November 11, 2025

Listening to the Static: An Author Response

Image of Exodus 15, from the Leningrad Codex

The white spaces on the page can be spaces both of death and breath. Both are texts of drowning, the Egyptian enemies, their horses and chariots, and the African slaves, who were thrown overboard the slave ship in an insurance scam. Somehow, I believe, through this unconscious visual echo, these enemies and victims meet in God’s lament to the angels, (though perhaps this lament is addressed to all of us who sing victory songs): “my creations are drowning in the sea, and you are singing song?”

November 9, 2025

Weak Prophecy As A Critique of Just-So Secularization Stories

by Raphael Magarik in Articles

William Blake, *Abraham and Isaac*, 1799-1800

In the book’s conclusion, Raz offers weak prophecy as an alternative, reparative model, offering us doubt and circumspection instead of confident certainty, whether theological or nationalist. I would also suggest a second, complementary payoff. To me, the positing of an ancient source that is dogmatic, masculine, and assertively authoritative is one of modernity’s favorite alibis for its own violence.

November 4, 2025

Modern Mirrors

by Karma Ben-Johanan in Articles

Mirror Detail from the Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck, 1434. Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We gather from here that more than she wants to say something about prophecy, Raz wants to convey something about the history of its reception, about the way modern poets, and perhaps moderns, in general, think about prophets and prophecy and incorporate that thought into their poetry, utilizing poetic language or the characters of prophets.

November 2, 2025

"Language of the Limp and the Wound"

by Yael Fisch in Articles

William Blake Richmond, *Song of Miriam*, 1880. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

With Yosefa’s book, we now have nuanced poetic language with which we may read this homily. The Rabbis were not prophets, nor singers or poets. They were strong readers. They saw reading as an opportunity to stretch out biblical scenes into their present.

October 14, 2025

A Memory of Violence

by Briana Grenert in Review, Book Notes

A Memory of Violence offers a useful overview for anyone interested in understanding Chalcedon and its effects at a more detailed level, as well as those interested in the history of Christianity writ large.

August 10, 2025

Human Salvation in Early Christianity: Exploring the Theology of Physicalist Soteriology

by Brad Boswell in Review, Book Notes

Gabriel von Max, *The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter* (1878) Montreal Museum of Fine Arts [Wikimedia Commons].

Scully’s book commendably demonstrates the need for renewed and careful attention to a pattern of thought that has been treated poorly, and it does so with sharp analytical clarity.

May 18, 2025

Review | The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land

by Sarah Shectman in Articles

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.

May 14, 2025

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years

by Joseph Foltz in Review, Articles

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?

December 1, 2024

Exhibition Review | Elephantine: Island of the Millennia

by Simcha Gross in Articles

Aramaic marriage document from Elephantine, dated 3 July, 449 BCE, currently at the Brooklyn Museum. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The desire to construct harmonious pasts selectively highlights only those aspects of ancient identities and experiences that align with current ideals, conveniently omitting the less contemporarily palatable. This selective narrative fosters the belief that coexistence is inherent and natural, rather than a hard-fought process.

October 31, 2024

Seder Mazikin: Law and Magic in Late Antique Jewish Society

by Sarit Kattan Gribetz in Book Notes

As scholars continue to investigate the bowls from multiple angles – paleographic, onomastic, linguistic, social historical, legal, literary, ritual, visual, gendered, comparative – our understanding of Babylonian Judaism and late antique society will continue to develop. Manekin-Bamberger’s insights about the bowls’ contractual dimensions and the professional scribes who produced them – as well as about the overlap of law and magic on a broader scale – are an essential contribution to this field, and will no doubt shape, methodologically and historically, how future studies approach this corpus and its relationship to other ancient Jewish texts and artifacts and to the long history of magic, law, and religion.

September 9, 2024

Slip Slidin' Away

by Amit Gvaryahu in Articles

Mira Balberg, however, points to the shifting attitudes towards forgetfulness and forgetting as a pivotal moment in the history of the rabbinic movement, and in Fractured Tablets she offers a fresh new reading of the rabbinic construction of forgetting. The rabbis shaped their subject as a fallible and often confused human being, bumbling around the world, trying to observe God’s commandments.

August 20, 2024

Remembering the Story of Israel: Historical Summaries and Memory Formation in Second Temple Judaism

by Doren Snoek in Book Notes

The volume shines when it considers the interplay between materiality and close readings of literature. But the question stands for our field as it grapples with memory studies: what, indeed, is the link between form and practice, between literature and history?

August 11, 2024

All the (Ancient) World’s a Stage

by Erin Galgay Walsh in Articles

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, by Lafayette Photo, London. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The saint, renowned for his discipline over the body, shows tenderness. These verses speak to genuine human fears about the finality of death and the chasm between the living and the dead. Just as Hamlet famously considers Yorick’s skull, a prop to invoke memento mori, Jacob depicts Symeon as holding out his foot for all to behold as we listen.

June 10, 2024

Written and Spoken Scripture in Wollenberg's The Closed Book

by Tzvi Novick in Book Notes

“Wollenberg’s book compels us to keep firmly in mind what the trope of Written Torah v. Oral Torah tends to obscure, namely, that the rabbis absorbed, studied, and taught Scripture chiefly as an oral text.”

April 29, 2024

Paul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity

by D. Clint Burnett in Book Notes, Review

Simeon Griswold, The Conversion of Saul (1857) Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Yarbro Collins’s goal in Paul Transformed is to capture the multiple images of Paul that early Christ-confessors created from reading the apostle’s letters.

April 17, 2024

Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library

by Ethan Schwartz in Articles

A bold, programmatic attempt to fill a significant methodological lacuna, Mastnjak’s Before the Scrolls argues that the study of the prophetic literature must begin with—and answer to—the material realities of textual production in ancient Israel and the Second Temple period.

April 16, 2024

The Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry

by Golda Akhiezer in Book Notes

“The pioneering study of Thea Gomelauri unfolds the history of the Lailashi Codex, and presents the paleographical and codicological description of one of the most ancient Bible codices.”

April 1, 2024

The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism

by Nicholas A. Johnson in Review

Henry Ossawa Tanner, *Christ with the Canaanite Woman and Her Daughter* (1909) [Wikiart].

Patterson’s reading seeks to reclaim an unrealized moral and ethical vision of a biblical passage that continues to be invoked today.

April 1, 2024

Jewish Law & Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, & Infidelity in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian

by Jeannie Sellick in Review

James Tissot, *Wedding at Cana*/*Les noces de Cana* (ca. 1886-1894) Brooklyn Museum, New York City [Wikimedia].

Monnickendam’s study wrestles with the complexity of Ephrem’s thought as well as the centrality of marriage imagery within his writings. While each chapter pulls readers into legal minutiae from across the ancient Mediterranean, she bookends her analysis with easy-to-follow summaries of her findings.

March 25, 2024

Women and the Polis: Public Honorific Inscriptions for Women in the Greek Cities from the Late Classical to the Roman Period

by D. Clint Burnett in Review, Book Notes

Stele bearing an inscription the Aglauros priestess, Timokrite, as an honor from Athenian demos (ca. 247/6 or 246/5 BCE) Acropolis Museum [Wikimedia].

Women and the Polis is a welcomed addition to the scholarly conversation not only about ancient Greek benefactresses in particular but also about ancient Greek benefaction in general.