passages from the writers Porphyry and Philo of Byblos quoted by the church father Eusebius of Caesarea ( Praep. I 9.20f., 24–29; X 9.12–16). He is said to have been a Phoenician priest from the time before the Trojan War, cited by Philo Byblius as vouching the Phoenician tradition he records and for its great antiquity. Philo Byblius is claimed to have translated Sanchuniaton’s work on Phoenician history from Phoenician i…

Karatepe

(327 words)

Author(s): Niehr, Herbert
[German Version] (“Black Hill”), an ancient fortified hill in Cilicia. Together with the neighboring fortress Domuztepe, it dominates the overland route from northern Syria and Cilicia to Central Anatolia across the Anti-Taurus mountain range. Now a Turkish city, it lies roughly 100 km northeast of Adana. Following the discovery of the archaeological site in 1946, excavations uncovered the upper and lower city on the Karatepe from 1947 onward. A considerable stir was caused by the Phoenician and Hieroglyphic-Luwian inscriptions on the door-jamb orthostats of the southwest and northeast gates and by the Phoenician inscription on the statue of the weather god in the open courtyard behind the southwest gate. The texts are nearly identical; the Phoenician inscription on the statue of the weather god shows slight modifications. The original language of these inscriptions is Old Anatolian/Indo-European Luwian, while the Phoenician version is regarded as a translation, in parts as an interpretation. The inscriptions describe King Azitawada's good deeds for the inhabitants of the land of Adana, his political hegemony, the construction of the city named after him on the Karatepe, and the establishment of temples and cults. This is followed by imprecations against anyone who should obliterate the inscription as well as by pleas for the blessing of the king. The city's Luwian pantheon consists of weather gods, the moon god, the sun god, the stag god, and the circle of all the gods to whom a co…

Israel and Canaan

(592 words)

Author(s): Niehr, Herbert
[German Version] While Canaanites are already mentioned in the Mari correspondence (mid-18th cent. bce), the place name Canaan appears for the first time in the inscription of Idrimi of Alalach (1500 bce). According to the Amarna correspondence (mid-14th cent. bce), Canaan constituted an Egyptian province with the major localities Gaza and Beth-Shean, encompassing Palestine andLebanon as far as Beirut. The Old Testament still reflects Canaan as a designation for Palestine in the 1st millennium bce (Gen 10:19; 37; Num 34:2–12; cf. Deut 1:7). “Canaan” as a theological a…

Judges of Israel, The Biblical

(546 words)

Author(s): Niehr, Herbert
[German Version] In order to understand the title שֹׁפֵט/šopeṭ, fundamental to the office of judge, reference should be made to the institution of the šāpiṭu in Mari in the 18th century bce and to the office of the Suffetes among the Phoenicians and in Carthage from the 6th century bce onward. It is a non-royal office of leadership in various realms. The list-like enumeration in Judg 10:1–5; 12:7–15 suggests that a pre-deuteronomistic tradition, which cannot be dated more precisely, knew of an office of leadership over the tribes of Israel in …

Ordeal, Trial by

(1,373 words)

Author(s): Wißmann, Hans | Niehr, Herbert | Ogris, Werner
[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Old Testament – III. Legal History I. Religious Studies Trial by ordeal is a means of decision-making as to the guilt or innocence of a suspect in legal cases where there is no available evidence or testimony, and where no guilty plea has been entered. In place of an oath, but in ¶ line with the inherent logic of the oath, a conditional self-curse was sometimes employed; this would apply in cases where, for example, a slave was disqualified from a hearing under oath, and a divine declaration of the truth was sought, as a special case of divination. Although trial by ordeal (Ger. Gottesurteil, Lat. iudicium Dei) assumes a personal God who is willing to establish the truth and is capable, on the basis of his omniscience, of being the supreme and final authority, the various ways in which trial by ordeal is carried out suggest the notion of an almost automatic result from potentially dangerous elements: in trial by fire, the innocent person under ordeal is able to withstand touching fire or hot iron. In trial by water, the manacled suspect sinks if innocent (being accepted by the water, as it were); if guilty, he or she is rejected by the water and so swims (this was often applied as a test of witches as late as the 15th and 16th cents.). In trial by food, in the case of the poison ordeal, especially widespread in Africa, the poison harms or kills the guilty. In all these cases, however, the conclusiveness of the ordeal is tied to ability to survive such trials, and ultimately, such survivals are supernatural or miraculous, as in the testing of evidence by the so-called ordeal of the bier, in which the corpse of the murdered person starts to bleed in the presence of his unidentified murderer. The eschatological ordeals of Zoroastrianism (Zarathustra) are intended to correspond to the execution of justice and the investigation of the guilty, and their identification. Not only does the soul of the righteous deceased pass with ease over the “bridge of the decider” (Činvat Bridge) to its final habitation in the hereafter, while the soul of the enemy of the faith discovers the bridge to be like a sharp sword which it cannot cross, and plummets into an infernal abyss (Bundahišn, ch. 30); but also, at the end of time, all mankind has to step through fire and molten metal. The righteous will experience this glowing heat as “lukewarm milk,” but to the wicked it will be like molten metal which purges them or burns them to death (Bundahišn…

Trade

(2,007 words)

Author(s): Köhler, Ulrich | Niehr, Herbert | Cansier, Dieter
[German Version] I. Religious Studies There are two basic types of interaction between trade and religion: trade growing out of the practice of religion and religious phenomena as by-products of trade. Only in exceptional cases do both have equal weight. Trade can arise from the need for sacrificial offerings, as well as for special vestments and regalia for religious specialists and other officiants, and not least the need to feed participants in religious events. Special foods required by the religious calendar, for example during…

Unity, Divine

(2,061 words)

Author(s): van den Brom, Luco J. | Niehr, Herbert
[German Version] I. Philosophy of Religion Unity, uniqueness and…

Israel

(10,133 words)

Author(s): Gutmann, Emanuel | Knauf, Ernst Axel | Otto, Eckart | Niehr, Herbert | Kessler, Rainer | Et al.
[German Version] I. The State of Israel – II. History – III. Society I. The State of Israel The formal full name, State of Israel (Heb. Medinat Yisrael), calls attention to the spatial divergence between the political entity and the geographical and historical Erets Israel (Land of Israel, Palestine and its linguistic equivalents). Israel is located in southwest Asia, on the southern stretch of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In its northern half, inland from the shore, is the coastal area and further east are the hills, from north to south, of the Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, with their center in Jerusalem. Beyond these to the east is the…