Featured New and Forthcoming Books

As early Jewish communities struggled with shifting imperial realities, they wrote trial stories that construct, unravel, and continually remake the links between judges, judgment, and justice. In these trial narratives they wrestle with empire and the feasibility of judges operating apart from their social and material environments. Chaya T. Halberstam offers close analyses of the trials of Daniel, Susanna, Jesus, Herod and his family, and a variety of largely unnamed litigants in rabbinic literature. The stories that are the focus of the book share the basic perspective that judges do not transcend their affective and material circumstances, even when they appeal to a higher standard and appear to follow some version of the ‘rule of law’. The judges in these narratives see and feel; they are inextricably a part of the networks, moods, and events around them. The trial stories of Jewish antiquity form a sophisticated critique of blind justice, even as it is programmatically prescribed throughout ancient literature. They suggest, instead, a counternarrative of judging that draws on feeling, relationships, and the ethic of care.

From Cambridge University Press:

In this book, Steven Fraade explores the practice and conception of multilingualism and translation in ancient Judaism. Interrogating the deep and dialectical relationship between them, he situates representative scriptural and other texts within their broader synchronic - Greco-Roman context, as well as diachronic context - the history of Judaism and beyond. Neither systematic nor comprehensive, his selection of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek primary sources, here fluently translated into clear English, best illustrate the fundamental issues and the performative aspects relating to translation and multilingualism. Fraade scrutinizes and analyzes the texts to reveal the inner dynamics and the pedagogical-social implications that are implicit when multilingualism and translation are paired. His book demonstrates the need for a more thorough and integrated treatment of these topics, and their relevance to the study of ancient Judaism, than has been heretofore recognized.

Tales from the Cave: Losing and Finding the Biblical Past is a study of the very idea of textual discovery. The famous story about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a Bedouin shepherd in a desert cave is not isolated: its contours are more or less true, but it stands in a tradition that dates back to antiquity and has left its mark on both premodern religious mythmaking and modern scholarship. Edward Said, discussing how scholars enter established fields of discourse, remarked that even the discoverer of a “once-lost manuscript produces the ‘found’ text in a context already prepared for it, for that is the real meaning of finding a new text." This book considers this “once-lost manuscript” motif across centuries, identifying the manuscript discovery narrative as a durable religious genre in Jewish and Christian texts that has also shaped historical-critical scholarship. Tales of textual loss and recovery lie at the heart of how both ancient and modern people understand the survival of their past and its incursions into the present.

This monograph argues that a decisive change took place in ancient Jewish portrayals of the Other around the 3rd century B.C.E. In Israelite/Jewish literature composed up to this point, the worship of other gods and the reverence of their icons is consistently depicted as sincere, and its appeal, whether to Israelites or non-Israelites, is, as a rule, not questioned. At some point around the end of the 3rd century B.C.E., however, a new form of portrayal arises, one which the author terms “the Bad Faith Argument”: that the worship of other gods and the reverence of their icons is, in fact, an entirely unattractive practice, and that even its practitioners must inwardly reject it. While the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible, for example, worship the god Baal Peor out of a genuine attraction to his cult, early rabbinic midrashim about this same narrative entirely reject the possibility that such devotion could have been sincere. Instead, the Rabbis insist, the Israelites who engaged in such worship must have done so only instrumentally, driven by an ulterior motive for sex with Baal Peor’s pagan devotees (and not by any real attraction to the god himself).