Welcome to Enoch Seminar Online International Scholarship on Second Temple Judaism.- Christian, Rabbinic and Islamic Origins

Joan Taylor’s recent monograph The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea falls into two parts. The first part is a close study of descriptions of Essenes in Greek and Latin sources. The starting point for her analysis is the observation that scholarship has long been dominated by a notion that the Essenes were a marginal, ascetic, spiritual, and mystic ...

This volume is the result of the St. Andrews Graduate Conference for Biblical and Early Christian Studies on the theme of “Sacred Texts in their Socio-Political Contexts” (July 2013). According to the editors, the collected essays in this volume all address “the issue of oppressive imperial ideology and the extent to which the authors of sacred texts engaged their political ...

Understanding the formation of the Jewish canon is beset by a paucity of any evidence which might depict precisely the means and method by which the twenty-two-book Jewish canon became accepted. Furthermore, among various Jewish communities existing before the first century, different individual books were considered authoritative. Unfortunately, these communities either did not articulate the bounds of their authoritative collections, ...

The year 2001 has proven to be an important moment in the history of the study of Second Temple Judaism. That year witnessed the First Enoch Seminar meeting, an academic gathering from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond of specialists in Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins. The initiative, led by Gabriele Boccaccini, created a place for the study ...

In the corpus of Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East, Kenneth A. Kitchen and Paul J. N. Lawrence have collected the main witnesses of treaties, laws, and covenants in the pre-classical ANE from the last three millennia BCE. Even if it “is not intended to replace existing standard editions of any given group of texts here included” ...

While marriage in antiquity has become a major topic of scholarship in recent decades, weddings in their own right have only recently begun to attract attention. Researchers now have access to thorough descriptions of classical Greek nuptial practices from such works as John Oakley and Rebecca Hague Sinos’ The Wedding in Ancient Athens (1993) and Anne-Marie Vérilhac and Claude Vial’s ...

The book of Deuteronomy resonated deeply with Jewish scribes and interpreters in the Second Temple period. From the different versions of the book (MT, SP, LXX) to the creative engagement with Deuteronomic stipulations (Chronicles, Philo, etc.), the laws of Deuteronomy were of central importance to Jewish life in Palestine and the Diaspora. This study by Sarah Pearce began as her ...

Hindy Najman’s new analysis of 4 Ezra offers a fascinating approach to understanding the way that common feature of Jewish apocalyptic literature, the historical review, functions as the key to this text. She posits that in the wake of the trauma of the destruction of the Second Temple, 4 Ezra essentially constitutes a “reboot” of the Jewish historical narrative, akin ...

It is almost 60 years ago that I began research on the subject of St Paul’s understanding of the atonement. When it came to submitting the results of my work to the University authorities, however, I found myself having to explain how my investigations into Pauline theology had led me to write a dissertation on the Son of Man in ...

The author of this volume, Gary N. Knoppers, is the O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. His intentions, as the title suggests, are to show the origins of the split between Jews and Samaritans, to evaluate its extent, and to examine whether or not it prohibited continued relations between them. The first chapter, entitled, “Samaritans, Jews, ...