As scholars continue to investigate the bowls from multiple angles – paleographic, onomastic, linguistic, social historical, legal, literary, ritual, visual, gendered, comparative – our understanding of Babylonian Judaism and late antique society will continue to develop. Manekin-Bamberger’s insights about the bowls’ contractual dimensions and the professional scribes who produced them – as well as about the overlap of law and magic on a broader scale – are an essential contribution to this field, and will no doubt shape, methodologically and historically, how future studies approach this corpus and its relationship to other ancient Jewish texts and artifacts and to the long history of magic, law, and religion.
Read MoreSlip Slidin' Away
Mira Balberg, however, points to the shifting attitudes towards forgetfulness and forgetting as a pivotal moment in the history of the rabbinic movement, and in Fractured Tablets she offers a fresh new reading of the rabbinic construction of forgetting. The rabbis shaped their subject as a fallible and often confused human being, bumbling around the world, trying to observe God’s commandments.
Read MoreRemembering the Story of Israel: Historical Summaries and Memory Formation in Second Temple Judaism
The volume shines when it considers the interplay between materiality and close readings of literature. But the question stands for our field as it grapples with memory studies: what, indeed, is the link between form and practice, between literature and history?
Read MoreAll the (Ancient) World’s a Stage
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, by Lafayette Photo, London. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, by Lafayette Photo, London. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The saint, renowned for his discipline over the body, shows tenderness. These verses speak to genuine human fears about the finality of death and the chasm between the living and the dead. Just as Hamlet famously considers Yorick’s skull, a prop to invoke memento mori, Jacob depicts Symeon as holding out his foot for all to behold as we listen.
Read MoreWritten and Spoken Scripture in Wollenberg's The Closed Book
“Wollenberg’s book compels us to keep firmly in mind what the trope of Written Torah v. Oral Torah tends to obscure, namely, that the rabbis absorbed, studied, and taught Scripture chiefly as an oral text.”
Read MorePaul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity
Simeon Griswold, The Conversion of Saul (1857) Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Simeon Griswold, The Conversion of Saul (1857) Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Yarbro Collins’s goal in Paul Transformed is to capture the multiple images of Paul that early Christ-confessors created from reading the apostle’s letters.
Read MoreBefore the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library
Mastnjak, Nathan. Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Mastnjak, Nathan. Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
A bold, programmatic attempt to fill a significant methodological lacuna, Mastnjak’s Before the Scrolls argues that the study of the prophetic literature must begin with—and answer to—the material realities of textual production in ancient Israel and the Second Temple period.
Read MoreThe Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry
“The pioneering study of Thea Gomelauri unfolds the history of the Lailashi Codex, and presents the paleographical and codicological description of one of the most ancient Bible codices.”
Read MoreThe Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ with the Canaanite Woman and Her Daughter (1909) [Wikiart].
Jewish Law & Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, & Infidelity in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian
James Tissot, Wedding at Cana/Les noces de Cana (ca. 1886-1894) Brooklyn Museum, New York City [Wikimedia].
James Tissot, Wedding at Cana/Les noces de Cana (ca. 1886-1894) Brooklyn Museum, New York City [Wikimedia].
Monnickendam’s study wrestles with the complexity of Ephrem’s thought as well as the centrality of marriage imagery within his writings. While each chapter pulls readers into legal minutiae from across the ancient Mediterranean, she bookends her analysis with easy-to-follow summaries of her findings.
Read MoreWomen and the Polis: Public Honorific Inscriptions for Women in the Greek Cities from the Late Classical to the Roman Period
Stele bearing an inscription the Aglauros priestess, Timokrite, as an honor from Athenian demos (ca. 247/6 or 246/5 BCE) Acropolis Museum [Wikimedia].
Stele bearing an inscription the Aglauros priestess, Timokrite, as an honor from Athenian demos (ca. 247/6 or 246/5 BCE) Acropolis Museum [Wikimedia].
Women and the Polis is a welcomed addition to the scholarly conversation not only about ancient Greek benefactresses in particular but also about ancient Greek benefaction in general.
Read MoreCoptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects
By methodically reading through its chapters and working through its exercises and chrestomathy, a user of Allen’s grammar can rapidly increase their familiarity with a good amount of the variation found in Coptic texts, then have the book on hand as a quick initial resource for whatever they might happen to read afterwards.
Read MoreThe Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity
Manuscript of the letter of Clement of Alexandria to Theodore featuring a reference to the Secret Gospel of Mark [Wikimedia].
Manuscript of the letter of Clement of Alexandria to Theodore featuring a reference to the Secret Gospel of Mark [Wikimedia].
Readers will learn a great deal from G. Smith and Landau about paleography, apocrypha, monasticism, the history of sexuality, and the strange academic environments in which all of these are explored: filled with curiosity, envy, ambition, and flashes of brilliance.
Read MoreTime and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism
By arguing that the rabbis used Roman holidays as a canvas on which to sort out their hybrid identity, Gribetz presents a model of Romanness commonly ignored and passed over by scholars of classics.
Read MoreContested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
The events of the last few years have made clear how all-consuming and central the search for cures can be in the formation of group identity—and group boundaries. This is an overdue study that gives proper attention to the search for healing among the diverse populations of Late Antique Palestine.
Read MoreThe Damascus Document, Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls
Fraade’s balanced and succinct style of commentary is… a product of and testament to the author’s meticulous use of the comparative method and will surely contribute to conversations between scholars of Scrolls and specialists in cognate fields.
Read MoreMaterials That Make Difference
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (Exhibited 1820) Tate Collection.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (Exhibited 1820) Tate Collection.
The case of the Jewish catacombs exemplifies how scholars of the ancient world have long worked with undertheorized ideas about religious identities, religious communities, and the relationship between material culture and lived religion, among other things.
Read MoreThe Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome
Canaletto, Rome: Ruins of the Forum, Looking towards the Capitol (1742) Windsor Castle Collection [Wikimedia].
Canaletto, Rome: Ruins of the Forum, Looking towards the Capitol (1742) Windsor Castle Collection [Wikimedia].
Denzey Lewis poses the provocative question: how did Rome become holy? The answer, as we see by the end of this book, lies mainly in the logic behind the compilation of the sources rather than in the sources per se.
Read MoreThe Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant 200 BCE–132 CE: Power, Strategies, and Ethnic Configurations
The key concept which Van Maaren brings to the study of ancient Jewish ethnic identity is Andreas Wimmer’s approach of ethnic boundary making, outlined in Wimmer’s 2013 book. This approach gives less focus to the question of what makes an ethnicity, and more to how such attempts to create and define ethnicity are important.
Read MoreHell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature
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Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell (modeled 1880-1917 and cast by Alexis Rudier 1926-1928) Philadelphia Museum of Art - Rodin Museum.
Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell (modeled 1880-1917 and cast by Alexis Rudier 1926-1928) Philadelphia Museum of Art - Rodin Museum.
Building upon scholarship that sees juridical contexts at the heart of these conceptions of punishment and just desserts, Henning pushes such conclusions further by asking what other assumptions, namely concerning bodies and gender, are brought into our scholarly interpretations of Hell and the afterlife.
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