I am very pleased to announce that ‘An Introduction to Second Temple Judaism’ has just been published.
This volume is based on ‘An Introduction to First Century Judaism’, Lester Grabbe’s earlier work, but the material has been revised and considerably expanded.
This new edition has been restructured making it more accessible for students, and Grabbe seems to have everyone in mind as he says: '… so what I am doing in this much briefer study is to try to introduce the beginner – the student, the educated lay person, the non-specialist – to the subject’. Indeed, bibliographies and reading lists have been updated, as well as a new introductory section, which offers an overview of the period, has been added.
I think a short extract from the Preface will give a better taste for its contents:
‘Chapter 1 provides an overview of Jewish history for the Second Temple period (though some periods are treated more fully in later chapters) and then discusses the main sources. It is important that the reader take note of where we get our knowledge of the Judaism of this time. There is no magical key to understanding Judaism during this era. We are all dependent on a handful of sources from which most of our knowledge comes. After the introductory chapter, the next four chapters look at various ‘currents’ or streams within Judaism. By treating them as moving streams we begin to see the dynamic aspect of Jewish history and realize that much of it is produced by the interaction of various movements. So I discuss textual Judaism (chapter 2), revolutionary Judaism (chapter 3), eschatological Judaism (chapter 4), and the strange phenomenon known as Gnosticism which seems to have Jewish roots (chapter 5). Together they encompass most facets of Judaism of the time.
What will soon become clear to the reader is that the idea of ‘orthodoxy’ or a ‘state church’ is not a good way of looking at Judaism before 70. British readers need to put the model of the Church of England out of mind. There was a centre to the religion: worship at the Jerusalem temple. Most Jews accepted the sacredness of the temple and the general teachings of the Torah. But there was no official orthodoxy (in the Christian sense), for it is clear that there were many interpretations of the Torah and many different views about how to apply the law outside the temple (within the temple, the priests were in control). Thus, each of the chapters 2-5 tells us about one aspect of Judaism, but as will soon be apparent the various currents are not isolated entities. On the contrary, a single individual may have been a part of more than one current. A study of one particular current helps us to understand one aspect of Judaism, while the study of all four discussed here provides a quite comprehensive picture of Judaism - albeit, a complex picture, like a mosaic with many different parts.’
This book will be a core text for courses on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as Qumran, Intertestamental Literature and Early Judaism.
Readers in the UK can purchase this volume right now and will be available in the US at the beginning of August 2010.
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