An essential resource for scholars and students Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.

Archaeology, iconography, and nonliterary written remains / Eric M. Meyers and A. Thomas Kraabel -- Jewish numismatics / Yaakov Meshorer -- Jewish Greek scriptures / Emanuel Tov -- The Bible rewritten (narratives) / Daniel J. Harrington -- The Bible explained (prophecies) / Maurya P. Horgan -- The literary genre "testament" / Anitra Bingham Kolenkow -- The testamentary literature in recent scholarship / John J. Collins -- Narrative literature / Robert Doran -- Jewish historiography / Harold W. Attridge -- Apocalyptic literature / John J. Collins -- Wisdom literature / Burton L. Mack and Roland E. Murphy -- Jewish hymns, odes, and prayers (ca. 167 B.C.E.-135 C.E.) / James H. Charlesworth -- Reconstructions of r.

Presents eighteen commissioned articles on biblical exegesis in early Judaism, covering the period after the Hebrew Bible was written and before the beginning of rabbinic Judaism. -- from publisher description

Although Jewish tradition gives tremendous importance to the Hebrew Bible, from the beginning Jewish interpretation of those scriptures has been practiced with remarkable freedom. Karin Hedner Zetterholm offers a clear and concise introduction to the legal, theological, and historical presuppositions that shaped the dominant stream of rabbinic interpretation, including Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrashim, discussing specific examples of different interpretive methods. She then explores the contours of Jewish biblical interpretation evident in the New Testament and the legacy of ancient traditions in the way different Jewish movements read the Bible today. Students of the history of biblical interpretation and of Judaism will find this an important and engaging resource.

Jewish writings from the period of Second Temple present a rich and complex variety of first-hand materials. Here, the editors have updated their classic sourcebook on Jewish beliefs and practices to take into account current thinking about the sources.

This volume assembles several important studies that examine the role of language in meaning and interpretation. The various contributions investigate interpretation in the versions, in intertestamental traditions, in the New Testament, and in the rabbis and the targumim. The authors, who include well-known veterans as well as younger scholars, explore the differing ways in which the language of Scripture stimulates the understanding of the sacred text in late antiquity and gives rise to important theological themes. This book is a significant resource for any scholar interested in the interpretation of Scripture in and just after the biblical period.

In The Authority of Law in the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism, Vroom identifies a development in the authority of written law that took place in early Judaism. Ever since Assyriologists began to recognize that the Mesopotamian law collections did not function as law codes do today—as a source of binding obligation—scholars have grappled with the question of when the Pentateuchal legal corpora came to be treated as legally binding. Vroom draws from legal theory to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the nature of legal authority, and develops a methodology for identifying instances in which legal texts were treated as binding law by ancient interpreters. This method is applied to a selection of legal-interpretive texts: Ezra-Nehemiah, Temple Scroll, the Qumran rule texts, and the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Prophets of the Past is the first book to examine in depth how modern Jewish historians have interpreted Jewish history. Michael Brenner reveals that perhaps no other national or religious group has used their shared history for so many different ideological and political purposes as the Jews. He deftly traces the master narratives of Jewish history from the beginnings of the scholarly study of Jews and Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany; to eastern European approaches by Simon Dubnow, the interwar school of Polish-Jewish historians, and the short-lived efforts of Soviet-Jewish historians; to the work of British and American scholars such as Cecil Roth and Salo Baron; and to Zionist and post-Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. He also unravels the distortions of Jewish history writing, including antisemitic Nazi research into the "Jewish question," the Soviet portrayal of Jewish history as class struggle, and Orthodox Jewish interpretations of history as divinely inspired. History proved to be a uniquely powerful weapon for modern Jewish scholars during a period when they had no nation or army to fight for their ideological and political objectives, whether the goal was Jewish emancipation, diasporic autonomy, or the creation of a Jewish state. As Brenner demonstrates in this illuminating and incisive book, these historians often found legitimacy for these struggles in the Jewish past.

In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars portrayed Judaism as the dark religious backdrop to the liberating events of Jesus' life and the rise of the early church. Since the 1950s, however, a dramatic shift has occurred in the study of Judaism, driven by new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and new methods and tools for analyzing sources. George Nickelsburg here provides a broad and synthesizing picture of the results of the past fifty years of scholarship on early Judaism and Christianity. He organizes his discussion around a number of traditional topics: scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God's activity on humanity's behalf, agents of God's activity, eschatology, historical circumstances, and social settings. Each of the chapters discusses the findings of contemporary research on early Judaism, and then sketches the implications of this research for a possible reinter-pretation of Christianity. Still, in the author's view, there remains a major Jewish-Christian agenda yet to be developed and implemented.