Article Introduction One might be tempted to follow Gottheil’s lead and collect additional con temporary and late descriptions of the Fāṭimid state and its unique characteris tics. I would, however, suggest shifting the perspective from external observations about the Fāṭimids to the view they had of themselves, i.  e. the image propagated and disseminated by them…

Article Molech isn’t a deity but instead a type of sacrifice (mlk). The epigraphy of the tophet names a god the מלך is given to. The name of the specific act of offering or sacrifice in the tophet was therefore mlk. O. Eissfeldt, followed by J.-G. Février, had connected the noun with the verbal root…

Article One of these popular beliefs based on scholarly results is that since the discovery of Hebrew inscriptions from the ninth and eighth century b.c.e. at Kuntillet ʿAjrud and Khirbet el-Qôm which mention “Yhwh and his Asherah”, we now ‘know’ that Yhwh ‘originally’ had a wife. KHIRBET EL-QôM At Khirbet el-Qôm, an inscription was found…

Article Monolatry and Henotheism: These terms can be defined in a number of ways (Petersen, “Israel”). One tends to agree with Petersen that “this use of a vocabulary does not appear to have resulted in significant conceptual clarity” (98). They are sometimes used to describe religious systems in which people are permitted only to worship…

This article presents the Arabic text and an English translation ofa letterof condolence sent from Saladin to Baldwin IV concerning the death of his father Amaury on 11 July 1174. For the date see WT 20.31, p. 957. The letter is significant because it seems to preserve an attempt by Saladin to establish or maintain…

Article The First Crusade began in 1096 with massacres of Jews along the Rhine, and its penultimate act in 1099 was the killing of nearly all of Jerusalem’s inhabitants—men, women, and children. The events sparked serious discussion among contemporary witnesses and continue to do so among scholars today. Jeremy Cohen has suggested that there is…

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Muslim minorities under Christian rule had been genocided, forcefully converted and exiled. After ‘re-claiming’ Spain, Catholics had expelled a total of 100,00-2,000,000 Jews and 500,000-3,000,000 Muslims according to contemporary writers Navarrete (1626)³ and Guadalajara (1630). Chabot, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, vol 2, 443 A Brief History of Culture by John Shertzer Hittell. Page 137…