Presentations at the Annual Conference of the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS)

At the 2026 Annual Conference of the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS), held July 21–23 in Leuven, Belgium, Tobias Schmitz delivered three presentations.

The presentation “Does the Hebrew Bible Know ‘Self-Love’? The Problem of Lev 19:18 Revisited Once Again,” given at the “Emotions and the Biblical World” research unit, addressed the famous biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Schmitz argued that there is no clear evidence of self-love in the Hebrew Bible, making the linguistically equally plausible interpretation of Lev 19:18—“You shall love your neighbor—he is like you”—more likely. This also sparked new insights into the debate surrounding the semantics of “love” in the Hebrew Bible.

The second lecture, titled “Between Keeping the Covenant and Repaying the Haters: The Faithfulness of God in Deuteronomy 7,” conducted by the Research Unit “Biblical Theological Investigations into the Attributes of God,” addressed one of the chapter’s central themes as part of the habilitation project on Deut. 7: God’s faithfulness as described in verses 9–10. This statement was placed within the context of the chapter and examined with a focus on its rhetorical function. It became evident that God’s faithfulness in Deut. 7 is closely linked to the consistency and reliability of God’s dealings with His people, but that this is by no means merely an abstract theological statement. This was followed by an outlook on the literary and historical context of Deut. 7:9–10.

Finally, the lecture “Thinking from the Margins: A Comparative Examination of a Pattern of Textual Growth with Focus on the Book of Hosea” drew attention to comparable observations in the books of Hosea, Amos, Deuteronomy, and Proverbs: The central sections of these books consist of individual sayings loosely strung together, which are not attributed to any specific speaker. It is only the respective framing sections—which, from a literary-historical perspective, tend to be secondary to the core sections—that contextualize the collections of sayings, associate them with a specific speaker, and thus guide their interpretation. These observations could point to a scribal editing technique in 8th–7th-century BCE Judah. The lecture was part of the newly established Research Unit “Re-Evaluating the Book of Hosea,” which is led by Anna Maria Bortz (Mainz), Kirsten Maria Schäfers (Bonn), and Tobias Schmitz, and seeks new approaches to the debate surrounding the origins of the Book of Hosea—a text of great theological significance and notorious exegetical complexity.