Profiling Jewish Literature in Antiquity: An Inventory, from Second Temple Texts to the Talmuds

This book introduces a new system for describing non-biblical ancient Jewish literature. It arises from a fresh empirical investigation into the literary structures of many anonymous and pseudepigraphic sources, including Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha of the Old Testament, the larger Dead Sea Scrolls, Midrash, and the Talmuds. A comprehensive framework of several hundred literary features, based on modern literary studies and text linguistics, allows describing the variety of important text types which characterize ancient Judaism without recourse to vague and superficial genre terms. The features proposed cover all aspects of the ancient Jewish texts, including the self-presentation, perspective, and knowledge horizon assumed by the text; any poetic constitution, narration, thematic discourse, or commentary format; common small forms and small-scale relationships governing neighbouring parts; compilations; dominant subject matter; and similarities to the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible. By treating works of diverse genres and periods by the same conceptual grid, the new framework breaks down artificial barriers to interdisciplinary research and prepares the ground for new large-scale comparative studies. The book introduces and presents the new framework, explains and illustrates every descriptive category with reference to specific ancient Jewish texts, and provides sample profiles of Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, Mishnah, and Genesis Rabbah. The books publication is accompanied by a public online Database of hundreds of further Profiles (literarydatabase.humanities.manchester.ac.uk). This project was made possible through the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Table of Contents:
I: Introduction II: Text of the Inventory III: Commentary on the Inventory 1: The Self-Presentation of the Text as a Verbal Entity 2: The Perspective and Knowledge Horizon of the Governing Voice 3: The Poetic and Rhetorical-Communicative Constitution of Texts 4: Narrative Coherence and Narrative Aggregation 5: Thematic Coherence and Thematic Aggregation 6: Meta-Textual Structuring of Texts 7: Correspondences and Verbal Overlap with Other Texts 8: Small Forms in the Governing Voice 9: Small-Scale Coherence Relationships 10: The Juxtaposition of Part-Texts in a Compound 11: Dominant Subject Matter and Scholarly Genre Labels Concluding Remarks IV: Sample Profiles 1: Jubilees 2: Temple Scroll 3: Mishnah 4: Genesis Rabbah

About the Author :
Written in collaboration with Philip Alexander (Professor Emeritus of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, Manchester University), Rocco Bernasconi (Lecturer of Jewish Literature, Facoltà di Teologia di Lugano), and Robert Hayward (Professor of Hebrew, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham).

Review :
Samely avoids idealized genre-forms and totalizing labels. His system is sensitive to texts of mixed form, to changes in form within a text, and potentially through the databases comparative potential to evolution in forms. With the inventory, Samely has created a flexible, robust, powerful analytic tool that enables one to describe a work of ancient Jewish literature with precision and nuance and to illumine it with a rich matrix of comparative data. This is a major advance, comprehensive and sophisticated. No scholar attempting to describe the genre, structure, or literary conventions of ancient Jewish literature(s) can afford to ignore it. As it is virtually certain that any future scholarly work on an ancient text that has been profiled will need to refer to what has been said about it, the current book will be required background reading for many scholars and is likely to become a classic. This book presents a new framework for analyzing the literary features of the anonymous and pseudepigraphic works of Jewish antiquity that aims to formulate categories specifically for describing these ancient texts.