According to Raul Gonzalez Salinero, the plurality of religious expressions within Judaism prior to the predominance of the rabbinical current disproves the assumption according to which some Jewish customs and precepts (especially the Sabbath) prevented Jews from joining the Roman army without renouncing their ancestral culture. The military exemption occasionally granted to the Jews by the Roman authorities was compatible with their voluntary enlistment (as it was in the Hellenistic armies) in order to obtain Roman citizenship. As the sources attest, Judaism did not pose any insurmountable obstacle to integration of the Jews into the Roman world. They achieved a noteworthy presence in the Roman army by the fourth century CE, at which time the Church's influence over imperial power led to their exclusion from the militia armata.

As inheritors of Platonic traditions, many Jews and Christians today do not believe that God has a body. God is instead invisible and incorporeal, and even though Christians believe that God can be seen in Jesus, God otherwise remains veiled from human sight. In this ground-breaking work, Brittany E. Wilson challenges this prevalent view by arguing that early Jews and Christians often envisioned God as having a visible form. Within the New Testament, Luke-Acts in particular emerges as an important example of a text that portrays God in visually tangible ways. According to Luke, God is a perceptible, concrete being who can take on a variety of different forms, as well as a being who is intimately intertwined with human fleshliness in the form of Jesus. In this way, the God of Israel does not adhere to the incorporeal deity of Platonic philosophy, especially as read through post-Enlightenment eyes. Given the corporeal connections between God and Jesus, Luke's depiction of Jesus's body also points ahead to future controversies concerning his divinity and humanity in the early church. Indeed, questions concerning God's body are inextricably linked with Christology and shed light on how we are to understand Jesus's own visible embodiment in relation to God. In The Embodied God, Wilson reframes approaches to early Christology within New Testament scholarship and calls for a new way of thinking about divine-and human-bodies and embodied experience.

The Koren Sacks Siddur is the first new Orthodox Hebrew/English siddur in a generation. The Siddur marks the culmination of years of rabbinic scholarship, exemplifies Koren's tradition of textual accuracy and intuitive graphic design, and offers an illuminating translation, introduction and commentary by one of the world's leading Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. Halakhic guides to daily, Shabbat, and holiday prayers supplement the traditional text. Prayers for the State of Israel, its soldiers, and national holidays, for the American government, upon the birth of a daughter and more reinforce the Siddur's contemporary relevance. A special Canadian Edition is the first to include prayers for the Canadian government within the body of the text.

In The Hebrew Bible: A Millennium, scholars from different fields and dealing with different material sources are trying to consider the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The development of new databases and other technological tools have an increasing impact on research practices. By inviting doctoral students, young researchers, and established scholars to contribute, this interdisciplinary book showcases methods and perspectives which can support future scientific collaborations in the field of the Hebrew Bible. This edited volume gathers relevant research from Dead Sea Scrolls Studies, Cairo Genizah Studies, European Genizah Studies, and from Late Medieval Biblical Manuscript Studies.

This Festschrift in honor of Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman, a leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinic Judaism, includes contributions by twenty of his disciples, each of whom is a scholar in their own right. The many subjects covered display a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

This book is the first scholarly English translation of the Ze'enah U-Re'enah, a Jewish classic originally published in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and was the first significant anthological commentary on the Torah, Haftorot and five Megillot. The Ze'enah U-Re'enah is a major text that was talked about but has not adequately studied, although it has been published in two hundred and seventy-four editions, including the Yiddish text and partial translation into several languages. Many generations of Jewish men and women have studied the Torah through the Rabbinic and medieval commentaries that the author of the Ze'enah U-Re'enah collected and translated in his work. It shaped their understanding of Jewish traditions and the lives of Biblical heroes and heroines. The Ze'enah U-Re'enah can teach us much about the influence of biblical commentaries, popular Jewish theology, folkways, and religious practices. This translation is based on the earliest editions of the Ze'enah U-Re'enah, and the notes annotate the primary sources utilized by the author.

For many years, the historical-critical quest for a reconstruction of the origin(s) and development of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch has been dominated by the documentary hypothesis, the heuristic power of which has produced a consensus so strong that an interpreter who did not operate within its framework was hardly regarded as a scholar. However, the relentless march of research on this topic has continued to yield new and refined analyses, data, methodological tools, and criticism. In this spirit, the contributions to this volume investigate new ideas about the composition of the Pentateuch arising from careful analysis of the biblical text against its ancient Near Eastern background. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and diverging perspectives, the chapters in this book are grouped into two parts. The first is primarily concerned with the history of scholarship and alternative approaches to the development of the Pentateuch. The second focuses on the exegesis of particular texts relevant to the composition of the Torah. The aim of the project is to foster investigation and collegial dialogue in a spirit of humility and frankness, without imposing uniformity. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Tiago Arrais, Richard E. Averbeck, John S. Bergsma, Joshua A. Berman, Daniel I. Block, Richard Davidson, Roy E. Gane, Duane A. Garrett, Richard S. Hess, Benjamin Kilchoer, Michael LeFebvre, Jiri Moskala, and Christian Vogel.

The First Comprehensive Summary, for the English Reader, of the Teaching of the Talmud and the Rabbis on Ethics, Religion, Folk-lore and Jurisprudence. Cohen does an excellent job of presenting the origins of Talmudic literature and summarizing in a meaningful way the many doctrines it contains.

Gustav Landauer was an unconventional anarchist who aspired to a return to a communal life. His antipolitical rejection of authoritarian assumptions is based on a radical linguistic scepticism that could be considered the theoretical premise of his anarchism. The present volume aims to add to the existing scholarship on Landauer by shedding new light on his work, focussing on the two interrelated notions of skepsis and antipolitics. In a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, Landauer's alternative can help us to more seriously address the struggle for a different articulation of our communitarian and ecological needs.

The Scholastic Culture of the Babylonian Talmud studies how and in what cultural context the Talmud began to take shape in the scholastic centers of rabbinic Babylonia. Bickart tracks the use of the term tistayem ("let it be promulgated") and its analogs, in contexts ranging from Amoraic disciple circles to Geonic texts, and in comparison with literatures of Syriac-speaking Christians. The study demonstrates increasing academization during the talmudic period, and supports a gradual model of the Talmud's redaction.