Series: Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Section 1 - The Jewish people in the first century Historial geography, political history, social, cultural and religious life and institutions Edited by S. Safrai and M. Stern in cooperation with D. Flusser and W.C. van Unnik Section 2 - The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud Section 3 - Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature

This long-awaited companion volume to The Literature of the Sages, First Part (Fortress Press, 1987) brings to completion Section II of the renowned Compendia series. The Literature of the Sages, Second Part, explores the literary creation of thousands of ancient Jewish teachers, the often- anonymous Sages of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Essays by premier scholars provide a careful and succinct analysis of the content and character of various documents, their textual and literary forms, with particular attention to the ongoing discovery and publication of new textual material. Incorporating groundbreaking developments in research, these essays give a comprehensive presentation published here for the first time. This volume will prove an important reference work for all students of ancient Judaism, the origins of Jewish tradition, and the Jewish background of Christianity. The literary creation of the ancient Jewish teachers or Sages – also called rabbinic literature – consists of the teachings of thousands of Sages, many of them anonymous. For a long period, their teachings existed orally, which implied a great deal of flexibility in arrangement and form. Only gradually, as parts of this amorphous oral tradition became fixed, was the literature written down, a process that began in the third century C.E. and continued into the Middle Ages. Thus the documents of rabbinic literature are the result of a remarkably long and complex process of creation and editing. This long-awaited companion volume to 'The Literature of the Sages, First Part' (1987) gives a careful and succinct analysis both of the content and specific nature of the various documents, and of their textual and literary forms, paying special attention to the continuing discovery and publication of new textual material. Incorporating ground-breaking developments in research, these essays give a comprehensive presentation published here for the first time. 'The Literature of the Sages, Second Part' is an important reference work for all students of ancient Judaism, as well as for those interested in the origins of Jewish tradition and the Jewish background of Christianity.

The literary creation of the ancient Jewish teachers or Sages--also called rabbinic literature--consists of the teachings of thousands of Sages, many of them anonymous. For a long period, their teachings existed orally, which implied a great deal of flexibility in arrangement and form. Only gradually, as parts of the amorphous oral tradition became fixed, was the literature written down, a process that began in the third century CE and continued into the Middle Ages. Thus the documents of the rabbinic literature are the result of a remarkably long and complex process of creation and editing. This volume gives a careful and succinct analysis both of the content and specific nature of the various documents, and of their textual and literary forms, paying special attention to the continuing discovery and publication of new textual material. The contributors are all engaged in academic teaching and research in Israel. Incorporating ground-breaking developments in research, their essays give a comprehensive presentation published here for the first time.

This study marks a bold new departure in 2 Enoch studies. The book has long been regarded as one of the most baffling apocalypses to come down to us from antiquity. The present work argues that 2 Enoch was written by a 1st c. CE Samaritan author whose purpose was to incorporate the Enochic tradition into Samaritanism. By identifying Enoch as the “prophet like Moses” (Deut. 18:15, 18), both during his earthly past and in the eschatological future, the author of 2 Enoch hoped to combat the Dosithean heresy and also to persuade co-religionists to resume a full sacrificial cultus in the shadow of Mt. Gerizim.

From a Biblical perspective, followership is an important aspect of leadership and is exemplified in the lives of numerous individuals in the Bible. These examples offer valuable guidance for how followership can be applied in modern organizations. Divided into three parts, this volume explores the definition and impact of followership on leadership, examining its interdependence with servant leadership, as well as the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between followers and leaders. The book also delves into how followers share power in the workplace and the characteristics and behaviors of followers. Overall, this work contributes to the emerging field of followership in organizational leadership research, with a particular emphasis on the Biblical perspective but also relevant to broader leadership studies.

Can Eden, the flood, and the Tower of Babel be real events that historians have simply renamed? Could Finnish and Norse, Hindu, Greek and Egyptian myth all be recording this same real history? Did Noah's generation surpass the agricultural, nuclear, and biotech technology of the twenty-first century? How did the ancients cut the multi-ton stones of the Egyptian pyramids and Incan walls, or melt Scottish forts? Did ancient China and Sumer know about the twin helix of DNA? Were successful human breeding experiments the origin of giants, while monsters like Grendel were the result of failures? What disaster occurred to them that caused the forgetting of all this knowledge? We know that comets captured by the sun's gravity break up into boulder streams that periodically intersect the Earth's orbit. Plato and the rabbis told us that repeating cosmic disasters have erased most of our history, leaving us only myth and Genesis. This book weaves the modern scientific evidence from Greenland ice cores, Mediterranean bathymetry, NASA archaeology, and human genetics with the linguistic insights of the Hebrew of Genesis 1-11 into a compelling narrative that we are only the second-most advanced civilization on planet Earth. For now.

This book brings together the perspectives of apocalypticism and early Jewish mysticism to illuminate aspects of New Testament theology. The first part begins with a consideration of the mystical character of apocalypticism and then uses the Book of Revelation and the development of views about the heavenly mediator figure of Enoch to explore the importance of apocalypticism in the Gospels and Acts, the Pauline Letters and finally the key theological themes in the later books of the New Testament. The second and third parts explore the character of early Jewish mysticism by taking important themes in the early Jewish mystical texts such as the Temple and the Divine Body to demonstrate the relevance of this material to New Testament interpretation.

Contextualizing the gospels in ancient Greco-Roman media practices New Testament scholars have often relied on outdated assumptions for understanding the composition and spread of the gospels. Yet this scholarship has spread myths or misconceptions about how the ancients read, wrote, and published texts. Nicholas Elder updates our knowledge of the gospels’ media contexts in this myth-busting academic study. Carefully combing through Greco-Roman primary sources, he exposes what we take for granted about ancient reading cultures and offers new and better ways to understand the gospels. These myths include claims that ancients never read silently and that the canonical gospels were all the same type of text. Elder then sheds light on how early Christian communities used the gospels in diverse ways. Scholars of the gospels and classics alike will find Gospel Media an essential companion in understanding ancient media cultures.

How did the written word serve as an authoritative source in the ancient world? What does it mean that some works became so popular as to merit dedicated interpretive commentaries? And does any direct relationship exist between the various methods of interpretation and styles of composition in these commentaries? The present work sets out to provide some solid answers to such questions. At the heart of this book stands a comparative analysis of ancient cuneiform commentary texts from mid-to-late first millennium Mesopotamia and early Jewish commentaries—known as pesharim—from the turn of the common era found in caves near Khirbet Qumran. Though some aspects of Mesopotamian hermeneutics may have influenced Jewish exegesis, likely through Jewish Aramaic scribes, the actual Mesopotamian practice of composing commentary texts exerted little-to-no influence on the compositional techniques of the pesharim. Nevertheless, many textual difficulties in the Qumran pesharim can be explained as the result of an accretion of interpretations over an extended period of time—a practice detailed in the textual record of the Mesopotamian commentaries. What is more, these commentaries reveal important evidence about both the way in which and the extent to which such works functioned as authoritative sources. As a result, this book advocates a shift away from discussing textual authority in simple binary terms, both in ancient and modern contexts, to functional descriptions of literary authority.

The focus of this book is on early Jewish interpretations of the ambiguous relationship between God and ‛the angel of the Lord/God’ in texts like Genesis 16, 22 and 31. Genesis 32 is included since it exhibits the same ambiguity and constitutes an inseparable part of the Jacob saga. The study is set in the wider context of the development of angelology and concepts of God in various forms of early Judaism. When identifying patterns of interpretation in Jewish texts, their chronological setting is less important than the nature of the biblical source texts. For example, a common pattern is the avoidance of anthropomorphism. In Genesis ‛the angel of the Lord’ generally seems to be a kind of impersonal extension of God, while later Jewish writings are characterized by a more individualized angelology, but the ambivalence between God and his angel remains in many interpretations. In Philo's works and Wisdom of Solomon, the ‛Logos’ and ‛Lady Wisdom’ respectively have assumed the role of the biblical ‛angel of the Lord’. Although the angelology of Second Temple Judaism had developed in the direction of seeing angels as distinct personalities, Judaism still had room for the idea of divine hypostases.