Torah in Early Jewish Imaginations

Torah is a topic of keen interest among scholars of the Bible and Second Temple Judaism. The Hellenistic age especially witnessed an undeniable textual pluriformity of not only the Pentateuch (Torah), but of a host of other works concerned with traditions of authoritative »teaching« or »instruction« (torah) that was related in complex ways to books that would become part of the Hebrew Bible. In the Second Temple period, the term torah was thus a robustly multivalent term, deployed in discourses emerging from different contexts, and toward a range of rhetorical ends. The essays in this volume employ a plethora of methodologies to offer innovative studies of a range of early Jewish literature – including texts from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint – that is concerned in different ways with Torah / torah.
Survey of contents
Ariel Feldman/Timothy J. Sandoval: Introduction − Richard J. Bautch: The Pentateuchal Redaction: An Exercise in Scribal Imagination − Steven D. Fraade: »Bringing the Messiah(s) Through Law«: Reflections from the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Some Successors − Carol A. Newsom: Access to Knowledge and Resistance to Genesis 2–3 in Mid-Second Temple Texts − Daniel A. Machiela: An Ancestral Pattern for Diaspora Life in the Aramaic Literature from Qumran − Ariel Feldman: The Song of the Sea in the Writings of Early Judaism − Joseph McDonald: Exodus as Chosen Trauma, Exodus as Chosen Glory: Group Identity Formation among Ancient Israelites, Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora, and Modern Ethiopian Jews − Jonathan Kaplan: Leviticus and the Rewriting of the Torah in 1QWords of Moses (1Q22) − Jeremy L. Williams: The Rhetorical Use of Blasphemy for Criminalization from Leviticus 24:10–23 to Acts 6:8 – 7:60 − Timothy J. Sandoval: Satirical Elements in Tobit? Tobit's Torah Ethics in GII versus GI − Judith H. Newman: Trickery as Virtue? Reworking the Torah's Trickster in the Book of Judith − Kelley Coblentz-Bautch: The Law and the Prophet: Reading 1 Maccabees in the Days of John Hyrcanus