New Books in Ancient History

The ascension of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, and yet Luke’s two-volume work contains the only narrative depictions of Jesus’ ascent into heaven in the New Testament–all the more reason to take a closer look at these ascension narratives recorded by Luke. Here to do just that in today’s show, David Bryan talks about the book he co-edited with David Pao, titled Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke’s Narrative Hinge (Fortress Press, 2016); in this collection of essays, leading scholars discuss the ancient, literary, and theological contexts of the ascent-into-heaven accounts found in Luke and in Acts. David K. Bryan is an adjunct instructor and doctoral candidate at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He has published on the parables of Jesus, and his other research interests include authority in the ancient world, apocalyptic literature, and the kingdom of God.L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her book, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search For Human Antiquity (Melbourne University Press, 2017), Rebe Taylor, the Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, explores the life of Ernest Westlake, whose fascination with remnants and antiquity led him in the early 20th century to Tasmania, the southernmost Australian state, where he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. But Westlake was surprised to find not an extinct race, but living Indigenous communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the discordant voices of the medical writers he excerpts. Speaking of Galen, Photius of Constantinople notes that the author tends to overload his writings with irrelevancies and digressions. Aristotle offers a characteristic caution, urging no one can become a doctor by reading books. These statements intimate the overall style and aims of this entertaining book: to approach the culture of antiquity through medical practice and belief. Though McKeown deliberately goes after the uncanny in selecting his excerpts to translate, one gets an overall impression of medicines remarkable continuity. Class, gender, and race were battlegrounds of medical legitimacy as much as they are now, and contemporary suspicion of medical advances was potent as ever. McKeown opts for evocation rather than scholarly interpretation of the medical cultures of antiquity, making this book entertaining reading for anyone interested in medicine’s long history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017) opens new vistas not only on the history of the practice of magic throughout Jewish history, but on the variety and syncretistic depth of such practices. Its author is Yuval Harari, professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. Professor Harari’s work challenges perceptions and categorizations of what Jewish magic is, and what its place in the Judaism of late antiquity was. It thus promises to facilitate a reappraisal of the performative practices, the beliefs and rituals, on which Jewish life as we know it is founded. Professor Harari’s work carefully and systematically examines a wide variety of Jewish texts and artifacts, and reveals the extent to which the practice of magic is woven into Jewish ritual, thought, culture, from Late Antiquity through and beyond the Middle Ages.David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The prowess of the Roman empire was imbued with courage and militarism. Symbolised by the combative male soldier, Michael Edward Stewart‘s tool of historical enquiry is masculinity. In his book, The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Kismet Press, 2016), Stewart explores whether theological constructions of manhood as ascetic and pacifist changed the contours of manly Romanitas. From the martial metaphors of Synesius of Cyrene, to the third gender of Eunuchs, to the paganism of Emperor Julian to the piety of Theodosius I – The Soldier’s Life reminds us that gender has been constructed for centuries. The fluidity of boundaries and power in this ancient construct of masculinity makes a poignant case against restrictive binaries and static hegemony. Published by Kismet press, this book is available online as part of a larger project for making knowledge, history and scholarship accessible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. Rosenblum explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, altered, innovated upon, and contemporized biblical dietary regulations. He shows that these differing interpretations do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they are informed by a variety of motives, including theological, moral, political, social, and financial considerations. In analyzing these ancient conversations about culture and cuisine, he dissects three rhetorical strategies deployed when justifying various interpretations of ancient Jewish dietary regulations: reason, revelation, and allegory. Finally, Rosenblum reflects upon wider, contemporary debates about food ethics.Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Archaeologists and scholars of the ancient Near East regularly make statements to the effect that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for many events of the Bible, including Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, the Exodus out of Egypt, and the conquest of cities like Jericho. Textbooks surveying the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, and books on the history of Israel make the same assertions. Then Egyptologist David Rohl comes along and ignites a revolution in the academic world, arguing that there is indeed much evidence for these same biblical events. In this podcast, well be speaking with David Rohl about his recent book, Exodus: Myth or History? (Thinking Man Media, 2015), along with the companion DVD set of his lectures, The David Rohl Lectures.David Rohl is an Egyptologist, historian and archaeologist specializing in the historical relationship between pharaonic Egypt and the Bible. He is known principally for his internationally acclaimed television documentary series, Pharaohs and Kings (1995) and In Search of Eden (2001), as well as for his best-selling book, A Test of Time (published in the USA as Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest).L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over 40 years, Jack M. Sasson has been studying and commenting on the cuneiform archives from Mari on the Euphrates River, especially those from the age of Hammurabi of Babylon. Among Mari’s wealth of documents, some of the most interesting are letters from and to kings, their advisers and functionaries, their wives and daughters, their scribes and messengers, and a variety of military personnel. The letters are revealing and often poignant. Sasson selects more than 700 letters as well as several excerpts from administrative documents, translating them and providing them with illuminating comments. In distilling a lifetime of study and interpretation, Sasson hopes to welcome readers into the life of a world entombed for four millennia, making the realities of ancient life tangible, giving it a human perspective that is at once instructive and entertaining. All that and more on today’s show as we speak with Jack Sasson about his recent publication, From the Mari Archives: An Anthology of Old Babylonian Letters (Eisenbrauns, 2015).Jack M. Sasson is Werthan Professor emeritus of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tenn), and professor emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill. Sasson has held numerous posts, elected and nominated, at universities and at professional societies, among them President of the American Oriental Society (1998) and of the International Association for Assyriology (2005-2010). He has edited the “Bible and Ancient Near East” pages of the Journal of the American Oriental Society (1976-1984; 1996-2000) and has joined the editorial boards of several journals and serials. He was chief editor of Scribner’s Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, a 4-volume reference set that appeared in 1995 and that has received many awards since then.L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to revealed books not found in our canon. Despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, Bible and a bibliographic one, book. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2016) suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged.In many Jewish texts, there is an awareness of a vast tradition of divine writings found in multiple locations that is only partially revealed in available scribal collections. Ancient heroes such as David are imagined not simply as scriptural authors, but as multidimensional characters who come to be known as great writers who are honored as founders of growing textual traditions. Scribes recognize the divine origin of texts such as the Enoch literature and other writings revealed to ancient patriarchs, which present themselves not as derivative of the material that we now call biblical, but prior to it. Sacred writing stretches back to the dawn of time, yet new discoveries are always around the corner.Using familiar sources such as the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees, Eva Mroczek tells an unfamiliar story about sacred writing not bound in the Bible. In listening to the way ancient writers describe their own literature rife with their own metaphors and narratives about writing The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity also argues for greater suppleness in our own scholarly imagination, no longer bound by modern canonical and bibliographic assumptions.The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity is already making its mark on the study of Jewish Antiquity and biblical studies broadly conceived. A panel of scholars recently convened at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting to discuss the impact of the work on the study of Second Temple literature. And It was announced just this week that Dr. Mroczek’s work was awarded the prestigious Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. The accolade if given by the University of Heidelberg.Please join me in congratulating Dr. Mroczek and welcoming her to the New Books Network.Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah. In Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age.Weiss argues that this particular Jewish relationship to the divine is rooted in the most canonical of rabbinic texts even as he demonstrates that in ancient Judaism the idea of debating God was itself a matter of debate. By elucidating competing views and exploring their theological assumptions, the book challenges the scholarly claim that the early rabbis conceived of God as a morally perfect being whose goodness had to be defended in the face of biblical accounts of unethical divine action. Pious Irreverence examines the way in which the rabbis searched the words of the Torah for hidden meanings that could grant them the moral authority to express doubt about, and frustration with, the biblical God. Using characters from the Bible as their mouthpieces, they often challenges God’s behavior, even, in a few remarkable instances, envisioning God as conceding error and declaring to the protestor, “You have taught Me something; I will nullify my decree and accept your word.”Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices