Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Matthew's gospel has significantly developed both sapiential and apocalyptic elements within its narrative. Little attention has been paid, however, to the question of how these two features of Matthew's gospel might relate to one another. It is this gap in scholarly literature that the present study is intended to fill, by means of a comparative study with two other texts of mixed genre: 1 Enoch and 4QInstruction. An examination of these texts demonstrates that each is marked by an inaugurated eschatology, within which the revealing of wisdom to an elect group, defined in distinction to the Jewish parent group, serves as the pivotal moment of inauguration. In addition, within 4QInstruction the idea is developed that possession of this revealed wisdom allows the remnant to live in fidelity to the will of the Creator and to the patterns built-in to the original creation. Thus, possession of revealed wisdom facilitates a recovery of creation. These findings provide lines of enquiry that may be brought to Matthew. Three sections of the gospel are examined (chapters 5-7; 11-12; 24-25). It is argued that Jesus is presented as an eschatological figure who reveals wisdom to an elect group. This wisdom cannot be reduced to great moral insight or interpretation of Torah, but is presented as prophetic revelation, happening in eschatological time. It remains the case, however, that Matthew presents it as wisdom and presents Jesus as a sage. More tentatively, it is suggested that creation provides the patterns for the ethical requirements of Jesus' wisdom, thus indicating that the idea of restored creation is also at work in Matthew. The fall of the temple may also be connected in Matthew's narrative to such a restoration, but again, the evidence for this is not clear.

The thesis aims to examine and refine the concepts of flesh and spirit in Musar le-Mevin, discussing Jörg Frey's hypothesis of the possibility to derive Paul's concept of sarx from Palestinian sapiential literature, in light of recent advancements in the field. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to the term baśar and its relationship to sin, knowledge and election. The second part focuses on the term jeṣer, its possible translation and the role it might have played in the development of the concept of jeṣer ha-raʿ as an evil agent. The third part analyses the term ruaḥ and describes how the sapiential composition develops its specific view of the spirit. The last chapter attempts to locate the text in relation to other intertestamental views of flesh and sin. Finally, the thesis discusses the possibility of studying Musar le-Mevin as a background to Paul's anthropology. The thesis suggests that the text develops an idea of allotted shares of the spirit which determine a person's position and fate. It also attempts to describe how this view incorporates ruaḥ baśar as a designation for those who were not given the knowledge of good and evil. The term baśar might be understood as the outcome of a fusion of the traditional Biblical connotations of fleetingness and earthliness with a pessimistic...