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Abstract
This article argues that recent scholarship on premodern composition can help to reconceptualize the presence of diverse people, including enslaved women, in scribal spaces. A brief historiographic section reviews how scholars have imagined normative Jews to be elite literate men, neglecting evidence of dictation to scribes, and thus excluded evidence of lower-class women especially from their imagining of the past. Applying Wendy Doniger’s rejection of the category of the singular male author in religious texts to Jewish texts, it proposes a heuristic tool to identify women’s presence and perspectives in ancient prose, liturgical, and ritual texts. Finally, it analyzes four incantation bowls as test-cases of this approach. For every text produced by a scribe, scholars ought to imagine a dynamic compositional environment with at least two people, and they can look for evidence of inclusion and exclusion of perspectives based on religious markers, class status, and gendered concerns.
Die Reihe „Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements“ ( JAJSup) widmet sich der Geschichte, den Texten und institutionellen religiösen Formationsprozessen, die die reiche kulturelle Spur vom Babylonischen Exil bis zum babylonischen Talmud ausmachen. Die interdisziplinäre Reihe dient als Diskussionsforum für Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aller Disziplinen. Die Reihe unterliegt dem Peer-Review und akzeptiert Manuskripte in deutscher, englischer und französischer Sprache.
Publications from the JAJS series before 2020 can be found at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com
Abstract
The Yahwistic community at Elephantine, whose document record covers almost the entire fifth century BCE, conserves the most direct, vibrant and authentic witness of Achaemenid-era Yahwism. This article focuses on the process of interpretatio iudaica through interactions with neighboring and reigning cults: Egyptian, Levantine and Achaemenid-Zoroastrian (AZ), comparing it to other Yahwistic settlements of its time. It shows that these communities behaved as normative citizens of the polytheistic/henotheistic world surrounding them. In what is an expected process of interpretatio of their day and age, they were in full dialogue with the philosophical/theological views and innovations of the cultures surrounding them. They translated their deity/ies with “host deities” when they came into contact with other cultures. Significantly, living in an Achaemenid imperial context, Ahuramazdā was translated with Yhw, and following Artaxerxes II’s reform, a new Yahwistic triad translated both the new AZ triad as well as the local Egyptian triad.
Abstract
This article explores the literary context of three types of hair modification in Second Temple Jewish literature: disarranging, unveiling, and cutting, when they occur and the social categories they embody. All of these behaviors mark women as mourners, with the tearing/cutting and disheveling of hair further identifying them as suppliants. While some depictions are based on biblical models, the supplication scenes clearly reflect Greek and Roman motifs ‒ women wearing their hair wild and addressing the troops and defendants wearing mourning dress and engaging in keening gestures. Outside these contexts, female figures rarely cut/dishevel their hair of their own accord, the majority of those who do so being slaves/captives/prisoners subject to the whims of authority figures ‒ masters/mistresses or priests.
Abstract
Nasi Israel was the official title of Shimon Bar Kosiba (Bar Kokhba), the leader of the second Jewish revolt against Rome (132–135/6 CE). The choice of this designation raises important issues pertaining to the way in which Bar Kosiba conceived his role as leader, the extent of his powers and, more generally, the ideological foundations of his regime. It has often been argued that Bar Kosiba’s model of nasi derives from the prophet Ezekiel’s depiction of the ideal Davidic nasi and that, as such, it has a messianic overtone. This article puts forward a slightly different model. It proposes that nasi Israel refers to a figure distinct from the Davidic nasi, which is derived from an interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision of the restored Temple (Ezek 40–48). This title functioned as a programmatic declaration signaling Bar Kosiba’s main objective to rebuild the Temple and renew the sacrificial worship.
Abstract
In the hope of shedding some light on what it meant to be “Jewish” in the first century CE, and perhaps in other times, this article will closely examine what “everybody knows” about Tiberius Julius Alexander – that he was an apostate from Judaism – by carefully considering the arguments of earlier writers and critiquing them, in light of the events of his distinguished military and governmental career. It will also consider some remarks of his uncle Philo that others have thought relevant, and will offer an alternative narrative of his role as second in command of the Roman army in the Jewish War.
Abstract
The Babylonian Talmud conceptualizes the proscription against consuming the tereifah/mauled animal (Exod 22:30) and reformulates it as a rule prohibiting any entity that has exited hutz limhitzato, “outside its [proper] bound.” Through a close analysis of the half-dozen sugyot that utilize this rule and their precursors, this article considers the gradual development of this conceptual category throughout the strata of rabbinic literature, concluding that the fullest development of this concept is manifest in the Stam (anonymous layer of the Babylonian Talmud). The developed conception behind the rule can be best understood in light of Mary Douglas’s conception of “matter out of place.” The rabbis make a Douglas-style argument, that, at times, the location of matter outside its proper place suffices to explain an item’s prohibited status. An appendix demonstrates that a seeming early appearance of the term hutz limhitzato in Mekhilta de-Rashbi is of medieval, rather than Tannaitic, provenance.
Abstract
This article analyzes the expression dad la-kior (female breasts for the [Temple’s] laver) for its spigots (t. Yom. 2:2, m. Yom. 3:10), which so far has received no scholarly attention. The Temple’s laver has no taps/spigots in any attestation from the Bible to Josephus. The laver is an essential item in rabbinic imagery of the Temple and choreography of human-Divine communication. The term dad is used figuratively also for the Divine as nursing infant Israel through the manna (t. Sot. 4:3, Sif. Num. 89). The complete dependency of Israel on the Divine in the desert and of the infant on the breast parallels the laver as the crucial point on which Israel’s atonement depends. Ben Qatin (cf. Latin catīnus [basin]), who offers the laver, and other diasporic donors’ dependency on a literary Temple and rabbinic identarian normativity about handwashing are strengthened through a female image. This marks breastfeeding as a topos for exegetical competition.