This insightful volume treats the world of the learned classes in the region of Awadh, in Muslim North India, with its famous capital Lucknow, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It focusses on those circles which carried, promoted, and reflected acculturation and interference in traditional as well as colonial settings. Part I examines the qasbahs where the seeds are laid for the efflorescence of scholarship, connecting South Asia with the Middle East and Europe. Part II deals with the accommodation of Islamic religious culture in the newly-established territorial states in the...

This volume asks why Jewish groups - Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes and the Dead Sea Scroll sect - flourished during the Maccabean era. It argues that such a result is uncommon, requiring special explanation.
In the introduction, sectarianism is defined and its varieties in Second Temple Judaism assessed. Among the causes of the known results suggested are the encounter with an outside culture that seemed to be weakening the external national perimeter, the impact of expanded literacy, the move to the city from the farm, as well as eschatological hope aroused by Maccabean victory. In...

This volume examines the unusual interest in women characters displayed in the Book of Jubilees, an interpretive reworking of the biblical narratives of Genesis through Exodus 12, written in the second century BCE. Demonstrating a pattern in the characterizations, the study shows how a matrilineal standard of ethnic purity and elevation of the biblical matriarchs function as key aspects in a polemic against the acceptance of foreigners into the community. The latter part of the book explores the exegetical techniques used to develop the portraits and places the polemic in the...

The development of the concept of the covenant during the Second Temple period is traced, by discussing relevant texts among the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha - especially the Dead Sea Scrolls - and the New Testament.

Research of burials constitutes one of the main reliable sources of information related to various aspects of funerary practices and rituals, and offers a perception of ancient social life and community organization. The material remains of mortuary rituals is effective in reconstructing the history of a society, its religious beliefs and its social outlook. Tombs offer ample data on the artistic taste evinced by funerary architecture and the ornamentation of receptacles and objects. Changes in Jewish funerary practices did not alter the plan and architecture of the tombs. Though the funerary...

These essays, by some of today's greatest scholars of Judaism and Hellenism in antiquity, explore a variety of ways in which these two great civilizations interacted. The common focus of these studies is the transition from one culture to the next - how words or concepts or conventions from the one came to be transplanted, and often modified in the process, in the other. Taken together, however, they provide something broader: a large, variegated picture of the cultural interaction that was to prove so crucial for the later history of Judaism and Christianity.

Here we reread George W.E. Nickelsburg's more important articles and encounter afresh some of his books, to criticize them and to attend to his response to the criticism. This set of Auseinandersetzungen thus carries forward the life of learning and debate that yields a rich harvest of scholarship. It pays tribute to a scholar through acts of engaged, critical scholarship, in which specialists reread articles reproduced in these pages and respond to them, with Nickelsburg then joining issue--a protracted engagement, spanning an entire intellectual career and many of its more important...

The essays in this Festschrift honor James L. Kugel for his contribution to the field of biblical studies, in particular early biblical interpretation.The essays are organized in three roughly chronological categories.The first group treats some part of the Tanakh, ranging from the creation and Abraham stories of Genesis to the evolving conception of sacred writing in the prophetic literature.The second set of essays focuses chiefly on the literature of Second Temple Judaism, including Qumran and extra-biblical literature.The last group concerns the scriptural imagination at work in rabbinic...

In these volumes, top scholars in the study of religion celebrate the enduring heritage in learning bequeathed to coming generations by Anthony J. Saldarini (1941-2001). Twenty-nine commemorative essays focus on the topical areas of formative Christianity and Judaism to which Dr. Saldarini devoted his efforts: earliest Christianity, with special attention to the Gospels; Judaism in late antiquity; and the interchange between Judaism and Christianity then and now. So too the disciplines represented in these pages match his history (including archaeology), literature, religion, and theology....

This book contributes to the study of Hosea 6:6 ("For what I desire is love and not sacrifice, and I prefer knowledge of God to burnt offerings") and its reception in ancient Jewish and Christian writings. Some of the articles contained in this book address the verse itself and the use made of it in the Sibylline Oracles, Gospel of Matthew, rabbinic writings, and patristic literature. Other articles deal with the notion of sacrifice in Philo and with the notion of mercy in the Septuagint, the Gospel of Luke, and Greek literature.