2025-2026 Events & Programs
The End of the World (Three-Part Mini-Course)
Date: Tuesday, December 03, 2024
Time: 07:00pm - 08:00pm
Location: Virtual
Jenny R. Labendz, Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar, Fall 2024
This three-part, online mini-course will compare and contrast Jewish and Christian ideas about the end of the world through an exploration of several topics: divine judgment, resurrection, and the inauguration of the end-times. The course will challenge widespread assumptions about how rabbinic Jews and early Christians thought about God's plan for the world.
Mini-Course Three Sessions:
Week 1: December 3
Divine Judgment
The first session will introduce the concept of “eschatology,” the study of what we usually call “the end of the world.” Building on a more nuanced and provocative understanding of the very concept of “the end of the world,” we will examine how the rabbis of antiquity, in the formative literature of Judaism, depicted the idea of final judgment by God. We’ll contrast their view of divine judgment with the predominant Christian view, and we’ll consider how the rabbinic view can change the way we think about what the end of the world means in the first place.
Week 2: December 10
Resurrection
The second session will dig into what at first seems like a straightforward (and delightful) concept that at the end of time, we will come to life again with all of our loved ones. The actual texts from which we draw this concept in Judaism, however, communicate a different way in which death is transcended.
Week 3: December 17
Session 3 Inauguration of the End Times
The third session will address the question of when the end of the world began. We’ll ask how—or if—to situate the “end of the world” on a timeline, and we’ll see the different ways in which ancient Jews and Christians did so. What was, or will be, the moment in which everything changes, when God breaks into the world to permanently change and redeem it, and then what happens?
Jenny R. Labendz is an associate professor of religious studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She specializes in ancient Jewish literature and religion from a comparative perspective. Her first book, Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), examines attitudes and discourse about non-Jews in late antique rabbinic literature. She is currently completing a second book, Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective, under contract with Oxford University Press.
Mini-Course Recording Session 1
