This volume incorporates all the articles and reviews published in volume 14 (2014) of the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.

The history of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study dates back to 1935, and it is the one area of scholarship that has been continuously represented at the Institute ever since. The volume opens with a historical sketch of the study of the Near and Middle East at the Institute. The second part of the volume consists of essays and short studies by IAS scholars, past and present, covering fields such as the ancient Near East and early Islamic history, the Bible and the Qurʾān, Islamic intellectual history within and beyond denominational history, Arabic and other Semitic languages and literatures, Islamic religious and legal practices, law and society, the Islamic West, the Ottoman world, Iranian studies, the modern Middle East, and Islam in the West.

Two homilies by Jacob of Sarug on Good Friday, one of which has only survived in Armenian translation.

An account of the family life of the Prophet Mohammad, concerning the noble ladies who lived in his house. The text gives an insight into the life of women in the beginning of the Islamic Era.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

A refereed journal published annually by the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies.

A study of the identity-formation process that the Christians of Syria-Palestine experienced during the Umayyad Caliphate. It approaches this subject by using John of Damascus and his writings on Islam as a case-study. This provides an exhaustive study of the available historical data in order to stimulate some further thought on John of Damascus’s theology and legacy from a contextual and intercultural methodology. Such an examination has not yet been pursued in the scholarship of Byzantine Christianity during that era. Proceeding from a centralizing ‘context’, the monograph revisits John of Damascus’s legacy (and the Umayyad Christians’ identity-formation of that era) from the perspective of his historical, Islamic-Arabic context, and not from any assumed, metanarrative, common to contemporary pro-Byzantine theology scholars.

This work is volume 2 of Boaz Cohen’s collected articles, with a new introduction by rabbinics scholar Natalie B. Dohrmann.

This book focuses on the production, sale, and consumption of portable arts in regions covered today by the modern polities of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestine Authority. The reprinted chapters in this volume have been revised and updated. They offer interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the region from the twelfth to the early twentieth centuries, combining evidence from primary written sources, archaeology, and objects in museums and private collections. Topics include the production and distribution of pottery, importation of glazed wares into the Middle East, shadow puppetry, economic activity associated with the Syrian hajj, the manufacturing practices of the crafts operating in Damascus during the last decades of Ottoman rule, and the decoration of artillery shell cases during and after World War I. Also included are an introduction containing a critical evaluation of the main sources of information, a cumulative bibliography, and a previously unpublished study of leatherworking in the late Ottoman period.

Widely regarded as a premier journal dedicated to the study of Syriac, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies was established in 1998 as a venue devoted exclusively to the discipline. An organ of Beth Mardutho, the Syriac Institute, the journal appears semi-annually and will be printed in annual editions. A peer-reviewed journal, Hugoye is a respected academic source for up-to-date information about the state of Syriac studies and for discovering what is going on in the field. Contributors include some of the most respected names in the world of Syriac today.