Benjamin Porat’s Justice for the Poor differs from these books not only in that it is written in Hebrew (from the list above, only Wilfand’s 2014 book has been translated into Hebrew), but also because it envisions rabbinic charity as a branch of “law.” Porat is a law professor, and his book is jointly published by a law school, a think tank an…[Read more]

This article is a new reading of a Hebrew letter, Oxford MS Heb.d.69(P), written on papyrus and dated tentatively by scholars to the 6th century. The article begins with a new edition of the letter, first published in 1903, its first translation into English, a discussion of its language and epistolary conventions, including layout, script, and…[Read more]

For almost 200 years scholars have recognized that most of the Pentateuch can be clearly divided into two separate, but interwoven literary works.. These are the Priestly and non-Priestly traditions, with the Priestly forming a clear and continuous whole and the Non-Priestly the main area of debate. Despite this, there has been no way to simply…[Read more]

The circulation and republication of Christian Roman laws on Jews and Judaism gives us a window into the ways imperial attention to the Jewish “other” – sometimes benevolent, sometimes punitive – created multiple paths for the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Laws on economic status, social interaction, and religious custom ultimately produce…[Read more]

The institutional, social, and theological rise of an imperial-episcopal orthodoxy in the 4th-century Roman Empire transformed the productive, if not always genial, scriptural and ritual interactions among Jews and Christians in previous centuries into a discourse of theological difference, enabling violence and exclusion.

In this review I discuss Michael Wise’s 2015 Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea: A Study of the Bar Kokhba Documents