{"title":"Archaeology of the Postexilic Period and the Writings","authors":"Benjamin D. Gordon","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.6","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides an overview of archaeological discoveries relevant to ancient Judean life in the postexilic or Second Temple period (late sixth century bce–70 ce). It seeks to provide background information on the main cultural developments that would have impacted the authors and audience of the Writings, both in Judea and Samaria. One such development is Persian provincialization, which had only modest impact on the local economy and culture. Another consists of processes of acculturation to foreign customs in the Hellenistic period, which would remain slow and largely limited to elite circles. Jerusalem’s rise to international status as a Jewish pilgrimage center under Herodian auspices likely impacted the dissemination of local literatures and sacred texts, the Writings among them. Contemporaneous architecture and artifacts from the domestic sphere can speak to religious diversity and local identity politics as the region began to shift its orientation to the West and the economy grew.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129336406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Studying the Writings as Postexilic Literature and Canon","authors":"D. Morgan","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.28","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues for the import and value of studying the Writings, the third canonical division of the Hebrew Bible. Special attention is given to the postexilic background of the Writings and the history of scholarship devoted to this literature as canon in the last fifty years. The challenges of studying this division are named and discussed, including the following: diversity and difference within the corpus; the puzzle of its structure; the use of many methods to evaluate and articulate its characteristics and message; its relationship to Torah and Prophets; and the much debated history of canonization. The significance of studying the Writings for both scholars and the faith communities that use them as scripture is a constant theme.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124462943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Qoheleth in the Writings","authors":"Erhard S. Gerstenberger","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.32","url":null,"abstract":"Qohelet (Greek/Latin: Ecclesiastes) is a very enigmatic book in the Hebrew Bible. Its critical, sometimes ironic or depressive approach to fundamental values of daily life (property; honor; power; intelligence; reward), however, has antecedents and parallels in Ancient Near Eastern wisdom. Also, it is not foreign to other writings of the Bible. Disconcerting as the absence of JHWH’s name and salvific deeds for Israel may be, the booklet, eventually becoming the festive lecture at the autumnal Feast of Booths, came into being as a textbook in some educational or scholarly institution of ancient Judaism (third century bce), complementing the study of Torah. Vanity and carpe-diem motives permeate the collection. The anonymous author(s) partially speak(s) in the guise of Salomon. Today’s interpretations focus on literary composition, autobiographic experiences of one or more authors, communitarian debate, reactions to historical events or philosophical currents, general skepticism, and eruptive bliss as components of Jewish theology.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124223647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Daniel as Part of the Writings","authors":"R. Klein","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.15","url":null,"abstract":"The book of Daniel outlines the challenges faced by Jews who lived under foreign empires in the postexilic period. The court tales (Daniel 1–6) describe how Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego maintained fidelity to their faith and strenuously opposed the tactics of the foreign emperors. The emperors in these chapters usually come to their senses at the end of one incident only to revert to oppressive behavior in the next chapter. The final six chapters (Daniel 7–12) are four apocalypses that were revealed to Daniel and predict divine intervention against the Syrian king Antiochus IV and the thwarting of his attacks on the Jerusalem temple and Judaism itself. The book contains the first clear statement of the doctrine of resurrection in the Hebrew Bible (Daniel 12:1–3). Resurrection will vindicate those who were martyred under the rule of Antiochus but threatens the persecutors with appropriate punishment after their deaths. While chapters 1–6 are older than chapters 7–12, their inclusion in the final form of the book makes Antiochus the last in a long line of Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Greek emperors. Completed just before the death of Antiochus in battle in 164 bce, the book of Daniel is among the last books included in the biblical canon. The book begins in chapter 1 in Hebrew and concludes in chapters 8–12 in the same language. The intervening chapters are written in Aramaic. While the character Daniel supposedly lived in the sixth century bce, the author of the apocalypses, in which Daniel speaks in the first person, lived in the second century bce.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124633056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Writings in the Hellenistic and Roman Period","authors":"T. Lim","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.10","url":null,"abstract":"There is no ancient account that describes the process leading to the formation of the third section of the canon. Scholars draw inferences from the evidence of ancient sources to support theories that posit various factors in the canonical process. This chapter will critically review scholarship on the formation of the traditional canon of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as a whole, with particular emphasis on the emergence of the collection of books that make up the Writings (Kethuvim). It will suggest that the heterogeneous collection of books that make up the Writings emerged in the Hellenistic-Roman period. While the books of the Writings remained more or less stable, their classification and order varied from one source to another. The “psalms” constitute a subcollection of books of the Writings, and their authoritative status is evident among the communities reflected in the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls and the early church.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114623855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Book of Job in the Context of the Writings","authors":"K. Dell","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.26","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides a fresh angle on the book of Job through the lens of its collection in the Writings. Issues of the themes and structure of Job are discussed and put into the context of the authorial use of genres, used, in a skeptical and questioning vein, to create a parody of traditional sentiments. Although traditionally designated a wisdom text, the wide variety of parodied genres in the book of Job indicate that it is not to be narrowly classified. Rather the links with other narratives and the dominance of lament genres resembling the Psalms and Lamentations indicate significant genre connections and also detailed intertextual links across much of the material of the Writings section of the canon.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125022154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Divine–Human Encounter in the Hebrew Wisdom of the Writings and the Confucian Analects","authors":"A. Lee","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.3","url":null,"abstract":"It is commonly believed that there are some shared basic quests for the understanding of the human and the divine in religious writings. Most scriptures did not develop in isolation, nor were they interpreted without interaction with other scriptures in the historical sociopolitical processes. This reality is especially true in the world of religious plurality and close proximity of religious communities in the globalized world of today. But academic approaches in the field of comparative studies of Confucianism and Christianity usually tend to generalize and polarize these two traditions based on the different notions of the divine and the human: biblical religion is on the whole seen as theocratic and transcendental in nature, while Confucian tradition is basically anthropocentric and humanistic in its outlook. It is the intention of this article to scrutinize this characterization by the method of cross-textual reading of the Hebrew Wisdom and the Confucian Analects to recover often neglected aspects in the two respective scriptural traditions.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130171458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postexilic Prose Traditions in the Writings","authors":"Thomas M. Bolin","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.25","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the prose traditions in the Writings under the broad division between historiography and storytelling. While 1–2 Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah make use of archival sources and possibly genuine first-person accounts, these materials are arranged and subsumed under an ideological umbrella—much like contemporaneous Greek historiography. Similarly, the storytelling of Daniel, Esther, Ruth, and the prose portions of Job, while clearly exhibiting folkloristic qualities, also show their primary concern to be with and address the realities faced by Jewish communities in the Persian and Hellenistic Diaspora. Overall the prose traditions in the Writings offer evidence of vibrant and active literary cultures among both temple personnel and cultured elites.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126779363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Writings in the Early Postexilic Period (Cyrus through Ezra-Nehemiah)","authors":"L. Grabbe","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190212438.013.9","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the history of Judah and the Judeans in the early Persian period (from about 539 to about 398 bce), based not just on Ezra-Nehemiah but on a critical examination of a variety of biblical and extra-biblical sources. It covers the obscure figure of Sheshbazzar, the building of the second temple, the activities of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the satrap Tattenai, the governorship of Nehemiah, and questions about the activities of the enigmatic figure of Ezra, in the satrapy of Transeuphrates under the rule of the Persian emperors from Cyrus to Artaxerxes II.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124401495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wisdom Traditions and the Writings","authors":"J. Crenshaw","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212438.013.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the wisdom literature and teachings of sages and scribes in ancient Israel, with a special focus on the postexilic and early Roman periods. Definitions of wisdom, sage, and scribe, their social status, their literary identities, and their teachings are discussed. Pertinent comparisons with ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, Torah and Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and the history of ancient Israel anchor presentations of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Wisdom of Solomon. The importance and pertinence of this literature and its teachings for ancient and contemporary seekers of wisdom are argued throughout.","PeriodicalId":395748,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122522439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}