Early Judaism And Its Modern Interpreters

An essential resource for scholars and students Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.

Jewish writings from the period of Second Temple present a rich and complex variety of first-hand materials. Here, the editors have updated their classic sourcebook on Jewish beliefs and practices to take into account current thinking about the sources.

Presents eighteen commissioned articles on biblical exegesis in early Judaism, covering the period after the Hebrew Bible was written and before the beginning of rabbinic Judaism. -- from publisher description

The historical literature / Peter R. Ackroyd -- Prophecy and the prophetic literature / Gene M. Tucker -- The wisdom literature / James L. Crenshaw -- The lyrical literature / Erhard S. Gerstenberger -- Legends of wise heroes and heroines / Susan Niditch -- Apocalyptic literature / Paul D. Hanson -- The Hebrew Bible and modern culture / Walter Harrelson.

In this fully revised and expanded edition, Nickelsburg introduces the reader to the broad range of Jewish literature that is not part of either the Bible or the standard rabbinic works. This includes especially the Apocrypha (such as 1 Maccabees), the Pseudepigrapha (such as 1 Enoch), the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of Josephus, and the works of Philo.

Created in conjunction with an exhaustive critical commentary, this is an English translation of '1 Enoch' taking into consideration all of the textual data now available the Ethiopic version, the Greek texts and the Dead Sea Aramaic fragments.

In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars portrayed Judaism as the dark religious backdrop to the liberating events of Jesus' life and the rise of the early church. Since the 1950s, however, a dramatic shift has occurred in the study of Judaism, driven by new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and new methods and tools for analyzing sources. George Nickelsburg here provides a broad and synthesizing picture of the results of the past fifty years of scholarship on early Judaism and Christianity. He organizes his discussion around a number of traditional topics: scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God's activity on humanity's behalf, agents of God's activity, eschatology, historical circumstances, and social settings. Each of the chapters discusses the findings of contemporary research on early Judaism, and then sketches the implications of this research for a possible reinter-pretation of Christianity. Still, in the author's view, there remains a major Jewish-Christian agenda yet to be developed and implemented.

"Over the past generation, several major discoveries and methodological innovations have led scholars to reevaluate the foundations of Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the most famous, but other materials have further altered our understanding of Judaism's development after the Biblical era. This volume explores some of the latest clues into how early Judaism took shape ..."--Back cover.