This volume, a tribute to John J. Collins by his friends, colleagues, and students, includes essays on the wide range of interests that have occupied John Collins’s distinguished career. Topics range from the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism and beyond into early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. The contributions deal with issues of text and interpretation, history and historiography, philology and archaeology, and more. The breadth of the volume is matched only by the breadth of John Collins’s own work.
John J. Collins offers readers a model for the scholarly study of all aspects of Judaism, from the Persian period through Late Antiqity, including its influence on early Christianity. The essays are thematically grouped to cover the problem of the Canon in Second Temple Judaism and deal with apocalypticism, the Book of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Also analyzed is the relationship between Wisdom and the Apocalypticism. This volume brings together over two decades of research by a leading authority in the field of Judaism. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
This is the extended and annotated edition including * an extensive annotation of almost 10.000 words about the oracles in religion * an interactive table-of-contents * perfect formatting for electronic reading devices THE Sibyls occupy a conspicuous place in the traditions and history of ancient Greece and Rome. Their fame was spread abroad long before the beginning of the Christian era. Heraclitus of Ephesus, five centuries before Christ, compared himself to the Sibyl "who, speaking with inspired mouth, without a smile, without ornament, and without perfume, penetrates through centuries by the power of the gods." The ancient traditions vary in reporting the number and the names of these weird prophetesses, and much of what has been handed down to us is legendary. But whatever opinion one may hold respecting the various legends, there can be little doubt that a collection of Sibylline Oracles was at one time preserved at Rome. There are, moreover, various oracles, purporting to have been written by ancient Sibyls, found in the writings of Pausanias, Plutarch, Livy, and in other Greek and Latin authors. Whether any of these citations formed a portion of the Sibylline books once kept in Rome we cannot now determine; but the Roman capitol was destroyed by fire in the time of Sulla (B. C. 84), and again in the time of Vespasian (A. D. 69), and whatever books were at those dates kept therein doubtless perished in the flames. It is said by some of the ancients that a subsequent collection of oracles was made, but, if so, there is now no certainty that any fragments of them remain.
The Damascus Document is an ancient Hebrew text that is one of the longest, oldest, & most important of the ancient scrolls usually referred to collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its oldest parts originate in the mid- to late 2nd century BCE. While the earliest discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred in 1947, the Qumran Damascus Document fragments were discovered in 1952 (but not published in full until 1996), mainly in what is designated as Qumran Cave Four. However, it is unique in that two manuscripts (MS A & MS B) containing parts & variations of the same text were discovered much earlier, in 1896, among the discarded texts of the Cairo Geniza, the latter being written in the 10th-11th centuries CE. Together, the manuscripts of the Damascus Document, both ancient & medieval, are an invaluable source for understanding many aspects of ancient Jewish (& before that Israelite) history, theology, and much more.
This volume presents a range of methodologically innovative treatments on ritual action in the Hebrew Bible. They treat a diverse range of ritual phenomena, including space, blessings and oath-taking, from the world of ancient Israel and Judah. The introduction engages with the dominant scholarly models drawn from ritual theory, and the volume explores their applicability to ancient textual material such as the Hebrew Bible. The chapters reflect high-level specialized engagement with specific ritual phenomena through the lens of appropriate theoretical and methodological approaches.
The essays in Sacred Texts and Disparate Interpretations shed new light on core themes in Qumran studies, such as the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, history of the Qumran community, Hebrew philology and paleography, Wisdom and religious poetry.
2020 Center for Biblical Studies Book Award (Reference Works) This book introduces readers to a much-neglected and misunderstood assortment of Jewish writings from around the time of the New Testament. Dispelling mistaken notions of "falsely attributed writings" that are commonly inferred from the designation "pseudepigrapha," Daniel Gurtner demonstrates the rich indebtedness these works exhibit to the traditions and scriptures of Israel's past. In surveying many of the most important works, Introducing the Pseudepigrapha of Second Temple Judaism shows how the pseudepigrapha are best appreciated in their own varied contexts rather than as mere "background" to early Christianity or emerging rabbinic Judaism. Foreword by Loren T. Stuckenbruck.
Reflecting the increasing recognition of the importance of legal texts and issues in early Judaism, the essays in this collection examine halakhic and rule texts found at Qumran in light of the latest scholarship on text production, social organization, and material culture in early Judaism. The contributors present new interpretations of long-lived topics, such as the sobriquet “seekers of the smooth things,” the Treatise of the Two Spirits, and 4QMMT, and take up new approaches to purity issues, the role of the maśkil, and the Temple Scroll. The volume exemplifies the range of ways in which the Qumran legal texts help illuminate early Jewish culture as a whole.
