Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Bundvad and Siegismund eds.)

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran

Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 14-15 August, 2017

Series:
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, Volume: 131
Editors: Mette Bundvad and Kasper Siegismund

The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran have attracted increasing interest in recent years. These texts predate the “sectarian” Dead Sea scrolls, and they are contemporary with the youngest parts of the Hebrew Bible. They offer a unique glimpse into the situation before the biblical canons were closed. Their highly creative Jewish authors reshaped and rewrote biblical traditions to cope with the concerns of their own time. The essays in this volume examine this fascinating ancient literature from a variety of different perspectives. The book grew out of an international symposium held at the University of Copenhagen in August 2017.

Hardback: €99.00/$119.00
E-Book: Open Access

E-Book
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41373-3
Publication Date: 24 Sep 2019

Hardback
Status: Published
ISBN: 978-90-04-41370-2
Publication Date: 26 Nov 2019

I noted the CFP for the Copenhagen Symposium here. Cross-file under Aramaic Watch.

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Geniza Fragments 78

GENIZA FRAGMENTS, the Newsletter of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library has published its October 2019 Issue. Topics include "The Genizah as an untapped source of Geonic responsa" and "The Sisters of Sinai in Jerusalem." For past posts on Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, the "Sisters of Sinai," start with "The Incredible Lady Bible Hunters" of St Andrews! and follow the links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Children in the ANE

ANCIENT FAMILY: Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today (Shawn Flynn and Kristine Garroway, The Conversation). But for children today (thank goodness!), the child mortality rate is no longer 50%.

An informative, wide-ranging, popular article. I have noted Professor Garroway's work, including her book, Growing Up in Ancient Israel (SBL Press, 2018), here, here, here, here, and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Christmas 2019

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating!

This is a good opportunity to mention two New Books of seasonal interest, both from Wiqf and Stock (Cascade Imprint):

The Protevangelium of James
BY Lily C. Vuong

About

The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant details to the well-known stories of Jesus’ conception, birth, and escape from the slaughter of innocents perpetrated by Herod the Great. Despite its noncanonical status, the Protevangelium of James was extremely influential in churches of the East, and since its publication in the West in the sixteenth-century has captured the imagination of readers all over the world. This study edition presents a fresh, new translation of the text with cross-references, notes, and commentary. The extensive introduction makes accessible the most recent scholarship in studies on Mary in Christian apocrypha, offers new insights into the text’s provenance and relationship to Judaism, and discusses the text’s contributions to art and literature.


The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary
BY Brandon W. Hawk

About

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is one of the most important witnesses in Western Europe to apocryphal stories about the lives of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim. This apocryphon was also used as the basis for another, the Nativity of Mary, which gained equal popularity. As bestsellers of medieval Christianity, these Latin apocrypha are major witnesses to the explosion of extra-biblical literature in the Western Middle Ages. Despite their apocryphal status, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary proved influential throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, as their popularity and influences may be traced in Christian literature, visual arts, liturgy, and theological perspectives still revered by Roman Catholic theologians. These apocrypha also remain significant works for considering the history of monasticism and the cult of the Virgin Mary. This book draws upon a range of manuscript sources to present comprehensive English translations of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary with full introductions and commentaries, as well as translations of related works with accompanying commentaries.

Cross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.

For posts of Christmas past, see my 2018 Christmas post and links. A Christmas-related post from the last year is here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Review of Ameling et al., Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. Volume IV

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Walter Ameling, Hannah M. Cotton, Werner Eck, Avner Ecker, Benjamin Isaac, Alla Kushnir-Stein, Haggai Misgav, Jonathan Price, Peter Weiß and Ada Yardeni (ed.), Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. Volume IV: Iudaea/Idumaea Part 1, 2649-3978. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Pp. xxvi, 1580 (2 vols.). ISBN 9783110543643/4. $345.98. Reviewed by Benedikt Eckhardt, University of Edinburgh (b.eckhardt@ed.ac.uk).

It will not be necessary to once again sing the praise of the CIIP project as a whole; suffice it to point to the reviews of Volume I, II and III on this platform.1 However, Volume IV, covering Judea proper and Idumea, is exceptional even by CIIP standards: its 1580 pages require two separate books, and add more than 1300 items from 172 locations to the Corpus.

[...]

For more on the Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP), including reviews of earlier volumes, see here and follow the links

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Biale, Gershom Scholem (in Hebrew)

NEW BOOK FROM MAGNES PRESS:

Gershom Scholem
Master of the Kabbalah

By: David Biale
Translation: Amotz Giladi

Synopsis
David Biale’s Gershom Scholem traces Scholem’s tumultumous life, tying together his scholarly studies with his political activism and cultural criticism. By mining a rich trove of diaries, letters and other writings, Biale shows how Scholem’s inner life must be understood as the necessary background to understanding his most important writings. Far from a dry, ivory-tower scholar, Scholem emerges as a passionately engaged man of his times, whose life encompassed the most significant events of the Jewish twentieth-century: World War I, the rise of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.

More details
Publisher: Magnes Press
Year: 2019
Catalog number: 45-531013
ISBN: 978-965-7008-31-7
Pages: 214
Language: Hebrew
Weight: 400 gr.
Cover: Paperback
Series: Bridges

For other recent books and posts on Scholem, the renowned twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, see here (cf. here) and links.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Hanukkah 2019

HAPPY HANUKKAH (CHANUKKAH, CHANUKAH) to all those celebrating! The eight-day festival begins tonight at sundown.

Last year's Hanukkah post is here. It links to past Hanukkah posts with additional historical background. For PaleoJudaica posts in the last year that relate to Hanukkah, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (but I'm not sure why).

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Another review of Moss, Divine Bodies

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: Candida R. Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 208. ISBN 9780300179767. $45.00. Reviewed by Harry O. Maier, Vancouver School of Theology (hmaier@vst.edu).

... Paul speaks of a glorified resurrected body, she succinctly summarizes, not a glorious one. Following Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s analysis of Stoic influences on Paul’s ideas, Moss agrees that Paul is talking of the (transformed) stuff of what resurrected bodies are made, not their qualities (p. 13). The script risks taking leave of the teachings of the apostle upon which it purports to rest: “Onto Paul’s assertion that the resurrected body will be heavenly, two thousand years of interpreters have mapped their own culturally informed values about bodily perfection” (p. 14). They have largely ignored what the New Testament sometimes does say about Jesus’ resurrected body as touchable, scarred, and perhaps hungry and thirsty. Moss seeks a complicated and non-systematic early Christian view of the resurrected body that attends to the hypothetical nature of early Christian speculation on the topic and its debt to larger currents of its cultural world.

I noted another review of the book here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.