Ioudaioi

The study of ancient Judaism has enjoyed a steep rise in interest and publications in recent decades, although the focus has often been on the ideas and beliefs represented in ancient Jewish texts rather than on the daily lives and the material culture of Jews/Judaeans and their communities. The nascent institution of the synagogue formed an increasingly important venue for communal gathering and daily or weekly practice. This collection of essays brings together a broad spectrum of new archaeological and textual data with various emergent theories and interpretative methods in order to address the need to understand the place of the synagogue in the daily and weekly procedures, community frameworks, and theological structures in which Judaeans, Galileans, and Jewish people in the Diaspora lived and gathered. The interdisciplinary studies will be of great significance for anyone studying ancient Jewish belief, practice, and community formation.

Greek authors likened “philosophical discourse” in the Hellenistic and Roman eras to an orchard. Logic, physics, and ethics served as the orchard walls, the trees, and the fruit of this enterprise. In a similar manner, this collection of essays, written by an international group of scholars and devoted to Philo of Alexandria’s fashioning of a new Jewish philosophical discourse, harvests the fruits of many disciplines – including the study of Ancient Judaism and History of Religions, Ancient Philosophy, and the Classics – and brings them to bear on one of the Roman period’s most prolific and creative Jewish thinkers and public figures. Essays treat Philo’s relationship to the varied schools of philosophy: Socratic thought, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Pythagoreism, Stoicism, and Middle Platonism all played a role in the seedbed of Philo’s orchard. The volume also includes a new catalogue of Philo’s library and a study of Philo’s reception in Christian philosophical discourse.