Torah in Early Jewish Imaginations

Torah is a topic of keen interest among scholars of the Bible and Second Temple Judaism. The Hellenistic age especially witnessed an undeniable textual pluriformity of not only the Pentateuch (Torah), but of a host of other works concerned with traditions of authoritative »teaching« or »instruction« ( torah) that was related in complex ways to books that would become part of the Hebrew Bible. In the Second Temple period, the term torah was thus a robustly multivalent term, deployed in discourses emerging from different contexts, and toward a range of rhetorical ends. The essays in this volume employ a plethora of methodologies to offer innovative studies of a range of early Jewish literature - including texts from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint - that is concerned in different ways with Torah / torah.Ariel Feldman/Timothy J. Sandoval: Introduction − Richard J. Bautch: The Pentateuchal Redaction: An Exercise in Scribal Imagination − Steven D. Fraade: »Bringing the Messiah(s) Through Law«: Reflections from the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Some Successors − Carol A. Newsom: Access to Knowledge and Resistance to Genesis 2-3 in Mid-Second Temple Texts − Daniel A. Machiela: An Ancestral Pattern for Diaspora Life in the Aramaic Literature from Qumran − Ariel Feldman: The Song of the Sea in the Writings of Early Judaism − Joseph McDonald: Exodus as Chosen Trauma, Exodus as Chosen Glory: Group Identity Formation among Ancient Israelites, Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora, and Modern Ethiopian Jews − Jonathan Kaplan: Leviticus and the Rewriting of the Torah in 1QWords of Moses (1Q22) − Jeremy L. Williams: The Rhetorical Use of Blasphemy for Criminalization from Leviticus 24:10-23 to Acts 6:8 - 7:60 − Timothy J. Sandoval: Satirical Elements in Tobit? Tobit's Torah Ethics in GII versus GI − Judith H. Newman: Trickery as Virtue? Reworking the Torah's Trickster in the Book of Judith − Kelley Coblentz-Bautch: The Law and the Prophet: Reading 1 Maccabees in the Days of John Hyrcanus