Abstract:
“Psychostasia” is the notion that a divine or supernatural figure
weighs and/or measures the souls of people when judging them. The
present effort represents the second of three articles on psychostasia.
The first article focused on the occurrences of psychostasia in
the OT. In the current article, attention is paid to the occurrences of
psychostasia in apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Jewish writings
from the Second Temple period, including the Qumran Scrolls. The
current purpose is firstly to determine whether or not the concept of
psychostasia was a recognised and recognisable feature of Second
Temple Palestinian Judaism. Allowing for a positive answer to the
latter, the second purpose of this article is to ascertain how the idea
of psychostasia was understood by Palestinian Jews of the Second
Temple period.
Description:
This article is a research output from a doctoral dissertation that was completed
under the supervision of professor Andries G. van Aarde at the University of Pretoria:
Llewellyn Howes, “The Sayings Gospel Q within the Contexts of the Third and
Renewed Quests for the Historical Jesus: Wisdom and Apocalypticism in the First
Century,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pretoria, 2012). (http://hdl.handle.net/2263/23913)
