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Spine title: Jewish background of Christianity.
2 Maccabees is a Jewish work composed during the 2nd century BCE and preserved by the Church. Written in Hellenistic Greek and told from a Jewish-Hellenistic perspective, 2 Maccabees narrates and interprets the ups and downs of events that took place in Jerusalem prior to and during the Maccabean revolt: institutionalized Hellenization and the foundation of Jerusalem as a polis; the persecution of Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes, accompanied by famous martyrdoms; and the rebellion against Seleucid rule by Judas Maccabaeus. 2 Maccabees is an important source both for the events it describes and for the values and interests of the Judaism of the Hellenistic diaspora that it reflects - which are often quite different from those represented by its competitor, 1 Maccabees.
Presenting the Second Temple era as an age of transition between a territorial past and an exilic and religious future, Judeans and Jews sharpens our understanding of this important era.
A new translation and commentary on I Maccabees that offers a fresh interpretation of the author’s values and purpose First Maccabees, composed in the second century BCE, chronicles four decades of clashes between Hellenistic Syria and Judea, from Antiochus Epiphanes’s ascent to the throne in 175 BCE to the Hasmoneans’ establishment of an independent Judean state, ruled by Simon and his sons. In this volume, Daniel R. Schwartz provides a new translation of the Greek text and analyzes its historical significance. In dialogue with contemporary scholarship, the introduction surveys the work’s themes, sources, and transmission, while the commentary addresses textual details and issues of historical reconstruction, often devoting special attention to the lost Hebrew original and its associations. Schwartz demonstrates that 1 Maccabees, despite its Hebraic biblical style and its survival within the Christian canon, deviates from biblical and Judaic works by marginalizing God, evincing scorn for martyrs, and ascribing to human power and valor crucial historical roles. This all fits its mandate: justification of the Hasmonean dynasty, especially the Simonides.
The writings of Flavius Josephus provide much of what we know about the first century CE - which witnessed the birth of Christianity, the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, and the concomitant rise of rabbinic Judaism. However, Josephus was an author, not a video camera, and what he wrote often reflects much apart from what actually happened in the first century: Josephus' works were affected both by his literary models and by current events, and they functioned in various ways for Josephus as an individual and also as a Jew and a Roman, writing in a time of tumult and radical change. Daniel R. Schwartz argues that by building from the bottom up - first establishing the text and its meaning, then moving on to issues of Josephus' models, sources, and purposes - we may nevertheless reconstruct, with some confidence, the events and processes of this crucial era.
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Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics. Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. Ghetto: The History of a Word of...
These twenty studies ask whether changes in different fields of ancient Jewish culture were caused by the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, what changed for other reasons, and what did not change despite that event.
Selected as one of NPR's Best Books of 2016, this book offers superior learning tools for teachers and students, from A to Z. An explosive growth in research on how people learn has revealed many ways to improve teaching and catalyze learning at all ages. The purpose of this book is to present this new science of learning so that educators can creatively translate the science into exceptional practice. The book is highly appropriate for the preparation and professional development of teachers and college faculty, but also parents, trainers, instructional designers, psychology students, and simply curious folks interested in improving their own learning. Based on a popular Stanford University...
The Biblical View of Man argues cogently that the Bible is more about human beings than about God and insists that, in the biblical view, what human beings need is not so much wisdom or grace but rather their own free will to fulfill the obligations that a loving God has bestowed upon them in order to allow them to prove and improve themselves. According to Rabbi Leo Adler, the exercise of such free will, rather than implying a lack of need for God, actually requires a firm commitment to God. First published in German in 1965, this engaging interpretation of the Bible appears in English for the first time.