Article Points of Controversy (Marriage and Divorce) Beyond the story of Zayd and Zaynab, in the earliest Eastern Christian texts about Islam one finds that the Islamic concept of divorce was generally frowned upon. Christians objected to polygamy and divorce. One of the particular aspects of Islamic regulations of divorce was the legal requirement for…

Two Christian theologians writing in Arabic in the early ninth century argued that God had created humanity to freely choose good or evil actions, a belief shared universally by previous Christian writers in Greek and Syriac no matter the denomination they came from. They were debating with Muslim intellectuals who held that God created all…

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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