Society, the Sacred and Scripture in Ancient Judaism: A Sociology of Knowledge

This work explores the relationship between religion, social patterns, and the perception of the character of scripture in four modes of Ancient Judaism: (1) the Jerusalem community of the fifth to fourth centuries B.C.E. (ie, the Early Second Temple Period); (2) the Judaism of the Graeco-Roman Disapora down to the end of the fourth century of the Christian Era; (3) earliest rabbinic Judaism in the second century C.E. in the land of Israel; (4) Late Antique Talmudic Rabbinism, primarily in...