Judaism, Ancient

Why did ancient Jewish and Christian authors attribute books, both real and imagined, to Adam and Eve, their daughters, Seth, Enosh, Kainan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Lamech, Noah, and Shem?

​​In late 2nd century Carthage, Tertullian, the first church father to write in Latin, composed Adversus Iudaeos to argue that Christianity’s interpretation of the Hebrew Bible was better than that of the Jews. While his depictions of Jews deal only with biblical verses, from his comments elsewhere about veiled women, Nazarenes, fasting, etc., he was clearly familiar with Jewish practice of his day.

​Even before the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the Jews of the Greco-Roman Diaspora successfully created Judaic systems that provided them with identity, purpose, new ways of thinking, and alternative points of access to the divine, independent of the Temple rituals in far-off Jerusalem.

Hellenistic religion didn’t require charity. In contrast, the biblical command for charity is founded not only on YHWH’s commitment to reward the generous, but on YHWH adopting the voice of the poor, a critical factor in the vibrancy of early Judaism and Christianity.

Was Abraham the founding father of what became the Jewish people, only the precursor of Moses? Alternatively, does he represent the human ideal, from which his descendants went astray, but that can be partially achieved through observance of the Torah?

Although Judea is one of the provinces of the multicultural empire of Persia, the book of Esther never mentions it. Rather, it grapples with the precarious position of Jews scattered throughout Persia, outside their ancestral homeland, and who stand out among the non-Jews in their insistence on keeping to their cultural rules and norms.

Whose knowledge is the most ancient? In the Hellenistic period, Egyptians and Babylonians, among others, debated the antiquity of their wisdom. Second Temple Jews claimed that their own knowledge dated from before the Flood. But how did it survive the destruction of the flood?

Upon the conquest of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar deported many Judeans to Babylonia. What was their life like there? Were they assimilated, or did they stand out? What language(s) did they speak and what religious practices did they maintain? What was their social and economic standing? Babylonian records allow us glimpses into the lives of some of the deportees.

A Post-Destruction model of Jewish Identity: Reading and studying Torah as if our life depended on it.