“I think we rather need to compare how the modern conceptualizations of spirit possession are similar or dissimilar to the ones in biblical texts. To put it bluntly: We do not need to see what makes an angel in ethnographic data and how people describe angels in order to see which beings in biblical texts might qualify as angels. Rather, we may compare different angel conceptualizations and narratives.”
Read MoreThe Critical Potential of Spirits: Hebrew Philology, the Poetics of Relation, and Unfamiliar Selves
“Flying in the face of scholarship’s “hermeneutical exorcism,” Carlson tells ethnographic stories about people who experience spirit phenomena. Reading their stories has the potential to generate what Édouard Glissant calls the “poetics of relation.” Opportunities for renewed and reconnective perception and perspective-taking, Glissant’s poetics of relation are his key to the project of “transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.””
Read MoreSBL 2022 Review Panel: Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible
The 2022 SBL Book Review panel of Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena (De Gruyter 2022) by Reed Carlson. The panelists were: Jutta Jokiranta (University of Helsinki), David Lambert (University of North Carolina), Ingrid Lilly (Wofford College), and Ethan Schwartz (Villanova University).
Read MoreMultilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism
Steven Fraade provides a preview of his forthcoming publication on Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge University Press, June 2023).
Read MoreRetrospective | My Journey with the Dead Sea Scrolls
4QDeuteronomyⁿ (All Souls Deuteronomy). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
4QDeuteronomyⁿ (All Souls Deuteronomy). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
“I often think that scholarly understanding of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and I grew up together; over the years, and now decades, a paradigm shift has occurred in the field, and my own views have changed along with it.”
Read MoreRediscovering Enoch from the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century
Annette Reed introduces the dynamic range of scholarship in a new edited volume discussing Enoch’s modern reception.
Read More"Going West" in Talmudic Literature | Publication Preview
Reuven Kiperwasser shares his process of writing Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture in his own transient state.
Read MoreImages and Ideas of Debated Readings in the Book of Lamentations
The project Kotzé sets out on, then, is more than a guide for text critical issues in Lamentations. It seeks, rather, to blend text criticism with an interpretive process keen on finding contemporary parallels in neighboring cultures.
Read More2022 AJR Year in Review
Rethinking The “People of the Book”
An illustration on vellum from the "Compendium of Chronicles" (Jami' al-Tawarikh) by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 CE. This image depicts a young Mohammed being recognized by the monk Bahira. Now found in the collection of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland [Wikimedia].
An illustration on vellum from the "Compendium of Chronicles" (Jami' al-Tawarikh) by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 CE. This image depicts a young Mohammed being recognized by the monk Bahira. Now found in the collection of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland [Wikimedia].
By thinking with premodern Christians as they imagined Muslims and Jews, we can also take a reflexive look at ourselves in the present. How and why do we identify with objects, particularly those from the past?
Read MoreChristian Monastic Life in Early Islam
Path to Mt. Sinai [Image courtesy of the author].
Path to Mt. Sinai [Image courtesy of the author].
My book attempts to address this particular historical context and argues for not only a general religious tolerance in the early centuries of Islam, but for an overlapping of sectarian boundaries throughout the period.
Read MoreAuthor’s Musings: Bringing Down the Temple House
Marjorie Lehman shares the formative context of feminist scholarship and the pandemic that guided her work on Bavli Yoma.
Read MoreAccessing the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Classroom
Roman geometric mosaic floor, from Conimbriga, Portugal. Image by Carole Raddato.
Roman geometric mosaic floor, from Conimbriga, Portugal. Image by Carole Raddato.
When it came to material culture, I faced another set of accessibility-related roadblocks. I had come to internalize the perspective from the opening of this essay: material culture constituted an evidentiary corpus for which vision was a precondition for insightful analysis. Such an opinion has an ancient pedigree.
Read MoreUnexpected Influences with Mira Balberg
'Nof Kibbutz' by Yohanan Simon
'Nof Kibbutz' by Yohanan Simon
Mira Balberg shares an unexpected influence upon her work with rabbinic literature.
Read MoreDissertation Spotlight | Disputation as Out-Narration
The beginning of Cyril of Alexandria’s Antirrhetica adversus Julianum from Parisinus graecus 1261 [Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France].
The beginning of Cyril of Alexandria’s Antirrhetica adversus Julianum from Parisinus graecus 1261 [Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France].
The implications for our understanding of Julian and Cyril, as well as the ancient traditions they represented and maintained, are enormous. But the implications extend further still, as should be clear from my concluding list of possible indicators that suggest narrative conflict may be at play between rival traditions, past or otherwise.
Read MoreDo Rabbis Belong in Early Jewish Christian Relations?
“In doing so, this scholarship reinforces a hegemonic Christian perspective that assumes that scholars of Christianity can speak on behalf of Jews because they are peripheral or secondary aids to the study of Christianity. It is a different but just as pernicious form of Jewish erasure that must be reckoned with.”
Read MoreThe Eye, the Sense of Sight, and Seeing God? Reflections on God’s (In)visibility Considering Early Jewish Christian Relations
“As scholars of early Jewish-Christian relations, how much of our identities should we reveal? Which, of course, lies at the heart of the question: What are the opportunities, pitfalls, joys, and challenges of incorporating our subjectivity and identities into our scholarship?”
Read More"The Parting of the Ways": Reflections on the Journey
“From an a priori perspective, this is not what the epithet “the Parting of the Ways” does; rather, it imposes an understanding rather than proves itself as an effective analogy. We need only consider the arguments that in relation to communities of Jesus believers which were predominately or entirely of gentile origin, there could be no parting of the ways: hence, it pertains only to those contexts where the majority had identified or still did identify themselves as Jews, presumably in terms of their genealogical inheritance.”
Read MoreThe Study of Early Jewish Christian Relations: Then and Now A personal reflection
“Perhaps the perennial focus on theological issues stems from a narrow, one might say non-Jewish, understanding of Judaism. If we instead took a more expansive view of Judaism as pertaining not to a religion in the modern sense but rather to the many aspects of life that Jews considered to be governed by Torah, we might also broaden our consideration of early Jewish Christian relations to include economic and cultural relationships.”
Read MoreCareers in Jewish Christian Relations
At the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, two senior scholars (Adele Reinhartz and Judith Lieu) and two junior scholars (Deborah Forger and Krista Dalton) whose work relates to the study of early Jews and Christians convened to reflect upon their career trajectories.
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