This volume brings together a wide range of international scholars of Ancient Judaism, whose essays explore various issues surrounding Jewish communities and Jewish identity in late antiquity. The essays are organized into three sections: Interpreting Ritual Texts, Mapping Diaspora Identities, and Rewriting Tradition.

The first full-length analysis of the heavenly book motif in English, this study highlights a vital element of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Through multiple intertextual readings, it demonstrates that for the ancients heavenly writing had life or death consequences.

his most ambitious scholarly achievement, his three-volume study of Rabbinic Judaism, is only now appearing in English.

An extensive commentary on the Book of Jubilees, followed by a series of chapters exploring the possibility that the book had more than one author, as well as its relationship to the Genesis Apocryphon, the Aramaic Levi Document, 4Q225 Pseudo-Jubilees, and the writings of Philo of Alexandria.

This volume is devoted to 4QInstruction, the last lengthy text of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be officially published. It is also the largest wisdom text of this corpus. The central concern of this study is how this composition should be understood in relation to the sapiential and apocalyptic traditions. Features of 4QInstruction that are examined include its appeal to revelation, its presentation of poverty, and its eschatology. The document’s relationship to both 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea sect is also discussed. This study will prove useful to anyone interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the reception of the Jewish wisdom tradition in the Second Temple period, and apocalypticism.

In this careful and provocative study, Chad Thornhill considers how Second Temple understandings of election influenced key Pauline texts with sensitivity to social, historical and literary factors. While Paul is able to move beyond ancient categories of a collective view of election, Thornhill shows how he also follows these patterns.