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While conquering the world, Rome encountered a great number of peoples around the Mediterranean. We know very little about how these populations viewed their conquerors. The Jews were the only people to offer a comprehensive view of Rome over a great span of time. They expressed it in a rich corpus of Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic sources, reflecting the evolution of the relations between Jews and Romans: from alliance and friendship to tensions and revolt, culminating for the Jews in temporary compliance to foreign domination together with hopeful expectations for redemption. The image of Rome which emerges from apocryphal, Talmudic and Midrashic literature durably shaped the Jewish political, moral and eschatological vision of the world and history.
Collection of ninety-five articles on Roman and European mythologies, reproduced in full with illustrations, from the two-volume Mythologies.
In his study Peter Frick starts with the examination of the theocentric structure of Philo's thought as outlined in the important passage De Opificio Mundi 171-2 where Philo correlates the idea of providence with his concept of God and the theory of creation. On this basis, any adequate understanding of providence in Philo must begin with the correlation between the formal aspects of the Philonic concept of God, especially the idea of God's transcendence, and Philo's conceptualization of the idea of providence in light of these formal aspects. In particular, the issue is how Philo can predicate that God is provident in nature, although God cannot be apprehended in his essence. Moreover, Phil...
Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings is more than a question of legal status: it is the experience of being Jewish or of 'Jewishness' in all its social and cultural dimensions. This work describes this experience as it emerges in Talmudic and Midrashic sources. Besides the question of “who is a Jew?”, topics include the contrast between Israel and the non-Jews, the physical embodiment of Jewish identity, the 'boundaries' of Israel and resistance to assimilation. Jewish identity, it is argued, hinges essentially on the Divine commandments (mitzvot) and on Israel's perceived proximity with the Divine. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including the theories of William James and Merleau-Ponty, this study raises important issues in anthropology, as well as accounting for central aspects of early rabbinic Judaism.
The Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was a watershed event in the religious, political, and social life of first-century Jews. This book explores the reaction to this event found in Jewish apocalypses and related literature preserved among the Pseudepigrapha (4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, 3 Baruch, 4 Baruch, Sibylline Oracles 4 and 5, and the Apocalypse of Abraham). While keeping the historical context of their composition in mind, the author analyzes the texts with a view to answering the following questions: What do these texts tell us about Jewish attitudes toward the Roman Empire? How did Jews understand the situation in post-70 Judea through the lens of Israel’s past, especially the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.?
Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In The Dispersion, Stéphane Dufoix skillfully traces how the word “diaspora”, first coined in the third century BCE, has, over the past three decades, developed into a contemporary concept often considered to be ideally suited to grasping the complexities of our current world. Spanning two millennia, from the Septuagint to the emergence of Zionism, from early Christianity to the Moravians, from slavery to the defence of the Black cause, from its first scholarly uses to academic ubiquity, from the early negative connotations of the term to its contemporary apotheosis, Stéphane Dufoix explores the historical socio-semantics of a word that, perhaps paradoxically, has entered the vernacular while remaining poorly understood.
A thorough and authoritative study of Athenian finance both before and during the Peloponnesian War. Loren Samons tackles the complexities of Athenian revenue and state expenditure, drawing on a range of literary and historical source material which survives in varying degrees of detail. Rents, taxes, tribute, fines, slave sales, fees and so forth formed the basis for state income which were then used to run the Athenian `machine', to pay various people for their services to the state and for beautifying their towns and cities.
Early Judaism and early Christianity emerged during the Hellenistic and early Roman imperial era. They were, naturally, confronted with the Hellenistic and the Roman religion. The question therefore arose as to whether Jews or Christians were free to participate in religious activities alien to the religious heritage of their own. In his articles, Karl-Gustav Sandelin presents documentary material showing that this problem was a burning issue within Judaism from the beginning of the Hellenistic period until the end of the first century C.E. Several Jewish individuals converted to the Hellenistic or the Roman religion. Such behavior was also discussed and generally condemned, for example by the Books of Maccabees and authors such as Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. A similar problem is to be found in the New Testament, notably in the letters of Paul, especially in the first letter to the Corinthians and in the Revelation of John.
Explores the influence of Roman imperialism on the development of Messianic themes in Judaism.