This position paper issues a call for editors and publishers with oversight over peer-reviewed publications of inauthentic post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments to embark on the processes that would consider (and likely result in) retraction. By common consent, findings in the publications identified in this essay are unreliable at best; many present material subsequently deemed falsified. Retraction is the proper and justified measure to take regarding these publications in order to correct the academic record and alert any and all potential readers to the untrustworthy nature of their content.
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Power in the Name contributes to this growing body of work unbeholden to the myopic strictures of materialism and (more broadly) scientism by comparatively analyzing examples of humans changing their environment (e.g., healing or hurting others) by invoking powerful divine names.
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Ultimately, Feldman is doing two things in this book: she is making a source-critical argument about the Pentateuch, and she is translating P. These are two separate, and significant, tasks. They’re interrelated, but not the same thing.
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Paula Fredriksen begins Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years with a question: considering the variety of gods and local deities present in both the ancient Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, how did one singular god end up dominating the focus of the late Roman Empire?
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This article introduces a classroom activity called a Text Lab, which helps students engage critically with ancient texts while familiarizing them with the tools and scholarship necessary to analyze these sources.
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“This book plunges us deep into the social relationships that made the production of rabbinic expertise possible. Weaving together accounts of tangible material support with sites of contact between rabbis and other people, I explore how rabbinic expertise was continually enacted and challenged through social interactions.”
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“Cultural difference does not condemn us to incomprehension. It forces us to go beyond our own cultural horizons in an effort to make sense of what is going on in the world of others. Ancient historians must use the mindset of a cultural anthropologist, in addition to the traditional tools of their discipline.”
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“I view my book not only as a celebration of resemblance and its nonsensical relations, but also an interruption of an exceptionalized and recurring image: that of God. The play of resemblances that found themselves in a divine origin is a patently human vanity project.”
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“The book, in re-centering this vibrancy, enacts a refusal of closure by demanding that we remain open to the persistence of heteronormative and androcentric patriarchy alongside queerness, transness, and animality.”
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“What does a human look like? What does a raven look like? What happens when you look at them for long enough to see something like yourself? And then you look even longer? –and there is something about being asked to attend to these things that gets at the heart of the matter.”
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“Critical to this argument, and worthy of further reflection, is Rafael’s deployment of their own artistic practice to communicate their book’s ideas and to produce a meta-argument about history and method that develops alongside the text, and does work that words alone could never do.”
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“In When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, Neis uncovers a world of reproductive uncertainty, making a convincing case for taking the rabbis’ scenarios and debates at face value – as constitutive of ancient world-making.”
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“Rafe’s book invites us to revisit what it meant in the rabbinic world to take care of another being, to rely on and be relied upon, and to be enmeshed with another being physically and psychically.”
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This review panel features responses from a range of scholars working in late antiquity, originally shared at the 2024 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting.
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The exceptional influence and popularity enjoyed by DEH from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, and its critical interface with Jewish historiography as a work both based on and source of major Jewish histories, suggest that this work is important for scholars of pre-modern Judaism and/or Christianity to know.
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“I hope the book further chips away at the deep-seated eurocentrism and Roman-triumphalism that continues to treat Iranian empires as backwards and primitive, employing different strategies of rule based on their lesser governing capabilities.”
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“In the end what I think distinguishes Simcha’s account from others is the sense of the informality and improvisatory character of these arrangements, their non-institutionalization and their easy evadability. Thus, minority communities were not bound by any Personalitätsprinzip: they were not required to follow their own laws and did not even necessarily have any formal privilege to follow them, just accreted usage and custom.”
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“Whatever the case, both Kartir and the Homilies converge on this one point, that is, that persecution now has an imperial scope. They agree that matters of religion are now imperial matters of concern, not just local. And it is perhaps this imperial vision of persecution that the early Sasanian experience with the Manichaeans bequeathed to later Sasanian Empire, especially following Constantine’s conversion and the later Christianization of the Roman Empire. “
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“I want to respond to Gross’s call to read Bavli narratives differently – neither as pure literary creations nor as sources for historical fact, but as sites in which the rabbis are actively navigating their relationship with empire by incorporating and responding to imperial ideas and motifs.”
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Actually, Simcha suggests, maybe all we have reflected in the Bavli is not a historical truth of kind kings versus mean magi but the effects of an imperial ideology which endeavored to get its Jewish subjects to think positively of the sovereigns and warily of the Zoroastrian clergy.
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