I don't think I have a build configuration issue.
Chris, please compare/diff http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core/5.2.0.Final/hibernate-core-5.2.0.Final.pom and http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core/5.2.1.Final/hibernate-core-5.2.1.Final.pom
You can clearly see that in the 5.2.1 pom file everyhing on dom4j is excluded, this wasn't the case for the 5.2.0 file.
<dependency> <groupId>dom4j</groupId> <artifactId>dom4j</artifactId> <version>1.6.1</version> <scope>compile</scope> + <exclusions> + <exclusion> + <artifactId>*</artifactId> + <groupId>*</groupId> + </exclusion> + </exclusions> </dependency>
So clearly hibernated changed the dependencies here.