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The Hebrew Bible formulates two sets of law: one for the Israelites and one for the gentile "residents" living in the Holy Land. Law Beyond Israel: From the Bible to the Qur'an argues that these biblical laws for non-Israelites form the historical basis of qur'anic law. This volume corroborates its central claim by assessing laws for gentiles in late antique Jewish and especially in Christian legal discourse, pointing to previously underappreciated legal continuity from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament and from late antique Christianity to nascent Islam. This volume first sketches the legal obligations that the Hebrew Bible imposes on gentiles, on humanity more broadly and, more specifi...
This book presents how ancient Christianity must be understood from the viewpoint of the history of religions in late antiquity. The continuation of biblical prophecy runs like a thread from Jesus through Mani to Muhammad. And yet this thread, arguably the single most important characteristic of the Abrahamic movement, often remains outside the mainstream, hidden, as it were, since it generates heresy. The figures of the Gnostic, the holy man, and the mystic are all sequels of the Israelite prophet. They reflect a mode of religiosity that is characterized by high intensity. It is centripetal and activist by nature and emphasizes sectarianism and polemics, esoteric knowledge, or gnosis and ch...
Positions Revelation within an ancient Jewish context and demonstrates how the author used humor to resist Roman power.
Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph.D. - Princeton) under the title: Late Antiquity Upside Down: Rabbinic Parodies of Jewish and Christian Literature.
A compelling book that casts the Qur’anic encounter with Jews in an entirely new light In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur’an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. He traces the Qur’anic origins of the protection of Jews and other minorities living under the rule of Islam, and shows how attitudes toward Jews in Shi‘i Islam are substantially different from those in Sunni Islam. Bar-Asher sheds light on the extraordinary contribution of Jewish tradition to the Muslim exegesis of the Qur’an, and draws important parallels between Jewish religious law, or halakha, and shari‘a law. An illuminating work on a topic of vital relevance today, Jews and the Qur’an offers a nuanced understanding of Islam’s engagement with Judaism in the time of Muhammad and his followers, and serves as a needed corrective to common misperceptions about Islam.
The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch or Second Baruch is a Jewish work of the late first century C.E., written in Israel in the aftermath of the Jewish War against Rome. It is part of a larger body of post-70 C.E. Jewish literature. The authors of these works had a difficult charge. They needed to re/imagine Judaism and its central symbols, take count of a thriving Diaspora, and articulate how Jewish life was to be lived from then on, without the benefit of a temple. Written at a time of religious reconstruction and mental reorientation, Second Baruch occupies a unique place in the history of early Jewish thought. In this highly original work, the author of Second Baruch developed an apocalyptic ...
In the immediate centuries after the Romans' destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, Jews and Christians offered contrasting religious explanations for the razing of the locus of God's presence on earth. Adam Gregerman analyzes the views found in three early Christian texts (Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, Origen's Contra Celsum, and Eusebius' Proof of the Gospel) and one rabbinic text (the Midrash on Lamentations), all of which emerged in the same place--the land of Israel--and around the same time--the first few centuries after 70. The author explores the ways they interpret the destruction in order to prove (in the case of Christians), or make it impossible to disprove (in the case of the Jews) that their community is the people of God. He demonstrates the apologetic and polemical functions of selected explanations, for claims to the covenant made by one community excluded those made by the other.
An edited collection on the historical, religious, and cultural contexts of the origins of the Qur'an.
This book provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish travel and mobility in Hellenistic and Roman times, based on a critical analysis of Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and early Christian literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources and a social-historical evaluation of the material. Catherine Hezser shows that certain segments of ancient Jewish society were quite mobile. Mobility seems to have increased in the later Roman period, when an extensive road system facilitated travel within the province of Syria-Palestine and the neighbouring Middle Eastern regions. Second Temple Judaism was centralized, with Jerusalem as its central space and seat of priestly authority. In post-70 rabbinic Juda...