Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (The Biblical Resource Series (BRS))

Definitely as book filled with real scholarship and analysis.

Good book for a required class. Excellent shipping on behalf of the company!! Thanks so much.

When Jews discuss the intellectual history of Judaism, they tend to focus on sacred texts produced in the Land of Israel- first the Bible, then the Mishnah (produced several hundred years after the last Biblical book, and about a century after the Second Temple's destruction). But during the late Second Temple period, Greek-speaking Jews throughout the Middle East produced a lot of Jewish literature; the purpose of Collins's book is to review this literature.Some of this literature, like Zionist literature today, was primarily nationalistic, focusing on attempts to combat anti-Semitism. But the surviving religious literature is more interesting. Unlike the Mishnah, it tends not to go beyond the Bible in explaining the details of Jewish law. Instead, much of this Jewish literature focuses on the virtues of monotheism and the evils of idolatry. For example, the Letter of Aristeas wrote that both Jews and enlightened non-Jews worship "the only God omnipotent over all creation" and that non-Jews who worship Zeus as their only deity worship the same God as Jews do. In addition, Greek-speaking authors focused heavily on social and sexual morality; for some reason, many of them sharply criticized homoseuxality. However, Greek-speaking authors were certainly not proto-Reform Jews; for example, the Letter of Aristeas defended Jewish dietary laws.