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The Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia are the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. In A Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls, Marco Moriggi presents new editions of forty-nine Syriac incantation bowls that were originally published between 1853 and 2012, with accompanying introductions, translations, philological notes, photographs and glossaries. Furthermore, there is a detailed analysis of the Estrangela and Manichaean scripts as used on the bowls, together with newly drawn script charts. In gathering, organising and updating most...
This volume sheds light on how Jews and Christians in Antiquity understood the nature and characteristics of demons. The contributions cover a wide range of corpora and explore aspects of continuity and change as ideas flowed between groups and cultures.
Sacred Body: Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination provides fresh and insightful interpretations of Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the “sacred” from the divine and focus instead on the “everyday sacred” of a dynamic earthly existence that emphasizes the body, celebrates life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoids abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism. Roberta Sabbath argues that a diverse array of Jewish artifacts, from sacred scripture to contemporary novels and ballet performance, articulate a tradition that has existed for millennia in mythic, proto-historic, legalistic, mystical, philosophical, and aesthetic expressions of Jewishness. The author refers to this tradition as Jewish literary illumination, and she deftly demonstrates how it illuminates the most salient message of Judaism: that earthly existence and the body are also the site of the spiritual and the sacred.
Rewriting the Ancient World looks at how and why the ancient world, including not only the Greeks and Romans, but also Jews and Christians, has been rewritten in popular fictions of the modern world. The fascination that ancient society holds for later periods in the Western world is as noticeable in popular fiction as it is in other media, for there is a vast body of work either set in, or interacting with, classical models, themes and societies. These works of popular fiction encompass a very wide range of society, and the examination of the interaction between these books and the world of classics provides a fascinating study of both popular culture and example of classical reception.
In Delicious Prose: Reading the Tale of Tobit with Food and Drink, Naomi S.S. Jacobs explores how the numerous references to food, drink, and their consumption within The Book of Tobit help tell its story, promote righteous deeds and encourage resistance against a hostile dominant culture. Jacobs’ commentary includes up-to-date analyses of issues of translation, text-criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and issues of class and gender. Jacobs situates Tobit within a wide range of ancient writings sacred to Jews and Christians as well as writings and customs from the Ancient Near East, Ugarit, Greece, Rome, including a treasure trove of information about ancient foodways and medicine.
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