Ancient Jewish Research Articles

When Did Angels Become Demons?

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) According to familiar Christian mythology, demons are or were fallen angels. Satan was an angel who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven. Other rebelled along with him and became his minions. These fallen became The mythology also assumes that demon refers to the same being as (or unclean or polluted) spirit.1 Contrary to what may be common assumptions, this mythology was not shared by most ancient Jews, including those who wrote and translated the Hebrew Bible, most writers of ancient noncanonical Jewish texts, and Jews in general before the rise of Christianity. Moreover, that myth, in its complete form, is not found in the NT, though separate aspects of it may be discerned there. The Christian myth that equated fallen with demons arose in the second and third centuries c.e. It was an invention of late ancient Christian writers. From a historical point of view, therefore, we should not retroject the equation of demons with fallen back into the minds of NT writers. Angels became demons only beginning in the second century and only then at the hands of Christians. The term demon is often used to refer to any and all malevolent superhuman (or supernatural) beings.2 Thus, all sorts of beings from the Hebrew Bible, ancient Judaism, and the ancient Near East-evil angels, various disease Lilith, impure spirits, and many more-are lumped together as demonic For this article, I do not include every nonhuman, intelligent evil being from any culture or any language in my category demon. I ask rather, When did what the ancient Jews called angels (Myk)lm) become identified with what the ancient Greeks called ... or ...? When later Christians asserted that the evil or fallen they inherited from Judaism were to be identified with ????????, they were not choosing merely a generic word for evil beings. were equating the fallen of contemporary Judaism with those beings the Greeks worshiped as gods or demigods. were making a new identification between two species derived from two separate cultures. That identification should not be retrojected into the minds of the NT writers. I. Greek Translations of the Hebrew Bible To establish that ancient Jews tended not to equate the species of with the species of demons, the best place to begin is with Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish translators of Hebrew Scripture used Greek daimonic terms sparingly, but they did use them.3 Six different Hebrew words seem to be translated as ..., in almost all cases the latter.4 In Deut 32:17, ... (sedIm) is rendered as ...: They sacrifice to demons and not to God; to gods they did not know. In Ps 105:37 (Eng. 106), there is a similar statement: They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons [...] (NRSV). Later, ... will come to be the most common word used by the rabbis for those beings they seem to have thought of as the same sorts of beings Christians called demons. we should note that in the ancient Near Eastern context, the word sedIm is related to the Assyrian sIdu, which referred to the great bull statues found in front of Assyrian palaces, sometimes depicted with wings. According to some modern commentators, the word d# originally meant simply lord and served as a divine title like Baal or Adonai. It could, therefore, be taken to refer to ancient gods of Canaan and other surrounding peoples, who could have viewed them as good powers or gods.5 The Jewish translators, therefore, use the word ???????? to refer to the gods of other peoples. We see this tendency in Isa 65:11, which the NRSV translates, But you who forsake the Lord, who forget my holy mountain, who set a table for Fortune [ynm] and fill cups of mixed wine for Destiny [dg]. The ancient Jews translated ynm with ???η, and dg with ....6 The translators take Hebrew words that could be abstract nouns referring to fortune or fate and recognize that those refer also to the names of gods in surrounding cultures. …

How Did God Get Started?

How Did God Get Started? COLIN WELLS the usual suspects a e day in theMiddle East about four thou sand years ago, an elderly but still rather astonishingly spry gentleman took his son for a walk up a hill. The young man carried on his back some wood that his father had told him theywould use at the top tomake an altar, upon which they would then perform the ritual sacrifice of a burnt offering. Unbeknownst to the son, however, the father had another sort of sacrifice inmind altogether. Abraham, the father,had been commanded, by the God he worshipped as supreme above all others, to sacrifice the young man himself, his beloved and only legitimate son, Isaac. We all know how things turned out, of course. An angel appeared, together with a ram, lettingAbraham know that God didn't really want him to kill his son, that he should sacrifice the ram instead, and that the whole thing had merely been a test. And to modern observers, at least, it's abundantly clear what exactly was being tested. Should we pose the question tomost people familiar with one of the three "Abrahamic" religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), all of which trace their origins to thismisty figure, and which to gether claim half theworld's population, the answer would come without hesitation. God was testingAbraham's faith. Ifwe could ask someone from a much earlier time, how ever, a time closer to that of Abraham himself, the answer might be different. The usual storywe tell ourselves about faith and reason says that faithwas invented by the ancient Jews, whose monotheistic tradition goes back to Abraham. In the fullness of time, or?depending on perspective?in a ARION l8.2 FALL 20I0 2 HOW DID GOD GET STARTED? misguided departure, the newer faiths of Christianity and Is lam split off from their Jewish roots and grew to become world religions in their own right.Meanwhile, in a com pletely unrelated series of events, the rationalistic paragons we know as the ancient Greeks invented reason and science. The Greek tradition of pure reason has always clashed with the monotheistic tradition of pure faith, though numerous thinkers have tried to "reconcile" them through the ages. It's a tidy tale of two pristinely distinct entities that do fine, per haps, when kept apart, but which hiss and bubble like fire and water when brought together. A tidy tale, to be sure, but nearly all wrong. Historians have been struggling to correct it formore than a century. What they haven't done, however, iswork out the implica tions of their findings in a way that gives us a new narrative explanation to take its place. This failure of synthesis may have something to do with why the old, discredited story has hung on for so long inpopular imagination. Because we sep arate faith and reason psychologically, thinking of them as epistemological opposites, we tend rather uncritically to as sume that theymust have separate historical origins as well. A moment's reflection says "it ain't necessarily so"?and is even unlikely to be so. It's time for a new narrative about the origins of monotheistic faith, one that's indebted to recent scholarship, but that puts it together in a coherent pattern consistent with both history and psychology. Surprisingly, the pattern that fits best with the historical evidence locates the origins of faith in the rise of reason it self, and despite itsnovelty itdoes so in a way that I suspect will strikemany readers as sensible and intuitive. This new synthesis in turn yields psychological insights into the issues of faith and reason that continue to bedevil us today?from public confrontations over evolution, abortion, and gay rights, to suicide bombings, West Bank settlements, and fly ing lessons inwhich students ominously disdain instruction in landing. Colin Wells 3 it wasn't the jews of course, faith isnotoriously hard to define, but "belief in God" presents a common-sense starting point. It's true that we sometimes use the word "faith" to describe non monotheistic religious traditions such as Buddhism or Hin duism. But even if we acknowledge themarginal presence of something we'd...

Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion

Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion

"It Moves Me to Wonder": Narrating Violence and Religion under the Roman Empire

My focus will be on ancient narratives that, contrary to expectations, use religion and violence to interrogate and confound oppositional thinking: Josephus's paraphrase of the book of Esther in the Jewish Antiquities; the Greek romance of Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon; and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. A close reading of these writings shows that the textual interlacing of violence, religion, and the production of the self in antiquity was not inevitably bound to a narrative of victimhood and retribution. Each story elevates sources of local religious authority at a time of growing confidence in ostensibly universal modes of knowledge disseminated in the political, judicial, and educational discourses of the Roman era. In this setting, the narrative elaboration of insider forms of knowledge forms a noteworthy interreligious pattern and suggests a common interest in thinking locally about or universalizing claims. In my reading, these texts do not call for the overthrow of political, judicial, and educational regimes of knowledge so much as enter into asymmetrical relations of power to appropriate and re-inscribe these claims of authority. In doing so, I contend, a measure of cultural permeability is instantiated in the narrative play between such global claims and the insider claims of some Jews, pagans, and Christians.

„Es war nunmehr notwendig, dass ich dies von Ruth erzählt habe ...“

No Access„Es war nunmehr notwendig, dass ich dies von Ruth erzählt habe ...“Beobachtungen zur Ruth-Erzählung des Flavius Josephus (Ant. V 318-337)Melanie KöhlmoosMelanie KöhlmoosSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Apr 2014https://doi.org/10.13109/wdor.2009.39.1.58SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 39Issue 1November 2009 ISSN: 0043-2547eISSN: 2196-9019HistoryPublished online:April 2014 PDF download

A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (review)

Reviewed by: A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel Anna Bernard A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Gudrun Krämer. Graham Harman and Gudrun Krämer, transls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 357. $35.00 (cloth). In her preface to this book, Gudrun Krämer contends that existing histories of Palestine are susceptible to a modernist myopia. They tend to start with the arrival of the first Zionist settlers in 1882, as if the history of the region begins and ends with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Krämer, a professor of Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin whose previous work includes books on the history of Islam and on the Jews in modern Egypt, chooses instead to begin her narrative with the earliest records of settlement from the Old Stone Age, and she continues from there to the biblical period, the Ottoman era, and the British Mandate. Her account ends, as the title suggests, with the Arab-Israeli armistice of 1949. The scope of the coverage means that this is necessarily a very broad survey. Krämer relies heavily on secondary sources—primarily in English, but also in German and Arabic—and she moves fairly rapidly through the pre- and early modern periods, devoting just two chapters to Jewish antiquity in Palestine and to the reasons for the region’s spiritual significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This introductory section is followed by three chapters on the late Ottoman period, focusing on the years between 1750 and 1918. The closing date is uncontroversial, since it marks the fall of the Ottoman empire following the Allied victory in the Levant, but the starting date once again emphasizes Krämer’s effort to unseat 1882 “as the date of Palestine’s entry into modernity” (40). By beginning her account in the eighteenth century, Krämer is able to trace the political and economic transformations that more accurately signal the region’s “entry into modernity,” and to show that many of these changes took place well before the Zionist settlers arrived. She pays particular attention to the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, which led to such developments as the expansion of the central and provincial governments, the establishment of a state education system, improved standards of health and sanitation, [End Page 809] increased international trade, and sweeping land reforms (71–87). The land reforms are especially significant in light of later events, since they not only marked a shift from collective to individual land ownership, but also made it possible for non-Ottoman citizens, including Jewish settlers and organizations such as the Jewish National Fund, to purchase land. However, although Krämer deals with this issue much later in the narrative (245), at this stage she scrupulously holds herself back from projecting into the future. As she reiterates in her introduction to the next chapter, which deals with the rise of Zionism and Arabism, her aim is not to write history “from its outcome—the foundation of the State of Israel,” but rather to “write a history of the Palestinian economy and society at large” (101), and she accordingly holds out the possibility of alternative outcomes as long as she can. Krämer is to be commended for giving far more attention to the Ottoman period than most of the existing “relational histories” (xi) of Israel/Palestine have, though historians focusing on its Arab history have also discussed Ottoman institutions in detail.1 By contrast, in the second half of the book, which is devoted to the Mandatory period, she is on ground which has been very well covered, from relational as well as non-relational angles. That said, Krämer does a fine job of placing British policy towards Palestine in the context of European colonial history as a whole. She is particularly good on the British government’s contradictory promises to the Zionists, the Arab nationalists, and the French (142–43), and she draws attention to early American involvement in the region by noting that Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” was equally...

The Council of Elders During The Pre-Hasmonean Period

The subject of this paper is the Jewish Council of Elders or γερουσία in the Hellenistic period. The author starts from contrasting opinions of contemporary scholars and focuses on the pre-Hasmonean period from 301 BCE to 152 BCE, concentrating on the Books of the Maccabees and Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities Ch. 12, with further reference to the Letter of Aristeas and other epigraphic evidence. What exactly did the words πρεσβύτεροι and γερουσία mean? What was the role of the Council of Elders? Did it even exist? What was its relationship to the High Priest? The linguistic usage of πρεσβύτεροι and γερουσία in the sources could lead us to a better understanding of the dynamics of Jewish society in the Ptolemaic and early Seleucid periods.

Augustine as Revolutionary?: Reflections on Continuity and Rupture in Jewish–Christian Relations in Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews

Augustine as Revolutionary? Reflections on Continuity and Rupture in Jewish-Christian Relations in Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews PAULA FREDRIKSEN. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defence of Jem and Judabm. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Pp. 488.THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS AGO, the most divisive issue in the study of ancient society and culture was the degree to which in the Second Temple and talmudic periods (circa 450 B.C.E. to 650 CE.) operated within the bounds of a single unified authoritative framework. Some scholars explained the conspicuous variation in belief and practice attested in the sources as relatively minor deviations from a more or less cohesive system of religious norms (as reflected perhaps in the writings of the rabbis). Others, however, viewed this diversity and even pluralism as the original and enduring condition of religious practice in antiquity, despite the strident insistence of a handful of ancient sectarians to the contrary. At this point, all but a very few have abandoned the proposition that ancient Jews functioned within or even had the notion of a normative Judaism governed by a systematic set of theological beliefs - though many now would also wisely refrain from speaking of multiple Judaisms as wholly discrete cultural or sociological systems.1The current generation of scholars, by contrast, is far more riven by a different, though equally perennial, historiographical conundrum, namely, the problem of historical continuity, change, and rupture. The past ten years have seen increasingly heated debates concerning the degree to which institutions, practices, and discursive categories were repeatedly and fundamentally transformed in antiquity at key moments of historical disjuncture. Can we indeed still speak usefully of as an essentially continuous, if always evolving, phenomenon? Thus, we find in recent - especially North American - scholarship the conspicuous recurrence of such terms as beginnings, rupture, making, and invention. Novel forms of identity are called - or interpellated - into existence. Rather than forming the fabric of a continuous religious and cultural system known as Judaism, Jewish tradition is unmasked as a discursive strategy, the name under which historical change masquerades.2To take two prominent recent examples: in a series of books and articles, Daniel Boyarin has argued that the gradual consolidation of a Christian orthodox establishment and the concomitant production of the specifically Christian discourses of orthodoxy, heresy, and religion did not merely provide the background for the emergence of as formulated by the rabbis of Late Antiquity but were the prime engines in this process.3 According to Boyarin, at least from a certain analytical vantage point, we can productively say that rabbinic was invented by Christianity as elites, over the course of Late Antiquity, engaged with - and, ultimately, refused - the hegemonic logic of imperial, orthodox Christianity. Complementarily, though in a rather different academic idiom, Seth Schwartz has advanced the equally provocative thesis that, from the second to fourth centuries, Jewishness formed at best a vestigial element in the social identities of the now highly Romanized and provincialized ethnic Jews of the Mediterranean basin, but under the often heavy-handed auspices of imperial Christianity its fragments were - somewhat paradoxically - reconstituted into a new and newly robust form of communal identity.4 In Schwartz's analysis, the disembedding of the Jews from the increasingly Christianized Roman imperial system of the late fourth to sixth centuries was critical to the emergence of as a radically new type of religious, social, and cultural formation.Of course, not all historians of ancient would endorse such sweeping, even extravagant narratives of social and cultural rupture. …

Garnier's Historical Sources in <i>Les Juifves</i>

Robert Garnier's "Les Juifves" (1583) is generally considered to be the crown jewel of the French Renaissance stage. At the close of his prefatory "Argument" to the play, Garnier obligingly furnishes the historical sources from which he has taken the story of the sufferings of Zedekiah and his family. However, the bibliographic information which the tragedian supplies in his "Argument" contains at least one error with respect to the Bible, and a second error pertaining to Flavius Josephus's "Jewish Antiquities" is more than likely as well.

Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion

Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion

Life after Death in Early Judaism: The Evidence of Josephus (review)

Reviewed by: Life after Death in Early Judaism: The Evidence of Josephus Randal A. Argall Life after Death in Early Judaism: The Evidence of Josephus, by C. D. Elledge. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. 224 pp. €44.00. This book is a revision and expansion of portions of the author’s dissertation, written under Prof. James Charlesworth at Princeton Theological Seminary (2001). It contains five chapters; two appendices which provide, first, a comparison between Josephus and Hippolytus on life after death, and then, the Greek passages of Josephus on the afterlife discussed in this study; an extensive bibliography; and indices of ancient sources and modern authors. There are copious footnotes throughout the book. The impression one comes away with is that this book is well-researched. The author demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to the nuances in the original sources and a striking ability to sort through a massive amount of secondary literature. The result is a fine work of scholarship that is presented in a clear, organized, and persuasive manner. Prior critical studies have noted that Josephus has Hellenized the beliefs of the Pharisees and Essenes on the future life. Elledge examines these Josephan passages on the Jewish sects in the broader context of other references to the future life in the Against Apion, the Jewish War, and the Jewish Antiquities. This more extensive look at the relevant passages in Josephus enables Elledge to reach some significant conclusions about Josephus’ sources, methodology, and purpose. Chapter one offers a brief overview of beliefs regarding the afterlife in Jewish literature contemporaneous with Josephus. The survey includes 1 Enoch, Daniel, Psalms of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wisdom of Solomon, Philo of Alexandria, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, New Testament writings, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Rabbinical writings. These texts offer a rich variety of conceptions on the afterlife available to Jewish faith, including differently nuanced views of belief in a reurrection. With respect to the resurrection, and in anticipation of his next chapter, Elledge finds it “surprising, however, given the numerous attestations of the belief in the literary evidence, that Josephus does not provide a single clear indication that Jews of the period believed in this idea” (p. 48). Chapter two provides a survey of passages in Josephus on immortality. These include Josephus’ comment on the reward of Jews who keep the law (C. Ap. 2.218–19); his description of the Jewish sects, the Essenes (B.J. 2.152–58; [End Page 173] A.J. 18.18) and Pharisees (B.J. 2.163; A.J. 18.13–14); various speeches in the Jewish War, including the two teachers who urged their students to remove Herod’s golden eagle from the temple gate (1.648–50), Josephus’ own oration against suicide (3.361–82), Eleazar’s oration at Masada (7.320–88), and the speech of Titus, who exhorted his troops to take the Antonia (6.33– 53); Josephus’ comments on the significance of certain dreams, visions, and oracles (A.J. 6.328–30; 17.349–50, 354); and Abraham’s speech as he is about to offer Isaac (A.J. 1.229–31). Elledge concludes: “Not once is there a single identifiable reference to the resurrection of the dead, only to immortality. The specific beliefs that appear in his descriptions thus cannot be consistently correlated with evidence from contemporary Jewish literature” (p. 80). Chapter three investigates the sources of Josephus’ statements on immortality. Elledge begins with the knotty problem of possible sources behind Josephus’ description of the Essenes and Pharisees. After sorting through the various scholarly proposals, he concludes that Josephus in the Jewish War and Hippolytus in the Refutatio used a common source that attributed belief in both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection to each of the two sects. Josephus apparently eliminated the idea of resurrection among the Essenes and suppressed it among the Pharisees, translating it into the Pythagorean notion of transmigration into a different body (the term “revivification” in A.J. 18.14 is also to be interpreted along these lines). Hippolytus, for his part, probably expanded the reference in the source (“resurrection of the flesh”). Furthermore, Josephus elaborated upon various Greek mythological...

Colonialism, Biblical World-Making, and Temporalities in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) offers an unusual portrait of the dynamic relationship between scripture and colonialism. In 1789 Equiano, who also went by the name Gustavus Vassa, related his experience of slavery to support abolitionism in Britain in the form of a best-selling, two-volume autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano's autobiography comprises a striking description of religion and culture among the Igbo of West Africa, the nation with which he identified by birth. According to Equiano, the Igbo were descended from ancient Jews, and their religion was a modern survival of ancient biblical religion. This claim, seemingly casual at first, is actually a complicated maneuver that reveals how deeply he had mined a trove of biblical commentary to shape his interesting narrative for a skeptical readership. The early modern genre of biblical commentary, which was deeply influenced by the exigencies of European colonialism, constitutes in its own right an authoritative literature that proved quite useful for Equiano.

Brothers in Arms: Josephus’ Portrait of Moses in the ‘Jewish Antiquities’ in the Light of His Own Self-Portraits in the ‘Jewish War’ and the ‘Life’

In the Jewish Antiquities , Josephus is surprisingly keen to amplify the rebellions and factions against Moses. The Israelites time and again accuse Moses of acting tyrannically, and the worst seditions ever are said to have happened while Moses was a general. When it comes to handling civil war, the picture of the experienced general recurs in Josephus’ own self-portraits in the Jewish War and the Life . The present article explores the similarities between Josephus’ portrait of Moses and Josephus’ own self-portraits. Though Josephus does not himself explicitly direct his readers’ attention to the parallels between his portrait of Moses and his own self-portraits, we may assume that his readers were able to grasp the parallels because of the common use of σύγκρισις in the Greco-Roman world. Josephus’ rhetorical strategy may indirectly have been to praise his own conduct in his praise of Moses.

Afterword. Tendencies of religious change in the world of the twentieth century and their implications in the Ukrainian context

How will religion develop in the 21st century? How optimistic can her outlook be on her future? What will be the meaning of global religious change in the coming decades? Despite being very advanced in the West, the answers to these questions remain problematic. In the famous work, "Returning the Sacred: Arguments for the Future of Religion," D. Bell noted that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most thinkers expected that religion would disappear in the twentieth century. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many sociologists believed that sociologists believed that "At least since the Enlightenment, most Western intellectuals have expected the death of religion as fervently as the ancient Jews of the coming of the Messiah," reminds American religious scholars R. Stark and R. Bindbridge. and the social sciences were particularly distinguished in the prediction of the inevitable triumph of rationality over “prejudice.” The most celebrated figures in sociology, anthropology, and psychology unanimously expressed the belief that their children, or indeed grandchildren, would witness a new era in which, from Freud, the infantile illusions of religion humanity will outgrow ”

The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic

‘Agapius of Hierapolis’ and Michael the Syrian's versions of the Testimonium Flavianum, a passage about Jesus from Josephus' Jewish Antiquities, both derive from the Syriac translation of Eusebius of Caesarea's Historia Ecclesiastica. Michael's Testimonium is more authentic than Agapius' Testimonium, and it is more authentic than the textus receptus in reading that Jesus was ‘thought to be the Messiah’. Some features of Agapius' Testimonium previously considered to be more authentic than the textus receptus can be explained by distinctive readings in the Syriac text that Agapius used.

Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity. By Steven Weitzman

Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity. By Steven Weitzman

“Remembered for Praise”: Some Ancient Sources on Benefaction to Herod's Temple

AbstractThe Temple of Jerusalem was reconstructed and enlarged under the patronage of Herod the Great beginning in 20/19 BCE. This essay assembles epigraphic sources from Jerusalem and literary sources preserved in the writings of Flavius Josephus and the ancient rabbis for benefaction to the Temple by individual wealthy Jews. Donors from as far afield as Rhodes, Alexandria and Adiabene may be identified, with Nicanor of Alexandria and Queen Helena and her son Monobazus of Adiabene appearing in archaeological remains, Josephus and rabbinic literature. This corpus provides a controlled example of ways that literary sources of various genre and archaeological remains may be placed in conversation so as to elicit historical evidence that may be of use to students of Jewish and general Roman antiquity.

Limitations of “Jewish” as a Label in Roman North Africa

AbstractSelective attentions to “normative” Jewish archaeological materials and exclusions of ambiguous or complex evidence from Jewish archaeological compendia have diverted attention from those artifacts that might otherwise have yielded more productive observations about the cultural ranges of ancient Jewish populations. Application of more critical approaches to the classification of archaeological evidence, contextual approaches for the analysis of archaeological materials, and the replacement of essentialistic or syncretistic cultural models with more realistic ones, yield vastly improved understandings of ancient Jewish archaeological materials, and, by extension, better articulated pictures of the continua between early Jewish and Christian cultural identities.

Was there science in ancient Judaism? Historical and cross-cultural reflections on "religion" and "science"

This article considers the place of scientific inquiry in ancient Judaism with a focus on astronomy and cosmology. It explores how ancient Jews used biblical interpretation to situate "scientific" knowledge in relation to "religious" concerns. In the Second Temple period (538 B.C.E.-70 C.E.) biblical interpretation is often used to integrate insights from Mesopotamian and Greek scientific traditions. In classical rabbinic Judaism (70-600 C.E.) astronomy became marked as an esoteric discipline, and cosmology is understood in terms of Ma'aseh Bereshit, a category that blurs the boundaries between "science" and "religion." Whereas modern thinkers often see Judaism and "science" as incompatible, medieval Jewish thinkers built on these ancient traditions; some even viewed themselves as heirs to a Jewish intellectual tradition that included astronomy, cosmology, medicine and mathematics.

Holy Households: Domestic Space, Property, and Power

Holy Households:Domestic Space, Property, and Power Kristina Sessa Holy Households began as an idea for a conference panel. I wanted to bring together four scholars who share my interest in the history of the late ancient domestic sphere, but who employ varying methodological approaches and have different areas of technical expertise. Thus I invited an archaeologist of rural, late Roman estates (Kim Bowes), an historian of Roman law (Julia Hillner), a specialist in papyrology and Egyptian material culture (Elisabeth O'Connell), as well as an expert in the cultural and social history of the early Christian family (Kate Cooper). By all accounts, the panel, which ran at the 2005 meeting of the North American Patristics Society at Loyola University in Chicago, was enormously successful. The papers collectively engaged with an aspect of domestic life that in my mind had not received sufficient attention by scholars of the late ancient Christian household: its spatial dimension.1 Their focus on the materiality of the household, not only its physical form but also its economic features, legal status, and social history as a private (i.e., individually owned and governed) institution, underlined the importance of domestic space as an analytic category in the study of topics like the development of monasticism, the ecclesiastical contestation over the independent practice of Christian rituals in the home, the histories of penance and the prison, and the reuse of pre-existing, non-Christian, and non-domestic structures (such as tombs) as Christian "homes." In sum, the papers examined the phenomenon of "Christianization" as a dialectical process that produced not a single model of the Christian home, but an extraordinary range of holy households. Three of the papers in this volume (Bowes, Hillner, and O'Connell) as well as its introduction (Cooper) feature research first presented at NAPS in 2005. My own contribution (Sessa), which was originally presented elsewhere, adds [End Page 129] yet another example of how domestic space might be approached as a topic of study for scholars interested in the history of the late ancient household. I would like to thank David Brakke for inviting me to guest-edit this special volume of JECS and for offering warm and unwavering support in the process, along with Ellen Muehlberger for her careful and thorough copyediting. I am also grateful for the enthusiastic and critical insights offered both by those who attended the panel back in 2005, and by the anonymous readers. Footnotes 1. This is not to suggest that space has been completely ignored by scholars of late antique religion and domestic life: see, for example, Cynthia Baker, Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Copyright © 2007 Johns Hopkins University Press and the North American Patristics Society