The present festive volume in honor of my friend and colleague Prof. Jesús Peláez del Rosal includes twenty-two articles by colleagues, disciples, and friends intentionally covering his fields of expertise in the heterogeneous group of disciplines clustered under the collective title of Biblical Studies. The wide spectrum of subjects of these articles properly reflects Peláezs interests and activities during his academic career, both as Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Córdoba and as editor-in-chief of the Publishing House El Almendro. As is also the case for the journal Filología Neotestamentaria, la niña de sus ojos, founded by Peláez and published conjointly by the University of Córdoba and El Almendro, articles were accepted in five different languages, namely Spanish, English, German, French, and Italian.
The preparation of this volume has been arduous indeed. After announcing our intention to offer Professor Peláez a Festschrift on the occasion of his retirement, we received so many positive reactions that they surpassed the material limits of a volume. Moreover, due to Jesus' various fields of expertise, it was also a challenge to sort the materials in such a way that the homage would not result in too heterogeneous a volume. This is the reason why we decided to present the numerous articles (more than thirty!) in two separate books. The first of them, which, dear reader, you have now in your hands, includes studies and essays on Old and New Testament philology in its widest sense. The second volume, which will appear simultaneously, may be described as a liber amicorum and includes articles by his closest friends, collaborators, and colleagues from the University of Córdoba on a variety of subjects, from the semantics of New Testament Greek to a Hispano-Hebraic piyyutim.
As far as the present volume is concerned, it is organized in three sections. The first of them includes studies on the Old Testament, the second on the New Testament, and the third includes papers with a wider philological character. The Old Testament part includes four studies and opens with an article by Steven E. Runge, Where Three or More are Gathered there is Discontinuity: The Correlation between Formal Linguistic