The understanding that Jews engaged with a full sweep of Islamic sciences was arguably one of the earliest insights of modern Jewish historiography; indeed, medieval Jews were sometimes explicit about turning to non-Jewish sources. But scholarship has traditionally highlighted Jewish engagement with the larger world in fields other than law, such as poetry, theology, and linguistics. Building on the work of others, After Revelation recognizes that medieval Jews and Muslims structured their traditions in similar ways.
Read MoreAwakening Awareness of the Body
May conversations such as these prompt experiences of embodied connection, even across digital spaces, and help us to recover a bodily awareness so often buried beneath reams of paper. May we be mindful of the care and feeding not only of the prophet (and sometimes the deity), but also of the scholar, the student, the writer, and the reader.
Read MoreArt as Text: When Mary Was Lazarus’s Sole Sister
The question of how many sisters were portrayed with Jesus at the Raising of Lazarus in early Christian art has not previously been explored, and interestingly, the hypothesis that Martha was added later aligns with the number of sisters portrayed in early art of the Raising of Lazarus.
Read MoreProphetic Mediation and Ritual Practice
Scenting a space with anointing oil and incense, creates a sensory experience of fragrant divine presence, burning a sacrifice on an alter creates the perception of a divine receiver, veiling and obscuring a sanctuary’s adyton creates a perception of an inhabitant etc.
Read MoreThe Decolonial Prophetic Body
The task ahead in repairing the violence done by the dualistic mind/body hierarchy—and especially the notion of some bodies and their worth as superior/inferior—is not simply an individual task, but a communal one. Indeed, the notion of text as embodied creates not only new avenues of research but also a deep responsibility to the communities who hold these texts as sacred.
Read MoreProphetic Bodies in the Ancient Near East
The prophet mediates or “incarnates” divine emotions, serving as their bodily representative; in other words, the prophetic body becomes the site of the bodily prophecy.
Read MoreWhose Body Is It Anyway: A Response to The Prophetic Body
So, if they are characters who may or may not replicate the experiences of a tangible historical person, then do they have a body? Are their imagined or projected bodies actual bodies that can be psychoanalyzed or engaged as if they were human? Is a character’s fictional embodiment part of its function as avatar for the audience?
Read MoreTowards Divine Embodiment and Biblical Animism: A Review and Suggestion for Anathea Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body
I wish to engage in an enthusiastic nudge for Portier-Young to continue to explore in subsequent volumes a theme that I consider to be one of most original insights of the book. This is the claim that the divine is sometimes represented in biblical prophetic as embodied, whether a parallel fashion with the prophetic body, or as a reciprocal intertwining with the dynamically transforming prophetic body (esp. Portier-Young 2024, 57-58).
Read MoreThe Prophetic Body: A 2024 SBL Review Panel
SBL Review Panel for Anathea Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body: Emodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature
Co-Sponsored by the Religious Experience in Antiquity and Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds Program Units of the Society of Biblical Literature
November 23, 2024
Human Salvation in Early Christianity: Exploring the Theology of Physicalist Soteriology
Gabriel von Max, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter (1878) Montreal Museum of Fine Arts [Wikimedia Commons].
Gabriel von Max, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter (1878) Montreal Museum of Fine Arts [Wikimedia Commons].
Scully’s book commendably demonstrates the need for renewed and careful attention to a pattern of thought that has been treated poorly, and it does so with sharp analytical clarity.
Read MoreCaesarea Maritima and the Ecclesiastical History
Image from Caesarea Maritima [Wikimedia Commons].
Image from Caesarea Maritima [Wikimedia Commons].
Rather than studying the History through a literary lens, my dissertation re-visualizes the texts and the relationships therein through a process of mapping – first, by understanding the city itself and its position among trading cities on the Mediterranean Sea; as I engage with data sets and digital tools to create this method of understanding, it becomes clear how the narrative thread, style, and scope of the History played a role in the text’s reception and legacy.
Read MoreThe Case for Retraction of Academic Authentications of Forged Fragments
Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This position paper issues a call for editors and publishers with oversight over peer-reviewed publications of inauthentic post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments to embark on the processes that would consider (and likely result in) retraction. By common consent, findings in the publications identified in this essay are unreliable at best; many present material subsequently deemed falsified. Retraction is the proper and justified measure to take regarding these publications in order to correct the academic record and alert any and all potential readers to the untrustworthy nature of their content.
Read MoreDivine Names and Numinous Power: Onomastic Tools to Help and Harm
Power in the Name contributes to this growing body of work unbeholden to the myopic strictures of materialism and (more broadly) scientism by comparatively analyzing examples of humans changing their environment (e.g., healing or hurting others) by invoking powerful divine names.
Read MoreReview | The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land
Ultimately, Feldman is doing two things in this book: she is making a source-critical argument about the Pentateuch, and she is translating P. These are two separate, and significant, tasks. They’re interrelated, but not the same thing.
Read MoreAncient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years
Paula Fredriksen begins Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years with a question: considering the variety of gods and local deities present in both the ancient Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, how did one singular god end up dominating the focus of the late Roman Empire?
Read MoreIntroducing the Text Lab: Helping Students Engage with Ancient Sources
This article introduces a classroom activity called a Text Lab, which helps students engage critically with ancient texts while familiarizing them with the tools and scholarship necessary to analyze these sources.
Read MoreFrom Dinner to Donor: the Social Exchanges at the Heart of Rabbinic Expertise
A bowl of figs, fresco from the main triclinium at Villa of Poppaea in Oplontis.
A bowl of figs, fresco from the main triclinium at Villa of Poppaea in Oplontis.
“This book plunges us deep into the social relationships that made the production of rabbinic expertise possible. Weaving together accounts of tangible material support with sites of contact between rabbis and other people, I explore how rabbinic expertise was continually enacted and challenged through social interactions.”
Read MorePublication Preview | Writing a History of Israelite Religion
Hilltop cult installation surrounded by a circle of boulders, from the Bull Site in the Samarian highlands. Credit: Photograph by Natritmeyer.
Hilltop cult installation surrounded by a circle of boulders, from the Bull Site in the Samarian highlands. Credit: Photograph by Natritmeyer.
“Cultural difference does not condemn us to incomprehension. It forces us to go beyond our own cultural horizons in an effort to make sense of what is going on in the world of others. Ancient historians must use the mindset of a cultural anthropologist, in addition to the traditional tools of their discipline.”
Read MoreAuthor Response | Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven
Rafael Neis, Unwarranted Optimism (gouache and acrylic on paper, 6 in. x 3 1/2 in., 2016)
Rafael Neis, Unwarranted Optimism (gouache and acrylic on paper, 6 in. x 3 1/2 in., 2016)
“I view my book not only as a celebration of resemblance and its nonsensical relations, but also an interruption of an exceptionalized and recurring image: that of God. The play of resemblances that found themselves in a divine origin is a patently human vanity project.”
Read MoreThe Theory of the Raven
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“The book, in re-centering this vibrancy, enacts a refusal of closure by demanding that we remain open to the persistence of heteronormative and androcentric patriarchy alongside queerness, transness, and animality.”
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