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Book Review: Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters

THIS VOLUME is a worthy and helpful addition to The Bible and Its Modern Interpreters series, which is edited by Douglas A. Knight. The first of the series, The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, was published in 1985 (see the review in INTERPRETATION 40 [1986], p. 302). The third and last volume will be The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters. The focus of this volume is on recent studies concerning the development and nature of what is labeled "Early Judaism," covering the period between 330 B.C.E., the time of Alexander, and 138 C.E., the end of the Bar Kochba revolt. The volume looks at how scholarship has blossomed in this field in recent years (1980 is the terminus for the literature under discussion), primarily based on new data which has become available since 1945. To describe this, twenty-two scholars have been invited to write twenty articles. Each article seeks to present some overview of the field, make some comments on methodological development, and to raise questions about the direction in which research should (or needs) to go. This overall aim is prominently set forth on the fly of the book's dust jacket. The volume opens with an article by the editors entitled "Introduction: The Modern Study of Early Judaism." Its aim is to define the scope of the volume and the issues to be addressed. Part One, "Early Judaism in its Historical Setting," contains four articles. Here Shaye J. D. Cohen discusses the political and social history of the Jews in Greco-Roman antiquity; Gary G. Porton calls attention to the diversity that characterized postbiblical J udaism; James D. Purvis treats the evidence now available for better understanding the Samaritans; and John G. Gager deals with the problem of the presence in early Christianity of antiSemitism and anti-Judaism. Part Two, "Recent Discoveries," also contains four articles. In them, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor focuses attention on the Qumran documents; Sebastian P. Brock discusses biblical, nonbiblical, and even non-Jewish manuscript discoveries; Eric M. Meyers and A. Thomas Kraabel review archaeological, iconographical, and other data from the second century C.E. and later; and Yaakov Meshorer details the work of Jewish numismatics from the Persian period to the Bar Kochba revolt. Part Three, "The Literature," is the longest section of the volume and contains nine articles. In this section, the following scholars write on the following subjects: Emanuel Tov on Jewish Greek Scriptures; Daniel J. Harrington on "midrash" or "haggadah"; Maurya P. Hogan on the "pesharim"; Anitra Bingham Kolenkow on the lit-