2011
The systematic study of written texts began not in biblical Israel or the classical world but in ancient Mesopotamia. Nearly 1,000 clay tablets from Babylonia and Assyria, dating from the eighth to the second century b.c.e., comprise the earliest substantial corpus of text commentaries known from...
The volume presents facsimile copies of over two hundred previously unpublished Babylonian letters and documents written in cuneiform script. The texts, dating from the sixth century BCE, mainly originate from the archives of the Eanna temple in Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, and they contribute...
Ancient Jewish writings combine interpretive narratives of Israel’s sacred history with legal prescriptions for a divinely ordered way of life. Two ancient Jewish societies have left us extensive textual corpora preserving interpenetrating legal and narrative interpretive teachings: the sectarian...
Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior...
In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, choreographer, dancer, and dance scholar Judith Brin Ingber collects wide-ranging essays and many remarkable photographs to explore the evolution of Jewish dance through two thousand years of Diaspora, in communities of amazing variety and amid changing...
Scholar, mystic and visionary, Ibn ‘Alwan lived through the transition from Ayyubid to Rasulid rule in thirteenth-century Yemen. He was well known in his time for his critique of the ruling elites and their governance, and left behind a substantial body of writings on Islamic mysticism, theology,...
The story of the 9th-century caliphal mission from Baghdad to discover the legendary barrier against the apocalyptic nations of Gog and Magog mentioned in the Quran, has been either dismissed as superstition or treated as historical fact. By exploring the intellectual and literary history...
2010
This book for introductory Old Testament classes offers an appealing illustration of how faith and academic study can work together, motivating and equipping Christian believers to turn to the Old Testament as a profound resource for their daily negotiations of faith, identity, and culture....
This volume contains selected papers from a December 2006 Dumbarton Oaks symposium that complemented an exhibition of early Bible manuscripts at the Freer Gallery and Sackler Gallery of Art titled “In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000.”
The short aporetic essay On First Principles by Theophrastus, thought to have been transmitted as his Metaphysics, is critically edited for the first time on the basis of all the available evidence–the Greek manuscripts and the medieval Arabic and Latin translations—together with an introduction,...
