Four new books from the SBL

NEW BOOKS:

FOUR NEW TITLES FROM THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE

Celebrating the Dead Sea Scrolls
Peter W. Flint, Jean Duhaime, and Kyung S. Baek, editors

This volume celebrates the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, their contents, the movement that produced many of them, the community that preserved them all, and new questions and scientific issues that arise from Scrolls studies. The twenty-five essays, in four sections, explore the origins and text of scripture, the interpretation of scripture in Second Temple Judaism, the identity and practices of the movement associated with Qumran and the Scrolls, and the extensive contributions of Canadian projects and scholarship. Four color and four black and white plates are included in the volume.

Paper $76.95 • 674 pages • ISBN 9781589836037 • Early Judaism and Its Literature 30

Israel in the Persian Period: The Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E.
Erhard S. Gerstenberger. Translated by Siegfried S. Schatzmann

Although the Persians are seldom mentioned explicitly in the Hebrew Bible, the Persian period (539–331 B.C.E.) gave new shape to ancient Israel, as the biblical text evolved and the foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition were laid. Therefore, contrary to earlier views, Persian politics, culture, and religion were the setting within which the nascent Jewish community lived and took shape. Against the backdrop of the history and intellectual world of Persia, Gerstenberger describes this exciting 200-year period in the history of Israel, which saw both the creation of biblical literature (historical, prophetic, and poetic writings, especially the Psalms) and important theological developments (e.g., the shape and characteristics of the Jewish community, monotheism, and new means of shaping one’s world).

Paper $65.95 • 596 pages • ISBN 9781589832657 • Biblical Encyclopedia 8

Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome: (An)Iconic Rhetoric in the Writings of Flavius Josephus
Jason von Ehrenkrook

This book investigates the discourse on idolatry and images, especially statues, in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, with a particular focus on his numerous accounts of a contentious and at times iconoclastic relationship between Jews and images. Placing this narrative material within a wider comparative context, both Jewish and non-Jewish, demonstrates that the impression of strict aniconism—uniform and categorical opposition to all figurative art—emerging from Josephus is in part a rhetorical construct, an effort to reframe Jewish iconoclastic behavior not as a resistance to Roman domination but as an expression of certain cultural values shared by Jews and Romans alike. Josephus thus articulates in this discourse on images an idea of Jewish identity that functioned to mitigate an increasingly tense relationship between Romans and Jews in the wake of the Jewish revolt against Rome.

Paper $29.95 • 240 pages • ISBN 9781589836228 • Early Judaism and Its Literature 33

Constructs of Prophecy in the Former and Latter Prophets and Other Texts
Lester L. Grabbe and Martti Nissinen, editors

This collection of essays, arising from the meetings of the SBL’s Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts Group, examines how prophecy has been constructed in biblical literature such as the Former Prophets, the Latter Prophets, Chronicles, and Daniel, and even in the Qur’an. Recognizing that these texts do not simply describe the prophetic phenomena but rather depict prophets according to various conventional categories or their own individual points of view, the essays analyze the way prophecy or prophets are portrayed in these writings to better understand how they were structured by their respective authors.

Paper $31.95 • To access free online click here • 266 pages • ISBN 9781589836006 • Ancient Near East Monographs 4