Performances Of Ancient Jewish Letters

This ambitious and engaging book sets itself the task of combining a wide range of approaches to cast new light on the form and function of several ancient Jewish letters in a variety of languages. The focus of The Performance of Ancient Jewish Lettersis on applying a new emerging field of performance theory to texts and arguing that letters and other documents were not just read in silence, as is normal today, but were "performed," especially when they were addressed to a community. A distinctive feature of this book consists of being one of the first to apply the approach of performance criticism to ancient Jewish letters. Previous treatments of ancient letters have not given enough consideration to their oral context; however, this book prompts the reader to "listen" sympathetically with the audience. The Performance focuses close attention on the ways in which the engagement of the audience during the performance of a text might be read from traces present in the text itself. This book invites the audience to hear a fresh reading of a family letter from Hermopolis, concerning ugly tunics and castor oil; festal letters, about issues surrounding the celebration of Passover, Purim and Hanukkah; a diaspora letter on how to live in a foreign land; and also an official letter concerning the building of the Jerusalem temple. These letters will help us understand a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely, MMT. Marvin L. Miller argues for the centrality of performance in the life of Jews of the Second Temple period, an area of study that has been traditionally neglected. The Performanceadvances the fields of orality and epistolography and supplements other scholars' works in those fields.

Aaron Ricker locates the purpose of Romans in its function as a tool of community identity definition. Ricker employs a comparative analysis of the ways in which community identity definition is performed in first-century association culture, including several ancient network letters comparable to Romans. Ricker's examination of the community advice found in Rom 12-15 reveals in this new context an ancient example of the ways in which an inscribed addressee community can be invited in a letter to see and comport itself as a “proper” association network community. The ideal community addressed in the letter to the Romans is defined as properly unified and orderly, as well accommodating to – and clearly distinct from – cultures “outside.” Finally, it is defined as linked to a proper network with recognised leadership (i.e., the inscribed Paul of the letter and his network). Paul's letter to the Romans is in many ways a baffling and extraordinary document. In terms of its community-defining functions and strategies, however, Ricker shows its purpose to be perfectly clear and understandable.

Embodied Performance presents a methodology by which performer-interpreters can bring their intuitive interpretations to the scholarly conversations about biblical compositions. It may not be comfortable, for scholarship is out of practice in listening to emotion and intuition. It may not be the only way to bring the fullness of human meaning making into scholarly discussions. It is a beginning, as Sarah Agnew, storyteller and scholar, places herself as the subject and object under examination, observing her practice as a biblical storyteller making meaning through embodied performance, and develops a coherent method rigorously tested with an Embodied Performance Analysis of Romans. Follow Sarah's story as she searches within Biblical Performance Criticism for such a method, before determining the need to strike out in a new direction from within an already innovative field. All biblical scholars are complex human beings, making meaning through their embodiment, their emotions, their embeddedness in community. Embodied Performance Analysis offers a way to attend to and incorporate the full range of human meaning making in our engagement with biblical compositions, for richer discussion closer to the intent of the compositions themselves.

The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.

Back cover: How did the Qumran discoveries change New Testament scholarship? What are the main insights to be gained from the Qumran corpus with regard to the Jesus tradition, Paul's language and theology, the dualistic language and worldview of the Fourth Gospel, or the formation of the biblical Canon? The articles of this volume present the fruits of 25 years of scholarship on Qumran and the New Testament.

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.

The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.