Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism – From the Temple to the Mishnah

Yair Furstenberg, Sara Tova Brody (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

304 Seiten

2023
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-06772-2 (ISBN)

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The concern for purity was the cornerstone of the religious culture of ancient Judaism. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism explores how this concern shaped the worldview of Jews during the Second Temple period as well as their daily practices and social relations. It examines how different groups offered competing visions and methods for living a life of purity, which embodied a promise for personal and cosmic salvation and at the same time determined the degree of sectarian separation.

Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers a comprehensive description of the world of purity among the Jews of the Second Temple period in general and within the tradition of the Pharisees in particular. Yair Furstenberg explores the language of purity that provided Jews in antiquity a powerful tool for organizing legal, social, and ideological boundaries, and its study is therefore pertinent for understanding the powers that shaped the varieties of Second Temple Judaism and their later offshoots: Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.

Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers new methods for carefully integrating the New Testament, Qumran literature, and early rabbinic sources into a comprehensive history of purity laws from the world of the Second Temple and the Pharisees to the later rabbinic movement, allowing the reader to trace the emergence of new religious sensibilities within changing social and cultic circumstances.

Yair Furstenberg is Associate Professor of Talmud at Hebrew University, where he serves as chair of the department. Among his publications are Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity: From the Books of Maccabees to the Babylonian Talmud and the edited volume Jewish and Christian Communal Identities in the Roman World.

Preface
Note on Translations and Editions
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: From Pharisees to Rabbis
Part One: The Varieties of Purity
1. Biblical Foundations, New Conception
2. Exclusive Paths to Purity from Qumran to Jesus
Part Two: Communal Identities
3. The Purity of the Pharisees
4. Outsider Impurity and the Forms of Judean Sectarianism
5. Inclusion and Marginalization
Part Three: Tradition and Invention
6. Changing Social Contexts
7. The End of Purity
Epilogue: The Rabbinic Movement within Shifting Religious Cultures
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	07.10.2023
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	666 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Judentum
ISBN-10	0-253-06772-3 / 0253067723
ISBN-13	978-0-253-06772-2 / 9780253067722
Zustand	Neuware