Israel and the Cosmological Empires of the Ancient Orient. Symbols of Order in Eric Voegelin's "Order and History", Vol. 1

The essays collected in the present volume are the output of an interdisciplinary conference on Israel and Revelation, the first volume of Eric Voegelin’s Order and History, held in Munich, May 15th–16th, 2017 and sponsored by the Voegelin-Zentrum für Politik, Kultur und Religion at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute (LMU Munich) and the Department of Philosophy of the Catholic University of the Sacred Hearth (Milan). The goal of the initiative consisted, in one way, in offering new perspectives on the reading of Israel and Revelation, and in another way, to call on the carpet ambiguities and discrepancies of the book. In front of the markedly interdisciplinary character of Israel and Revelation, some contributions addressed the integration of themes treated by the different disciplines the work approaches: philosophy, theology, archaeology, Ancient Oriental studies, Jewish studies, political theory. Others instead focused on the originality of the hermeneutic approach, which adds a horizon of meaning that is far wider than those of the individual disciplines involved in the work. As a result, it thus emerged that Israel and Revelation preserves within it a range of stimuli that still await development, and whose potentiality concerns both the individual areas from which the investigation draws as well as its general theoretical framework.