“The contrast between wine culture of Palestine and beer culture of Babylonia is well documented in the Talmud…”
One of the important distinctions between the diet of Graeco-Roman Palestine and Babylonia was...
Category Archives: Late Antiquity
“Universalist ideas were central to Jewish authors living in the Second Temple period…”
Universalist ideas were central to Jewish authors living in the Second Temple period, and...
“… in the Second Temple period, Judaism was a petri dish of ideas that nurtured a pluralism which invited all people to worship the Jewish God”
We tend to think of the consecutive developments of Greek philosophy, normative Judaism, and...
“What makes the Second Temple period so unique is that much of its literature sees no need for hard distinctions between religious communities”
Many Jews in the Second Temple period believed that Israel shares a special relationship...
“The laying-up of something in the Temple had the effect of dedicating it to God, and so gave it an additional sanctity”
In view of the divine origin which was attributed to the Scriptures, it is...
“…oriental banquets must be compared and contrasted with Greek symposia, and the latter in turn with Roman convivia”
Common consumption of food, and of alcoholic beverages in particular, is one effective way...
“…although much of Second Temple and Rabbinic literature can be read in light of the Greek and later Roman-Christian context in which they were composed…”
…although much of Second Temple and Rabbinic literature can be read in light of...
“Josephus’s invective against John and his rebel cohort should be read within a wider Roman discourse on transgressive gender”
I have argued that Josephus’s invective against John and his rebel cohort should be...
“Discourses on transgressive gender behavior played an integral role in articulating Roman imperial ideology”
The emphasis in these sources, however, is not simply on gender deviancy as a...
“How do we read or map gender at such complexly determined and politically ambivalent sites?”
Studies of the ancient Mediterranean world have been powerfully enhanced by the current awareness of the complexity that the politics of identity both reveals and covers over. In particular, heterogeneity strives with universalism where the forces of empire and colonialism produce multiple and charged cultural contact zones. At the borderlines of oppression, not only resistance but also enormous creativity is encountered in the production of hybridized subjects. How do we read or map gender at such complexly determined and politically ambivalent sites? How, furthermore, do we read or map gender across religious affiliation, breaking through prior barriers of disciplinary practice that have separated scholars of Christianity, Judaism and pagan or “classical” antiquity, without thereby losing all traction on the particularity of religious cult or culture, shifty and overlapping as these mappings may prove to be?
Virginia Burrus, “Mapping as Metamorphosis: Initial Reflections on Gender and Ancient Religious Discourses”, in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. Todd Penner & Caroline Vander Stichele (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), 3-4.