I’m pleased to report that my article, “Rise, Kill, and Eat: Animals as Nations in Early Jewish Visionary Literature and Acts 10” has been accepted for publication in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament.
This is a piece I wrote back in 2011 before finally getting a chance to dust it off and send it out last year, so it’s a bit of a relief to get one more item from my backlog of articles out. The abstract is as follows:
Peter’s vision in Acts 10 ostensibly concerns dietary laws but is interpreted within the narrative as a revelation of God’s mercy towards the gentiles, culminating in the baptism of Cornelius’ household. How this vision pertains to the immediately following events has remained a problem in scholarship on Acts. This article argues that the vision depends on earlier apocalyptic Jewish depictions of various nations as animals (and empires as hybrid beasts) and allegorical explanations of the food laws familiar in the Second Temple period in which the forbidden animals are understood as representing those peoples with whom Israel must not mix. What seems on the surface to refer to food is therefore naturally understood within this genre as a reference to nations and peoples. Acts 10 thus makes use of standard Jewish apocalyptic tropes familiar to its audience but less familiar to modern readers.
Many thanks to the anonymous referee(s) from JSNT, whose critiques significantly improved the final version of this piece. Looking forward to seeing it out in the wild later in 2019.