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Associate Professor of Old Testament
“The Plan of All Things”: Theological Transformations of the Early Hellenistic Period
In the wake of Alexander the Great’s surprising conquests, Greek administrators reshaped the socio-economic fabric of the ancient Near East, introducing new ways of organizing time, value, risk, and knowledge. Jewish scribes responded with an explosion of unprecedented theological ideas, including apocalyptic writings, angelologies and demonologies, and schemes of universal history that confessed God’s sovereignty in a world increasingly shaped by abstraction, calculation, and speculation. These texts wrestle with issues of divine sovereignty, hidden order, and the limits of human understanding amidst a political system that claimed total control. These texts are thus timely biblical tools for theological reflection.
