The Lawgiver

The Lawgiver
Author: Herman Wouk
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1451699409

"A lighthearted and delightful tour de force" (The Washington Times). A romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day, The Lawgiver is a story that emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, Skype transcripts, and text messages. At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including reunite with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the movie. As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, the force of tradition, rebellion and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America’s most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.

Jews in the Hellenistic World

Jews in the Hellenistic World
Author: John Raymond Bartlett
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1985
Genre: Church history
ISBN: 9780521285513

This book aims to introduce the work of Hellenistic Jewish writers of the period 200 BC to AD 200. Four in particular are studied. The authors of the Letter of Aristeas and the Sibylline Oracles came from second-century BC Egypt. Eupolemus wrote probably in Jerusalem at the same time. Josephus, a priest from Judaea, wrote in Rome in the late first century AD. Using Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, and conscious of the position of Jews in the Graeco-Roman world, they wished to demonstrate that their cultural and religious heritage stood comparison with the Graeco-Roman tradition and that Jews were neither so philosophically naive nor so politically troublesome as they were often supposed to be. An opening chapter describing the position of Jews in the Hellenistic world is followed by selected passages, all newly translated, with introductory essays and commentary. The collection makes available to students much material hitherto not easily accessible.

Moses among the Greek Lawgivers

Moses among the Greek Lawgivers
Author: Ursula Westwood
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2023-09-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004681930

Josephus’ Antiquities introduces Moses as the Jewish lawgiver, adapting the biblical account for a new audience. But who was that audience, and what did they understand by the term lawgiver (νομοθέτης)? This book uses Plutarch’s Lives as a proxy for an imagined audience, providing a historically grounded but flexible model of a lawgiver, against which some of the otherwise invisible forces shaping Josephus’ choices are thrown into sharp relief. This method reveals patterns of appeal and challenge in Josephus’ intriguing and lively account of Moses’ legislative activities.

In the Court of the Gentiles: Narrative, Exemplarity, and Scriptural Adaptation in the Court-Tales of Flavius Josephus

In the Court of the Gentiles: Narrative, Exemplarity, and Scriptural Adaptation in the Court-Tales of Flavius Josephus
Author: David Edwards
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2023-06-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004549064

Edwards explores how Josephus in Antiquities adapts the scriptural stories of Joseph and Esther in unexpected ways as models for accounts of more recent Jewish figures. Terming this practice “subversive adaptation,” Edwards contextualizes it within Greco-Roman literary culture and employs the concept of “discourses of exemplarity” to show how Josephus used narratives about past figures to engage Roman elites in moral reflection and pragmatic decision-making. This book supplies analysis of frequently overlooked accounts as well as Josephus’ broader literary strategies, and shows how ancient Jews appropriated imperial historiographical conventions and forms of discourse while countering Greco-Roman claims of cultural superiority.

When God Spoke Greek

When God Spoke Greek
Author: Timothy Michael Law
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 0199781729

Most readers do not know about the Bible used almost universally by early Christians, or about how that Bible was birthed, how it grew to prominence, and how it differs from the one used as the basis for most modern translations. Although it was one of the most important events in the history of our civilization, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE is an event almost unknown outside of academia. Timothy Michael Law offers the first book to make this topic accessible to a wider audience. Retrospectively, we can hardly imagine the history of Christian thought, and the history of Christianity itself, without the Old Testament. When the Emperor Constantine adopted the Christian faith, his fusion of the Church and the State ensured that the Christian worldview (which by this time had absorbed Jewish ideals that had come to them through the Greek translation) would leave an imprint on subsequent history. This book narrates in a fresh and exciting way the story of the Septuagint, the Greek Scriptures of the ancient Jewish Diaspora that became the first Christian Old Testament.

Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World

Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World
Author: Louis H. Feldman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 691
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1400820804

Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.

The Words of Moses

The Words of Moses
Author: Sarah J. K. Pearce
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783161507335

Recent studies highlight the character of Deuteronomy's laws of public officials (Deut. 16.18-18.22) as the first draft for a constitutional government of the future. Sarah Pearce explores what these laws meant for Jewish interpreters and their communities in the Second Temple period. Her focus is on the reception and transformation of Deuteronomy's laws on the organisation of justice (Deut. 16.18-17.13): the appointment of local judiciaries; the authority and function of the central court; and the prohibition of single testimony. The author offers a detailed commentary on these laws in sources including the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, Greek Deuteronomy, the Books of Chronicles, the Temple Scroll, the Damascus Document, Philo of Alexandria, and Josephus. Her aim is to understand the ancient interpreters of Deuteronomy, first and foremost, in their own terms and their own contexts.

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism
Author: Gwynn Kessler
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2020-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1119113652

An innovative approach to the study of ten centuries of Jewish culture and history A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism explores the Jewish people, their communities, and various manifestations of their religious and cultural expressions from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Presenting a collection of 30 original essays written by noted scholars in the field, this companion provides an expansive examination of ancient Jewish life, identity, gender, sacred and domestic spaces, literature, language, and theological questions throughout late ancient Jewish history and historiography. Editors Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm situate the volume within Late Antiquity, enabling readers to rethink traditional chronological, geographic, and political boundaries. The Companion incorporates a broad methodology, drawing from social history, material history and culture, and literary studies to consider the diverse forms and facets of Jews and Judaism within multiple contexts of place, culture, and history. Divided into five parts, thematically-organized essays discuss topics including the spaces where Jews lived, worked, and worshiped, Jewish languages and literatures, ethnicities and identities, and questions about gender and the body central to Jewish culture and Judaism. Offering original scholarship and fresh insights on late ancient Jewish history and culture, this unique volume: Offers a one-volume exploration of “second temple,” “Greco-Roman,” and “rabbinic” periods and sources Explores Jewish life across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived Features original maps of areas cited in every essay, including maps of Jewish settlement throughout Late Antiquity Includes an outline of major historical events, further readings, and full references A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: 3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, literature, and ethnic identity, as well as general readers with interest in Jewish history, world religions, Classics, and Late Antiquity.