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This study explores a previously overlooked aspect of the Mesopotamian context of the synagogue at Dura-Europos. It considers the function of the Jewish murals together with that of the contemporaneous pictorial art of the Manichaeans and thus brings a fundamentally new perspective to the most famous and commented-upon aspect of the synagogue. While the archeological records of the painted synagogue are silent, various characteristics of the mid-third-century Manichaean paintings are documented in literary records, including what they portrayed and the pedagogical reasons for how and why they were used. As evidenced by Iranian, Coptic, and Syriac textual sources from between the mid 3rd and the late 4th/early 5th centuries, the founding prophet of Manichaeism, Mani (active from 240 to 274 or 277 C. E.), wrote down his teachings and commissioned visual representations of them on a solely pictorial scroll – the Book of Pictures – used for oral instructions while missionizing across greater West Asia and the East Mediterranean region. When accessed together, the available evidence demonstrates that correlations between the religious function of Durene Jewish and Sasanian Manichaean art go beyond surface similarities: they both displayed a visual library of doctrinal subjects, that is, they capture in the pictorial form a large sample of core tenets, which were also recorded in the sacred texts of their respective religions; and they both fulfilled a primarily instructional role since their scenes were sermonized about and discussed in light of living interpretations.
The paper discusses the opposition of the rabbis in late antique Palestine to Roman public spectacles and their intentional incorporation of references to the theater, hippodrome, and amphitheater, and their performances, into their sermons. By speaking about these very same issues in their sermons, the rabbis essentially, and perhaps deliberately, became actors in their own communal theater – the synagogue. Based on a careful reading of the literary sources, it is argued that with the ironic use of the same tools and props employed in the theater the rabbis not only sought to condemn public entertainment, including theatrical performances, but also urged their communities to shun this leisure activity in favor of other “spectacles” more conducive and appropriate to the religious realm.
This article explores the role that emotion plays in rabbinic interpretations of the law of the captive woman. Discrete “emotional communities” establish “feeling rules” through which they broadcast their ideal emotional world and the values associated with it. Different midrashim, employing rich metaphors, agree that the feeling rule in the law of the captive seeks to elicit disgust from the captor. That emotion emphasizes the otherness of its object and thereby affects the power relations that obtain between subject and object. Midrashic sources disagree, however, over whether the captor’s disgust response will motivate him to jettison the captive. At issue is the identity of the powerful party confronting the captor: a gentile plot that disgust could help him neutralize or an evil inclination which it could not. If the captor marries his captive, he will experience hate, an emotion that will confirm the otherness that he earlier failed to recognize.
The impact of the Exodus tradition on ancient Judaism has been subject of various investigations, leading to further questions about the formative and normative force (J. Assmann) of the Exodus narrative. Rather than focus on the effect of this force, this article employs a speech-act analysis of the biblical text in order to shed light on the causation of it. Following the doctrine of infelicities (J. Austin, R. Grimes), this study examines why the promise of knowledge of Yahweh by Pharaoh apparently did not succeed. Five possible points of a “happy” fulfilment of the promise can be determined. At each of these points a particular form of infelicity can be detected. 1. The guilt confessions of Pharaoh (hitch), 2. his release of the people of Israel (flaw) and even 3. the outcry of his drowning army (non-play) do not show convincing signs of knowledge. In the end, it is not 4. the people of Egypt (contagion), but 5. the Midianite Jethro (substitution), who is described as getting to know Yahweh substitutionally. It is the tenth of ten recognition formulas concerning non-Israelites that seems to provide a fitting answer to the promise of knowledge in the book of Exodus. This has consequences for the structure of the narrative as well as for the intended effect on the reader of each new generation.
The debate over the Jewish, Greek, or mixed social settings of Ezekiel’s Exagoge often focuses on whether the play was intended for performance in a Greek theatre. Consequently, much scholarship has attempted to define the play’s import to a reconstructed audience. This effort, while fruitful, has distracted scholars from the ways that this tragedy resonated with the broader parameters and ramifications of theatre culture in its particular social context. Our paper redirects the discussion by parsing the ways that the Exagoge engages with the theatre culture of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Literary and epigraphic evidence reveals that Hellenistic performance culture, no less than its Classical forebears, was markedly political. Festivals, including the penteteric Ptolemaieia in Alexandria, were an important means for communicating the ideology of the Hellenistic royal dynasties. Drawing on Catherine Bell’s understanding of “redemptive hegemony” as the way that human practices simultaneously convey an understanding of power relations in society and a vision for strategic empowerment, we interrogate the ways that the Exagoge both affirms and critiques Ptolemaic politics by invoking the same performative setting usually exploited as a means of royal acclamation.
Although the Jerusalem Temple plays a central role in Jewish/Judaean society in both ancient sources and scholarly assessments, we have little direct evidence for how it functioned as an institution. Rather than work outward from the literary sources, this article works with a hypothetical model of the Temple’s minimal requirements. This approach helps to concretize the factors that we need to understand further, to identify areas where we can find substantiating or comparative evidence, and to provide a framework for critique of this and other treatments and for further research. The article presents an assessment of the economic scale of such a modeled Jerusalem Temple, suggesting that it mobilized resources comparable to those of a city, almost certainly exceeding the scale of operations of any individual enterprise. In addition, the article considers questions of provisioning a Temple operating on this scale with animals and other resources, and the local economic and social implications of sacrifice and pilgrimage for Jerusalem and its hinterland.