The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism
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The Dictionary of Early Judaism is the first reference work devoted exclusively to Second Temple Judaism (fourth century b.c.e. through second century c.e.). The first section of this substantive and incredible work contains thirteen major essays that attempt to synthesize major aspects of Judaism in the period between Alexander and Hadrian. The second ? and significantly longer ? section offers 520 entries arranged alphabetically. Many of these entries have cross-references and all have select bibliographies. Equal attention is given to literary and nonliterary (i.e. archaeological and epigraphic) evidence and New Testament writings are included as evidence for Judaism in the first century c.e. Several entries also give pertinent information on the Hebrew Bible. The Dictionary of Early Judaism is intended to not only meet the needs of scholars and students ? at which it succeeds admirably ? but also to provide accessible information for the general reader. It is ecumenical and international in character, bringing together nearly 270 authors from as many as twenty countries and including Jews, Christians, and scholars of no religious affiliation.
Outside the Bible, 3-Volume Set
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The Hebrew Bible is only part of ancient Israel's writings. Another collection of Jewish works has survived from late- and post-biblical times, a great library that bears witness to the rich spiritual life of Jews in that period. This library consists of the most varied sorts of texts: apocalyptic visions and prophecies, folktales and legends, collections of wise sayings, laws and rules of conduct, commentaries on Scripture, ancient prayers, and much, much more. While specialists have studied individual texts or subsections of this vast library, Outside the Bible seeks for the first time to bring together all the major components into a single collection, gathering portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the biblical Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha, and the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus. The editors have brought together these diverse works in order to highlight what has often been neglected; their common Jewish background. For this reason the commentaries that accompany the texts devote special attention to references to Hebrew Scripture and to issues of halakhah (Jewish law), their allusions to motifs and themes known from later Rabbinic writings in Talmud and Midrash, their evocation of recent or distant events in Jewish history, and their references to other texts in this collection. The work of more than seventy contributing experts in a range of fields, Outside the Bible offers new insights into the development of Judaism and Early Christianity. This three-volume set of translations, introductions, and detailed commentaries is a must-have for scholars, students, and anyone interested in this great body of ancient Jewish writings. The collection includes a general introduction and opening essays, new and revised translations, and detailed introductions, commentaries, and notes that place each text in its historical and cultural context. A timeline of the Second Temple Period, two appendixes (Books of the Bible; Second Temple Literature), and a general subject index complete the set.
Josephus in nine volumes [plus index]
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Greco-Roman antiquity's premier Jewish historian. Josephus, soldier, statesman, historian, was a Jew born at Jerusalem about AD 37. A man of high descent, he early became learned in Jewish law and Greek literature and was a Pharisee. After pleading in Rome the cause of some Jewish priests he returned to Jerusalem and in 66 tried to prevent revolt against Rome, managing for the Jews the affairs of Galilee. In the troubles that followed he made his peace with Vespasian. Present at the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, he received favors from these two as emperors and from Domitian, and assumed their family name Flavius. He died after 97. As a historical source Josephus is invaluable. His major works are: History of the Jewish War, in seven books, from 170 BC to his own time, first written in Aramaic but translated by himself into the Greek we now have; and Jewish Antiquities, in twenty books, from the creation of the world to AD 66. The Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of Josephus, which is in thirteen volumes, also includes the autobiographical Life and his treatise Against Apion.
Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary: Volume 9, Life of Josephus
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Flavius Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, is among the most important writers from classical antiquity. The significance of the works of Josephus as sources for our understanding of biblical history and of the political history of Palestine under Roman rule, can scarcely be overestimated.This is the second volume published in this commentary series, which is the first comprehensive literary-historical commentary on the works of Flavius Josephus in English.Flavius Josephus: Life of Josephus is also published by Brill in paperback (ISBN 0 391 04205 x, still available)
Death of Caligula: Josephus Ant. Iud. xix 1–273, translation and commentary
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The emperor Gaius ("Caligula") was assassinated in January A.D.41. Since he was the last of the Julii, and he left no heir, it seemed that the dynasty of Caesar and Augustus was finished.Accordingly, the Republic was restored, but then a coup d'etat by the Praetorian Guard put Claudius in power ... the dramatic events of these few days are a crucial turning-point in Roman history - the moment when the military basis of the Principate was first made explicit.Tacitus' account has not survived, and Suetonius and Dio Cassisu offer no adequate substitute. Fortunately, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus chose to insert into his "Jewish Antiquities" - as an example of the providence of God - a detailed narrative of the assassination plot and its aftermathtaken from contemporary and well-informed Roman sources.This new edition of T.P. Wiseman's acclaimed Death of an Emperor (his translation and commentary of Josephus' account of Caligula's assassination) includes an updated bibliography, revised introduction, translation and commentary. Appendix 1 on the Augustan Palatine has been completely revised totake account of recent archaeological information.
Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery
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To prove his sons' treachery, Herod embellished a letter. To certify his history of Vespasian's Judaean campaign, Josephus marshaled epistolary testimony. To alleviate a domestic problem, the Israelite king David sent a missive with a man it marks for death. Arguing for the importance of the first-century historian Josephus to the study of classical and Hellenistic literature, Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery investigates letters in Josephus' texts. The author breaks new ground by analyzing classical, Hellenistic, and Jewish texts' use of letters, comparing those texts to Josephus' narratives, a virtual archive containing hundreds of letters. An external voice similar to speeches, embedded letters raise questions of authority, drive and color dramatic scenes, and function at textual and meta-textual levels to deceive their readers. Josephus, contextualized in a complex intellectual and cultural milieu, sustains and develops epistolarity in important ways that will be of interest to classicists, historians, theologians, and comparatists.
Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome
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This book investigates the discourse on idolatry and images, especially statues, in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, with a particular focus on his numerous accounts of a contentious and at times iconoclastic relationship between Jews and images. Placing this narrative material within a wider comparative context, both Jewish and non-Jewish, demonstrates that the impression of strict aniconism uniform and categorical opposition to all figurative art emerging from Josephus is in part a rhetorical construct, an effort to reframe Jewish iconoclastic behavior not as a resistance to Roman domination but as an expression of certain cultural values shared by Jews and Romans alike. Josephus thus articulates in this discourse on images an idea of Jewish identity that functioned to mitigate an increasingly tense relationship between Romans and Jews in the wake of the Jewish revolt against Rome.
Life of Josephus
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Flavius Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, is among the most important writers from classical antiquity. The significance of the works of Josephus as sources for our understanding of biblical history and of the political history of Palestine under Roman rule, can scarcely be overestimated.This is the second volume published in this commentary series, which is the first comprehensive literary-historical commentary on the works of Flavius Josephus in English.Flavius Josephus: Life of Josephus is also published by Brill in paperback (ISBN 0 391 04205 x, still available)
Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism
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Former students, colleagues and friends of the eminent classicist and historian Prof. Louis H. Feldman are pleased to honor him with a Jubilee volume. While Prof. Feldman has long been considered an outstanding scholar of Josephus, his scholarly interests and research interests pertain to almost all aspects of the ancient world and Jews.The articles in Judaism in the Ancient World: Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume relate to the fields studies by Prof. Feldman such as biblical interpretation, Judaism and Hellenism, Jews and Gentiles, Josephus, Jewish Literatures of the Second Temple, History of the Mishnah and Talmud periods, Jerusalem and much more.The contributors to this volume are among the most prominent in their fields and hail from the international scholarly community.
Prayer in Josephus
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This book is an analysis of prayer in the works of Flavius Josephus, comprising a study of Josephus'own views and an analysis of 32 prayer texts within his narrative. New light is thus shed on his historiographic method and his theology.
Passover in the Work of Josephus
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This book is about Flavius Josephus presentation of the Feast of Passover in his works.The first part is an analysis of the texts in which Flavius Josephus mentions this Feast in his paraphrase of the Bible. In the second part, the references to Passover in the rest of his works are considered. The third part is an attempt to contextualize the results of the first two parts in his contemporaneus literature and historical events.Flavius Josephus is normally referred to in a fragmentary way. In this study it is possible to find a more complete idea of his presentation of such an important celebration. From it, both New Testament and Early Judaism scholars, could benefit by acquiring a more comprehensive insight of this subject and its context.
The Masada Myth
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In 73 A.D., legend has it, 960 Jewish rebels under siege in the ancient desert fortress of Masada committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman legion. Recorded in only one historical source, the story of Masada was obscure for centuries. In "The Masada Myth," Israeli sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda tracks the process by which Masada became an ideological symbol for the State of Israel, the dramatic subject of movies and miniseries, a shrine venerated by generations of Zionists and Israeli soldiers, and the most profitable tourist attraction in modern Israel. Ben-Yehuda describes how, after nearly 1800 years, the long, complex, and unsubstantiated narrative of Josephus Flavius was edited and augmented in the twentieth century to form a simple and powerful myth of heroism. He looks at the ways this new mythical narrative of Masada was created, promoted, and maintained by pre-state Jewish underground organizations, the Israeli army, archaeological teams, mass media, youth movements, textbooks, the tourist industry, and the arts. He discusses the various organizations and movements that created the Masada experience (usually a ritual trek through the Judean desert followed by a climb to the fortress and a dramatic reading of the Masada story), and how it changed over decades from a Zionist pilgrimage to a tourist destination. Placing the story in a larger historical, sociological, and psychological context, Ben-Yehuda draws upon theories of collective memory and mythmaking to analyze Masada s crucial role in the nation-building process of modern Israel and the formation of a new Jewish identity. An expert on deviance and social control, Ben-Yehuda looks in particular at how and why a military failure and an enigmatic, troubling case of mass suicide (in conflict with Judaism s teachings) were reconstructed and fabricated as a heroic tale."
Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome
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In Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome William den Hollander places under the microscope the Judaean historian's own account of the latter part of his life, following his first encounters with the Romans. Episodes of Josephus' life, such as his embassy to Rome prior to the outbreak of the 1st Judaean Revolt, his prophetic pronouncement of Vespasian's imminent rise to the imperial throne, and his time in the Roman prisoner-of-war camp, are subjected to rigorous analysis and evaluated against the broader ancient evidence by the application of a vivid historical imagination. Den Hollander also explores at great length the relationships formed by Josephus with the Flavian emperors and other individuals of note within the Roman army camp and, later, in the city of Rome. He builds solidly on recent trends in Josephan research that emphasize Josephus' distance from the corridors of power.
The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome
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Twenty-seven interdisciplinary essays on aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, exemplifying a wide range of techniques, by a well-known scholar. Three are previously unpublished, including a reappraisal of the Judaism and Hellenism debate and a study of the Sardis synagogue. The books overall coherence derives from the authors long-standing interests in the analysis of texts as documents of cultural and religious interaction, and in how Jewish communities were woven into the social fabric of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman East. The four sections are: Greeks and Jews, Josephus, The Jewish Diaspora and Epigraphy, and finally Beyond the Greeks and Romans, essays which extend into Christian literature and on to the nineteenth century reception of the Judaism/Hellenism dichotomy. Scholars and students from a wide variety of backgrounds will benefit.This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details."
Contours in the Text
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This is an examination of Paul's possible awareness of the plurality of Ancient Jewish Scripture. Norton-Piliavsky places Paul's work within the context of ancient Jewish literary practice, bridging the gap between textual criticism and social history in contemporary discussions. The author argues that studies of ancient Jewish exegesis draw on two distinct analytical modes: the text-critical and the socio-historical. He then shows that the two are usually joined together in discussions of ancient Jewish literature arguing that as a result of this commentators often allow the text-critical approach to guide their efforts to understand historical questions. Norton argues that text-critical and historical data must be combined, but not conflated and in this volume sets out a new approach, showing that exegesis was part of an ongoing discussion, which included mutually supporting written and oral practices. Norton shows that Josephus' and Dead Sea sectarians' use of textual variation, like Paul's, belongs to this discussion demonstrating that neither Paul nor his contemporaries viewed Jewish scripture as a fixed literary monolith. Rather, they took part in a dynamic exegetical dialogue, constituted by oral as much as textual modes.
A Companion to Josephus
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A Companion to Josephus presents a collection of readings from international scholars that explore the works of the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Represents the first single-volume collection of readings to focus on Josephus Covers a wide range of disciplinary approaches to the subject, including reception history Features contributions from 29 eminent scholars in the field from four continents Reveals important insights into the Jewish and Roman worlds at the moment when Christianity was gaining ground as a movement Named Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 by Choice Magazine, a publication of the American Library Association
