Contours of an Ancient Jewish Exegetical Tradition Spanning Time, Place, and Language

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World

This chapter aims to characterize various ways in which the concept of wilderness is used in ancient Jewish traditions. It shows some of the various usages of the concept of wilderness in a particular period in the history of Judaism. In this way it can be understood how powerful, seminal, and essential the concept of wilderness is to this formative period in the history of Jewish tradition. This chapter seeks to understand how it is that the barren terrain, which was conceived of as punishment for transgression, can also be used as a place of purification - how the suffering of wilderness can be overcome in the very place of that suffering. It considers the three uses: 1) wilderness as suffering; 2) wilderness as purification; and 3) wilderness as a locus for revelation. Distinguishing these various usages can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Second Temple Judaism.Keywords: Jewish traditions; Judaism; purification; revelation; Second Temple; suffering; Wilderness

This chapter aims to characterize various ways in which the concept of wilderness is used in ancient Jewish traditions. It shows some of the various usages of the concept of wilderness in a particular period in the history of Judaism. In this way it can be understood how powerful, seminal, and essential the concept of wilderness is to this formative period in the history of Jewish tradition. This chapter seeks to understand how it is that the barren terrain, which was conceived of as punishment for transgression, can also be used as a place of purification - how the suffering of wilderness can be overcome in the very place of that suffering. It considers the three uses: 1) wilderness as suffering; 2) wilderness as purification; and 3) wilderness as a locus for revelation. Distinguishing these various usages can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Second Temple Judaism.Keywords: Jewish traditions; Judaism; purification; revelation; Second Temple; suffering; Wilderness

Ethnographers and History Shaul Kelner (bio) 1. How does the history we choose to engage with shape the ethnographic tale we tell, and what type of historical consciousness do we bring to the work? In his 1945 manifesto on hiking as a form of Zionist education, Zev Vilnay opens with the comment, “Even in ancient times, the Israelite was accustomed to wander the Land of Israel and to know it well.”1 Most of the pamphlet goes on to address matters practical and philosophical associated with the structure, staffing and pedagogy of ritualized hiking (tiyul). Before he addresses that, however, Vilnay’s initial concern is to “recover roots,” to use Yael Zerubavel’s turn of phrase—to assert historical continuity between contemporary practice and the Jewish past.2 Vilnay’s first chapter is given over to consideration of the biblical pilgrimage festivals and to later Jewish travel writings in the Land of Israel, such as R. Estori Ha-Parhi’s 1322 Sefer Kaftor va-Ferah and R. Moses Cordovero’s accounts in Sefer Gerushin of sixteenth-century kabbalistic excursions in the environs of Safed.3 In writing Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism4, an ethnography of the state-sponsored tours that have brought more than 300,000 Diaspora Jews to Israel since 1999, I knew well that Vilnay’s perspective was widely shared among educators engaged in the enterprise. Jewish educational travel experiences in Israel—whether for sabras (native-born Israelis),5 new immigrants or Diaspora Jews—have typically been framed as continuous with a premodern Jewish pilgrimage tradition. The ideological and legitimizing thrust of such a framing is clear. As I set out to conduct the research, I faced a choice: to participate in nationalist mythmaking, or to break with it and present the enterprise [End Page 17] of Israel-experience travel as a quintessentially twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon. Each option implied a different relation to history, and each suggested a different history to engage with. I chose to emphasize a narrative of discontinuity. Birthright Israel and the twentieth-century Diaspora youth tours that preceded it are best understood, I argue, not as the contemporary manifestation of an ancient Jewish pilgrimage tradition, but as a novel practice made possible only by the political, economic, organizational, conceptual and technological resources of the modern age. Without a conception of Diaspora-state relations as a strategic asset for both parties, without a robust tourism industry and a population that enjoys en masse the luxury of leisure time to travel, without a professionalized field of Jewish education, without the technology to move hundreds of thousands of people through the air and the bureaucratic systems to coordinate it, without a philanthropic system capable of financing such an enterprise, Birthright Israel would simply be unimaginable. The history I chose to engage, therefore, looks not to the premodern Jewish past. My historical focus takes me back to the mid-nineteenth century at the earliest, to engage with three different histories. One regards the rise of the modern mass tourism industry. Another treats the Zionist movement in the prestate period, as well as its development of the cultural and institutional practices of tiyul that would later shape Diaspora youth travel to Israel. The third takes up aspects of twentieth-century American Jewish history relevant to the growth of the Israel-experience program field. This includes institutional histories of Diaspora youth travel programs, such as the Young Judaea Summer Programs in Israel. It also goes beyond an investigation of specific programs to consider broader efforts to build a field of Israel-experience education—efforts that included research, advocacy and institution building. The latter approach frames Birthright Israel within a moment in the institutional history of American Jewish education. Here, I was concerned with avoiding teleology. It would have been easy to frame the growth of the Israel-experience field as a story that begins with small, independent programs targeted to a limited number of youth-movement leaders and culminates with a massive effort to make a trip to Israel a universal rite of passage for every American Jewish young adult. But this would also have been misleading. Therefore, although the ethnography studied...

Lehmhaus focuses on the variegated forms and functions of lists in Jewish textual traditions from late antiquity, commonly known as rabbinic or talmudic literature. As he shows, Rabbinic works deploy lists for different discursive purposes-- exegetical, homiletical, narrative-- embedded in their ancient Near Eastern surroundings and based on a long tradition derived from biblical and other ancient Jewish traditions. Lehmhaus argues that rabbinic texts deploy the versatility or affordance of the list not only for ordering knowledge but also for the very process of knowledge turning them into a powerful ‘epistemic genre’. He suggests that rabbinic authors may have arrived at certain conclusions precisely in and through lists in which specific concepts or taxonomies were tried out before becoming more manifest or substantiated. This argument is exemplified by focusing on complex types of list in two tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, which can be described as clusters, sequences, or, most compellingly, as catalogues.

Opening the Sealed Book follows the author's three-volume Anchor Bible Commentary on Isaiah published between 2000 and 2003, and considers the earliest period in the book's reception history, sectarian interpretations in particular. In a brilliant first chapter Blenkinsopp discusses books and literacy in the ancient world, and the notion of ‘book’ as applied to Isaiah, especially the verses about a ‘sealed book’ (29:11–12) and ‘my secret’ (24:16), and their literary relationship with Daniel and the apocalyptic tradition. He then considers how Isaiah is represented as ‘Author, Prophet and Man of God’, both in the book of Isaiah itself and in Chronicles, Ben Sira, Josephus, and other ancient Jewish traditions, and examines his role in the origins of Jewish apocalyptic sectarianism. This leads to the two central chapters of the book in which all the interpretations of Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, particularly Matthew's Gospel, are examined with characteristic rigour and occasionally passion, as the sheer power of Isaiah's language and imagery to change the world becomes more and more apparent.

In Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, Radcliffe Edmonds provides us with a new etic framework for understanding ancient magic, but one steeped in the emic perspectives of the actual practitioners and clients as preserved in the literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. In this paper I examine Edmonds’s findings in relation to the ancient Jewish magical and mystical traditions found mainly in Sefer HaRazim, “The Book of the Mysteries,” a late-antique ritual handbook written in Hebrew.

The odd juxtaposition of beholding God in a mirror and transformation in 2 Cor. 3.18 has incited many commentators to grasp for some parallel from Greek magic (R. Reitzenstein), catoptromantic ritual (H. Achelis), Dionysian mysteries (C. Wagner), Wisdom traditions (M. Thrall), Jewish hydromancy (J. Scott), ‘vision mysticism’ (A. DeConick), or Greco-Roman mythology (A. Weissenrieder). All of these proposals, it is contended, fail to note the key importance of Moses in 2 Cor. 3. Ancient Jewish exegetical traditions based on Num. 12.6-8 portray Moses seeing God through a mirror on Mt Sinai ( Lev. Rabb. 1.14; Philo, Leg. All. 3.99-101). Although most commentators note an allusion to Moses in another famous Pauline reference to a mirror (1 Cor. 13.12), the allusion to the Mosaic mirror in 2 Cor. 3.18 has not been explored. Using the Mosaic mirror traditions, this article argues that Paul knew and used Mosaic mirror vision as the model for Christian catoptric seeing in 2 Cor. 3.18. The Mosaic model indicates that the Christian vision through a mirror was thought of as both clear and involving a Mosaic-like metamorphosis into glory (Exod. 34.29-35).

One of the most salient and intriguing features of the ethnic and cultural identity of the modern Samaritan community is its remarkable fluidity and adaptability, the causes of which are identified in this chapter, within the framework of a broad historical overview. The main factors examined here are: the long-term geopolitical developments that have forced the Samaritans to adapt not only their language and general way of life, but also their political allegiance and social situation to ever changing external challenges and demands; the violent reduction of the Samaritans from a large people to a minute minority; and the evolution of postexilic and rabbinic Judaism. Religious Judaism has not gone along with the redefinition of Samaritan identity endorsed by the secular Zionist institutions, but remains true to the ancient Jewish tradition that rejects Samaritans.Keywords: ancient Jewish tradition; rabbinic Judaism; Samaritan community

This study treats the theme of divine judgement as mediated by heavenly beings, the ‘Watchers’ and the members of the heavenly court in the Aramaic Jewish tradition (Dan. 4, 7.1; En. 14), who are imagined as heavenly bodies and spirits, mediators between the human and heavenly worlds. This tradition is founded upon Mesopotamian scholarly lore. In the Hebrew apocalypse of Dan. 10–12, written in Hellenistic times, a new term, śār, appears, which similarly designates the spirit of a star. These spirits and mediators have a direct role in influencing and determining the fate of territories and kingdoms. The idea of zodiacal spirits is apparent in the physiognomic texts that were found in Qumran.

The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought

This introduction presents the special JRMDC number focused on Digital Humanities in Ancient Jewish, Christian and Arabic Traditions. The first part draws general issues in the field, then the second part shows general DH debates present in the eight articles of the volume.

Although the major ancient Jewish Bible translations, the Septuagint and Targumim, render Joshua 14:15 relatively literally, at least without major deviations from Hebrew text, the Christian translation made by Jerome around 400 ce, the Vulgate, does deviate from biblical text at a major point. This chapter argues that it is precisely this Christian translation that incorporated Jewish exegetical traditions. There were also other Jewish traditions about burial of Adam and Eve: e.g., in Greek Life of Adam and Eve we read in 40.6-7 and 43.1-2 that Adam and Eve were interred on the same spot in earthly paradise from where God had taken dust in order to form Adam, a tradition found as early as second century BCE in Jubilees 4.29. In Judaism the tradition that finally became dominant was that the place where Adam was buried was the Temple Mount; in Christianity, however, that place was identified as Golgotha.Keywords: Adam's tomb; biblical text; Jewish exegetical traditions; Life of Adam and Eve; Septuagint; Targumim

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

The predominant image of the crown is among the most baffling features of several, difficult Gnostic apocalypses, recensions of which we know to have been controversial in the school of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (ca. 263c.e.). In these “Sethian” apocalypses, recovered from Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945, crowns adorn heavenly beings, and are donned by seers during their celestial voyages. It is clear they are significant in this literature, but scholarship has yet to answer how, and why. First, while these crowns are relatively common in the “Sethian Gnostic” literature, they are notably absent from the Hellenic philosophical tradition which also informs the apocalypses in Plotinus’ school. The abundance of crown-imagery, however, in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalypses thus serves as evidence of a Judeo-Christian background for this “Platonizing” Sethian literature, even if it is replete with Neoplatonic jargon instead of references to Jesus of Nazareth. Secondly, the crowns seem to indicate a state of glorification and deification derivative from ancient Jewish tradition concerning the possibility of recovering the primordial glory of humanity, often phrased as becoming an angel. Thirdly, Plotinus’ Christian Gnostic opponents may have seen these crowns differently — as indicative of the glory of martyrdom, reminding us that this early confrontation between Hellenic and Christian Gnostic philosophers followed on the heels of the Decian and Valerianic persecutions.