A comprehensive discussion of texts concerning the goddess Asherah, as she is portrayed in texts from Ugarit (both epic and ritual texts, as well as the lists of sacrifices), Israel (the Khirbet el-Qom and Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions) and the Old Testament.
The War Texts is the name given to a small group of Dead Sea Scrolls that depict the preparation for and the various phases of the eschatological battle between the 'Sons of Light' and the 'Sons of Darkness'.
The distinction between clean and unclean animals, probably originating in tensions between shepherds and farmers, is in the biblical laws of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 transformed into an important theological principle.
The sixth and fifth centuries BCE were a time of constant re-identifications within Judean communities, both in exile and in the land; it was a time when Babylonian exilic ideologies captured a central position in Judean (Jewish) history and literature at the expense of silencing the voices of any other Judean communities.
This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements.
An examination of the evidence that the Festival of Weeks was the occasion for the celebration of the renewal of the covenant in the Second Temple period, encompassing chapters on the Hebrew Bible, book of Jubilees, Qumran Scrolls, and the New Testament (Luke-Acts and Ephesians).
This book represents the fruit of a long process of study and reflection, a powerful but subtle synthesis, by one of the most eminent scholars of Second-Temple Judaism.
The Body As Property indicates that physical disfigurement functioned in biblical law to verify legal property acquisition, when changes in the status of dependents were formalized.
The occurrence of treaties throughout the Ancient Near East has been investigated on a number of occasions, generally in order to resolve certain questions arising in the biblical field.
In the generation after Constantine the Great elevated Christianity to a dominant position in the Roman Empire, his nephew, the Emperor Julian, sought to reinstate the old gods to their former place of prominencein the face of intense opposition from the newly powerful Christian church.
Blood for Thoughtdelves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals.
Throughout history, the relationship between Jews and their land has been a vibrant, much-debated topic within the Jewish world and in international political discourse.
Hasidism, a movement many believed had passed its golden age, has had an extraordinary revival since it was nearly decimated in the Holocaust and repressed in the Soviet Union.
This book contains an editionwith an extensive introduction, translation and commentaryof The Light of the World, a text on theoretical astronomy by Joseph Ibn Nahmias, composed in Judeo-Arabic around 1400 C.
Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon.
This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis' new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self.
Foreigners and Their Food explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize "e;us"e; and "e;them"e; through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders.
Orthodox by Design, a groundbreaking exploration of religion and media, examines ArtScroll, the world's largest Orthodox Jewish publishing house, purveyor of handsomely designed editions of sacred texts and a major cultural force in contemporary Jewish public life.
Halakhah in the Making offers the first comprehensive study of the legal material found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and its significance in the greater history of Jewish religious law (halakhah).
Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors.
This landmark contribution to ongoing debates about perceptions of the Jews in antiquity examines the attitudes of Greek writers of the Hellenistic period toward the Jewish people.
In this timely and compelling account of the contribution to immigrant rights made by religious activists in post-1965 and post-9/11 America, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo provides a comprehensive, close-up view of how Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups are working to counter xenophobia.
Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word "e;Jewish"e;-even in casual conversation-he lowered his voice.
The Crime of My Very Existence investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality.
Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world-an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century.
Since Peter Stuyvesant greeted with enmity the first group of Jews to arrive on the docks of New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews have entwined their fate and fortunes with that of the United States-a project marked by great struggle and great promise.
This study of contemporary crypto-Jews-descendants of European Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition-traces the group's history of clandestinely conducting their faith and their present-day efforts to reclaim their past.
In Todd Endelman's spare and elegant narrative, the history of British Jewry in the modern period is characterized by a curious mixture of prominence and inconspicuousness.
Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity-as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more.
The image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis was shaped by Anne Frank, whose house-the most visited site in the Netherlands- has become a shrine to the Holocaust.
This thought-provoking book, the first of its kind in the English language, reexamines the fifty-year-old nation of Israel in terms of its origins as a haven for a persecuted people and its evolution into a multi- cultural society.
Inspired by stories he heard in the West Bank as a child, Hillel Cohen uncovers a hidden history in this extraordinary and beautifully written book-a history central to the narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict but for the most part willfully ignored until now.
This illuminating study explores a central but neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives, or agunes ("e;chained wives"e;)-women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorce-and of the men who deserted them.
Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period.
