The Hexateuchal narrative arc begins with Abram’s encounter with Yhwh in Shechem in Gen 12:6–7 and ends with Joshua’s covenant at the same place in Josh 24:25–26. These “bookends” make mention of a particular tree in Shechem, which also features in Gen 35:1–4. The inherited Priestly tradition claimed that none of the ancestors in Genesis knew the name Yhwh, but the Hexateuchal editors of the Persian period insist that both El and Yhwh were known in Shechem and Bethel. In effect, these editors defend northern Yahwism against its southern detractors, and resist any supersessionist proposal that would turn the ancestral memories of the Samarian province into mere history. Israel was born in the house of El, and the ancestors of Israel, who came from beyond the riverine borders of the Euphrates and the Nile, had no clear understanding of Yhwh until they set foot in Canaanite country.

Juxtaposing the shared emphasis on the basic human need for companionship in the Eden Narrative and the Epic of Gilgamesh provides new insight, both into how the texts respectively present companionship and into the issues of anthropology and gender that have previously distracted readers from this theme. Focus on parallels between Eve and Shamhat, who initiates Enkidu into human civilization, has obscured Eve’s resonance with Enkidu, created to be a match for Gilgamesh, as Eve was for Adam. The match created for the semidivine Gilgamesh is the male, semibestial Enkidu; however, Adam’s “helper” is a female, explicitly contrasted with the animals, and “bone of [his] bones and flesh of [his] flesh.” Though the heroes of the epic constantly struggle at the boundaries of human existence, the Eden Narrative depicts humans, male and female, together created distinct from god and animal, though likewise compelled to acknowledge their limitations.

Incest (“revealing the nakedness of the flesh of one’s flesh”) and slavery are presented in the Triteuch (Gen 1 through Lev 26) as twin threats to kinship creation (becoming “one flesh”) as the uniquely human matrix for fulfilling the commandment “be fruitful and multiply.” The serpent’s duplicitous nakedness symbolizes incestuous reproduction; the Tower builders, who seek to preserve their “one lip,” acquire one name, and avoid fragmentation into distinct kinship groups, “imagine” (zāmam, suggesting incest) a new way to reproduce themselves and their name; Pharaoh attempts to efface Israelite kinship and its “names” with the selective genocide of the males. The divine name YHWH, glossed as “I will be,” represents the freedom to give names to one’s children—the expression of the continuity of kinship creation (antitype of slavery)—and also the indexical uniqueness of each “I”-sayer—the interlinguistic basis of the oneness of humanity (antitype of the Tower).

This article proceeds on the principle that we need to decenter dominant ethnic groups—primarily Greeks and Greco-Macedonians in the early Hellenistic era—in order to understand other marginalized viewpoints and experiences, including but not limited to those of Judeans (Jews). An analysis of the Babylonian author Bel-re’ushu helps to provide a new angle on Judean (e.g., Artapanus) and Egyptian (e.g., Manetho) participation within ethnic discourses that include claims to civilizational priority. I would suggest that the rhetoric of ethnic superiority in writings by subject peoples can be viewed as a symptom of ethnic interactions and not merely as a literary response to elite Greek claims regarding the inferiority of supposedly “barbarian” peoples. So it is not always the currently hegemonic Greeks that are the principal interlocutors in these ethnic discourses.

In this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to another story and typified a style of writing that I characterize in the article as a heresiology. The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome deaths of women, was one way in which heresiological discourse frames rhetorical arguments for writers like Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, I purposely draw our attention to how Athanasian orthodoxy became reliant on gender-based violence.

This paper examines various ways in which apocalyptic studies can benefit from the introduction of the term and concept of gilayon, a reconstructed Hebrew counterpart of the Judeo-Greek apocalypse. The term gilayon, which combines the meanings of “revealed book” and “book of revelation,” refers to a central image of early Jewish revealed literature and could serve to define an important corpus, the boundaries of which might well overlap with (but still differ from) what is understood by the “genre apocalypse” in modern research. Moreover, this reconstructed concept uncovers additional meanings and associations, which shed light on texts known as “apocalyptic,” and has explanatory power for many phenomena associated with them. The introduction of gilayon may modify the entire paradigm of our understanding of early Jewish mysticism and help to divert the discussion of textual genres associated with it from a phenomenological to a historical route.

This article argues for a new interpretation of Ephesians based on its self-referentiality. Taking as my starting point the standard view that Eph 3:3–4 refers to the preceding portion of Ephesians, I explore how the text works rhetorically. I argue that in Ephesians 3:3–4 the author reflexively authorizes Ephesians as a revelatory text that provides privileged access to “the mystery” and to “Paul” as its mediator figure. Eph 3:3–4 thereby commends its readers to approach the epistle as textualized revelation. I advance this thesis through a contextual examination of Eph 3:2–13 with attention to three sets of comparanda. First, the Pesharim and Hodayot provide relevant witnesses to the textualization of revelation in early Judaism. Second, Quintilian’s depiction of ideal reading and the reception of Eph 3:3–4 by Origen and Jerome provide an opportunity to reimagine the epistle in light of ancient readerly landscapes. Third, depictions of inspired individuals endowed with divinely granted “insight” provide a revelatory framework for understanding σύνεσις in Eph 3:4. To conclude, I suggest further avenues of research that the present interpretation of Ephesians might open, including light it sheds on Ephesians’s pseudepigraphy.

Recent research on Jewish demonology has been significantly advanced by evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. In light of these advances, this article revisits the use of daimones and related terms in the Greek translations of Jewish scriptures commonly called the Septuagint (LXX). Against the tendency to conflate these LXX data into one intermediate stage in the development of the demonology of the New Testament, it calls for further attention to the particular dates and translational tendencies in specific LXX texts, as well as further attention to contemporaneous Aramaic and Hebrew sources. Accordingly, it situates the daimones of LXX Deuteronomy, the Greek Psalter, and LXX Isaiah alongside the emergent demonologies in the Aramaic Enoch literature, Jubilees, 4Q560, and 11Q11. Taken together, these sources attest new literary creativity surrounding transmundane powers among Jews in the Hellenistic period, shaped by distinctive concerns that cannot be reduced to a transitional, proto-Christian moment.

This article provides edition, translation, and annotation of a Greek excerpt dealing with the christological issue of “whether there is an anhypostatos nature.” Until now unedited and recently catalogued as one of the fragments of Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Synousiastas, it in fact contains a close parallel to a famous passage from Leontius of Byzantium’s Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos concerning the distinction between hypostasis and enhypostaton. It is argued that the fragment was written in the aftermath of the Tritheist controversy and, more specifically, that it faces the doctrines of John Philoponus.

A majority of scholars view the Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence, reported in 1 Maccabees, as inauthentic, since it contains many improbabilities, including the assertion that the Jews and the Spartans are fraternal nations. However, its patent implausibility also renders it unimaginable that the correspondence was intended to be understood literally. Hence, the binary choice offered in research, whereby it is either a bizarre fabrication or an authentic correspondence, despite all its peculiarities, is problematic. The Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence thus remains a conspicuous, unresolved enigma in the research of 1 Maccabees and the early Hasmonean period. Based on a textual clue, this article proposes a solution, namely, that the correspondence is, in fact, an ingenious derision of the Jews’ authentic ethnic “brothers”—the Samaritans. This suggestion provides new insights into the history of the early Hasmoneans and the literary creativity of the author of 1 Maccabees.

Luke 14:26 has commonly been viewed as an example of hyperbole. This article applies modern studies on hyperbole that hold as its principle criteria both a scalar property and an evaluative/expressive function. We apply these criteria, analyzing Luke 14:26 in terms of encoded language, co-text, and context. We argue that hyperbole arises from the choice to use “hate” rather than “love more than” but also that the hyperbolic usage relies on a cause for effect (emotion for emotional response) metonym.1 In terms of language, we show that “hate” has variant meanings that may be different in their degrees of encoding. In terms of co-text, we argue that Luke’s use of “hate” and Matthew’s use of “love more than” are relevantly chosen; in other words, they are suited to and to be interpreted against their co-texts.

The proper place of Judah Halevi’s thought in the initial emergence and subsequent development of medieval kabbalah has been the subject of debate for centuries. The general consensus has it that the Kuzari was not much more than a convenient repository of terms. This study measures the extent of Halevi’s impact on early kabbalah by using the Kuzari’s reasons for the sacrificial rite as a test case.

Halevi offered an exoteric, more rationalistic explanation and alluded to an esoteric one. Catalonian kabbalists in fact engaged for generations with these two reasons offered by the Kuzari, displaying a shared yet variable approach to Halevi’s thought. Unsurprisingly, some grabbed the low-hanging fruit by interpreting Halevi’s esoteric reason, which he refused to disclose, in terms of theosophical kabbalah. More unexpected, however, is the possible conceptual indebtedness of the earliest Catalonian kabbalists, like Ezra of Gerona, to Halevi’s theurgic conception of the commandments and doctrine of the Godhead. Of particular interest, too, is the fact that later generations of kabbalists interpreted the Kuzari using paradigms they also employed in their conceptualization of theosophical kabbalah, such as astral magic or neoplatonic psychology and spiritual eschatology.

Halevi’s work was not simply scavenged for its well-wrought nomenclature. If one looks closely, evidence for the Kuzari’s significant and lasting imprint can be found throughout kabbalah: in the doctrine of the Godhead, in the theurgic conception of religious ritual, in the development of an esoteric interpretation of religious praxis, in the establishment of an esoteric reading of Sefer yeẓirah, and more.

What role has the “Old Testament” played in the self-understanding of Christians over the centuries, and what can we learn from the fact that Israel’s scriptures are often cited in early Christian texts? Using the Acts of Philip as a case study, this article argues that we should not assume all early Christian writers thought of these as “my own scriptures.” When we encounter citations from Israel’s scriptures in Christian texts, a variety of interpretive options should be considered, including the possibility that some writers saw Israel’s scriptures as “other people’s scriptures, not ours,” or would have consigned them a limited role in the Christian life, treating them as relevant for apologetics and evangelism—or for talking about apologetics and evangelism—but not for ongoing Christian discipleship. The article offers a new interpretation of Acts Phil. 5–7 and also examines Qur’anic citations in the Dialogue of Timothy I and the Caliph.

In the seminal work, Direction to the Duties of the Hearts, Baḥya ibn Paqūda (flourished 11th century) aimed to reconstruct Jewish existence on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” and the “duties of the hearts.” Baḥya’s intent was to instigate a transition towards the internalization of Jewish religious life. This paradigm shift was to take place not only by the shaping of an ideational formation and a new set of distinctions that Baḥya aimed at integrating in Jewish life, but also through a reflective consideration of the state of the Jewish tradition, its transmission mechanisms, historical trajectory, and contemporaneous challenges. As I will demonstrate in this article, in order to realize this transformation, Baḥya utilized a distinction that cross-cuts his work: the distinction between ẓāhir (“external” or “manifest”) and bāṭin (“inner” or “hidden”), that mostly indicates the relation between the manifest sphere of one’s actions and the activity that takes place only in one’s mental space. However, as I argue, this distinction is also applied by Baḥya to the expanse of Jewish “tradition,” pertaining to what was disclosed in it and what was left unimparted, what was communicated and what was kept unsaid, what was remembered and what was neglected.

The Te’omim Cave is a large karst cave located in the Jerusalem Hills. Since 2009, the cave has been explored by our team as a joint project of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University and the Cave Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Over 120 intact oil lamps were collected in the 2010–2016 survey seasons from all sections of the cave; most of them were dated to the second to fourth centuries CE. All of these lamps had been deliberately inserted in narrow, deep crevices in the main chamber walls or beneath the rubble. Some crevices contained groups of oil lamps mixed with weapons and pottery vessels from earlier periods or placed with human skulls. This article discusses the possibility that the oil lamps, weapons, human skulls, and other artifacts were used as part of necromancy ceremonies that took place in the cave during the Late Roman period, and that the cave may have served as a local oracle (nekyomanteion).

This article examines the way in which Manuel Kalekas describes the procession of the trinitarian persons in one of his earliest systematic treatises. As a member of so-called “Kydones circle,” Kalekas was part of a fourteenth-century group of Latinophrone Byzantine theologians who were interested in ecclesial union with the Latin West and in Latin theological sources. In addition to certain texts from Augustine, during the fourteenth century several works by Thomas Aquinas became available in Greek translation. Kalekas’s De fide is of interest because it integrates conceptual and structural insights from Aquinas even as it draws on Greek traditions from Cappadocia and Byzantium. Although the importance of Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles for the work of the Kydones circle is often cited, this article argues that Aquinas’s Summa theologiae was also a significant influence for Kalekas.

This article proposes that Jonas’s understanding of gnosticism differs substantially from the account typically associated with him. That standard account takes the basic tenets of existentialism as the foundation to its discussion of alienated individuality, whereas Jonas’s system uses neo-Kantian epistemology to construct both alienation and individuality out of a unified field of human interaction. Within his framework, gnosticism is a single historical-philosophical episode of inauthenticity, highly influential yet isolated in time, unlike the ubiquitous understanding of it. This article reviews Jonas’s system, elements of its early and later acceptance, along with selected issues raised by critics, from Heidegger and Scholem to Colpe, Yamauchi, Williams, and King.

In the esoteric writings of the Medieval German Pietists, nocturnal female demons, known as lilioth, preyed upon mortal men who crossed their paths or who laid down to sleep in their territory. These lilioth could smell the scent of a man, whose body carried with it the additional value of sexual allure, and would hunt them down with their finely attuned olfactory sense. Another odor discussed in these texts, the smell of flying ointment, guaranteed invisibility and offered invulnerability to night-time travelers of both sexes which mirrors the phenomenon known in contemporary Latin sources under the term cursus. In these texts, Jewish mystics, before the dawn of the Kabbalah, rewrote the widely known folklore traditions and fairy tales common to both Jewish and Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. The study presented here is therefore aimed to provide insight into a previously underestimated chapter in Jewish esoteric and kabbalistic sensorium, namely, the olfactory experience.

By the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times they stirred religious opposition. At the same time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the so-called practical kabbalah, associated with magic and a talismanic approach to religious ritual, gained substantial popularity among Ashkenazi (i.e., Eastern and Central European) Jews. This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. By zooming in on a single codex, this article foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts. The article showcases a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, in order to focus on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.

The short fragment prompting this study is a kabbalistic inquiry into three of the positive commandments in which women are especially obligated—the so-called commandments of Hannah. When accounting for these commandments in kabbalistic terms, the fragment endorses the ritual efficacy of Jewish women. It does this in a manner analogous to descriptions of commandments performed by men, in which the practitioner is vested with the power of unifying the divinity and, as a result, drawing down its influence. The sizeable literature on the commandments produced by medieval kabbalists abounds with such descriptions, from which scholars have long sourced information concerning the practices of medieval men performing “Jewish mysticism.” The fragment on the commandments of Hannah urges a reassessment of how the literature of medieval kabbalah constructs women’s ritual efficacy. After gauging that text’s provenance and surveying a host of comparable traditions from authoritative texts, the study proceeds to ask: Do the rationales of the three commandments of Hannah presuppose the application—by women—of esoteric knowledge during ritual performances? The article also highlights the lack of correspondence between (a) the occasional affirmations of women’s sacramental efficacy in the texts and (b) the negative consensus concerning the social-historical representation of female practitioners of kabbalah. Without attempting to overturn this consensus, the study aims to recover a phenomenology of commandments performed specifically by women, which is shown to be a rare, albeit representative, feature of medieval kabbalah.