Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism

Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism PDF Author: Christian Frevel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004232109
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
Focusing on concepts, practices and images associated with purity in the ancient Mediterranean, this volume contributes new aspects to the current discussion about the forming of religious traditions, from a comparative perspective that acknowldges individual developments, mutual exchanges, as well as transcultural processes.

Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism

Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism PDF Author: Christian Frevel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004232109
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
Focusing on concepts, practices and images associated with purity in the ancient Mediterranean, this volume contributes new aspects to the current discussion about the forming of religious traditions, from a comparative perspective that acknowldges individual developments, mutual exchanges, as well as transcultural processes.

The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism

The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism PDF Author: Jacob Neusner
Publisher: Brill Archive
ISBN: 9789004037458
Category : Judaism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description


Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple

Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple PDF Author: Jonathan Klawans
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195395840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Ancient Jewish sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Some find in sacrifice the key to the mysterious and violent origins of human culture. Others see these cultic rituals as merely the fossilized vestiges of primitive superstition. Some believe that ancient Jewish sacrifice was doomed from the start, destined to be replaced by the Christian eucharist. Others think that the temple was fated to be superseded by the synagogue. In Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple Jonathan Klawans demonstrates that these supersessionist ideologies have prevented scholars from recognizing the Jerusalem temple as a powerful source of meaning and symbolism to the ancient Jews who worshiped there. Klawans exposes and counters such ideologies by reviewing the theoretical literature on sacrifice and taking a fresh look at a broad range of evidence concerning ancient Jewish attitudes toward the temple and its sacrificial cult. The first step toward reaching a more balanced view is to integrate the study of sacrifice with the study of purity-a ritual structure that has commonly been understood as symbolic by scholars and laypeople alike. The second step is to rehabilitate sacrificial metaphors, with the understanding that these metaphors are windows into the ways sacrifice was understood by ancient Jews. By taking these steps-and by removing contemporary religious and cultural biases-Klawans allows us to better understand what sacrifice meant to the early communities who practiced it. Armed with this new understanding, Klawans reevaluates the ideas about the temple articulated in a wide array of ancient sources, including Josephus, Philo, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. Klawans mines these sources with an eye toward illuminating the symbolic meanings of sacrifice for ancient Jews. Along the way, he reconsiders the ostensible rejection of the cult by the biblical prophets, the Qumran sect, and Jesus. While these figures may have seen the temple in their time as tainted or even defiled, Klawans argues, they too-like practically all ancient Jews-believed in the cult, accepted its symbolic significance, and hoped for its ultimate efficacy.

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: Mira Balberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one’s self and one’s body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one’s human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

Purity and Danger

Purity and Danger PDF Author: Professor Mary Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136489274
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Purity and Danger is acknowledged as a modern masterpiece of anthropology. It is widely cited in non-anthropological works and gave rise to a body of application, rebuttal and development within anthropology. In 1995 the book was included among the Times Literary Supplement's hundred most influential non-fiction works since WWII. Incorporating the philosophy of religion and science and a generally holistic approach to classification, Douglas demonstrates the relevance of anthropological enquiries to an audience outside her immediate academic circle. She offers an approach to understanding rules of purity by examining what is considered unclean in various cultures. She sheds light on the symbolism of what is considered clean and dirty in relation to order in secular and religious, modern and primitive life.

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature PDF Author: Moshe Blidstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019879195X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.

Ancient Judaism

Ancient Judaism PDF Author: Jacob Neusner
Publisher: University of South Florida
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism

Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism PDF Author: Jonathan Klawans
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195177657
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Jonathan Klawans shows how the link between moral impurity and physical defilement, as understood by the ancient Hebrews, can be followed through to St Paul and the Christian era when the need for ritual purity was finally rejected.

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities PDF Author: Christine E. Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198034466
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In ancient Jewish culture the ideas of purity and impurity defined the socio-cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Hayes argues that different views of the possibility of conversion, based on varying ideas about Gentile impurity, were the key factor in the formation of Jewish sects in the second temple period, and in the separation of the early Christian Church from what later became rabbinic Judaism.

"They Shall Purify Themselves"

Author: Susan Haber
Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit
ISBN: 1589833554
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
These essays address the connection between purity in early Judaism and the synagogue, Jesus' observance of purity laws, and women's relationships with purity in the first century.