"In this book Richard Kalmin offers a thorough reexamination of rabbinic culture in late antique Babylonia. He shows how this culture was shaped in part by Persia on the one hand and by Roman Palestine on the other. Kalmin also offers new interpretations of several rabbinic texts of late antiquity."--BOOK JACKET.

Ve-Eileh Divrei David: Essays in Semitics, Hebrew Bible and History of Biblical Scholarship, covers the career of S. David Sperling, a well-known and respected Biblical scholar. It is divided into three sections representing the three foci of the author’s work namely, Semitic philology, Bible, and the history of biblical scholarship. The chapters represent a remarkable 40 years of scholarship and convey deep knowledge of a range of topics that is rarely paralleled in today’s scholarship. “These 22 (previously published) essays reflect a lifetime’s contribution to the field of Semitic linguistics and philology ... The treatments are rich in depth, and reflect serious engagement with the issues under discussion ...” -Sandra Jacobs, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.5 (2019)

This is the fourth and fi nal volume of Lester L. Grabbe's four-volume history of the Second Temple period, collecting all that is known about the Jews during the period in which they were ruled by the Roman Empire. Based directly on primary sources such as archaeology, inscriptions, Jewish literary sources and Greek, Roman and Christian sources, this study includes analysis of the Jewish diaspora, mystical and Gnosticism trends, and the developments in the Temple, the law, and contemporary attitudes towards Judaism. Spanning from the reign of Herod Archelaus to the war with Rome and Roman control up to 150 CE, this volume concludes with Grabbe's holistic perspective on the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period.

A word conventionally imbued with melancholy meanings, "diaspora" has been used variously to describe the cataclysmic historical event of displacement, the subsequent geographical scattering of peoples, or the conditions of alienation abroad and yearning for an ancestral home. But as Daniel Boyarin writes, diaspora may be more constructively construed as a form of cultural hybridity or a mode of analysis. In A Traveling Homeland, he makes the case that a shared homeland or past and traumatic dissociation are not necessary conditions for diaspora and that Jews carry their homeland with them in diaspora, in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study. For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of homeland, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. Ultimately, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing apart from other cultural migrations.

In For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod, Barak S. Cohen reevaluates the evidence in Tannaitic and Amoraic literature of an independent “Babylonian Mishnah” which originated in the proto-talmudic period. The book focuses on an analysis of the most notable halakhic corpora that have been identified by scholars as originating in the Tannaitic period or at the outset of the amoraic. If indeed such an early corpus did exist, what are its characteristics and what, if any, connection does it have with the parallel Palestinian collections? Was this Babylonian Mishnah created in order to harmonize the Palestinian Mishnah with a corpus of rabbinic teachings already existent in Babylonia? Was this corpus one of the main contributors to the forced interpretations and resolutions found so frequently in the Bavli?