Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature

Neben einer Neuübersetzung bietet die Monographie einen detaillierten versgetreuen Kommentar, der auf philologische, literarische sowie historische Fragen Bezug nimmt. In der umfassenden Einleitung werden die Datierung des Werks, der historische Hintergrund und die Originalsprache untersucht. Darüber hinaus werden verschiedene biblische wie klassische Einflüsse diskutiert und das Verhältnis zwischen Feminismus und Theologie im Text erörtert.

This is the first full-scale, verse-by-verse commentary on 4 Baruch. The pseudepigraphon, written in the second century, is in large measure an attempt to address the situation following the destruction of the temple in 70 CE by recounting legends about the first destruction of the temple, the Babylonian captivity, and the return from exile. 4 Bruch is notable for its tale about Jeremiah's companion, Abimelech, who sleeps through the entire exilic period. This tale lies behind the famous Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and is part of the genealogy of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." Allison's commentary draws upon an exceptionally broad range of ancient sources in an attempt to clarify 4 Baruch's original setting, compositional history, and meaning.

During the past few decades a great amount of scholarly work has been done on the various prayer cultures of antiquity, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish and Christian. In Jewish studies this burgeoning research on ancient prayer has been stimulated particularly by the many new prayer texts found at Qumran, which have shed new light on several long-standing problems. The present volume intends to make a new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on ancient Jewish prayer texts by focusing on a limited set of prayer texts, scil. , a small number of those that have been preserved only in Greek. Jewish prayers in Greek tend to be undervalued, which is regrettable because these prayers shed light on sometimes striking aspects of early Jewish spirituality in the centuries around the turn of the era. In this volume twelve such prayers have been collected, translated, and provided with an extensive historical and philological commentary. They have been preserved on papyrus, on stone, and as part of Christian church orders into which some of them have been incorporated in a christianized from. For that reason these prayers are of great interest to scholars of both early Judaism and ancient Christianity.

The Letter of Aristeas has been an object modern scholarly interest since the seventeenth century. It is best known for containing the earliest version of the translation of the Hebrew Law into Greek, and this story accounts for much of the scholarly attention paid to the work. Yet, this legend only takes up a small percentage of the work. Looking at Aristeas as a whole, the work reveals an author who has acquired a Greek education and employs both Jewish and Greek sources in his work, and he has produced a Greek book. Even though Aristeas has garnered scholarly attention, no fully fledged commentary has been written on it. The works of R. Tramontano, M. Hadas and others, often referred to as commentaries, only contain text and annotated notes. This volume fills the gap in the scholarship on Aristeas by providing a full, paragraph-by-paragraph commentary, containing a new translation, text-critical notes, general commentary, and notes on specific words, phrases and ideas.

This work provides the key to one of the most enigmatic Jewish Hellenistic texts preserved in Greek and Slavonic. Despite the fact that 3 Baruch is one of the major early Jewish apocalypses, it has been relatively neglected in modern scholarship, probably since 3 Baruch is one of the most difficult works to comprehend and classify. Its content differs significantly from that of other writings of the same genre, as the book preserves syncretistic ideas and tendencies which are combined in unique ways. The worldview, the message, and the very textual structure of 3 Baruch are enigmatic in many respects. The present study demonstrates that the textual history of 3 Baruch, implicit meanings and structural links in its text, as well as conceptions behind the text, are partly reconstructable. Moreover, 3 Baruch, properly read, significantly enriches our understanding of the history of the motifs found in early Jewish lore, at times providing missing links between different stages of their development, and preserves important evidence on the roots of Jewish mysticism, proto-Gnostic and proto-Christian traditions. The study contains the introduction, synoptic translation, textual notes, and detailed commentaries.

2 Maccabees is a Jewish work composed during the 2nd century BCE and preserved by the Church. Written in Hellenistic Greek and told from a Jewish-Hellenistic perspective, 2 Maccabees narrates and interprets the ups and downs of events that took place in Jerusalem prior to and during the Maccabean revolt: institutionalized Hellenization and the foundation of Jerusalem as a polis; the persecution of Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes, accompanied by famous martyrdoms; and the rebellion against Seleucid rule by Judas Maccabaeus. 2 Maccabees is an important source both for the events it describes and for the values and interests of the Judaism of the Hellenistic diaspora that it reflects - which are often quite different from those represented by its competitor, 1 Maccabees.

The volume is a commentary on 1 Enoch chapters 91-108 that begins with the Ethiopic text tradition but also takes the Greek and Aramaic (Dead Sea Scrolls) evidence into account. This section of 1 Enoch, which contains material from at least five different documents composed some time during the 2^nd century BCE, provides a window into the early stages of the reception of the earliest Enoch tradition, as it was being negotiated in relation to elitist religious opponents, on the one hand, and in relation to other Jewish traditions that were flourishing at the time.

The commentary, at the beginning of which there is an extensive introduction, is structured in the following way: there is a translation for each unit of text (including the Greek and Aramaic where it exists, with the Greek and Ethiopic translations presented synoptically), followed by detailed textual notes that justify the translation and provide information on a full range of variations among the manuscripts. This, in turn, is followed by a General Comment on the unit of text; after this there are detailed notes on each subdivision of the text which attempt to situate the content within the stream of biblical interpretation and developing Jewish traditions of the Second Temple period. The five documents in 1 Enoch 91-108 are dealt with in the following order: (1) Apocalypse of Weeks (93:1-10; 91:11-17); (2) Admonition (91:1-10, 18-19); (3) Epistle of Enoch (92:1-5; 93:11-105:2; (4) Birth of Noah (106-107); and (5) the Eschatological Appendix (108).

Der Kommentar über das jüdisch-hellenistische weisheitliche Lehrgedicht des Pseudo-Phokylides aus dem 1. Jahrhundert vor oder nach Christus behandelt in einer ausführlichen Einleitung die Frage nach den Quellen, nach Aufbau und Gliederung, Hauptthemen und Zweck der Schrift und bietet in einer eingehenden Kommentierung eine neue Übersetzung mit fortlaufendem Kommentar. Der griechische Text wird als Anhang beigegeben. Der interkulturelle Charakter dieser Weisheitslehren wird durch ausführliche Heranziehung von biblischen, hellenistisch-jüdischen und griechisch-römischen Vergleichstexten herausgearbeitet.

Erstmals wird der griechische Text des Testaments Abrahams durchgehend kommentiert. Unter Heranziehung reichen Quellenmaterials aus der jüdischen und christlichen Literatur des 1. Jahrtausends arbeitet Allison die literarische Kunst und den komödiantischen Grundzug der Schrift sowie ihre Abhängigkeit von der griechisch-römischen Mythologie und der Hebräischen Bibel heraus. Das Werk dürfte für lange Zeit der Standardkommentar zum Testament Abrahams sein.

Die neue, auf ca. 58 Bände angelegte englischsprachige Reihe Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature behandelt die frühe jüdische Literatur zwischen dem 3. Jh. v. Chr. und der Mitte des 2. Jh. n. Chr. Die Schriften sollen jeweils als textliche Einheit auf dem Hintergrund ihres jeweiligen jüdischen und historisch-politischen Kontextes ausgelegt werden. Dabei werden textbasierte, historische literarische und theologische Analysen erstellt. Der erste Band von Joseph A. Fitzmyer widmet sich der Kommentierung des Buches Tobit.