Judaism : oso

The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet

Jennie Barbour — 2013-01-24

Author:: Jennie Barbour
ISBN:: 9780199657827
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657827.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This book is a study of the making of collective memory within early Judaism in a seminal text of the Western canon. The book of Ecclesiastes and its speaker Qohelet are famous for saying that there is nothing new under the sun, and in the literary tradition of the modern West that has been taken as the motto of a book that is universal in scope, Greek in its patterns of thought, and floating free from the particularism and historical concerns of the rest of the Bible. Jennie Barbour argues that reading the book as a general compendium in this way causes the reader to miss a strong undercurrent in the text. While Ecclesiastes says nothing about the great founding events of Israel’s story, it is haunted by the decline and fall of the nation and the Babylonian exile, as the trauma of the loss of the kingdom of Solomon persists through a spectrum of intertextual relationships. The view of Qohelet from the throne in Jerusalem takes in the whole sweep of Israel’s remembered historical experiences; Ecclesiastes is revealed as not simply as a piece of marketplace philosophy, but as a learned essay in processing a community’s memory, with strong ties to the rest of Jewish and Christian scripture.

Other and Brother

Neta Stahl — 2013-01-24

Author:: Neta Stahl
ISBN:: 9780199760008
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199760008.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This work explores the striking metamorphosis of the figure of Jesus from Other to brother in 20th century Hebrew and Yiddish literature and culture. Jesus and Christianity function in this book as the window through which the author presents and examines major shifts in Jewish self-perception. This historical journey follows changes in Jewish life before and after the Holocaust and Israeli statehood. Zionist writers of the 1920s and 1930s associated Christian symbols and places mentioned in the New Testament like Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee with the enthusiasm and the hardships of redeeming the Holy Land. Post-Israeli statehood poets exhibit attraction to Jesus as the absolute Other. The new generation of poets, free from personal experience of living under the cross, identified with Jesus whom they associated with European culture and aesthetics in an attempt to transcend the actual and imagined borders of their parochial lives in Israel. Twentieth century Jewish writers redeem Jesus from his traditional status as the Other, from the Christian Church, and even from his exile in Europe, reconstructing through this contradictory figure their own new selves. The book provides a panoramic overview of Twentieth Century Jewish Literature and its towering figures—U.Z. Greenberg, Abraham Shlonsky, Zalman Shneor, Scholem Asch, S.Y. Agnon, Avot Yeshurun, Yona Wollach, Yoel Hoffman, and Yitzhak Laor—from a unique and unconventional angle.

Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism

Jonathan Klawans — 2013-01-24

Author:: Jonathan Klawans
ISBN:: 9780199928613
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199928613.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

This book reexamines the theological positions attributed to the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, by the ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. The analysis attends to Josephus’s overall literary concerns, while carefully comparing Josephus’s accounts with relevant biblical, rabbinic, and Dead Sea texts. The book argues that Josephus provides a relatively accurate picture of Jewish theological diversity in his day. This book also examines Josephus’s own theologizing. It argues that Josephus articulated a largely Pharisaic theology, in line with his claim to have adopted this group’s ways. This book also establishes that Josephus’s own theology points in many of the directions that later, rabbinic Judaism was to follow in its reaction to the destruction of the second temple. Without denying the importance of Jewish law—and recognizing Josephus’s embellishments and exaggerations—this project calls for a renewed focus on Josephus’s testimony, and models an approach to ancient Judaism that gives theological questions a deserved place alongside matters of legal concern. Ancient Jewish theology was indeed diverse. Jewish theologizing was also sufficiently robust to be able to offer answers to the historical challenges faced by Jews at that time.

The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea

Joan E. Taylor — 2013-01-24

Author:: Joan E. Taylor
ISBN:: 9780199554485
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism, Biblical Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554485.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

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.

The Challenge of Received Tradition

Naomi Grunhaus — 2013-01-24

Author:: Naomi Grunhaus
ISBN:: 9780199858408
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858408.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

During the medieval period of intense Bible study, one of the most vexing problems facing Jewish interpreters of the Hebrew Bible was how to forge ahead using the new interpretive strategy of uncovering the plain, contextual meaning (peshat), without neglecting revered ancient rabbinic modes of interpretation (derash). This book investigates the ubiquity and necessity of derash‐type interpretations in the biblical commentaries of Radak (R. David Kimhi, c. 1160–1232), a preeminent thirteenth century exegete, analyzing the standard structures in his commentaries with their consistent juxtaposition of peshat and derash-type rabbinic comments. Carefully parsing Radak’s methodological statements and each of the structures he typically employs, the book demonstrates how at times he uses rabbinic traditions to resolve textual questions that arise in exegesis, while at other times, these traditions perform only ancillary functions in his commentaries. The book also examines in detail Radak’s criteria when challenging rabbinic teachings, both in narrative and legal contexts, concluding that most often he rejects rabbinic traditions when they appear to contradict textual biblical evidence, but occasionally also on the grounds of implausibility. Particularly noteworthy is Radak’s questioning rabbinic legal interpretations of Scriptures, which most other exegetes hesitated to do. The book considers the anomaly of Radak’s ample quotation of rabbinic traditions, constantly relying on traditional authority in multiple ways, while simultaneously challenging this same authority by rejecting some rabbinic interpretations. Ultimately, the book concludes that Radak did not find this quotation and challenging of rabbinic traditions as contradictory

Beyond the Walls

Joseph Palmisano — 2013-01-24

Author:: Joseph Palmisano
ISBN:: 9780199925025
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199925025.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

Empathy is a way of re-membering oneself with the religious other that buttresses an interreligious unity-in-diversity. This book therefore proposes a way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and dialogue between Judaism and Catholicism is through a more detailed consideration of the phenomenological category of empathy vis-à-vis Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) and Edith Stein (1891–1942). The book's methodology is phenomenological and narrative in approach, and is therefore necessarily contextual in so far as it takes seriously the post-Shoah situation. Heschel's call for a prophetic return to God, a call that is “ecumenically” expansive and supportive of humanity's need to receive otherness, is a call to live life in the form of response to God's pathos. This call finds a prophetic response through Edith Stein's interreligiously attuned scholarship and witness of empathy, as narratively “drawn” from within the chiarascuro horizon of the Shoah. Stein's portrait rises in the typology of “mandorla” figure—as one capable of dialectically bridging sameness with otherness—conveying an em-pathos in word and deed that is less narrow and more interreligious in kind, precisely because her “way” of martyrdom is as a re-memberer with the religious other(s) who is same: she neither distances herself nor denies her consanguinity with the Jewish people. Stein's Jewish and Christian fidelity, while being an archetype for interreligious relations, also challenges Catholicism to do the teshuva work of remembering its Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with otherness.

Rabbis as Romans

Hayim Lapin — 2012-09-20

Author:: Hayim Lapin
ISBN:: 9780195179309
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195179309.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

The Rabbinic Movement emerged in Palestine by the late second century. Although frequently studied for its significance to the history of Judaism, it is more rarely studied as an example of a provincial social movement in a Roman province. Rabbis as Romans addresses this latter aspect of the Rabbis’ history, studying their origins in the late first or early second century to the end of the fourth century. After a detailed treatment of the process of provincialization in Palestine—political annexation, revolt, and the political, administrative, and economic reorganization that followed—the book turns to the history of the Rabbinic movement itself, arguing that Rabbis are best understood as a movement of literate urban men of some means. This is a social stratum deeply touched by Romanization, with the material means to make choices about legal practices, education for themselves and sons, language, and culture. This observation requires a revised understanding of the development of the rabbinic movement, but also recognizes rabbinic texts and the history of the movement as important resources for the history of provincialization in the Roman Near East. In addition to a history of the origins and formation of the rabbinic movement, the book studies Rabbis’ role as judges, a role they seem to have had especially for adherents, and a series of legal and non-legal texts that locate Rabbis’ cultural self-fashioning within wider cultural debates in the Roman empire.

Paradox and the Prophets

Daniel H. Weiss — 2012-09-20

Author:: Daniel H. Weiss
ISBN:: 9780199895908
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199895908.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) stands as the most widely influential representative of 20th-century Jewish philosophy, and his Religion of Reason is frequently described as one of the most significant attempts to wrestle with the competing claims of philosophy and the Jewish religious tradition since Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Nevertheless, Cohen has often been treated merely as a precursor to later thinkers like Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. This striking new study offers a rereading of Religion of Reason, arguing that the style and method of Cohen’s final work have been fundamentally misunderstood, resulting in a persistent uncertainty as to the nature and significance of its contents. Previous readers, puzzled by the seemingly incompatible perspectives that can be found within Cohen’s book, have tended either to uphold one or another of the text’s “voices” or to criticize the text for intellectual incoherence. In contrast, this book argues that the multiplicity of Cohen’s text is an essential element of its rational and communicative purposes. Drawing upon Kierkegaard as a theorist of indirect communication, the book shows how Cohen combines the “incompatible voices” of philosophy and of Scripture in order to convey religio-ethical ideas—such as the unique God, the other as You, and the messianic future—that would be distorted through a fully consistent, single-voiced mode of communication. Thus, far from representing an outdated mode of thought, Religion of Reason both serves as a model for and places sharp corrective demands on contemporary constructive efforts to reason more productively about religion and ethics.

Judaism in Christian Eyes

Yaacov Deutsch — 2012-09-20

Author:: Yaacov Deutsch
ISBN:: 9780199756537
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199756537.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book examines Christian ethnographic writing about the Jews in early modern Europe, offering a systematic historical analysis of this literary genre and arguing its importance for better understanding both the period in general and Jewish–Christian relations in particular. The book focuses on nearly eighty texts from Western Europe (mostly Germany) that describe the customs and ceremonies of the contemporary Jews, containing both descriptions and illustrations of their subjects. It examines books in which Christian authors describe Jewish life and provides new interpretations of Christian perceptions of Jews, Christian Hebraism, and the attention paid by the Hebraist to contemporary Jews and Judaism. Since many of the authors were converts, studying their books offers new insights into conversion during the period. Their work presents new perspectives on the study of religion, developments in the field of anthropology and ethnography, and internal Christian debates that arose from the portrayal of Jewish life. Despite the lack of attention by modern scholars, some of these books were extremely popular in their time and represent one of the important ways by which Jews were perceived during the period. The key claim of the study is that, although almost all of the descriptions of Jewish customs are accurate, the authors chose to concentrate mainly on details that show the Jewish ceremonies as anti-Christian, superstitious, and ridiculous; these details also reveal the deviation of Judaism from the Biblical law. The book suggests that these ethnographic descriptions are better defined as polemical ethnographies and argues that the texts, despite their polemical tendency, represent a shift from writing about Judaism as a religion to writing about Jews, and from a mode of writing based on stereotypes to one based on direct contact and observation.

Holy War in Judaism

Reuven Firestone — 2012-09-20

Author:: Reuven Firestone
ISBN:: 9780199860302
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199860302.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Holy war, defined for this study as war authorized or even commanded by God, is a fundamental part of biblical religion and a core institution of the Hebrew Bible. Jews of antiquity engaged in wars considered to be divinely sanctioned, but after crushing defeats against the Roman Empire this kind of response to communal threat became so self-destructive that Jewish leaders devised a means of removing holy war from the repertoire of Jewish political actions. The result was the tendering of two interpretive instruments, normative for nearly two thousand years, which would prevent Jewish zealots from declaring holy war and thus endangering the community. The exegesis was possible within a particular historical context, but times change. The transformations brought about by modernity required Jews to re-examine the traditional rabbinic prohibition against war in the light of the times. Within a hundred years the traditional safeguards were effectively removed for the majority of religious Jews that continued to take Jewish traditional exegesis seriously. This full process, from removing holy war from possibility to reviving holy war as a paradigm for action, is the topic of this study.

Comedy and Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible

Melissa Jackson — 2012-09-20

Author:: Melissa Jackson
ISBN:: 9780199656776
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656776.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

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.

Stories of the Law

Moshe Simon-Shoshan — 2012-05-24

Author:: Moshe Simon-Shoshan
ISBN:: 9780199773732
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773732.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Stories of the Law deals with the question of the relationship between law and narrative in the Mishna, the early century rabbinic legal text. It argues that despite the limited number of stories in the Mishnah, “narrative” and “narrativity” are central categories not only regarding the Mishnna’s characteristics as a literary document but also for understanding the legal theory that underlies the Mishnah. Through the close reading of numerous mishnaic stories, the author demonstrates that stories are crucial to the Mishnah’s efforts to construct the rabbis as the sole legitimate source of legal authority in Judaism. At the same time, these stories consistently critique the notion of rabbinic authority, ultimately presenting a complex and nuanced portrayal of the rabbis as religious leaders. In addition to its contributions to the study of rabbinic literature, the book presents new theoretical frameworks both understanding the relationship between law and narrative and for describing and evaluating narrative discourse as it interacts with other form of language and expression, a central issue in narrative theory.

Ethnicity and the Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9-10

Katherine E. Southwood — 2012-05-24

Author:: Katherine E. Southwood
ISBN:: 9780199644346
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644346.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

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.

Wisdom and Law in the Old Testament

Joseph Blenkinsopp — 2012-03-22

Author:: Joseph Blenkinsopp
ISBN:: 9780198755036
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198755036.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2012-03-22

This new edition has been considerably expanded to take in work on the legal and didactic material published since the 1980s. It gives more attention to the different literary genres used by Israel's sages, and to the social settings in which the material came into existence and circulated. References to relevant archaeological data have also been brought up to date. The main purpose of the book, however, remains the same – to trace the course of two related key streams of tradition, law, and wisdom throughout the history of Israel in the biblical period, and to demonstrate their essential lines of continuity with classical Jewish thought and early Christian theology.

Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed

Daniel Davies — 2012-01-19

Author:: Daniel Davies
ISBN:: 9780199768738
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199768738.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed is one of the most discussed books in Jewish history. Since its appearance, many readers have advocated an “esoteric” reading of the Guide, professing to find a hidden message in Maimonides' metaphysical beliefs. Through close readings of the Guide, this book addresses the major debates surrounding its secret doctrine. It argues that perceived contradictions in Maimonides' accounts of creation and divine attributes can be squared by paying attention to the various ways in which he presents his arguments. Furthermore, by employing philosophical rigor, it shows how a coherent theological view can emerge from the many layers of the Guide. But Maimonides' clear declaration that certain matters must be hidden from the masses cannot be ignored, and the kind of inconsistency that is peculiar to the Guide requires another explanation. It is found in the purpose Maimonides assigns to the Guide: scriptural exegesis. Ezekiel's account of the chariot, treated in one of the most laconic sections of the Guide, is the subject of the final chapters. By connecting the vision with currents in the wider Islamic world, the book shows how Maimonides devises a new method of presentation in order to imitate scripture's multilayered manner of communication. He updates what he takes to be the correct interpretation of scripture by writing it in a work appropriate for his own time, and to do so he has to keep the Torah's most hidden secrets.

Cursing the Christians?

Ruth Langer — 2012-01-19

Author:: Ruth Langer
ISBN:: 9780199783175
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199783175.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

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.

Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography

Amram Tropper — 2011-10-03

Author:: Amram Tropper
ISBN:: 9780199267125
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism, Religion in the Ancient World
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199267125.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In third-century CE Palestine, the leading member of the rabbinic movement put together a highly popular wisdom treatise entitled Tractate Avot. Though Avot has inspired hundreds of commentaries, this book marks the first effort to situate it within the context of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Following his novel interpretation of Avot, this book relates the text to ancient Jewish literary paradigms as well as to relevant socio-political, literary, and intellectual streams of the contemporary Near East. Through comparisons to ancient wisdom literature, the Second Sophistic, Greek and Christian historiography, contemporary collections of sayings, and classical Roman jurisprudence, the book interprets Avot in light of the local Jewish context as well as the ambient cultural atmosphere of the contemporary Near East.

Wisdom-Laws

Bernard S Jackson — 2011-10-03

Author:: Bernard S Jackson
ISBN:: 9780198269311
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269311.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book offers fresh perspectives on the nature of biblical law and the methodology we bring to its study. We think of law as rules whose words are binding, used by the courts in the adjudication of disputes. The book explains that early biblical law was significantly different, and that many of the laws in the Covenant Code in Exodus should be viewed as ‘wisdom-laws’. By this term is meant ‘self-executing’ rules, the provisions of which permit their application without recourse to the law-courts or similar institutions. They thus conform to two tenets of the ‘wisdom tradition’: that judicial dispute should be avoided, and that the law is a type of teaching, or ‘wisdom’.

The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E.–350 C.E.

Marc Hirshman — 2011-10-03

Author:: Marc Hirshman
ISBN:: 9780195387742
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195387742.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last century, this book is both an introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and Sasanid Persia, a small group of approximately 2,000 Jewish scholars and rabbis sustained a thriving national and educational culture. They procured loyalty to the national language and oversaw the retention of a national identity. This accomplishment was unique in the Roman Near East, and few physical artifacts remain. The scope of oral teaching, however, was vast and was committed to writing only in the high Middle Ages. The content of this oral tradition remains the staple of Jewish learning through modern times. Though oral learning was common in many ancient cultures, the Jewish approach has a different theoretical basis and different aims. The author explores the evolution and institutionalization of Jewish culture in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources. At its core, he argues, was the Jewish cultural thrust in the first centuries of the Common Era to preserve the language of its culture in its most pristine form. He traces and outlines the ideals and practices of rabbinic learning as presented in the relatively few extensive discussions of the subject in late antique rabbinic sources. This book is an attempt to characterize the unique approach to learning developed by the rabbinic leadership in late antiquity.

Reading the Zohar

Pinchas Giller — 2011-10-03

Author:: Pinchas Giller
ISBN:: 9780195118490
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195118490.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Comprising well over a thousand pages of densely-written Aramaic, the compilation of texts known as the Zohar represents the collective wisdom of various strands of Jewish mysticism, or kabbalah, up to the thirteenth century. This massive work continues to provide the foundation of much Jewish mystical thought and practice to the present day. This book examines certain sections of the Zohar and the ways in which the central doctrines of classical kabbalah took shape around them.

Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah

Alexander Samely — 2011-10-03

Author:: Alexander Samely
ISBN:: 9780198270317
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism, Biblical Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198270317.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book offers a description of early rabbinic hermeneutics (midrash) as it can be reconstructed from the Mishnah (3rd century CE). The argument is based on a survey of all passages of biblical interpretation in this largely legal document. The book describes how the discourse of the rabbis appropriates Scripture while taking precise account of its wording. It clarifies the conditions of a modern appreciation of rabbinic hermeneutics and provides a unified set of concepts for its precise description, based on modern linguistics and philosophy of language. Basic features of rabbinic hermeneutics and its difference from modern historical reading are explained, and a catalogue of recurrent techniques of interpretation is defined. This catalogue lays foundations for the analysis of rabbinic documents and the comparison with other hermeneutic traditions. Each technique is explained and illustrated with translations from the Mishnah. The book provides a manual of all techniques in systematic order and a list of Mishnaic passages of interpretation together with their hermeneutic techniques.

Mission and Conversion

Martin Goodman — 2011-10-03

Author:: Martin Goodman
ISBN:: 9780198263876
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Religion in the Ancient World, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198263876.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book tackles a central problem of Jewish and comparative religious history: proselytization and the origins of mission in the Early Church. Why did some individuals in the first four centuries of the Christian era believe it desirable to persuade as many outsiders as possible to join their religious group, while others did not? In this book, the author offers a new explanation of the origins of mission in this period, arguing that mission is not an inherent religious instinct, that in antiquity it was found only sporadically among Jews and pagans, and that even Christians rarely stressed its importance in the early centuries. In the first half of the book, he makes a detailed and radical re-evaluation of the evidence for Jewish missionary attitudes in the late Second Temple and Talmudic periods, overturning many commonly held assumptions about the history of Judaism, in particular the view that Jews proselytized energetically in the first century AD. This leads the author on to take issue with the common notion that the early Christian mission to the gentiles imitated or competed with contemporary Jews. Finally, the author puts forward some novel suggestions as to how the Jewish background to Christianity may nonetheless have contributed to the enthusiastic adoption of universal proselytization by some followers of Jesus in the apostolic age.

Jewish-Christian Dialogue

David Novak — 2011-10-03

Author:: David Novak
ISBN:: 9780195072730
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195072730.001.0001
Published in print:: 1992
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Most of the available books that deal with the Jewish-Christian relationship are primarily historical studies concentrating on the Jewish background of Christianity, the separation of Christianity from Judaism, or the medieval disputations between Judaism and Christianity. This book is a philosophically-constructed theological argument carefully drawing upon classical Jewish sources. It advocates that there is actual justification from within the Jewish religious tradition for the new relationship between Judaism and Christianity. As such, the book lays the groundwork for a more theologically serious development of Jewish–Christian dialogue.

Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria

Joan E. Taylor — 2011-10-03

Author:: Joan E. Taylor
ISBN:: 9780199291410
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism, Religion in the Ancient World
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199291410.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The 1st-century ascetic Jewish philosophers known as the ‘Therapeutae’, described in Philo's treatise De Vita Contemplativa, have often been considered in comparison with early Christians, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study, which includes a new translation of De Vita Contemplativa, focuses particularly on issues of historical method, rhetoric, women, and gender, and comes to new conclusions about the nature of the group and its relationship with the allegorical school of exegesis in Alexandria. The book argues that the group represents the tip of an iceberg in terms of ascetic practices and allegorical exegesis, and that the women described point to the presence of other Jewish women philosophers in Alexandria in the first century CE. Members of the group were ‘extreme allegorizers’ in following a distinctive calendar, not maintaining usual Jewish praxis, and concentrating their focus on attaining a trance-like state in which a vision of God's light was experienced. Their special ‘feast’ was configured in terms of a service at a Temple, in which both men and women were priestly attendants of God.

Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature

Jean Baumgarten and Jerold C. Frakes — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jean BaumgartenJerold C.FrakesProfessor of Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
ISBN:: 9780199276332
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism, Religion and Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276332.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book provides a survey of the broad and deep literary tradition in Yiddish. The book is a study of an entire culture via its literature, and thus it sees literature in a broad sense. It begins with four chapters addressing pertinent issues of the larger cultural context of the literature and moves on to a consideration of the primary genres in which the culture is expressed: epic, romance, prose narrative, drama, biblical translation and commentary, ethical and moral treatises, prayers, and the broad range of literature of daily use — medical, legal, and historical.

Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism

Jonathan Klawans — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jonathan Klawans
ISBN:: 9780195132908
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195132908.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Much has been written about ritual impurity in ancient Judaism, but the question of how the ancient Jews understood the relationship between defilement and sin has largely been ignored. This book offers a systematic exploration of the topic. The book takes the results of current research on the Hebrew Bible and applies them to early Jewish and Christian groups. The Bible, it shows, considers the moral impurity generated by sin to be entirely distinct from (but no less real than) the ritual impurity generated by bodily function such as menstruation. The book then traces the relationship between ritual and moral impurity from early Jewish sects through the New Testament and the theology of Saint Paul, and shows how Christian theology arrived at the point where the need for ritual purity was entirely rejected.

Holy Men and Hunger Artists

Eliezer Diamond — 2011-10-03

Author:: Eliezer Diamond
ISBN:: 9780195137507
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195137507.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The existence of ascetic elements within rabbinic Judaism has generally been either overlooked or actually denied. This is in part because asceticism is not commonly identified with celibacy, whereas the rabbis emphasized sexuality as a positive good. In addition, argues this book, it serves the theological agendas of both Jewish and Christian scholars to characterize Judaism as non- or anti-ascetic. In fact, however, the book shows that rabbinic asceticism does indeed exist. This asceticism is secondary, rather than primary, in that the rabbis place no value on self-denial in and of itself, but rather require themselves the virtual abandonment of familial, social, and economic life in favour of an absolute commitment to the study of the Torah. It is an asceticism of neglect, rather than negation. One form of asceticism in particular—fasting—became increasingly popular in the wake of the destruction of the second temple. The book traces this to the need to mourn the temple's devastation but also to the cessation of temple-related rituals. The book shows that fasting was seen as a substitute for these rituals when the Temple was destroyed.

Heretics or Daughters of Israel?

Renée Levine Melammed — 2011-10-03

Author:: Renée Levine Melammed
ISBN:: 9780195151671
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151671.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Between 1391 and the end of the 15th century, numerous Spanish Jews converted to Christianity, most of them under duress. Before and after 1492, when the Jews were officially expelled from Spain, a significant number of these conversos maintained clandestine ties to Judaism, despite their outward conformity to Catholicism. Through the lens of the Inquisition's own records, this study focuses on the crypto-Jewish women of Castile, demonstrating their central role in the perpetuation of crypto-Jewish society in the absence of traditional Jewish institutions led by men. This book shows how many “conversas” acted with great courage and commitment to perpetuate their religious heritage, seeing themselves as true daughters of Israel. This book sheds new light on the roles of women in the transmission of Jewish traditions and cultures.

Early Israelite Wisdom

Stuart Weeks — 2011-10-03

Author:: Stuart Weeks
ISBN:: 9780198270072
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198270072.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria

Josef W. Meri — 2011-10-03

Author:: Josef W. Meri
ISBN:: 9780199250783
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Islam, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250783.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

Out of Left Field

Rebecca T. Alpert — 2011-09-22

Author:: Rebecca T. Alpert
ISBN:: 9780195399004
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195399004.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

This book explores the many-faceted relationship between Jews and black baseball in Jim Crow America. Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews called the Belleville Grays—the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball—made their mark on the segregated world of the Negro Leagues. The book tells the stories of the Jewish businessmen who owned and promoted teams as they both acted out and fell victim to pervasive stereotypes of Jews as greedy middlemen and hucksters. Some Jewish owners produced a kind of comedy baseball, akin to basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters—indeed, Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein was very active in black baseball—that reaped financial benefits for both owners and players but also played upon the worst stereotypes of African Americans and prevented these black “showmen” from being taken seriously by the major leagues. But Jewish entrepreneurs, motivated in part by the traditional Jewish commitment to social justice, helped grow the business of black baseball in the face of the oppressive Jim Crow restrictions, and radical journalists writing for the communist Daily Worker argued passionately for an end to baseball's segregation. This book offers a unique perspective on the economic and social negotiations between blacks and Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, shedding new light on the intersection of race, religion, and sports in America.

Judaic Sources and Western Thought

Jonathan Jacobs — 2011-09-22

Author:: JonathanJacobsDirector, Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics, and Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New Yorkhttp://www.colgate.edu/academics/FacultyDirectory/Jjacobs.html
ISBN:: 9780199583157
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583157.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

This book explores the significance and enduring relevance of Judaic roots and sources of important European and Western moral and political ideas and ideals. The book focuses on the distinct character of Judaic thought concerning moral value, the individual human being, the nature of political order, relations between human beings, and between human beings and God. In doing so, it shows how Judaic thought contains crucial resources for engaging some of the most important issues of moral and political life. The currents of thought that have shaped the so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition involve diverse perspectives and emphases. The chapters in this volume bring into relief the distinctly Judaic origins of many of them and explicate how they remain valuable resources for moral and political thought. These are not about Jewish intellectual history; rather, their purpose is to clarify the conceptual resources, insights, and perspectives grounded in Judaic texts and thought. To realize that purpose the chapters address important topics in philosophical anthropology, exploring the normative dimensions of human nature and fundamental features of the human condition.

Josiah's Reform and the Dynamics of Defilement

Lauren A. S. Monroe — 2011-09-22

Author:: Lauren A. S. Monroe
ISBN:: 9780199774166
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199774166.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

The biblical account of the religious reforms of king Josiah is one of the most widely discussed texts in the Hebrew Bible. Scholars have long understood Josiah's destruction of Israelite cult objects and personnel to mark an essential break with Israel's polytheistic past and a foundational moment in the development of monotheism. The language of 2 Kgs 23 represents Josiah's reform as ritual, yet the text has never been systematically studied from a ritual perspective. Situating Josiah's defilement in the context of other Israelite rituals, it uncovers new fault lines in the text that reveal two compositional phases. An early account with parallels in priestly ritual texts and the Holiness Code promoted particular ambitions of the Josianic court, while a later, postmonarchic, Deuteronomistic version recast Josiah as the only king in Israel's history to fully appreciate the obligations and limitations imposed by Mosaic law. Utilizing language associated with Deuteronomy's war-ḥērem, the later author modeled Josiah on Joshua. Both [re]claimed the land from the clutches of the Canaanites and [re]established Israel as the place where Yahweh's law and priestly authority prevailed. This study challenges the widely held assumption that Josiah imposed Deuteronomic law in the late seventh century; it provides a more expansive picture of the holiness school and its engagement in literary production; and it points away from a Josianic, Deuteronomistic redaction of 2 Kgs 23, shedding new light on the composition of the book of Kings.

Contesting Conversion

Matthew Thiessen — 2011-09-22

Author:: Matthew Thiessen
ISBN:: 9780199793563
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199793563.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

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.

Unsettling Gaza

Joyce Dalsheim — 2011-05-01

Author:: Joyce Dalsheim
ISBN:: 9780199751204
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751204.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

This ethnographic study takes a unique approach to one of the most contentious issues in the Middle East—the Israeli settlement project. The book’s work intercedes in the conflict between religiously motivated Jewish settlers and their liberal and secular opponents and asks the reader to suspend judgment just long enough to gain fresh insight. The book shows that the intense antagonism between these groups disguises their fundamental similarities and reveals the social and cultural work achieved through a politics of mutual denunciation. While previous studies have examined settlers and other so-called fundamentalists in Israel, this is the first to place radical, right-wing settlers and their left-wing and secular opposition in a single analytical frame, moving between places and across borders, carrying stories, questions, and insights from one side to the other. Based on fieldwork in the settlements of the Gaza Strip and surrounding communities during the year prior to the Israeli withdrawal, the book presents unique ethnographic data and poses controversial questions about the contentious issue of settlement in Israeli-occupied territories in ways that move beyond the usual categories of politics, religion, and culture. It critically examines how religiously motivated settlers think about living with Palestinians, express theological uncertainty, and imagine the future beyond the confines of territorial nationalism. Attending to the complexities of different ways of being Israeli, the book holds up a mirror in which both the liberal Left and the radical Right find themselves reflected in the face of the other. With theoretical implications stretching far beyond the boundaries of Israel/Palestine, the book’s findings shed fresh light on politics, identity among Israelis, and the troubling conflicts in Israel/Palestine and provide both challenges and insight to broader questions at the interface between religiosity and formations of the secular.

The Peace and Violence of Judaism

Robert Eisen — 2011-05-01

Author:: Robert Eisen
ISBN:: 9780199751471
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751471.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of Jewish views on peace and violence. It examines five major thought-worlds in Judaism—the Bible, rabbinic Judaism, medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and modern Zionism—and it demonstrates that each of these thought-worlds exhibits ambiguity regarding peace and violence. To make this case, an unusual format has been adopted. Two separate analyses are presented for each of the thought-worlds: one that argues for a peaceful reading of Judaism, and another that argues for a violent reading. The aim is to show that both readings are valid and authentic interpretations of Judaism. The study also explores why Judaism is so ambiguous on the issues of peace and violence by examining the interpretive methods that support each reading. These include such techniques as the selection of texts that support a viewpoint, selective emphasis on some texts at the expense of others, and the use of historical context to give meaning to a text. This study is relevant not just for Judaism. Other religions exhibit the same ambiguities that Judaism does when it comes to peace and violence. This study is therefore meant to provide a model for the analysis of other religious traditions as well.

Faith and Freedom

Michah Gottlieb — 2011-05-01

Author:: Michah Gottlieb
ISBN:: 9780195398946
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism, Philosophy of Religion
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195398946.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-05-01

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.

The Three Blessings

Yoel Kahn — 2011-01-01

Author:: Yoel Kahn
ISBN:: 9780195373295
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195373295.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

According to the Talmud (Menahot 43b), a Jewish man should give thanks each day “not having been made a gentile … a woman … nor a slave.” This study traces the history of this text in the Jewish Morning Blessings (Birkhot ha-shachar) across two thousand years of history. Marking the boundary between “us” and “them,” marginalized and persecuted groups used these lines to affirm their own identity and sense of purpose. After the medieval Church seized and burned books it considered offensive, new, coded formulations emerged as forms of spiritual resistance. Owners voluntarily carefully expurgated their books to save them from being destroyed, creating new language and meanings while seeking to preserve the structure and message of the received tradition. Renaissance Jewish women ignored rabbis’ objections to declare assertively that their gratitude at being “made a woman and not a man.” Hebrew manuscripts demonstrate creative literary responses to censorship and show that official texts and interpretations do not fully represent the historical record. As Jewish emancipation began in the 19th century, modernizing Jews again had to balance fealty to historical practice with their own and others’ understanding of their place in the world. Seeking to be recognized as modern and European, early modern Jews rewrote the liturgy to fit modern sensibilities and identified themselves with the Christian West against the historical pagan and the uncivilized infidel. In recent decades, a reassertion of ethnic and cultural identity has again raised questions of how the Jewish religious community should define itself.

Law, Reason, and Morality in Medieval Jewish Philosophy

Jonathan Jacobs — 2010-09-01

Author:: Jonathan Jacobs
ISBN:: 9780199542833
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542833.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This is a study of the key features of the moral psychology and metaethics of three important medieval Jewish philosophers, Saadia Gaon, Bahya ibn Pakuda, and Moses Maimonides. They are selected because of the depth and subtlety of their thought and because of their relevance to central, enduring issues in moral philosophy. The book examines their views of freedom of the will, the virtues, the rationality of moral requirements, and the relation between rational justification and revelation. Their appropriations of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought are explicated, showing how their theistic commitments make crucial differences to moral psychology and moral epistemology. All three thinkers developed rationalistic philosophies and sought to show how Judaism does not include doctrines in conflict with reason. Maimonides receives the fullest attention, given that he articulated the most systematic and influential accounts of the main issues. While explicating the main claims and arguments of these thinkers, the book also shows the respects in which their thought remains relevant to several important issues and debates in moral philosophy. These thinkers' views of ‘the reasons of the commandments’ (in Torah) include resources for a sophisticated moral epistemology of tradition. The points of contact and contrast between medieval Jewish moral thought and the practical wisdom approach to moral theory and also natural law approaches are examined in detail.

Faith Finding Meaning

Byron L. Sherwin — 2010-02-01

Author:: Byron L. Sherwin
ISBN:: 9780195336238
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336238.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-02-01

Recent sociological studies have confirmed the persistence of profound internal challenges to the continuity of Judaism as a religion and to the Jews as a people. These challenges are eroding the foundations of Jewish identity and are threatening the authenticity of Judaism as a historical living faith-tradition. This work “makes the case” for a return to Jewish theology as a means of restoring Jewish authenticity and for reversing self-destructive trends. After identifying and critiquing various “substitute faiths” embraced by many contemporary Jews in Chapters One and Two, the nature and goals of Jewish theology are examined (Chapter Three). Rather than depicting theology as “faith seeking understanding,” the chapters that follow present a comprehensive theology of Judaism, deeply rooted in classical Jewish texts, and an understanding of theology as “faith seeking meaning (Chapter Four). Rather than portraying theology, as often has been the case, as a systematic creed imposed from without, theology is presented here as an outcome of the dialogue between an individual's quest for meaning and the spiritual and intellectual resources of a historical faith-tradition—in this case, Judaism. Features of faith such as living in a covenantal relationship (Chapter Five), seeking a rendezvous with God in the self, the sacred word, the world, and the sacred and ethical deed, are offered as paths to individual meaning and to creating one's life as a work of art (Chapter Six), despite the challenges of evil and absurdity encountered in daily experience (Chapters Seven and Eight).

The Ten Lost Tribes

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite — 2009-09-01

Author:: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
ISBN:: 9780195307337
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195307337.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-09-01

For over two millennia, western cultural development—and particularly the western geographic imagination—has been shaped by the myth of the ten lost tribes of Israel. From biblical times to this present day, geographers and theologians, adventurers and politicians have found meaning in the idea that some core group of humanity—the ten tribes first referenced in I Kings—had been “lost,” banished to a secret place, someday to return triumphant someday. This book reveals for the first time the tremendous extent to which this notion has been embedded at the very root of key episodes in world historical development: the formation of the first “world” empires, the Christian and Jewish worlds of late antiquity and the middle ages, the age of discovery, the spread of European imperialism across the globe, the rise of modern‐day evangelical apocalypticism. All have as one of their most important origins the search for the missing tribes, and the fervent belief that their restitution marked a necessary step to global redemption. This new study charts the myth of the ten lost tribes from its biblical formation to the modern period, displaying a wealth of sources as it charts the role of the search for the ten lost tribes in the expansion of world geographical knowledge. The lost tribes, long thought to lurk at the world's very “edges,” became the means of expanding those edges: as new oceans, islands, or continents were located for the first time. The ten tribes were used as the mechanism for understanding the world. Virtually every known place on the earth's surface, from Argentina to Zululand, the American Southwest to Southeast Asia, has, at some point, been claimed as their true home. This book shows how the constant quest for the missing tribes has served as a major engine for territorial exploration and expansion, and why it has been one of our most enduring and pervasive cultural myths.

Scriptural Exegesis

Deborah A. Green and Laura S. Lieber — 2009-05-01

Author:: Deborah A.GreenGreenberg Assistant Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature, University of Oregonhttp://pages.uoregon.edu/jdst/faculty/Laura S.LieberAssistant Professor of Late Ancient Judaism, Duke Universityhttp://religiondepartment.duke.edu/people?subpage=profile&Gurl=%2Faas%2FReligion&Uil=laura.lieber
ISBN:: 9780199206575
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206575.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-05-01

This book gathers voices from an international community of scholars to consider the many facets of the history of biblical interpretation and to question how exegesis shapes spiritual and cultural creativity. Divided into four broadly chronological sections that chart a variety of approaches from ancient to modern times, the chapters examine texts and problems rooted in the ancient world yet still of concern today. Eighteen chapters incorporate the expertise of contributors from a diverse range of disciplines, including ancient religion, philosophy, mysticism, and folklore. Each embraces the challenge of explicating complex and often esoteric writings in light of Michael Fishbane's groundbreaking work in exegesis.

Evangelicals and Israel

Stephen Spector — 2009-01-01

Author:: Stephen Spector
ISBN:: 9780195368024
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Religion and Society, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368024.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2009-01-01

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.

Created Equal

Joshua A. Berman — 2009-01-01

Author:: Joshua A. Berman
ISBN:: 9780195374704
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Biblical Studies, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195374704.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2009-01-01

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.

Becoming Hebrew

Arieh B. Saposnik — 2009-01-01

Author:: Arieh B. Saposnik
ISBN:: 9780195331219
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331219.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2009-01-01

Becoming Hebrew is a study of the ways in which a Zionist national culture was generated in the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) of Palestine between 1900 and 1914. The book addresses three principal lacunae in the study of Zionist culture to date. The first of these is chronological. Much of the literature to date has assumed that a distinctive Zionist national culture began to appear in Palestine during the interwar period, whereas Becoming Hebrew argues that its formative period in fact predates the war. Out of this chronological claim emerge the two additional, more conceptually and theoretically substantive, correctives. In the first instance, the book shows that the relationship between the Zionist cultural undertaking and traditional Jewish culture is far more complicated and nuanced than has often been recognized. Joining a new and important historiographical trend, the book suggests further that the Zionist case sheds important light on nationalism generally, which itself emerges in a more complex and dialectical relationship with the religious cultures and traditional societies out of which it grows than has often been acknowledged in much of the now classical literature. Finally, in its conceptualization of “culture” as created in Zionist Palestine, the book synthesizes a literary‐like study of imageries and discourses and a more anthropological examination of observable cultural practices and tangible, public social processes to produce a history of culture as a broad interweaving of many aspects of human life.

Song of the Distant Dove

Raymond P. Scheindlin — 2008-09-01

Author:: Raymond P. Scheindlin
ISBN:: 9780195315424
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195315424.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2008-09-01

Judah Halevi, the great medieval Hebrew poet, abandoned home and family in Spain (al-Andalus) at the end of his life and traveled east to die in the Holy Land. This book narrates his journey, quoting from Arabic letters by Halevi and his friends, and explores its meaning through analysis of his Hebrew poems. The poems are presented both in Hebrew and in new English verse translations and are provided with full commentary. The discussion introduces Halevi’s circle of Jewish businessmen and intellectuals in al-Andalus and Egypt, examines their way of life, and describes their position vis-à-vis Arabic and Islamic culture. It also explores the interweaving of religious ideas of Jewish, Islamic, and Hellenistic origin in Halevi’s work. Although Halevi was partially motivated by a desire to repudiate the Judeo-Arabic hybrid culture and embrace purely Jewish values, the book demonstrates that his poetry and his pilgrimage continue to reflect the Judeo-Arabic milieu. His poetry and pilgrimage also show that while the Jews’ precarious situation as a tolerated minority weighed on Halevi, he was impelled to the pilgrimage not by a grand plan for ending the Jewish exile, as is widely thought, but by a personal religious quest. Chapters 1 through 3 each deal with one of the major themes of Halevi’s poetry that point in the direction of the pilgrimage. Chapters 4 through 6 are a narrative of the pilgrimage. Chapters 7 through 10 are a study of Halevi’s poems that are explicitly about the Land of Israel and about the pilgrimage. The epilogue explores the later legend of his martyrdom.

The Black Jews of Africa

Edith Bruder — 2008-09-01

Author:: Edith Bruder
ISBN:: 9780195333565
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333565.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-09-01

Over the last several decades, an astonishing phenomenon has developed: a Jewish rebirth of sorts occurring throughout Africa. Different ethnic groups proclaim that they are returning to long forgotten Jewish roots and African clans trace their lineage to the Lost Tribes of Israel. This book addresses the elaboration and the development of Jewish identities by Africans. Africans have encountered Jewish myths and traditions in multiple forms and under a number of situations. The context and circumstances of these encounters produced a series of influences that gradually led, within some African societies, to the elaboration of a new Jewish identity connected with that of the Diaspora. The book presents one by one the different groups of Black Jews from western central, eastern, and southern Africa, and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. The purpose of the book is to review the processes and immensely complex interactions which shaped these new religious identities. It explores the way in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and Africans idea of Jews in order to create a distinct Jewish identity. It particularly seeks to identify and to assess colonial influences and their internalization by African societies in the shaping of new African religious identities. Along with these notions the book examines how, in the absence of recorded African history, the eminently malleable accounts of Jewish lineage developed by African groups inspired by Judaism co-exist with the possible historical traces of a Jewish presence in Africa.

Shalom Shar'abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El

Pinchas Giller — 2008-05-01

Author:: Pinchas Giller
ISBN:: 9780195328806
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195328806.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-05-01

This book examines the history, teachings, and practices of a school of kabbalists who have flourished in the Middle East for the last two and a half centuries. The Beit El kabbalists center their practice around the teachings of Shalom Sharʾabi, an 18th century Yemenite kabbalist who came to prominence in Jerusalem. Sharʾabi is considered by his acolytes to be the recipient of divine inspiration from the prophet Elijah. The practice itself is a form of mystical prayer, utilizing a specific underlying linguistic theory. The application of this theory extends to the entire religious practice of the Beit El kabbalists. The school drew on the Rabbinic elite of Jerusalem, Syria, the present‐day Baghdad, Persia and to the east. Its influence in North Africa was less strong and although it accumulated European adherents, the Hasidic movement moved to negate many of its ideas and practices. It became a dominant force in the Jerusalem chief Rabbinate of the late Ottoman empire. There remain, however, desiderata in the religious thinking of the Beit El kabbalists. This missing aspects of the practice cast doubt on whether the Beit El kabbalists can properly be called mystics, and whether the academy's identification of Kabbalah with Jewish mysticism.

"My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man"

Susan Niditch — 2008-05-01

Author:: Susan Niditch
ISBN:: 9780195181142
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181142.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-05-01

The story of Jacob and Esau is told in the book of Genesis. With his mother's help, Jacob impersonates his hairy older twin by dressing in Esau's clothes and covering his own hands and the nape of his neck with the hairy hide of goats. Fooled by this ruse, their blind father, Isaac, is tricked into giving the younger son the blessing of the firstborn. This is only one of many biblical stories in which hair plays a pivotal role. In recent years, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the relationship between culture and the body. Hair plays an integral role in the way we represent and identify ourselves. The way we treat our hair has to do with aesthetics, social structure, religious identity, and a host of other aspects of culture. In ancient Israel, hair signifies important features of identity with respect to gender, ethnicity, and holiness. This book seeks a deeper understanding of Israelite culture as expressed, shaped, and reinforced in images of hair. Among the examples used is the tradition's most famous long-haired hero, Samson. The hair that assures Samson's strength is a common folktale motif, but is also important to his sacred status as a Nazirite. The book examines the meaning of the Nazirite identity null held by Samuel as well as Samson null arguing that long hair is involved in a complex set of cultural assumptions about men, warrior status, and divine election. The book also looks at pictorial and other material evidence. It concludes by examining the troubling texts in which men impose hair cutting or loosening upon women, revealing much about attitudes to women and their place in Israelite culture.

Hidden Children of the Holocaust

Suzanne Vromen — 2008-05-01

Author:: Suzanne Vromen
ISBN:: 9780195181289
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181289.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-05-01

At the time of the Nazi invasion in May 1940, Belgium was a Catholic country with linguistic divisions between north and south. The Catholic Church was the only institution untouched by the German occupiers. Therefore many hunted Jews sought the Church's help, which was spontaneously extended by the lower clergy. The book is based on unstructured interviews with formerly hidden children, with nuns who sheltered them, and with two surviving escorts who worked for the Committee for the Defense of Jews resistance network and took the children from their families to convents willing to hide them. The interviews detail from the point of view of both nuns and children how the children were integrated into daily convent life and how they reacted to Catholic rituals and socialization. The lives are framed by their historical context. The chapter on the escorts and on the Committee for the Defense of Jews leads to a general discussion of the different facets of the Belgian resistance. A chapter on memory and commemoration then traces the emergence of the concept of the hidden child and the construction of collective memories. The chapter also addresses the formal recognition of rescuers as “Righteous Among the Nations” and offers an in‐depth interpretation of Yad Vashem, the memorial institution of Israel. At the same time, it uncovers how gender initially played a major role in the recognition of priests and nuns who were rescuers. The struggle for the souls of some orphaned Jewish children who were baptized during the war and whose return to the Jewish community was contested is discussed as a particularly painful episode. This book contributes to Holocaust literature written in English about Belgium, a country given relatively too little attention. With its focus on commemoration, the book also adds to the understanding of how memory is institutionalized and reinforced by mnemonic practices.

Opening the Covenant

Michael S. Kogan — 2008-01-01

Author:: Michael S. Kogan
ISBN:: 9780195112597
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112597.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-01-01

The Vatican II Council of 1965 signaled a new era in the relationship of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Determined to free the Church of the anti-Jewish polemic which led to such widespread suffering of the innocent, Catholic authorities completely revised their conceptions of Jews and Judaism. Soon, many mainstream Protestant churches also issued a series of official statements that affirmed the eternal nature of God's ancient covenant with Israel. An entirely new category of theology emerged as part of the developing Jewish-Christian dialogue, and gradually Jewish theologians began to respond. This book represents an advance in Jewish thinking about Christianity. It delves deeply into the theologies of the two faiths to locate precise points of difference and convergence and sees Christianity as the breaking open of the original Covenant to include gentile peoples. God has brought this about through the work of Jesus and his interpreters. If Christianity is a divinely inspired movement, then Judaism must re-evaluate its truth-claims. This will in no way compromise the truth of Judaism itself, but will cause Jews to understand their own faith more fully by locating it in the larger context of God's universal redemptive plan. This book calls for each tradition to receive the wisdom of the other as a means of self-understanding. Once each faith is freed to find God's purpose in the other, the way will be open to a liberating pluralism in which Jews and Christians come to see each other as Israelite siblings sharing a universal role as God's witnesses, the builders of God's Kingdom on earth. Neither faith can do this world-redemptive work alone.

Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself

Lenn E. Goodman — 2008-01-01

Author:: Lenn E. Goodman
ISBN:: 9780195328820
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195328820.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-01-01

In this expanded text of his 2005 Gifford Lectures, the well‐known philosopher Lenn Goodman details how the Torah and the rabbinic Sages flesh out the demands of the Bible's core ethical imperative: Love thy neighbor as thyself. The philosophy of monotheism and the ethics of charity, justice, and love, Goodman argues, go hand in hand, informing, enlarging, and enlightening one another: The idea of God's goodness infuses every practical and intellectual facet of the Judaic moral ideal. Our ethical commitments are deepened, broadened, and intensified by our understanding of God's love; our knowledge and love of God are enriched and given effect by our moral character and ethical practices. In a special “Q&A” section, Goodman continues the dialogue begun in Glasgow, addressing questions that arose in the lectures as to the place of the mitzvot or commandments in Judaism and comparing Christian, Muslim, and secular perspectives on divine commands and human obligations.

Jewish Liturgical Reasoning

Steven Kepnes — 2007-09-01

Author:: Steven Kepnes
ISBN:: 9780195313819
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313819.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an attempt to articulate the internal patterns of philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning that are at work in Jewish synagogue liturgies. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is also about the relationship between internal Jewish liturgical reasoning and the variety of “external” philosophical and theological forms of reasoning that have been developed in modern and postliberal Jewish philosophy. The book focuses, in its first chapters, on the liturgical reasoning of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. It then attempts to further develop the liturgical reasoning of these figures with methods of study from hermeneutics, semiotic theory, postliberal theology, anthropology, and performance theory. These newer theories are enlisted to help form a contemporary liturgical reasoning that can respond to such events as the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and interfaith dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The book argues that liturgical reasoning can reorient Jewish philosophy and provide it with new tools, new terms of discourse, and a new sensibility for the twenty‐first century.

Forms of Rabbinic Literature and Thought

Alexander Samely — 2007-05-01

Author:: Alexander Samely
ISBN:: 9780199296736
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296736.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2007-05-01

This book surveys the corpus of rabbinic literature, which was written in Hebrew and Aramaic about 1,500 years ago and which contains the foundations of Judaism, in particular the Talmud. The rabbinic works are introduced in groups, illustrated by shorter and longer passages, and described according to their literary structures and genres. Tables and summaries provide short information on key topics: the individual works and their nature, the recurrent literary forms which are used widely in different works, techniques of rabbinic Bible interpretation, and discourse strategies of the Talmud. Key topics of current research into the texts are addressed: their relationship to each other, their unity, their ambiguous and ‘unsystematic’ character, and their roots in oral tradition. The book explains why the character of the texts is crucial to an understanding of rabbinic thought, and why they pose specific problems to modern, Western-educated readers.

Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple

Jonathan Klawans — 2007-01-01

Author:: Jonathan Klawans
ISBN:: 9780195162639
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195162639.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2007-01-01

This book reevaluates modern scholarly approaches to ancient Jewish cultic rituals, arguing that sacrifice in particular has been long misunderstood. Various religious and cultural ideologies (especially supersessionist ones) have frequently prevented scholars from seeing the Jerusalem temple as a powerful source of meaning and symbolism to those ancient Jews who worshiped there. Such approaches are exposed and countered by reviewing the theoretical literature on sacrifice and taking a fresh look at a broad range of evidence concerning ancient Jewish attitudes toward the temple and its sacrificial cult. Starting with the Hebrew Bible, this work argues for a symbolic understanding of a broad range of cultic practices, including both purity rituals and sacrificial acts. The prophetic literature is also reexamined, with an eye toward clarifying the relationship between the prophets and the sacrificial cult. Later ancient Jewish symbolic understandings of the cult are also revealed in sources including Josephus, Philo, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. A number of ancient Jews certainly did believe that the temple was temporarily tainted or defiled in some fashion, including the Dead Sea sectarians and Jesus. But they continued to speak of the temple in metaphorical terms, and — like practically all ancient Jews — believed in the cult, accepted its symbolic significance, and hoped for its ultimate efficacy.

Men of Silk

Glenn Dynner — 2007-01-01

Author:: Glenn Dynner
ISBN:: 9780195175226
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195175226.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2007-01-01

Hasidism, a kabbalah-inspired movement founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (c1700-1760), transformed Jewish communities across Eastern and East Central Europe. This book illuminates Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early 19th century, presenting Hasidism as a socioreligious phenomenon that was shaped in crucial ways by its Polish context. Despite their folksy image, the movement's charismatic leaders are revealed as astute populists who proved remarkably adept at securing elite patronage, neutralizing powerful opponents, and methodically co-opting Jewish institutions. The book also reveals the full spectrum of Hasidic devotees, from humbleshtetldwellers to influential Warsaw entrepreneurs. The Hasidic concept of “worship through corporeality” (avodah be-gashmiyut), a notion that holiness may be derived from even mundane endeavors, enabled Hasidic leaders and adherents to immerse themselves in politics, business, and popular culture, and yet effectively remain mystics. Hasidism's transformation into a mass movement is thus attributable to a convergence of sociopolitical and theological innovations.

The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy

Robert Eisen — 2007-01-01

Author:: Robert Eisen
ISBN:: 9780195171532
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171532.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2007-01-01

This book analyzes the history of the interpretation of the book of Job by medieval Jewish exegetes. The scholarship on medieval Jewish thought has focused largely on the systematic philosophical aspects of this literature. The author, however, is concerned with exegesis qua exegesis. He offers a close examination of commentaries on Job written by six major thinkers: Saadiah Gaon (882-942, Egypt and Babylon), Moses Maimonides (1138-1204, Spain and Egypt), Samuel ibn Tibbon (1160-1230, Provence), Zerahiah Hen (13th Century, Barcelona and Rome), Levi Gersonides (1288-1344, Provence), and Simeon ben Zeham Duran (1361-1444, Majorca and Algiers). Saadiah and Maimonides wrote in Arabic, the other four in Hebrew. The author looks at the relationship between the commentaries and their antecedent sources as well as their relationship to the broader context of medieval Jewish thought. He also provides an overview of the questions the commentators confronted about the historicity, national origin, and “Jewishness” of the text. He argues that the commentaries on Job are linked in a coherent and evolving tradition of interpretation and he identifies various views of providence as the central concern of them all.

Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine

Richard Kalmin — 2006-09-01

Author:: Richard Kalmin
ISBN:: 9780195306194
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195306198.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2006-09-01

The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the 3rd through 6th centuries CE, by rabbis living under Sasanian Persian rule in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. What kind of society did these rabbis inhabit? What effect did that society have on important rabbinic texts? This book offers a re-examination of rabbinic culture of late antique Babylonia. It shows how this culture was shaped in part by Persia on the one hand, and by Roman Palestine on the other. The mid 4th century CE in Jewish Babylonia was a period of particularly intense “Palestinianization,” at the same time that the Mesopotamian and east Persian Christian communities were undergoing a period of intense “Syrianization.” The book argues that these closely related processes were accelerated by 3rd-century Persian conquests deep into Roman territory, which resulted in the resettlement of thousands of Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the eastern Roman provinces in Persian Mesopotamia, eastern Syria, and western Persia, profoundly altering the cultural landscape for centuries to come. The book also offers new interpretations of several fascinating rabbinic texts of late antiquity. It also demonstrates how Babylonian rabbis interacted with the non-rabbinic Jewish world, often in the form of the incorporation of centuries-old non-rabbinic Jewish texts into the developing Talmud, rather than via the encounter with actual non-rabbinic Jews in the streets and marketplaces of Babylonia.

Hastening Redemption

Arie Morgenstern and Joel A. Linsider — 2006-05-01

Author:: Arie Morgenstern, Joel A. Linsider
ISBN:: 9780195305784
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195305787.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2006-05-01

Offering a novel understanding of the origins of renewed Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in modern times, this book situates that settlement in the context of Jewish messianism and traces it to a wave of messianic fervor that swept the Jewish world during the first half of the 19th century. Believing that the Messiah would appear in the year 5600 AM (1840 CE), thousands of Jews immigrated to the Land of Israel from throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. This book focuses primarily on the immigration (“aliyah”) of the disciples of the Ga’on of Vilna, the Eastern European opponents of Hasidism (known in the Land of Israel as the Perushim) who, notwithstanding their vaunted rationalism, were characterized by a strong mystical and messianic bent. In recounting their story, the book describes their complex and changing relationships with the ruling Ottoman and Egyptian authorities, with the Anglican missionaries then active in Jerusalem (principally the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews), and with the Organization of Peqidim and Amarkalim (Clerk’s organization) in Amsterdam and its head, Zevi Hirsch Lehren. The book makes extensive use of the newly discovered archives of the Peqidim and Amarkalim, of the diaries and journals of the Anglican missionaries, of kabbalistic texts from throughout North Africa and the Near East, and of previously unavailable manuscripts by the disciples of the Vilna Ga’on. Finally, the book recounts the varied responses to the Messiah’s failure to appear in 1840, and the continued growth in the Jewish community, a precursor to the emergence of modern political Zionism in the late 19th century.

The Troubles of Templeless Judah

Jill Middlemas — 2006-02-01

Author:: Jill Middlemas
ISBN:: 9780199283866
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0199283869.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2006-02-01

The Neo-Babylonian defeat of Judah and destruction of Jerusalem in 587 resulted in an era — commonly, though now anachronistically, known as the ‘exilic age’ — considered to be of fundamental significance in the historical, social, and theological development of ancient Israel. Although perceived by the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and modern scholarship as a foundational epoch, examinations of the exile tend to focus on the fraction of the community who experienced forced deportation after the collapse of Jerusalem, namely, those members of the community relocated to Babylonia. Since recent scholarship has raised awareness of renewal among the community left in Judah, the book reassesses the historical circumstances and the theological reflection made in the homeland. In drawing together recent analyses of the archaeological data and the strategies of governance adopted by the Neo-Babylonian empire, the evidence points to sufficient infrastructure in sixth-century Judah to allow for communal and religious life. The author then surveys the heterodox and Yahwistic worship practices thought to stem from this community. It is shown that interpreters have accepted perspectives of the religiosity of Templeless Judah generated by ideological stances in the ancient world and in modern scholarship. In order to gain access to the thought and distinguish themes from the people in the homeland, the author studies the book of Lamentations. Rather than formulating great theological constructs, the Judahites agonised over their troubles in prayer. In so doing, the laments attributable to Templeless Judah helpfully provide a means to ascertain other literature with a similar provenance.

Marked in Your Flesh

Leonard B. Glick — 2005-07-14

Author:: Leonard B. Glick
ISBN:: 9780195176742
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/019517674X.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2005-07-14

This book traces the history of male infant circumcision from its origins in ancient Judea, through centuries of Christian condemnation and Jewish defense, to its current role in American culture and medical practice. Genesis 17 is the biblical text where infant circumcision was mandated by Judean priests in the 6th century BCE; they characterized it as confirming a covenant, but the deeper meaning of the practice was male supremacy and dominance. Early Christians vehemently rejected circumcision, while Jews defended it with equal vigor in the Talmud and other rabbinic texts. The circumcision rite, embellished by folk practices and raised to new heights of significance by Jewish mystics, evolved into its contemporary form in medieval and early modern Europe. Meanwhile, Christian theological writings and medieval European folk beliefs — including those connected with fantasies about ritual murder — contributed to the enduring negative image of circumcision in the non-Jewish world. In the modern period, a few Jews began to question circumcision for the first time. In Germany, where Reform Judaism originated, German-Jewish physicians debated whether ritual circumcision should be either modified or eliminated. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, infant circumcision became a widely accepted medical practice in Britain and the United States, not as a ritual practice but as a preventive or therapeutic procedure. A key element in the new attitude to circumcision was the belief that the practice explained Jewish health and longevity. In the United States, Jewish physicians became especially prominent advocates for the practice, but physicians throughout the country endorsed it with equal enthusiasm. The contemporary circumcision debate in America finds expression in a wide variety of media: most notably, fiction, guides to Jewish parenting, and television sitcoms. The book closes with an epilogue assessing whether circumcision is beneficial or harmful, and whether parents have the right to request genital alteration for their infants or children.

A Question of Identity

Renee Levine Melammed — 2005-04-20

Author:: Renee Levine Melammed
ISBN:: 9780195170719
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195170717.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2005-04-20

The riots of 1391 in Spain triggered a series of developments that would change the course of Jewish history as well as of Spanish history. Spanish society was not willing to accept the large group of Jews that succumbed to forced baptism at this time; this rejection led to ethnic discrimination, the establishment of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the forced conversions of the Jews in Portugal in 1497. Regardless of their outward religious affiliation, these Iberian conversos retained a strong sense of identity that was deeply connected to Iberia, an identity that became defined as being a member of the Nation. This identity remained with the converso, whether he or she resided in Iberia or emigrated; in the latter case, each emigrant had to contend with the reality of his or her new environment. While a destination like Holland allowed for a relatively free expression of one's new Jewish affiliation, France and England did not. By contrast, the emigrant in Italy faced an array of choices, from joining an existing Jewish community to forming one's own, to remaining Catholic to attempting to maintain an ambiguous commute between the two worlds. The ties between the members of the nation were first and foremost ethnic, but also economic, familial, and emotional. Later, when the descendants of some of these conversos faced modernity, unexpected changes transpired: in Majorca, intermarriages took place for the first time; in Belmonte, conversions to Judaism were recorded; in the Southwest, claims that are extremely difficult to substantiate have been made by supposed descendants of sixteenth-century conversos . Consequently, the question of identity among Iberian conversos has proven to be surprisingly long-lived, for debates on the topic are still taking place well into the twenty-first century.

From Christian Science to Jewish Science

Ellen M. Umansky — 2005-04-20

Author:: Ellen M. Umansky
ISBN:: 9780195044003
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195044002.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2005-04-20

This book examines the attraction of American Jews to Christian Science during the early 1900s, and the emergence of Jewish Science as a counter movement. It discusses the works of the major proponents of Jewish Science: Morris Lichtenstein, Tehilla Lichtenstein, Alfred Geiger Moses, and Clifton Harby Levy. It argues that the greatest legacy of Jewish Science may well be its emphasis on the importance of spiritual healing.

The School Tradition of the Old Testament

E. W. Heaton — 2004-04-07

Author:: E. W. Heaton
ISBN:: 9780198263623
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0198263627.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2004-04-07

The books of the Old Testament are often thought of as being remote and ‘primitive’. In fact, they were written by thoroughly learned men, educated in the traditional schools of ancient Israel. This book presents a fresh and enlivening case for the strong influence that this schooling must have had on the writers of the stories, poetry and proverbs of the Bible. The eight Bampton Lectures that form the first eight chapters of this book were delivered in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, UK. The topics covered are: the evidence for schools in ancient Israel; comparisons between Egyptian and Israeli school-books and literature; ‘wisdom’ and school traditions in the Old Testament books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; the school tradition in the literary style of the teachings of the prophets and teachers; the narrative skills of the Jerusalem school tradition in the stories of the Old Testament; doubt and pessimism as expressed in Job and Ecclesiastes; and various aspects of belief and behaviour in the Old Testament, as reflected in the school tradition. The last chapter is a summing-up. The book is of interest to students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or religious studies, both in Judaism and Christianity.

Fixing God's Torah

B. Barry Levy — 2004-04-07

Author:: B. Barry Levy
ISBN:: 9780195141139
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/019514113X.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2004-04-07

Many scholars and learned readers believe that rabbinic Judaism assumes a dogmatic commitment to the notion that the Bible text, particularly the Torah text, is letter perfect; orthodox Jews often accept this notion as fact, others, as normative rabbinic doctrine. This position developed over the centuries as an internal theological and interpretative posture and as a response to external pressures. These factors include rabbinic indifference to alternative forms of the Bible text recovered from pre‐rabbinic times or non‐rabbinic sources, attacks from Christians and Muslims who accused the Jews of falsifying the text or failing to transmit it accurately, and mystical Jewish teachings that saw in the Torah a divinely revealed and perfectly transmitted document whose letters were, in their entirety, a divine name. The assumption of letter‐perfect accuracy sustains much of the midrashic literature and has become a cornerstone of the postmodern fad of decoding the text to reveal alleged references to phenomena that occurred long after its books were written. This study, based on careful examination of hundreds of authoritative rabbinic writings, offers a very different picture of the Bible's textual reality and the rabbinic beliefs about it. Beginning with late antiquity and progressing throughout the subsequent ages, this book explores Talmudic, midrashic, medieval, Renaissance, and modern rabbinic texts that address the question of the letter‐perfect accuracy of the Bible text; it is particularly attentive to the writings of Rabbis Solomon ben Adret, Jacob ben Ibn Adoniyah, and David Ibn Zimra, as well as others who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The documents analysed have been chosen from Bible commentaries, responsa, halakhic codes, guidebooks for scribes, studies of Bible manuscripts and the printed Bible, and many other rabbinic works. In presenting these sources, many translated here for the first time, the author explores the various rabbinic attempts to fix the Bible text—to correct it and to establish its authoritative spelling. He demonstrates conclusively that many of the same rabbinic figures whose teachings inform other contemporary Orthodox doctrines were quite open about the fact that their Bible texts, even their Torah scrolls, were not completely accurate. Moreover, though many of the variations are of little exegetical significance, these rabbis often acknowledged that, textually speaking, the situation was beyond repair.

Zadok's Heirs

Deborah W. Rooke — 2003-11-01

Author:: Deborah W. Rooke
ISBN:: 9780198269984
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0198269986.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

Traces the development of the Jewish high priesthood, from the earliest local chief priests in the pre‐monarchic period down to the Hasmonean priest‐kings of the first century b.c.e. Using evidence from both biblical and extra‐canonical sources, this book challenges the idea that during the post‐exilic period the high priesthood replaced the monarchy as the focus of civil authority in the community. There is no clear evidence of a high priest with civil as well as cultic power until the second century b.c.e., when the Maccabean leaders Jonathan and Simon took on the high priesthood. However, they attained the high priesthood in addition to their pre‐existing civil and military leadership role, and both they and their successors, the Hasmoneans, were viewed as kings rather than as high priests. Hence, even though the high priesthood ultimately came to be held by those who also had a position of civil authority, it was never an office that in and of itself bestowed upon its holder the right to rule in the civil sphere.

Torah in the Mouth

Martin S. Jaffee — 2003-11-01

Author:: Martin S. Jaffee
ISBN:: 9780195140675
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195140672.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

This book is a study of the relationship of oral tradition to written sources among different Jewish groups that thrived in Palestine from the later Second Temple period into Late Antiquity. Its main concern is to track the emerging awareness, within diverse Palestinian scribal groups, of the distinction between written books and the oral traditions upon which they were based or in light of which they were interpreted. The thesis holds that during the Second Temple period in particular, diverse Jewish scribal communities –such as the composers of Jewish pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea community, and the Pharisees – certainly employed oral traditions in their literary and interpretive work. But they did not appeal to oral tradition as an authoritative source of knowledge. This was reserved for written books regarded as prophetic transmissions from antiquity. The emergence of a coherent ideology of oral tradition as a kind of revelation comparable to that of Scripture is associated with the consolidation of third century rabbinic Judaism. The book argues that the rabbinic ideology of Oral Torah – “Torah in the Mouth” – is, in great measure, a legitimation of the institution of rabbinic discipleship, which depended upon the primacy of face‐to‐face relationships, unmediated by the written word.

Calendar and Community

Sacha Stern — 2003-11-01

Author:: Sacha Stern
ISBN:: 9780198270348
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0198270348.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

Traces the development of the Jewish calendar—how months and years were reckoned—from its earliest descriptions in the second century b.c.e. until it reached, in the tenth century c.e., to its present form. Solar and lunar calendars are attested in the early period, but by the first century c.e., the Jewish calendar had become predominantly lunar. A wide range of sources (literary, documentary/epigraphic, Jewish, Graeco‐Roman, and Christian) reveals, however, that Jewish communities in Palestine and the diaspora reckoned their lunar calendar independently from one another, and hence, would often celebrate the same festivals at different times. This diversity persisted until the end of antiquity, although some general trends can be identified. Until the first century c.e., Jewish lunar calendars tended to be late in relation to the solar year, and Passover would always occur after the spring equinox; whereas, by the fourth century, intercalations were adjusted in such a way that Passover was frequently earlier. In the fourth century, moreover, many communities began to calculate the day of the new moon instead of relying on observation of the new crescent, as had previously been the norm. The change from observation to calculation is particularly evident in the case of the rabbinic calendar, for which there is more evidence than any other Jewish calendar. Largely under pressure from the Babylonian rabbinic community, the rabbinic calendar gradually evolved from the third century c.e. into a fixed, calculated calendar, which became dominant in the Jewish world by the tenth century. The general evolution of the Jewish calendar throughout our period, from considerable diversity (solar and lunar calendars) to unity (a single, normative rabbinic calendar), can be explained as epitomizing the emerging solidarity and communitas of the Jewish communities of late antiquity and the early medieval world.

The Book Called Isaiah

H. G. M. Williamson — 2003-11-01

Author:: H. G. M. Williamson
ISBN:: 9780198263609
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0198263600.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

The book analyses and assesses the various methods and approaches used by nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century scholars researching into the theme of the unity and diversity of the compositional structure of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. It considers the differences between the traditional, historical–critical, form of Old Testament study and the more modern, post‐critical literary reading, and argues that a more intensive application of the traditional methods would be of great value in studying the unity of the book of Isaiah and in interpreting its message. Focusing on one particular phase in the composition of Isaiah and on the relationship of the central section, known as ‘Deutero‐Isaiah’, to the other parts of the book and to other Old Testament writings, it investigates the literary influences on Deutero‐Isaiah and analyses his subsequent editorial contribution to the continuing prophecy of the judgement and salvation of Israel, thereby reinforcing the argument that critical analysis must precede interpretation.

Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel

Michael Fishbane — 2003-11-01

Author:: Michael Fishbane
ISBN:: 9780198266990
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0198266995.001.0001
Published in print:: 1988
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

The interpretation of authoritative texts is a characteristic feature of the classical religions. In this regard, the Hebrew Bible is a fundamental source for religious exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This book investigates, in a comprehensive manner, the origins of such Scriptural interpretation within the Hebrew Bible itself. Of crucial importance is the development of a method, in order to isolate and analyse the exegetical features found (explicitly and implicitly) within this text. The terms traditum (or body of tradition) and traditio (or transmission) are introduced, and the hermeneutical dialectic between a corpus of authoritative materials and its ongoing reception is spelt out.

Beyond Auschwitz

Michael L. Morgan — 2003-11-01

Author:: Michael L. Morgan
ISBN:: 9780195148626
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195148622.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

Auschwitz is the center of the twentieth century, its dark core, yet, in the postwar years in America few intellectuals dared to come to grips with the horror and the suffering. Jewish theologians too were slow to respond until, in the turbulent years of the sixties and beyond, a small number of Jewish thinkers came to realize that the survival of Judaism and continued Jewish life require first and foremost confronting Auschwitz; looking into the abyss had become unavoidable. In this book, Michael Morgan tells the story of these theologians, and offers the first comprehensive overview of post‐Holocaust Jewish theology. He gives an account of the encounter with the death camps in the postwar writings of figures such as Hannah Arendt, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi and describes the role of the Six Day War in 1967 on the development and reception of post‐Holocaust Jewish thought. In chapters on each of the central thinkers (Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Emil Fackenheim), he analyzes the way they have struggled with the dialectic of history and identity, and with the threat of radical rupture. Throughout the book, the intellectual developments are set in their historical context and there are chapters on the reception of post‐Holocaust Jewish thought and its legacy for today. This is a book of philosophical and theological analysis as well as a work of intellectual history and will interest a wide spectrum of readers.

Ancient Jewish Novels

Lawrence M. Wills — 2003-11-01

Author:: Lawrence M.WillsEpiscopal Divinity Schoolhttp://www.eds.edu/sec.asp?pageID=96
ISBN:: 9780195151428
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Religion, Judaism
DOI:: 10.1093/0195151429.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2003-11-01

The present collection makes available in fresh translations all of the ancient examples of the Jewish novels, and introduces them for the student and general reader. The texts are divided into three categories: novels, historical novels, and testaments, and each text is given its own introduction. Similarities and differences are discussed in regard to other ancient popular literature, such as Greek novels, Roman novels, Christian novels, and Apocryphal Acts, and the distinction between fiction and history is explored. Jewish identity and the competition of ethnic groups are generally the themes, but with the large number of women characters, we are also afforded insights into gender constructions in Jewish popular literature. The protagonists of Jewish novels are often figures otherwise unknown to Jewish history, but are sometimes also biblical patriarchs (Moses, Joseph, Abraham, Job), although their stories are told here in a way surprisingly different from what is found in the Hebrew Bible. There are also possible allusions to Jewish mysticism and mysteries in some of the texts. The texts are: Greek Esther, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon (or Bel and the Serpent) from Greek Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Third Maccabees, The Marriage and Conversion of Aseneth (or Joseph and Aseneth), The Tobiad Romance, The Royal Family of Adiabene, the Testament of Joseph, the Testament of Job, and the Testament of Abraham. Some of the novels are found in the Old Testament Apocrypha, while others derive from other sources, such as Josephus or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.