This volume contains articles by Martha Himmelfarb on topics in Second Temple Judaism and the development and reception of Second Temple traditions in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The section on Priests, Temples, and Torah addresses the themes of its title in texts from the Bible to the Mishnah. Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls contains articles analyzing the intensification of the biblical purity laws, particularly the laws for genital discharge, in the major legal documents from the Scrolls. In Judaism and Hellenism the author explores the relationship between these two ancient cultures by examining the ancient and modern historiography of the Maccabean Revolt and the role of the Torah in ancient Jewish adaptations of Greek culture. The last two sections of the volume follow texts and traditions of the Second Temple period into late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The articles in Heavenly Ascent consider the relationship between the ascent apocalypses of the Second Temple period and later works involving heavenly ascent, particularly the hekhalot texts. In the final section, The Pseudepigrapha and Medieval Jewish Literature, Himmelfarb investigates evidence for knowledge of works of the Second Temple period by medieval Jews with consideration of the channels by which the works might have reached these later readers.

In this book, Alex J. Ramos examines production, consumption, and transaction in the regional economy of Galilee during the Early Roman period. Drawing on literary sources—including biblical texts, Josephus, and the Mishnah—and archaeological evidence, he assesses the ways that the Roman and Herodian states, settlement patterns, and Jewish religious obligations would have shaped household economic behavior. Approaching the topic through new institutional economics, Ramos considers the role of state institutions of administration and taxation and religious institutions derived from the Torah and the Temple in structuring for Galilean Jews the incentives, priorities, and costs of economic decision making. In contrast to classical economic assumptions of what is economically “rational” behavior, he considers the ways that the laws of the Torah defined the bounds of rational and socially permissible approaches to economic production, consumption, and transaction. Ultimately, Ramos argues that state institutions played a rather indirect and weak role in shaping the economy through much of the Early Roman Galilee; religious institutions, by comparison, played a more formative role in defining economic behavior.

This book explores the way that the Torah was appreciated and interpreted as a text and symbol in Christian and Jewish sources from the Second Temple period through the Middle Ages. It tracks the development and complex interactions of three images of Torah— “God-like,” “Angelic,” and “Messianic”— which are found in late-antique Jewish and Christian materials as well as in medieval kabbalistic and Jewish philosophic sources. It provides a unique template for tracing the development of theological ideas related to the images of Torah and offers a sophisticated and innovative analysis of the relationship between mystical experience, theology, and phenomenology.

In Ontological Aspects of Early Jewish Anthropology, Tyson L. Putthoff explores early Jewish beliefs about how the human self reacts ontologically in God’s presence. Combining contemporary theory with sound exegesis, Putthoff demonstrates that early Jews widely considered the self to be intrinsically malleable, such that it mimics the ontological state of the space it inhabits. In divine space, they believed, the self therefore shares in the ontological state of God himself. The book is critical for students and scholars alike. In putting forth a new framework for conceptualising early Jewish anthropology, it challenges scholars to rethink not only what early Jews believed about the self but how we approach the subject in the first place.

The present volume explores the ever-evolving understandings and diverse manifestations of the Hebrew notion of torah in early Jewish and Christian literature and the different roles torah played within those communities, whether in Judea or in the Hellenistic and early Roman diaspora. This collection of essays is purposefully wide-ranging, with contributors exploring and rethinking some of the most basic scholarly assumptions and preconceptions about the nature of torah in light of new critical approaches and methodologies with the goal of seeing how different vantage points and different conclusions can better address the complexity of the topic and better reflect the ambiguity and fluidity inherent in the concept of torah itself. Contributors include Gabriele Boccaccini, Francis Borchardt, Calum Carmichael, Federico Dal Bo, Lutz Doering, Oliver Dyma, Paula Fredriksen, Robert G. Hall, Magnar Kartveit, Anne Kreps, David Lambert, Michael Legaspi, Jason A. Myers, Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Patrick Pouchelle, Jeremy Punt, Michael L. Satlow, Joachim Schaper, William Schniedewind, Elisa Uusimäki, Jacqueline Vayntrub, Jonathan Vroom, James W. Watts, Benjamin G. Wright III, and Jason M. Zurawski.

This volume addresses two pivotal questions surrounding the composition of 1Maccabees. It sets out to discern the place and function of the torah within the community described by the book. However, before addressing the main problem, the author must first determine the composition history of the text. Given that the former orthodoxy of a unitary authorship seems to be breaking down, and no consensus has taken its place, a literary critical investigation occupies a necessary and lengthy portion of the work. Once a recommendation for the book’s composition history is reached, attitudes toward the inherited Judean tradition are described in each of the strata discovered. The resulting study reveals a wide variety of opinions on the Judean traditions and their function in society. This contributes to the current trend in scholarship of the Hellenistic period questioning the dichotomy between Judaism and Hellenism by demonstrating the different attitudes within even one text.

"This interdisciplinary collection of essays on the promulgation of the Pentateuch and its acceptance as authoritative Torah includes contributions from international specialists on the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Samaritan history, colonial theory, Mediterranean studies, the Elephantine Island texts, and comparative legal history. The material gathered here is a state-of-the-art presentation of the issues, raising new questions and seeking new answers." "The book includes a substantive introduction that pulls the various contributions together and places them in the broader context of recent work on the propagation and acceptance of the Pentateuch as a prestigious writing in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods."--BOOK JACKET.

This book, written jointly by two distinguished Qumran scholars, attempts to provide answers to some important questions that have been discussed recently in media reports on the Dead Sea Scrolls, such as: have certain manuscripts been suppressed?; do the manuscripts question substantial aspects of the Jewish and Christian traditions?; do the roots of Early Christianity derive from the Essene movement?; and more. This volume offers solid and up-to-date information on the literary heritage, the social organization and the religious beliefs of the Qumran community and its links with Early Christianity. It gives the reader an opportunity to look behind the scenes of the research of the Dead Sea texts and the ongoing scholarly debate on the origins of the Essene movement and the Qumran sect.