In order to reconstruct the contents of the most famous work of Mani, Living Gospel (written originally in Syriac), we have to use the Arabic and Classical New Persian texts containing accounts and even indirect quotations of this book. One of the most remarkable points in these accounts is that they clearly show that an important part of the Living Gospel contains the Manicha...

From as far back as our sources allow, hymns were part of Near Eastern temple ritual, with their performers an essential component of the temple functionaries. 1 These sources include Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian texts from as early as the third millennium BCE. From the second millennium BCE, we gain further examples of hymns from the Hittite realm, even if most (if not all) of the poems ar...

My colleague Kenneth A. Strand and I have published previously in A USS two studies on the literary form of Rev 18.' In those two studies, that chapter was found to be a discrete literary unit consisting of seven hymns of judgment upon the impure woman of the prophecy, called "Babylon the Great." These seven hymns are distributed in chiastic order according to both their form (Shea) and their t...

Mikelis Šapalas (1827-1884), a teacher in Lankupiai and Prussian-Lithuanian literary figure, edited small collection of hymns called Naujos nobaʒnos Giesmes (New Devotional Hymns), which was published 1860 Memel (Klaipėda) at the Vaikinis printing house. The aim this article is to expand on repertoire Šapalas’ hymn book, consider reasons for choice hymns, extent influenced by activities mission...