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Bedouin culture, the culture of desert-dwelling nomads, has existed for 4,500 years, including the era when the texts of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, were composed. It is thus a good context for understanding much of the Bible’s often ambivalent content regarding economics, material culture, social values, social organization, legal practices, religious behavior, and oral traditions. The abundant and varied Bedouin materials in this book constitute a cultural document that supplements materials learned from other cultures of the Ancient Near East about the Bible. The plenitude of Bedouin materials in the Hebrew Bible, the common logic between Bedouin and biblical experiences, and the ancient proximity of Bedouin to what the Bible cites as Israelite abodes, ensure that the origin of almost all the biblical references presented in this book stemmed from Bedouin rather than other ancient cultures. This book, in detailing the profusion of Bedouin culture in the Bible, goes far toward establishing that the ancient Israelites did have a nomadic background, as they are portrayed. Through the prism of Bedouin culture we also gain fresh insights into our customary perspectives on prominent aspects of Judaism and their biblical origins, such as the Israelite god Yahweh (enunciated in Judaism as “Adonai”), the attribute of this god as unseen, the original significance of circumcision, the eating of unleavened bread during Passover, the dwelling in thatched booths during the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Jewish prohibitions against eating pork and other forbidden foods.

Biblical Truths addresses the question, How can a thinking person of the 21st century, who accepts the conclusions of modern science, historiography, and “facts,” continue to confess the traditional orthodox creeds of Christianity? How can such Christians continue to read the New Testament as a reliable source for “truth,” faith, and knowledge? Biblical Truths uses postmodern, antifoundational theories and philosophy to offer a ways of reading the Bible that are theologically faithful but intellectually respectable.

When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Christian literary memory. This book explores the diverse ways in which history was written according to the Hellenistic literary tradition, focusing specifically on the time during which the New Testament writings came into being: from the mid-first century until the early second century CE. While acknowledging cases of historical awareness in other New Testament writings, the book traces the origins of this historiographical approach to the Gospel of Mark and Luke—Acts. The book shows how the earliest Christian writings shaped Christian thinking and writing about history.

When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. This book explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, the book shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, in order to legitimate the Jewishness of Christians. The book begins with an overview of the importance of ethnicity and ethnic rhetoric to the formation of ancient Christian identity. It then situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts before moving on to focus on the production of Jewish identity and difference in Acts 2:5–13. The book assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21), and explores how Acts of the Apostles and the Salutaris Foundation inscription each uses ethnic reasoning together with civic and imperial space to produce unified identities. The book concludes that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts.

Engaging ancient medical texts, inscriptions, ancient philosophy, early church fathers, and apocalypses, this book demonstrates that early Christian depictions of hell intensified and preserved ancient notions of gender and bodily normativity. Whereas heaven uses ancient categories of the body to construct identity, in hell the stakes are higher-the damned look like the bodies of living women and people with disabilities, and they are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, criminalizing those bodies on earth. Hell Hath No Fury uncovers the relationship between textual violence and real world violence. This book examines that way that ancient understandings of the gender and the body influenced early Christian constructions of sin, showing that gender roles deemed some bodies more susceptible to sin. Early Christian understandings of gender and the body also figured highly in the punishments themselves, depicting the damned as female and disabled for eternity. This book also considers the way in which Mary’s composite characterization draws upon ancient notions of gender and the body to depict her as the ideal figure to descend to hell and minister to the damned. Avoiding reductionist understandings of ancient apocalyptic literature, gender, and the body, Hell Hath No Fury demonstrates that early Christian visions of hell traversed freely between worlds in order to negatively mark the damned, and in turn those who inhabited female, enslaved, or disabled bodies on earth.

This book suggests that human trauma gave birth to the Bible. The Bible's ability to speak to suffering is a major reason why the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity have retained their relevance for thousands of years. In a reinterpretation of the Bible's origins, the book tells the story of how the Jewish people and Christian community had to adapt to survive multiple catastrophes and how their holy scriptures both reflected and reinforced each religion's resilient nature. The book's analysis demonstrates how many of the central tenets of biblical religion, including monotheism and the idea of suffering as God's retribution, are factors that provided Judaism and Christianity with the strength and flexibility to endure in the face of disaster. In addition, the book explains how the Jewish Bible was deeply shaped by the Jewish exile in Babylon, an event that it rarely describes, and how the Christian Bible was likewise shaped by the unspeakable shame of having a crucified savior.

This book reevaluates the biblical house of the father (bêt ’āb) in light of the anthropological critique of the patrilineal model. It uncovers and defines the contours of an underappreciated yet socially significant kinship unit in the Bible: “the house of the mother (bêt ’ēm).” Identified with what anthropologists call “the uterine family,” the biblical house of the mother comprised a mother, her maidservants, and her biological and adopted children. The house of the father subdivided into maternally named or maternally identified units. Members of a maternally named house formed an alliance within the larger house of the father and competed as a unit for succession within the house of the father. Biblical Hebrew recognizes these maternal units with kinship labels specific to a mother and keyed to female reproductive organs: “son of my womb,” “the child who opens the womb,” “my brother, the son of my mother,” “a brother, one who had nursed at my mother’s breasts.” We also find maternally delineated space within the house of the father described as a “house,” “chamber,” or “tent” of the mother, and this space is associated biblically with conception, birth, breastfeeding, and marriage negotiations. This book demonstrates that the Bible recorded its past in the form of idealized, founding-family narratives, and within those narratives, competing mothers and their sub-houses marked hierarchies within the house of the father and political divisions within the national house of Israel.

The purpose of this book is to show why and how (what later became) the four canonical gospels take on a historical cast, a history-like “feel” that remains vitally important for many Christians today. This aim is worked out by in-depth comparisons with other Greco-Roman stories that have been made to seem like history (mythic historiography). Instead of using these comparisons to justify genetic links between texts, Litwa uses them to show how the evangelists dynamically interacted with Greco-Roman literary culture, felt the pressures of its structures of plausibility, and responded by using well-known historiographical tropes. These include the mention of famous rulers and kings, geographical notices, the introduction of eyewitnesses, vivid presentation, alternative reports, staged skepticism, and so on. This study is the most sustained and thorough comparison of the gospels and Greco-Roman mythology (not just Homer and Euripides) of the past fifty years. Its innovation is to show that the gospels were not perceived as myths (or mythoi), but as histories (records of actual events).

The Apocrypha or deuterocanonical texts of the Bible were Jewish texts that were included in Christian Old Testaments over and above the books of the Jewish Bible, although in the ancient period both the Jewish canon and the Bibles of the various Christian churches were in flux. Thus the authority of these extra books, as well as the decision about which books would be so included, has also varied enormously. The Apocrypha have been continuously debated by Christian authors over the centuries, and Jewish authors from the Middle Ages on have re-introduced some of the books of the Apocrypha into Jewish religious culture. Also, in addition to the extra books of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, considered here are the less well known books of the Ethiopic, Syriac (Peshitta), Armenian, and Coptic Bibles. The books of the various Apocrypha’s and the problems associated with them are introduced in these categories: novellas, historical texts, wisdom texts, apocalypses, and psalms, prayers, and odes. Important themes central to Jewish identity in the Greek and Roman periods that appear in these works are treated. The role that these texts have continued to play in Christian and in some cases Jewish tradition is noted, along with some examples of the figures of the texts in art.

This book deals with matters of self-representation and the presentation of selves. How does late-biblical literature portray individuals’ emotions, disappointments, desires, and doubts within particular cultural and religious frameworks? The goal is to explore ways in which followers of Yahweh, participating in long-standing traditions and specific socio-historical settings of late-biblical times, are shown to privatize and personalize religion. The author is interested in a variety of phenomena including the use of first-person speech in literary creations, the assumption of seemingly auto-biographical forms and orientations, the emphasis on individual responsibility for sin and punishment, the creative and daring challenge to conventional ideas about the way the world operates, the interest in the emotional dimensions of biblical characters, the portrayal of everyday small things that relate to essential aspects of worldview, and descriptions of self-imposed ritual. This set of interests lends itself to exciting approaches in the contemporary study of religion, rooted largely in the sociology of religion. The concept of “lived religion,” developed by Robert Orsi, Meredith McGuire, and others, and related ideas about material religion, explored, for example, by Colleen McDannell, help to provide the study’s theoretical framework.

Utilizing theories of gift exchange from Seneca to Marcel Mauss and beyond, Thomas Blanton explains the operation of the gift economy at work in the letters of Paul of Tarsus. The book shows how Paul adapted discourses and practices of gift exchange to motivate the transmission of goods and services based on an ethic of reciprocity. In an economy of symbolic goods, Paul posited that gifts proceeding from the god of Israel could be incompletely reciprocated through the donation of money, material goods, labor services, or the extension of hospitality: “spiritual” benefactions were reciprocated by the donation of material goods and services. But the idea of “spiritual gifts” was also instrumental in orchestrating sociopolitical hierarchies. Paul claimed a relatively high status as an “apostle,” or mediator of heavenly gifts, and was able even to effect an inversion in the “normal” system of social evaluation whereby wealthy and educated persons held higher status than did manual laborers and craftsmen, such as Paul himself. Overturning some of the conventions associated with patronage, Paul asserted that the material goods supplied by patronal figures could only inadequately reciprocate the “spiritual gifts” that Paul mediated. In this way, he was able to lay claim not only to material goods and labor services but also to a relatively high status as a mediator of gifts that were valued highly within early Christian groups. The book’s development and elaboration of theories of gift exchange are pertinent to the fields of anthropology, sociology, and religious studies.

The first scholarly work to trace the Temple throughout the entire New Testament, this book examines Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the Temple in the first century and provides both Jews and Christians with a better understanding of their respective faiths and how they grow out of this ancient institution. The centrality of the writing reveals the authors' negotiations with the institutional and symbolic center of Judaism as they worked to form their own religion.