Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), a prominent disciple of the Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda, creatively reconfigured some traditional Vedantic vocabularies to present the “cosmo-national” individual as one who is not antithetical to but is deeply immersed in the densities of national locations. As we situate Nivedita’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” in post-Saidian academic cultures, one of the most striking features of her reiteration of the theme that Indians should seek the universal in and through the particularities of their national histories, cultural norms, and religious systems is that it is grounded in an East-West binary, where specific values, sensibilities, and themes are attributed to each pole—primarily material to the Western and spiritual to the Eastern. The locations of her life and thought within this binary generate a complex combination of certain highly perceptive readings of Eastern styles of living; spiritual idealizations and ahistorical romanticizations of some traditional Hindu beliefs, traditions, and customs; global visions of internationalist exchanges across humanity; and pointed critiques of the operations of empire—while, occasionally, she can herself challenge the binary as an inexact classification.

In the movement of scriptural interpretation from antiquity to the modern period, critical attention in the Christian world recurrently turns to a provocative passage in the book of Judges. The passage (Judg 9:8–15) is a story about talking trees, a tale that is repeatedly called a “fable” (fabula) by Christian interpreters. In seeking from varying perspectives to explain the role of a fabulous dialogue in the discourse of truth, such interpreters suggest pressing issues in the assessment of figurative language. These issues include the controversial concept of the “literal” sense of Scripture; its potential relation to a “literary” sense of the text; the broader relation between scriptural and literary texts in general; and finally the complex interplay between factual and fabulous modes of expression.

In this expansive movement a decisive turning point is the late-medieval period. During this period commentary on the fundamental test case in Judges displays revealing changes in critical orientation. To assess those changes, it is important to investigate a broad range of interacting developments in exegesis, semiotics, homiletics, rhetoric, and poetic theory. The implications of this formative activity eventually extend far beyond the Middle Ages to the modern period. In the end, what is involved in the historic encounter with the passage in Judges is far more than the interpretation of a story. It is the intricate intersection of fable and fact in the changing poetics of Scripture itself—and beyond Scripture, in the intriguing poetics of imaginative language at large.

Lamentations Rabbah Proem 24, a late ancient rabbinic midrash, is in many ways a unique text within the entire rabbinic corpus. It presents an extraordinary array of characters (including Abraham, Moses, the Torah, and even the alphabet) who are called upon to placate God, but fail. As their quest proves inconclusive, the biblical Rachel jumps into the fray to tell her story: how out of sisterly compassion she allowed Leah to take her own place in the conjugal bed on “her” wedding night. Disclosing to her sister the secretive “signs” she had shared with Jacob, Rachel crawled under the nuptial bed to respond to Jacob whenever he spoke. This scandalous autobiography transforms an apparent instance of illicit sex, the ideal material for theatrical stage mimes, into an act of martyrdom and sublime compassion. This article argues that the performance culture of the late ancient Mediterranean world provides the key for assessing this text’s originality. We begin with an analysis of the text, drawing attention to its theatrical qualities and its relationships with contemporary visual imagery (mosaics) and texts from outside the rabbinic milieu (Christian Apocrypha). We then examine the casting of midrashic Rachel as a response to both the mimic adulteress and the Christian martyr. Finally, we consider rabbinic familiarity with mime, particularly with its usefulness as a social mediator and agent of collective catharsis. It is precisely these aspects of mimic performance, we argue, that Rachel’s vignette appropriates in this fascinating rabbinic text.

In 1 Pet 4:11a, those who exercise χαρίσματα involving speech acts are instructed to carry out their tasks ὡσ λόγια θεοῦ. Two interpretations of this phrase have gained prominence within Petrine scholarship. Some claim that Scripture is being referenced to establish a standard for regulating the use of communicative gifts in the church. Others contend that the verse sets up a hypothetical comparison designed to emphasize the appropriate manner in which the spoken word should be performed. The problem is that both of these positions have left crucial questions unattended. The purpose of this study is to provide a close examination of the three issues that most significantly impact the interpretation of 1 Pet 4:11a: (1) the meaning of λόγια; (2) the reconstruction of verbal elision; and (3) the Petrine author’s view of divine revelation through human mediation. In the end, I suggest that the verse is intended to convey a direct correspondence between the comparative image (i.e., one who delivers oracles from God) and the ministry of those who exercised speaking gifts within the Anatolian congregations. That is, when Christians rendered service to the community through various forms of verbal communication, they were understood to be dispensing divine revelation.

In Ambrose’s apologetic writing against the Roman prefect Symmachus, he makes a surprising argument for Christianity’s superiority over Roman religious practices, arguing that Christianity is in fact a newer and therefore superior form of religion. The whole world has “progressed” and so must religious practices. In the letters to Symmachus, Ambrose’s arguments are ad hoc and apologetic, not constructive. This article seeks to understand better the intellectual and historical contexts that make Ambrose’s surprising convictions possible by looking at Ambrose’s writings on creation in the context of the pro-Nicene debates. Considering Ambrose’s writing in the Hexameron, I argue that Ambrose’s account of cosmological progress finds an intellectual milieu in pro-Nicene reflection on the implications of Christ’s divine consubstantiality for a doctrine of creation. When Christ is no longer seen as a mediator between God and the world, a new space is opened up to speak of creation’s change and even “progress” without a worry that doing so will jeopardize creation as the divine handiwork. Ambrose’s apologetic strategy, though apparently not directly related to pro-Nicene debates, is illuminated when seen against this backdrop. The result is a better understanding both of Ambrose’s strategies in particular and of the situation of fourth-century apologetics more broadly.

On 12 July 1969, Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, wrote “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?,” a socialist critique of America’s penal system that focused on its inability to rehabilitate prisoners. Beyond its explicit rejection of American capitalism, his essay, with its very title, also invokes two passages from the Bible—Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:55) and the book of the prophet Hosea (Hos 13:14) —although Newton never elaborates on their allusive force. Intertextually bound to Newton’s title, these biblical passages function as a type of guiding lens through which “full-knowing readers” can engage Newton’s treatment of mass incarceration. This essay provides such an intertextual reading of “Prison” vis-à-vis 1 Cor 15 and Hos 13, with particular attention to the ways Newton’s biblical models simultaneously enrich and complicate interpretations of “Prison.”

Even gods are not always above bureaucracy. Societies very different from each other have entertained the idea that the heavens might be arranged much like an earthly bureaucracy, or that mythological beings might exercise their power in a way that makes them resembles bureaucrats. The best-known case is the Chinese “celestial bureaucracy,” but the idea is also found in (to take nearly random examples) Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, the Hebrew Bible, Late Antiquity, and modern popular culture. The primary sources discussed in this essay pertain to an area of history where bureaucracy was historically underdeveloped, namely medieval Scandinavia. Beginning with the Glavendrup runestone from the 900s, I examine a way of thinking about divine power that seems blissfully bureaucracy-free. Moving forwards in time to Adam of Bremen’s description of the temple at Uppsala (1040s–1070s), I find traces of a tentative, half-formed bureaucracy in the fading embers of Scandinavian paganism. In the 1220s, well into the Christian era, I find Snorri Sturluson concocting a version of Old Norse myth which proposes a novel resolution between the non-bureaucratic origins of his mythological corpus and the burgeoning bureacratization of High Medieval Norway. Although my focus is on medieval Scandinavia, transhistorical comparisons are frequently drawn with mythological bureaucrats from other times and places. In closing, I synthesise this comparative material with historical and anthropological theories of the relationship between bureaucracy and the divine.

The attack of Heliodorus on the temple in 2 Macc 3 is the first of a series of events occupying the narrative core of the book. In the first act of the story, a dispute arises over the actual contents of the temple treasury, with the high priest Onias claiming that they are “deposits of widows and orphans” (3:10). This essay focuses on this detail and shows that it entails an as yet unnoticed connection with a core of biblically ingrained traditions that gain momentum in the Second Temple period and come to the fore afterwards in the works of ancient Jewish and Christian authors: traditions that equate God’s money with money intended for the poor. In order to substantiate my claim, I survey texts in Deuteronomy, Tobit, and the Epistle of Jeremiah in search of hints of this process of “pauperization” of God’s property, and proceed to investigate the history of reception of 2 Macc 3:10 in the Latin translations, among the church fathers, and in the post-Talmudic work Josippon. The aim is to demonstrate that 2 Macc 3:10 became a productive link in the rhetorical formulation of a topos which bore long-lasting literary, theological, and practical fruits.

The book of Proverbs concludes with an alphabetic acrostic that describes and praises its feminine subject (Prov 31:10–31). The poem’s praise closes with a generalized critique of beauty, its deceptiveness and short-lived nature (v. 30). What function does this critique of beauty serve in light of the praise of the woman and her deeds? How do the poem and, specifically, this critique of beauty function in the broader organization of the book of Proverbs? This study argues that the poem rejects innate beauty in favor of acquired wisdom, a message that can be found elsewhere in Proverbs. The poem rejects beauty through an appeal to a rhetorical device—the “totalizing description”—which is used elsewhere to argue for a subject’s beauty or perfection. Through the structure of the alphabetic acrostic, the poem carefully embeds its message of willed action and acquired wisdom; using a description of the woman’s successive deeds, the poem shows how each deed leads to the enduring success of the woman’s family, her community, and the subsequent generation.

Nicholas of Cusa read Augustine, like he read Dionysius the Areopagite, as teaching that God was best known and encountered in an understanding of one’s own ignorance of ultimate reality (learned ignorance). Cusa’s use of Augustine in Defense of Learned Ignorance, On the Vision of God, and On the Not-Other helps recover the importance of learned ignorance in Augustine’s own writings. This study tracks learned ignorance as an essential mechanism of Augustine’s pursuit of wisdom through his early writings, the Confessions, and the later anti-Pelagian treatises. Learned ignorance functioned as philosophical dialectic in his earliest treatises, a practice of prayer in the Confessions, and as both polemic and apophatic theodicy in his later writings. Augustine’s shifting conceptualization of learned ignorance, in turn, helps recover how Cusa often preached learned ignorance as the humility of faith. Thus, Cusa’s commitment to learned ignorance derived from both the Neoplatonic dilemma of knowing the unknowable and the Augustinian understanding of original sin as pride and redemption as humility.

This is a first-time presentation of the initial section of the Toledot Yeshu (TY) narrative describing the birth and early life of Jesus in Judeo-Arabic, a text with important implications for current research on TY. First, the origin of the birth narrative has been debated in recent scholarship on the Hebrew versions of TY. The existence of this lengthy Judeo-Arabic birth narrative, preserved in two manuscripts belonging to the Russian National Library, as well as the identification of other, earlier Judeo-Arabic manuscript fragments that include the TY birth narrative, demonstrates that the birth narrative formed part of TY significantly earlier than has been previously suggested. Second, the narrative preserved in the Russian manuscripts also demonstrates the relevance of the Judeo-Arabic versions of TY for the understanding of the development of this protean work. Examination of their textual tradition reveals interesting connections with particular Hebrew versions of TY from Europe and can shed light on the question of how the work moved between East and West. Finally, this Judeo-Arabic version of TY is significant in its demonstration of a clever adaptation to its linguistic and cultural surroundings. It incorporates a lengthy introduction—the only one currently known in all of the TY literature—which is a literary tour de force employing contemporaneous Arabic style together with a well-known rabbinic dictum, thereby situating Toledot Yeshu simultaneously in its Islamicate milieu and in Jewish textual and even ritual tradition. The discussion concludes with a transcription and translation of the birth narrative as preserved in these two Russian manuscripts.

The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos. Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from “sapphire”—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα—scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the visual and verbal lexicon of the kabbalists to the Greco-Arabic scientific tradition. The present paper seeks to redress this neglect through an examination of the appropriation of the diagrammatic-iconographical and rhetorical languages of astronomy and natural philosophy in medieval and early modern kabbalistic discourse. This study will place particular emphasis on the adoption-adaptation and ontologization of the dominant schemata of these most prestigious fields of medieval science by classical kabbalists, what it reveals about their self-understanding, and how it contributed to the perception of Kabbalah as a “divine science” well into the early modern period.

This article investigates Maimonides’s ethos of disclosing “secrets” and explores its Islamic origins, focusing on sources neglected by earlier scholarship concerning the Guide of the Perplexed. I turn from the prevalent method by which the Guide has been studied for decades, namely, as a work at the core of which lie strategies and an ethos of concealment. In lieu of the conventional method, I go in a very different direction by inquiring into the modes that Maimonides used in fashioning his Guide as a work that involves a self-proclaimed exceptional act of revelation of secrets and a breach of the boundaries of concealment. The resulting textual investigation demonstrates that clusters of motifs presented in these sources, as well as structures of arguments, were retained in their cultural migration. This exploration allows me to illuminate new aspects of the question of the genre of Maimonides’ Guide, its sources, and its author’s intertextual art of writing.

This article investigates an uncharted facet of Martin Luther’s Hebrew translation method. It is one of the more fascinating aspects of his translation, which demonstrates both the complexity of how he translated Hebrew and the lasting impact of the Hebrew on his German, neither of which has been fully appreciated by scholars. This article demonstrates how he sometimes blended Hebrew and German idioms in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the Minor Prophets. It further shows how he used this translation method to convey various linguistic features of the Hebrew language to his German audience. Finally, it shows how this has a number of important implications for Luther studies, Hebrew and German linguistics, and medieval and early modern history.

This study draws on critical spatial theory to analyze the earliest archaeological and literary evidence of the triclinium, or Roman dining room, in Early Roman Palestine. It begins by examining the archaeological evidence of triclinia and similar banqueting spaces in Palestine, addressing their dating, their differing settings, and how their appearance and diffusion reflects socioeconomic and cultural changes under Roman influence. Next, it examines literary constructions of banqueting spaces in the Parables of Enoch, Testament of Moses, and “Q Sayings Gospel.” It demonstrates that these sources all seem to envision a triclinium setting in which elites eat, drink, and engage in all sorts of revelry while reclining on couches. The final section is devoted to critical spatial analysis of both the archaeological and literary data. It argues that these sources all evince, in varying ways, the interpenetration of local and global spaces rather than the unilateral “Romanization” of provincial space.

The widespread Jewish sympathies for Lessing’s pre-Hegelian, pro-Jewish, progressive Deism from the Education of the Human Race spurred some Jewish authors to return to and discuss Lessing’s religious thought within the theological endeavors of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth-century Germany. To be able to rely on Lessing, even retroactively, was welcome proof for Jewish Reformers that the humanistic approach to religious problems that stood at the very center of their project was at once Jewish and universal. It was the spirit of Lessing’s Education that was appropriated here for Judaism rather than Lessing’s letter. With Lessing in the camp of Reform Judaism the intended modernization of Judaism was safeguarded against the accusation of political and social egoism on the part of the Jews. It was the universal idea of religious progress that they shared with Lessing, not just the sloughing off of the yoke of outdated talmudic law.

This essay examines Samuel Hirsch’s Religious Philosophy of the Jews as a forerunner of twentieth-century works of ethical monotheism in modern Jewish thought. In particular, it explores Hirsch’s use of the dichotomy between monotheism and idolatry as a way to resist Hegel’s attempts to incorporate Judaism into his developmental history of religion. Hirsch frames his opposition to the Hegelian account of religion by means of providing a rival interpretation of Genesis 3 to that offered by Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. After juxtaposing Hegel’s and Hirsch’s respective interpretations of Genesis 3, I explore Hirsch’s account of religion, which, unlike Hegel’s, is presented in terms of the dichotomy of true and false religion. Finally, I will briefly highlight how Hirsch’s basic strategy for understanding Judaism vis-à-vis other religions—namely, casting the dichotomy between monotheism and idolatry in starkly ethical terms—is taken up and utilized by Hermann Cohen and Emmanuel Levinas in the twentieth century.

Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner offered a concerted critique of N. T. Wright’s account of Israel’s election as well as Wright’s description of the apostle Paul’s messianic atonement theology. They allege that Wright treats Israel’s election as instrumental rather than intrinsic and his exegesis of Rom 5:20‒21 results in a rehearsal of anti-Jewish tropes. This essay responds to them by 1) claiming that many of their criticisms are inaccurate representations of Wright’s views; 2) defending a missional perspective of Israel’s view of election; 3) asserting that Wright’s reading of Rom 5:20 about the Torah multiplying sin within Israel is neither immoral, nor implausible, nor idiosyncratic; and 4) offering some final thoughts about Wright and Jewish-Christian relations.

The relation between the everyday and the religious cult has traditionally been regarded as one of opposition, like the profane and the sacred. Since such a conception comes with a high price—rendering the cult esoteric and the everyday bereft of religious significance—this article proposes a more complex dynamic between the two. Drawing on Dewey’s idea of aesthetic experience as an intensification of ordinary experience, the article argues that a similar structure should be applied to the cult, or, more specifically, cultic play. In cultic play, there is admittedly discontinuity from ordinary life, owing to play’s distinct settings and rules. Nevertheless, such discontinuity reveals a deeper continuity, in which ordinary experience becomes present in new, sacred ways. In a dialectical manner, cultic play draws on ordinary experience, discloses and intensifies it through the context of play, and thus points forward to possibilities for inhabiting the everyday in richer ways.