In comics: how ancient rabbis upend “traditional” ideas of reproduction, gender, and humanity. A blog post commissioned by UC Press Blog about the book When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species.

Link: htt…[Read more]

A concise description of Biblical and Epigraphic Hebrew, incorporating some of the latest discoveries about its phonology, syntax, and communicative role.

This chapter lays out how the Priestly corpus represents a distinctive form of material religion within the ancient Near East. Both its ideology and practice, on the one hand, and its physical shape as a composition, on the other, are distinctive and have had distinctive impacts on the history of religion. While the acts that the Priestly corpus…[Read more]

What do we call the drive to juxtapose multiple variants of an event or omen within a single passage or text such as we find in major first-millennium works like Enūma Anu Enlil and Sa.gig? This article proposes a term from musicology, “heterophony” which describes the practice of presenting multiple variants of a melody simultaneously in a…[Read more]

This article is a discussion of two Greek loanwords found in the Rabbinic text Song of
Songs Rabbah. It shows that these words are best identified and explained through a
comparison with a Stoic theory of fire, described and refuted by Philo of Alexandria.
That these words, both hapax legomena in Rabbinic literature, are used in the…[Read more]

I offer an examination of the passage’s function in 1 Clement and potential reception
among the Corinthians. The latter part of this chapter imagines how the
Corinthian recipients of 1 Clement may have understood its brief scene of
violence against women and their purported overcoming of “being weak in
the body.” Building upon schol…[Read more]

Der Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem wissenschaftlichen Konsens, dass Hermas im
Hirten des Hermas als freigelassener Sklave dargestellt wird. Nach einem Blick auf
biographische Einordnungen des Hermas bei verschiedenen frühchristlichen Autoren
wird auf Theodor Zahn als „Erfinder“ der biographischen Hypothese eingegangen,
dass Hermas ein Freig…[Read more]