Dinah S Daughters

The status of women in the ancient Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts has long been a contested issue. What does being a Jewess entail in antiquity? Men in ancient Jewish culture are defined primarily by what duties they are expected to perform, the course of action that they take. The Jewess, in contrast, is bound by stricture. Writing on the formation and transformation of the ideology of female Jewishness in the ancient world, Zlotnick places her treatment in a broad, comparative, Mediterranean context, bringing in parallels from Greek and Roman sources. Drawing on episodes from the Hebrew Bible and on Midrashic, Mishnaic, and Talmudic texts, she pays particular attention to the ways in which they attempt to determine the boundaries of communal affiliation through real and perceived differences between Israelites, or Jews, on one hand and non-Israelites, or Gentiles, on the other. Women are often associated in the sources with the forbidden, and foreign women are endowed with a curious freedom of action and choice that is hardly ever shared by their Jewish counterparts. Delilah, for instance, is one of the most autonomous women in the Bible, appearing without patronymic or family ties. She also brings disaster. Dinah, the Jewess, by contrast, becomes an agent of self-destruction when she goes out to mingle with gentile female friends. In ancient Judaism the lessons of such tales were applied as rules to sustain membership in the family, the clan, and the community. While Zlotnick's central project is to untangle the challenges of sex, gender, and the formation of national identity in antiquity, her book is also a remarkable study of intertextual relations within the Jewish literary tradition.

Believed by some to have been the original beginning of the Old Testament, The Book of Jasher has been suppressed and rediscovered numerous times since its initial translation from the Hebrew in AD 800. Referred to in Joshua and Second Samuel, this apocryphal book of the Bible expands upon some of the stories we know so well: we meet Cain and Abel's three sisters, are privy to a more detailed account of the awful circumstances of the Great Flood and Noah's conduct toward the multitudes who assembled before his ark, and learn more about the women of the Bible. Jasher's version of the story of Abraham is considered by many to be the most beautiful as this new perspective on the Old Testament will inspire believers and intrigue readers of ancient literature.

This new edition of the standard work "The Englishman's Hebrew Concordance of the Old Testament" is an improved and corrected edition that features a new, larger format. Now coded to "Strong's, " it is invaluable in Bible study for those who do not know Hebrew. A new index of out-of-sequence "Strong's" numbers allows the reader to quickly and easily locate any word by its "Strong's "number. The Hebrew and English indexes have been retained.

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