Before the Bible reveals the landscape of scripture in an era prior to the crystallization of the rabbinic Bible and the canonization of the Christian Bible. Most accounts of the formation of the Hebrew Bible trace the origins of scripture through source critical excavation of the archaeological "tel" of the Bible or the analysis of the scribal hand on manuscripts in text-critical work, but the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of scripture formation. Judith Newman focuses not on the putative origins and closure of the Bible, but on the reasons why scriptures remained open, with pluriform growth in the Hellenistic-Roman period. Drawing on new methods from cognitive neuroscience and the social sciences as well as traditional philological and literary analysis, Before the Bible argues that the key to understanding the formation of scripture is the widespread practice of individual and communal prayer in early Judaism. The figure of the teacher as a learned and pious sage capable of interpreting and embodying the tradition is central to understanding this revelatory phenomenon. The book considers the entwinement of prayer and scriptural formation in five books reflecting the diversity of early Judaism: Ben Sira, Daniel, Jeremiah/Baruch, Second Corinthians, and the Qumran Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns). While not a complete taxonomy of scripture formation, the book illuminates performative dynamics that have been largely ignored as well as the generative role of interpretive tradition in accounts of how the Bible came to be.

Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in early Judaism

Religion & Spirituality

Newman, Judith H.

Christian Books & Bibles

Oxford University Press

Part of the "Just Add Kids" series, this book is a collection of 51 Bible stories that actively involve elementary children, ages 6 - 10, in learning the story. Organized by Biblical content, this book will be easy for the teacher to use and fun for the children!

Just Add Kids: The Jailhouse Rocked: And 50 Other Bible Stories for Elementary Children

Children's Books

Abingdon Press

Flegal, Daphna

Stickler,Lee Dell

Religions

ABINGDON PRESS *

Partial contents: Pre-Exilic Prayers and the Beginnings of Scripturalization; Scripturalization in the Telling of History: Nehemiah 9; The Past as Blueprint for Present: Salvation by Typology in Judith 9; Biblical Exempla: The Arrogance of Power in 3 Maccabees 2; From Prayers to Liturgy.

Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Early Judaism and Its Literature)

Scholars' Press

Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism

Society of Biblical Literature

During the past few decades a great amount of scholarly work has been done on the various prayer cultures of antiquity, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish and Christian. In Jewish studies this burgeoning research on ancient prayer has been stimulated particularly by the many new prayer texts found at Qumran, which have shed new light on several long-standing problems. The present volume intends to make a new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on ancient Jewish prayer texts by focusing on a limited set of prayer texts, scil. , a small number of those that have been preserved only in Greek. Jewish prayers in Greek tend to be undervalued, which is regrettable because these prayers shed light on sometimes striking aspects of early Jewish spirituality in the centuries around the turn of the era. In this volume twelve such prayers have been collected, translated, and provided with an extensive historical and philological commentary. They have been preserved on papyrus, on stone, and as part of Christian church orders into which some of them have been incorporated in a christianized from. For that reason these prayers are of great interest to scholars of both early Judaism and ancient Christianity.

Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature)

History

Horst, Pieter W. van der

World

de Gruyter

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