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Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age. Weiss argues that this particular Jewish relationship to the divine is rooted in the most canonical of rabbinic texts even as he demonstrates that in ancient Judaism the idea of debating God was itself a matter of debate. By elucidating competing views and exploring their theological assumptions, the book challenges the scholarly claim that the early rabbis conceived of God as a morally perfect being whose goodness had to be defended in the face of biblical accounts of unethical divine action. Pious Irreverence examines the ways in which the rabbis searched the words of the Torah for hidden meanings that could grant them the moral authority to express doubt about, and frustration with, the biblical God. Using characters from the Bible as their mouthpieces, they often challenged God's behavior, even in a few remarkable instances, envisioning God conceding error, declaring to the protestor, \"You have taught Me something; I will nullify My decree and accept your word.\"

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years. Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites. In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas.

This wide-ranging study uses historical and archaeological evidence to consider humanity's interactions with the environment, fashioning agricultural, gardening and horticultural regimes over a millennium and a half. The discussions of archaeological finds of seeds from discarded rubbish including animal fodder and bedding show the wide range of wild species present, as well as cultivated and gathered plants in the diet of inhabitants and livestock. Pollen analyses, and studies of wood, mosses, and beetles, alongside a look at the local natural environment, and comparison with medieval written records give us a tantalizing picture of early Winchester. The earliest record is by Ælfric of Eynsham in his 11th-century Nomina Herbarum . From medieval records come hints of gardens within the city walls, and considerable detail about agriculture and horticulture, and produce brought into the city. Wild fruit and nuts were also being gathered from the countryside for the town's markets and mills. At St Giles' Fair exotic imported spices and fruits were also sold. All these sources of evidence are brought together to reveal more fully the roles of agriculture and the environment in the development of Winchester.

This book is dedicated to an analysis of the writings of modern religious Jewish thinkers who adopted a neo-fundamentalist, illusionary, apologetic approach, opposing the notion that there may sometimes be a contradiction between reason and revelation. The book deals with the thought of Eliezer Goldman, Norman Lamm, David Hartman, Aharon Lichtenstein, Jonathan Sacks, and Michael Abraham. According to these thinkers, it is possible to resolve all of the difficulties that arise from the encounter between religion and science, between reason and revelation, between the morality of halakhah and Western morality, between academic scholarship and tradition, and between scientific discoveries and statements found in the Torah. This position runs counter to the stance of other Jewish thinkers who espouse a different, more daring approach. According to the latter view, irresolvable contradictions between reason and faith sometimes face the modern Jewish believer, who must reconcile himself to these two conflicting truths and learn to live with them. This dialectic position was discussed in Between Religion and Reason, Part I (Academic Studies Press, 2020). The present volume, Part II, completes the discussion of this topic. This book concludes a trilogy of works by the author dealing with modern Jewish thought that attempts to integrate tradition and modernity. The first in the series was The Middle Way (Academic Studies Press, 2014), followed by The Dual Truth (Academic Studies Press, 2018).

The Vatican II Council of 1965 signaled a new era in the relationship of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Determined to free the Church of the anti-Jewish polemic which led to such widespread suffering of the innocent, Catholic authorities completely revised their conceptions of Jews and Judaism. Soon, many mainstream Protestant churches also issued a series of official statements that affirm the eternal nature of God's ancient covenant with Israel. An entirely new category of theology emerged as part of the developing Jewish-Christian dialogue, and gradually Jewish theologians began to respond. Opening the Covenant represents a significant advance in Jewish thinking about Christianity. Michael Kogan delves deep into the theologies of the two faiths to locate precise points of difference and convergence. He sees Christianity as the breaking open of the original Covenant to include Gentile peoples. God has brought this about, says Kogan, through the work of Jesus and his interpreters. If Christianity is a divinely inspired movement, then Judaism must reevaluate its truth-claims. This will in no way compromise the truth of Judaism itself but will cause Jews to understand their own faith more fully by locating it in the larger context of God's universal redemptive plan.Kogan calls for each tradition to receive the wisdom of the other as a means of self-understanding. Once each faith is freed to find God's purpose in the other, the way will be open to a liberating pluralism in which Jews and Christians come to see each other as Israelite siblings sharing a universal role as God's witnesses, the builders of God's Kingdom on Earth. Neither faith can do this world-redemptive work alone. Kogan argues that an affirmation of one's own religion can still provide space for the truth of the \"other,\" and presents a theory of multiple revelations of truth flowing from the one God of all.

This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies,Materia Magicaidentifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence. Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used.Materia Magicaapproaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite. Materia Magicadevelops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.

Nineveh, Iraq, is one of the longest occupied cities in the world, dating at least back to the mid-7th millennium BC. UC Berkeley excavations uncovered a district of large dwellings and wide streets near the Maski Gate (MG22), providing a stratigraphic history of Late Assyrian ceramics at the centre of the empire through to the 7th century BC.

Mediating Marginality draws on eight years of excavation and survey at the newly discovered Bronze Age Cemetery of Purić-Ljubanj in the county of Vukovar-Syrmia in eastern Croatia. It also incorporates data from an ongoing landscape project that continues to provide evidence of an extensive, hitherto unknown, cultural group living on the margins between well known and documented groups, such as the Belegiš and West Serbian variant of the Vatin cultural complex. The monograph explores what this marginality may have meant for these people and how they built a strong community identity through ongoing landscape modification that involved appropriating materials from a very limited palette and reworking and redepositing these in very specific ways over an exceptionally long period of time. Ideas surrounding the deployment of skill, stocks of knowledge and scales of performance are used to interrogate the social world the Spačva-Ljubanj mound builders created for themselves and reveal that although apparently marginalised they were far from impoverished and indeed appear to have created a thriving cultural heritage. The monograph closes with a discussion of how the project intends to go forward, placing particular emphasis on how the modern community can best benefit from continued research in the area.

The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish. In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by \"border-makers,\" heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.

A discussion of what the doctrine of creation can mean to anyone who takes seriously the teachings of the classic rabbis, ancient and modern philosophers, and contemporary scientists. It comprises a unique synthesis of religious belief and philosophical speculation.