New Books in Ancient History

Cosmology and cosmic journeys play a significant role in biblical and extra-biblical texts, especially in apocalyptic narratives. What about for the book of Revelation? The answer is yes.Join us as we speak with Joel Rothman about his recent book, The Cosmic Journey in the Book of Revelation: Apocalyptic Cosmology and the Experience of Story-Space (T&T Clark, 2023).Joel Rothman recently earned his PhD at the University of Divinity in Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karenleigh Overmann proposes a novel answer to these timeless questions.Tune in as we talk with Karenleigh Overmann about her book, The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Gorgias Press, 2024).Karenleigh Overmann earned a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford, and is research fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we delve into one of the most profound and enduring works of sacred poetry: the Book of Psalms. Emotional and spiritual, joyful and despairing, triumphant and trembling with terror, the psalms have given voice to humanity's deepest yearnings for millennia. These timeless prayers and hymns have offered solace, inspiration, and a path to connection with the Divine, both individually and collectively.Traditionally attributed to King David, the psalms were sung by the Jewish priests in the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. But what is it about these ancient verses that still resonate with readers and worshippers today—Jews, Christians, and people of many faiths or none at all? How do these sacred words help the human heart and mind reach toward the Transcendent? And what explains their unparalleled staying power over thousands of years?To guide us through this journey, we are honored to welcome Dr. Shlomo Dov Rosen, a truly remarkable and multifaceted scholar. Dr. Rosen is a philosopher, poet, and congregational rabbi whose expertise bridges disciplines and traditions. With a Ph.D. in philosophy, he brings a unique perspective to the psalms, informed by his deep engagement with Jewish law, theology, and even the literary world of Milton. As someone who has dedicated his life to both the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of faith, Dr. Rosen is uniquely equipped to help us explore the profound meanings of these ancient prayers.In today’s conversation, we touch on the historical origins of the psalms, their universal and interfaith appeal, and how they speak to the human experience of war, illness, gratitude, jay and awe in the face of nature—and beyond nature. We’ll also discuss why certain psalms, like the beloved 23rd Psalm, hold such enduring power, even for those who might not consider themselves religious. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) focuses on this animal-style imagery, examining the dissemination of this image system. Filled with fascinating images carefully chosen from an enormous geographical scope, Petya Andreeva's vivid book explores how communities used animal-style design to create and define status, to bond alliances together, and to showcase steppe know-how and worldliness in sedentary communities. Fantastic Fauna should appeal to those in Eurasian history, East Asian history, art and archeology, and those interested in thinking about steppe art. Interested listeners should also check out Petya's chapter on the Golden Hoard (available here), part of an Open-Access UNESCO volume on the Silk Roads.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (U California Press, 2023) investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they considered overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range that spans generation, kinship, and species. The book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew ReviewRafael Rachel Neis is Neis is a scholar, writer, educator, and artist. A Professor of History and Judaic Studies, they are Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and hold the Jean and Samuel Frankel Chair in Rabbinics.Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024), Chaya T. Halberstam challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual judge's personal relationships, reactive emotions, and impulse to care.Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in ancient Jewish writings alongside minor case stories in Josephus and rabbinic literature. She shows both the consistency of a counter-tradition that sees legal practice as contingent upon relationship and emotion, and the specific ways in which that perspective was manifest in changing times and contexts.Interviewee: Chaya T. Halberstam is Professor of Religious Studies at King's University College, University of Western Ontario.Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2024), Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India’s religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Based on an understanding of scholasticism as a cross-cultural phenomenon, undertaken by rabbinic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian scholars in late antiquity, this book examines the development of Palestinian rabbinic compilations from social-historical and literary-historical perspectives. Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi (Bloomsbury, 2024) focuses on the compilation of the Talmud Yerushalmi in the context of late antique scholarly practice aimed at preserving past knowledge for future generations.This book provides insight into how rabbinic scholarship in the Land of Israel participated in the wider intellectual practices of Roman-Byzantine times. Beginning with the social, educational, and legal contexts that generated rabbinic knowledge. Catherine Hezser goes on to investigate the oral and written transmission of rabbinic traditions to eventually examine the compilation of the Talmud Yerushalmi with a comparative and redaction-historical approach.Integrating Palestinian rabbinic education and scholarship into the context of late antique Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Christian scholarly practices, Catherine Hezser demonstrates how rabbinic compilatory techniques resembled but also differed from.those of Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian scholars. The book highlights how rabbinic compilations are idiosyncratic and create a distinct rabbinic identity. Overall, Hezser argues that rabbinic scholarship was an integral part of late antique intellectual life in the Near Middle East and should be recognized as an Eastern equivalent to Western, paideia-based forms of scholarship in the Roman-Byzantine period and beyond.Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at SOAS University of London, UK.Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why yet another book on the Manusmriti? In From Fire To Light: Rereading the Manusmriti (Harper Collins, 2024), acclaimed academic Arvind Sharma argues that the present understanding of the Manusmriti - regarded as a text designed by the higher castes, especially brahmanas, to oppress the lower castes and women - only tells one side of the story. As he demonstrates, this perception, when examined against textual, commentarial and historical evidence, is limited to the point of being misleading (and sometimes downright wrong). Providing an alternative reading of the Manusmriti, From Fire to Light accepts some of the conclusions associated with the existing interpretation but presents them in a new light, mitigating and at times contradicting some of its other features. In taking the plural character of the Hindu tradition and the Manusmriti's historical context more deeply into account, it brings about a paradigm shift in our understanding of this ancient Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices