Between Temple and Torah: Essays on Priests, Scribes, and Visionaries in the Second Temple Period and Beyond

✍ Scribed by Martha Himmelfarb

• Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 413
• Series: Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism/Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 151
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume contains articles by Martha Himmelfarb on topics in Second Temple Judaism and the development and reception of Second Temple traditions in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The section on "Priests, Temples, and Torah” addresses the themes of its title in texts from the Bible to the Mishnah. "Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls” contains articles analyzing the intensification of the biblical purity laws, particularly the laws for genital discharge, in the major legal documents from the Scrolls. In "Judaism and Hellenism” the author explores the relationship between these two ancient cultures by examining the ancient and modern historiography of the Maccabean Revolt and the role of the Torah in ancient Jewish adaptations of Greek culture. The last two sections of the volume follow texts and traditions of the Second Temple period into late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The articles in "Heavenly Ascent” consider the relationship between the ascent apocalypses of the Second Temple period and later works involving heavenly ascent, particularly the hekhalot texts. In the final section, "The Pseudepigrapha and Medieval Jewish Literature,” Himmelfarb investigates evidence for knowledge of works of the Second Temple period by medieval Jews with consideration of the channels by which the works might have reached these later readers.

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction

Priests, Temples, and Torah
1. The Temple and the Garden of Eden in Ezekiel, the Book of the Watchers, and the Wisdom of Ben Sira
2. Levi, Phinehas, and the Problem of Intermarriage at the Time of the Maccabean Revolt
3. Torah, Testimony, and Heavenly Tablets: The Claim to Authority of the Book of Jubilees
4. Earthly Sacrifice and Heavenly Incense: The Law of the Priesthood in Aramaic Levi and Jubilees
5. Temple and Priests in the Book of the Watchers, the Animal Apocalypse, and the Apocalypse of Weeks
6. “Found Written in the Book of Moses”: Priests in the Era of Torah

Purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls
7. Sexual Relations and Purity in the Temple Scroll and the Book of Jubilees
8. Impurity and Sin in 4QD, 1QS, and 4Q512
9. The Purity Laws of 4QD: Exegesis and Sectarianism
10. The Polemic against the Ṭevul Yom: A Reexamination

Judaism and Hellenism
11. Judaism and Hellenism in 2 Maccabees
12. Elias Bickerman on Judaism and Hellenism
13. The Torah between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Difference in Antiquity
14. “He Was Renowned to the Ends of the Earth” (1 Macc 3:9): Judaism and Hellenism in 1 Maccabees

Heavenly Ascent
15. Heavenly Ascent and the Relationship of the Apocalypses and the Hekhalot Literature
16. Revelation and Rapture: The Transformation of the Visionary in the Ascent Apocalypses
17. The Practice of Ascent in the Ancient Mediterranean World
18. Merkavah Mysticism since Scholem: Rachel Elior’s The Three Temples

The Pseudepigrapha and Medieval Jewish Literature
19. R. Moses the Preacher and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
20. Some Echoes of Jubilees in Medieval Hebrew Literature