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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Judaism > General
The fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were truly an Age of
Secrecy in Europe, when arcane knowledge was widely believed to be
positive knowledge that extended into all areas of daily life, from
the economic, scientific, and political spheres to the general
activities of ordinary people. So asserts Daniel Jutte in this
engrossing, vivid, and award-winning work. He maintains that the
widespread acceptance and even reverence for this "economy of
secrets" in premodern Europe created a highly complex and sometimes
perilous space for mutual contact between Jews and Christians.
Surveying the interactions between the two religious groups in a
wide array of secret sciences and practices-including alchemy,
cryptography, medical arcana, technological and military secrets,
and intelligence-the author relates true stories of colorful
"professors of secrets" and clandestine encounters. In the process
Jutte examines how our current notion of secrecy is radically
different in this era of WikiLeaks, Snowden, et al., as opposed to
centuries earlier when the truest, most important knowledge was
generally considered to be secret by definition.
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Tomorrow's God
(Hardcover)
Robert N. Goldman; Edited by Mary L Radnofsky; Preface by Judith Ann Goldman
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What does it mean to be "like a child" in antiquity? How did early
Christ-followers use a childlike condition to articulate concrete
qualifications for God's kingdom? Many people today romanticize
Jesus's welcoming of little children against the backdrop of the
ancient world or project modern Christian conceptions of children
onto biblical texts. Eschewing such a Christian exceptionalist
approach to history, this book explores how the Gospel of Matthew,
1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas each associate
childlikeness with God's kingdom within their socio-cultural
milieus. The book investigates these three texts vis-a-vis
philosophical, historical, and archaeological materials concerning
ancient children and childhood, revealing that early
Christ-followers deployed various aspects of children to envision
ideal human qualities or bodily forms. Calling the modern reader's
attention to children's intellectual incapability, asexuality, and
socio-political utility in ancient intellectual thought and
everyday practices, the book sheds new light on the rich and
diverse theological visions that early Christ-followers pursued by
means of images of children.
In the last several decades since the first publications of the
biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, a revolution has occurred in the
understanding of the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible during
the Second Temple period. The present volume is a collection of
articles documenting that revolution, written by Sidnie White
Crawford over an almost thirty-year period beginning in 1990. As a
member of the editorial team responsible for publishing the Qumran
scrolls, the author was responsible for the critical editions of
nine Deuteronomy scrolls and the four Reworked Pentateuch
manuscripts; thus, her work played a critical role in the changing
understanding of the textual history of the Pentateuch,especially
the book of Deuteronomy and the Rewritten Bible texts. The author's
lifework is brought together here in an accessible format. While
the majority of the articles are reprints, the volume will close
with two major new pieces: a text-critical study of the
Deuteronomic Paraphrase of the Temple Scroll and a comprehensive
overview of the history of the text of the Pentateuch.
From the end of the 15th century until the 18th, Spanish Jews
carried on Jewish practices in the shadow of the Inquisition. Those
caught were forced to recant or be burnt at the stake. Drawing on
their confessions and trial documents, this book tells their story.
Analysis of the scroll fragments of the Qumran Aramaic scrolls has
been plentiful to date. Their shared characteristics of being
written in Aramaic, the common language of the region, not focused
on the Qumran Community, and dating from the 3rd century BCE to the
1st century CE have enabled the creation of a shared identity,
distinguishing them from other fragments found in the same place at
the same time. This classification, however, could yet be too
simplistic as here, for the first time, John Starr applies
sophisticated statistical analyses to newly available electronic
versions of these fragments. In so doing, Starr presents a
potential new classification which comprises six different text
types which bear distinctive textual features, and thus is able to
narrow down the classification both temporally and geographically.
Starr's re-visited classification presents fresh insights into the
Aramaic texts at Qumran, with important implications for our
understanding of the many strands that made up Judaism in the
period leading to the writing of the New Testament.
Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations
investigates how the Exodus has been, and continues to be, a
crucial source of identity for both Jews and Judaism. It explores
how the Exodus has functioned as the primary model from which Jews
have created theological meaning and historical self-understanding.
It probes how and why the Exodus has continued to be vital to Jews
throughout the unfolding of the Jewish experience. As an
interdisciplinary work, it incorporates contributions from a range
of Jewish Studies scholars in order to explore the Exodus from a
variety of vantage points. It addresses such topics as: the Jewish
reception of the biblical text of Exodus; the progressive unfolding
of the Exodus in the Jewish interpretive tradition; the religious
expression of the Exodus as ritual in Judaism; and the Exodus as an
ongoing lens of self-understanding for both the State of Israel and
contemporary Judaism. The essays are guided by a common goal: to
render comprehensible how the re-envisioning of Exodus throughout
the unfolding of the Jewish experience has enabled it to function
for thousands of years as the central motif for the Jewish people.
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