A Companion to late ancient Jews and Judaism : third century BCE to 7th century CE

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"This companion volume brings together 30 scholarly essays covering many different topics within the larger subject of late ancient Jews and Judaism. Organized thematically these essays explore ide...

"This companion volume brings together 30 scholarly essays covering many different topics within the larger subject of late ancient Jews and Judaism. Organized thematically these essays explore identity, gender, material culture, sacred and domestic spaces, as well as literary motifs and theological questions and issues within late ancient Jewish history, historiography and methodology. Chronologically these essays cover material from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Geographically these essays map out late ancient Jewish life and remains throughout the Mediterranean world and the ancient Middle East. The purpose of this volume is not to retell the political or social history in a linear fashion, but to explore the subject area from many facets and points of inquiry. In addition, by pulling our lens to the wider setting of "late antiquity" and our geography to Mediteranean and Middle East, these essays highlight the variety of Jews, Judaisms, and Jewish expressions that flourished across these spaces and time periods. Yet in addition, this volume demonstrate the ways in which our scholarly constructs of ancient history (e.g. "Roman," or "Hellenistic") or Jewish history ("second temple," or "rabbinic") can be reconstructed, and productively so, when studied through other varied and creative lenses. There are many, many volumes that focus on the "second temple" period or sources or the rabbinic period or sources. People have tended to shy away from one volume that includes both because they are seen as two separate corpuses of works and time periods and too vast to cover well in one volume. The idea behind this volume was to try to blur the lines between these literatures and chronologies to highlight the similarities and crossovers between the two (that there is no hard and fast line between "second temple" and "post-second temple/rabbinic") rather than to reinforce the binary between the two. Thus "Late Ancient" creates multifaceted and, we think, more useful, ways of categorizing the material, literary and cultural artifacts of this period. I also hope that the maps we have produced are a key selling point as they map out Jewish settlement and remains across these periods and geographies, periods and geographies that are often isolated one from another in other scholarship"--Provided by publisher.

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