Judaism

Comedy is both relative, linked to a time and culture, and universal, found pervasively across time and culture. The Hebrew Bible contains comedy of this relative, yet universal, nature. This book engages the Hebrew Bible via a comic reading and brings that reading into conversation with feminist‐critical interpretation, in resistance to any lingering stereotype that comedy is fundamentally non‐serious or that feminist critique is fundamentally unsmiling. Dividing comic elements into categories of literary devices, psychological/social features, and psychological/social function, this work examines the narratives of a number of biblical characters for evidence of these comic elements. The characters include the trickster matriarchs, the women involved in the infancy of Moses, Rahab, Deborah and Jael, Delilah, three of David's wives (Michal, Abigail, Bathsheba), Jezebel, Ruth, and Esther. Nine particularly instructive points of contact between comedy and feminist interpretation emerge: both resist definition, exist amid a self/other, subject/object dichotomy, emphasize and utilize context, promote creativity, acknowledge the concept of distancing, work towards revelation, are subversive, are concerned with containment and control, and enable survival. The use of comedy as an interpretative lens for the Hebrew Bible is not without difficulties for feminist interpretation. While maintaining an uncomfortable, even painful, awareness of the hold patriarchy retains on the Hebrew Bible, feminist critics can still choose to allow comedy's revelatory, subversive, survivalist nature to do its work revealing, subverting, and surviving.

This book examines ancient Jewish thought with regard to Jewish identity construction, circumcision, and conversion. It argues that there is no evidence in the Hebrew Bible that circumcision was considered to be a rite of conversion to Israelite religion. The infant circumcision that was practiced within Israelite and early Jewish society, and was demanded by Genesis 17, excluded from the covenant those not properly descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period many Jews did begin to conceive of Jewishness in terms that enabled Gentiles to become Jews. Nonetheless, some Jews, especially the author of Jubilees, found this definition of Jewishness problematic, and they defended the borders of Jewishness by reasserting a strictly genealogical conception of Jewish identity. Consequently, some Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced criticism because of their suspect ethnicity. Second Temple Jewish sources record such exclusion with regard to the Herodians, who were Idumean converts. This examination of the way in which Jews in the Second Temple period perceived circumcision and conversion provides a better understanding of early Christianity as the book of Acts portrays it. The final chapter demonstrates how careful attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based on genealogical descent has implications for understanding the disputes over the early Christian mission to the Gentiles.

This book reveals the Hebrew Bible to be a sophisticated work of political philosophy, and the birthplace of egalitarian thought. Focusing on the Pentateuch, this book lays bare the manner in which the Bible appropriated and reconstituted ancient norms and institutions to create a new blueprint for society. Theology, politics, and economics were marshaled anew to weaken traditional seats of power, and to create a homogeneous class of empowered common citizens. Much of this anticipates developments in the history of political thought that would recur only during the Enlightenment and in the thought of the American Founding Fathers. Ancient religion granted sacral legitimation to the ruling classes and saw the masses as mere servants. The Pentateuch, by contrast, elevates the common citizenry in the eyes of God by invoking the political institution of the vassal treaty, and casting Israel as a subordinate king to the Almighty through the theology of covenant. Through the prism of the political philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Montesquieu, the book demonstrates the Pentateuch to be history's first proposal for the distribution of political power. Utilizing the anthropology of pre‐modern economies, ancient norms are explored concerning land tenure, taxation, and loans are reworked so that the common citizenry remains economically secure. Invoking the transformational role of the printing press in the spread of the Reformation and the birth of the Enlightenment, the book identifies far‐reaching consequences in the Bible's approach to what was then the new technology of communication: the alphabetic text.

This book presents a study of the cult of saints among Muslims and Jews in medieval Syria and the Near East. Through case studies of saints and their devotees, discussion of the architecture of monuments, examination of devotional objects, and analysis of ideas of ‘holiness’, the book depicts the practices of living religion and explores the common heritage of all three monotheistic faiths. Critical readings of a wide range of contemporary sources — travel writing, geographical works, pilgrimage guides, legal writings, historical sources, hagiography, and biography — reveal a vibrant religious culture in which the veneration of saints and pilgrimage to tombs and shrines were fundamental.

The birkat haminim is a prayer in the weekday Jewish liturgy for the removal of those categories of humans who prevent messianic redemption. Its earliest known texts, themselves medieval, curse apostates (to Christianity), sectarians, Christians, enemies of Israel, and the insolent empire. Jewish sources place the origin of the prayer in the late first century, in response to an ambiguous group challenging rabbinic authority. Some Church Fathers knew of the prayer and complained that Jews were cursing Christians. The origins of this prayer, were they knowable, should illuminate early Christian-Jewish relations. However, the story of the prayer continues until today. Drawing on the shifting liturgical texts and polemics and apologetics surrounding the prayer, Langer traces the transformation of the birkat haminim from what functioned without question in the medieval world as a Jewish curse of Christians, through its early modern censorship by Christians, to its modern transformation into a generalized petition that God remove abstract evil. Christian censorship itself had opened the door to this transformation by destabilizing the prayer’s language. The true transformations in its meaning, however, accompanied Jewish integration into Western culture and consequent changes in mindset. Thus, even when censors ceased to concern themselves with Jewish texts, changes to the text only enhanced the trajectories already in place. The prayer both lost its function as a curse and its references to any specific categories of living human beings.

This is a new and ground-breaking study of the nature and origins of the earliest material in the book of Proverbs, drawing on evidence from Israel and neighbouring countries in the ancient Near East. This literature has widely been believed to have originated as pedagogical material, designed for the education of future administrators in the royal bureaucracy from the time of Solomon. That belief has played an important part not only in the interpretation of the texts, but in reconstructions of Israelite society and history. This book challenges this view, arguing that it is largely founded on assumptions which are now widely discredited, and sets out to re-evaluate the evidence in the light of more recent research. The conclusions drawn here will have important implications for the future study of this material from both a Christian and Jewish perspective, and for our understanding of ancient Israel's society and history.

Ever since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves near the site of Qumran in 1947, this mysterious cache of manuscripts has been associated with the Essenes, a ‘sect’ configured as marginal and isolated. Scholarly consensus has held that an Essene library was hidden ahead of the Roman advance in 68 CE, when Qumran was partly destroyed. With much doubt now expressed about aspects of this view, the book systematically reviews the surviving historical sources, and supports an understanding of the Essenes as an influential legal society, at the centre of Judaean religious life, held in much esteem by many and protected by the Herodian dynasty, thus appearing as ‘Herodians’ in the Gospels. Opposed to the Hasmoneans, the Essenes combined sophisticated legal expertise and autonomy with an austere regimen of practical work, including a specialisation in medicine and pharmacology. Their presence along the north-western Dead Sea is strongly indicated by two independent sources, Dio Chrysostom and Pliny the Elder, and coheres with the archaeology. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent not an isolated library, quickly hidden, but burials of manuscripts from numerous Essene collections, placed in jars in caves for long-term preservation. The historical context of the Dead Sea area itself, and its extraordinary natural resources, as well as the archaeology of Qumran, confirm the Essenes’ patronage by Herod the Great, and indicate that they harnessed the medicinal material the Dead Sea zone provides to this day.

This book offers a fresh reflection on the intermarriage crisis within Ezra 9-10. Numerous issues, such as ethnicity, religious identity, purity, land, kinship, and migration, orbit around the central problem of intermarriage. These issues are explored in terms of their modern treatment within anthropology, and this information is used to generate a more informed, understanding of the chapters within Ezra. The intermarriage crisis in Ezra is pivotal for our understanding of the postexilic community. As the evidence from anthropology suggests, the social consciousness of ethnic identity and resistance to the idea of intermarriage which emerges from the text point to a deeper set of problems and concerns, most significantly, relating to the complexities of return-migration.This book argues that the sense of identity which Ezra 9–10 presents is best understood by placing it within the larger context of a return migration community who seek to establish exilic boundaries when previous familiar structures of existence have been rendered obsolete by decades of displaced existence outside the land. The complex view of ethnicity presented through the text may, therefore, reflect the ongoing ideology of a returning separatist group. The textualization of this group’s tenets for Israelite identity, and for scriptural exegesis, facilitated its perpetuation by preserving a charged nexus of ideas around which the ethnic and religious identities of later communities could orbit. The multifaceted effects of return-migration may have given rise to an increased focus on ethnicity through ethnicity being realized in exile but only really being crystallized in the homeland.

Most observers attribute evangelical Christians’ bedrock support for Israel to the apocalyptic belief that the Jews must return to Israel as a precondition for Christ’s Second Coming. But the actual reasons, this book argues, are far more complicated. In Evangelicals and Israel, the book delves deeply into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, evangelical publications, survey research, news reports, worship services, and interfaith conferences to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelicals’ alliance with Israel. He finds a complex set of motivations. In addition to end-times theology, these include gratitude to the Jews for providing the theological foundation for Christianity; remorse for the Church’s past anti-Semitism; the belief that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse him who curses Israel; fear that He will judge the nations at the end of time based on how they treated the Jewish people; appreciation of Israel as a friendly democracy; and reliance on the Jewish state as the West’s only firewall against Islamist terrorism. This book explores many Christian Zionists’ hostility toward Islam, but also their unexpected pragmatism and flexibility concerning Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The book looks as well at George W. Bush’s beliefs about the Bible and the evangelical influence on his Middle East policies.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is often considered the founder of modern Jewish philosophy or even of modern Judaism. For many, Mendelssohn's commitment to enlightened values appeared to be irreconcilable with his life-long adherence to Judaism. This book approaches this problem by placing Mendelssohn's moderate enlightenment in three contexts: Maimonides' medieval enlightenment, Spinoza's radical enlightenment, and F.H. Jacobi's Christian counter-Enlightenment. This books argues that Mendelssohn breaks from Maimonides because he faces problems never encountered by Maimonides—namely how to remain an observant Jew in a modern state where Jews could be citizens with their Christian neighbors. Through an original, selective reading of Jewish tradition, Mendelssohn is able to achieve remarkable harmony between Judaism and enlightenment. But at the end of his life Mendelssohn confronts a profound challenge to his religious principles in the “Pantheism Controversy” that he wages with Jacobi over Lessing's alleged Spinozism. To defend his enlightened religious position, Mendelssohn develops a pragmatic religious idealism that inaugurates an anthropocentric turn in religious thought later developed by thinkers such as Hermann Cohen and Mordecai Kaplan.