Jewish Cultural Encounters In The Ancient Mediterranean And Near Eastern World

Taking the flexible concept of “cultural encounter” as a starting point, this volume presents a variety of studies which focus on the impact of encounters between cultures, groups, and individuals as it relates to ancient Jewish religion, culture, and society.

Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.

This volume abandons the document-based approach of standard introductions and investigates aggregates of classical rabbinic texts through three broad perspectives – intertextuality, east and west, halakhah and aggadah – generating fresh insights that will reset the scholarly agenda.

"This monograph argues that Roman bathhouses were laboratories in which Jews interacted with Graeco-Roman culture. It tells the story of the Jews who frequented them, documenting their pleasures, anxieties, and concerns, and reconstructing their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the activities that took place there. The chapters of the book are arranged as an invitation to follow the ancient Jew as he or she engages the bath, and highlights details small and large about what Jews knew about the place, but even more so, about what they felt about it. Were they intimidated by the nudity that prevailed there or by the sculptures that adorned the place? How did Jewish law configure the bath? What were the Jewish social norms that developed there? Exploring these questions enhances and complicates our understanding of ancient Judaism and its encounter with the dominant way of life around it. Jewish engagement with and perceptions of the bathhouse are documented in numerous sources: inscriptions on stone, documents written on papyri, and most of all, in hundreds of references in the Jewish literature of the time. These stories, laws, and regulations, written in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, reflect every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient Mediterranean. In this monograph, Yaron Eliav brings all of these sources together for the first time"--

This book is a collection of cutting-edge essays on the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of ancient Mediterranean media culture, featuring interdisciplinary feedback from scholars in New Testament studies and Classics.

Volume V of the CIIP contains inscriptions from Galilee during the time of Alexander the Great until the end of the Byzantian rule in the 7th century in all the languages used during that period, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Samaritan, Palmyrene Aramaic, and Christian Aramaic. The volume encompasses more than 2,000 texts grouped by their find-sites, from the Northwest to the Southeast.

This publication seeks to endeavour the relationship between material artefacts and reading practices in ancient and medieval cultures. While the acts of reception of written artefacts in former times are irretrievably lost, some of the involved artefacts are preserved and might comprise hints to the ancient reading practices. In form of case studies, the contributions to this volume examine various forms of written artefacts as to their implications on modes of reading. Analyzing different Qumran scrolls, codices, Tefillin, Mezuzot, magical texts, tablets, bricks, and statues as well as meta-textual and iconographic aspects, the articles inquire the possibilities of how to correlate material aspects to assumed modes of reception and practices of reading. The contributions stem from Egyptology, Papyrology, Qumran Studies, Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, Ancient Christianity, and Islamic Studies. In total, this volume contributes to the research on practices of reception in times past and demonstrates the potential hidden in text-bearing artefacts.

Divine Names are a key component in the communication between humans and gods in Antiquity. Their complexity derives not only from the impressive number of onomastic elements available to describe and target specific divine powers, but also from their capacity to be combined within distinctive configurations of gods. The volume collects 36 essays pertaining to many different contexts - Egypt, Anatolia, Levant, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome - which address the multiple functions and wide scope of divine onomastics. Scrutinized in a diachronic and comparative perspective, divine names shed light on how polytheisms and monotheisms work as complex systems of divine and human agents embedded in an historical framework. Names imply knowledge and play a decisive role in rituals; they move between cities and regions, and can be translated; they interact with images and reflect the intrinsic plurality of divine beings. This vivid exploration of divine names pays attention to the balance between tradition and innovation, flexibility and constraints, to the material and conceptual parameters of onomastic practices, to cross-cultural contexts and local idiosyncrasies, in a word to human strategies for shaping the gods through their names.