The contributions to this volume examine the emergence of ancient Jewish art from the interdisciplinary perspective of Art and Archaeology, Ancient Judaism and Rabbinics, Patristics and Church History. The studies show that an interdisciplinary approach leads to a better understanding not only of ancient Jewish, but also of Graeco-Roman and Christian art. They evaluate how late antique Jewish art was embedded in its Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine cultural contexts by, at the same time, evincing specifically Jewish and local Near Eastern idiosyncrasies. Contributors: Roland Deines, Rachel...

In the immediate centuries after the Romans' destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, Jews and Christians offered contrasting religious explanations for the razing of the locus of God's presence on earth. Adam Gregerman analyzes the views found in three early Christian texts (Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, Origen's Contra Celsum, and Eusebius' Proof of the Gospel) and one rabbinic text (the Midrash on Lamentations), all of which emerged in the same place--the land of Israel--and around the same time--the first few centuries after 70. The author explores the ways they interpret the...

In this study, Jonathan S. Milgram demonstrates that the transformation of inheritance law from the biblical to the tannaitic period is best explained against the backdrop of the legal and social contexts in which the tannaitic laws were formulated. Employing text and source critical methods, he argues that, in the absence of the hermeneutic underpinnings for tannaitic innovations, the laws were not the result of the rabbinic imagination and its penchant for inventive interpretation of Scripture. Turning to the rich repositories in biblical, ancient near eastern, Second Temple, Greek,...

Seth L. Sanders offers a history of first-millennium scribes through their heavenly journeys and heroes, treating the visions of ancient Mesopotamian and Judean literature as pragmatic things made by people. He presents each scribal culture as an individual institution via detailed evidence for how visionary figures were used over time. The author also provides the first comprehensive survey of direct evidence for contact between Babylonian, Hebrew, and Aramaic scribal cultures, when and how they came to share key features. Rather than irrecoverable religious experience, he shows how ideal...

This collection of Daniel Boyarin's previously uncollected essays on the Talmud represents the different methods and lines of inquiry that have animated his work on that text over the last four decades. Ranging and changing from linguistic work to work on sex and gender to the relations between formative Judaism and Christianity to the literary genres of the Talmud in the Hellenistic context, he gives an account of multiple questions and provocations to which that prodigious book gives stimulation, showing how the Talmud can contribute to all of these fields. The book opens up possibilities...