Browsing by Subject "Judaic studies"

This dissertation argues that the boundaries between ostensibly separable “Jewish” and “Christian” religious traditions were fluid in the past and remain so today through examination of four contemporary case studies evidencing two general phenomena. One phenomenon explored is how varieties of self-identified Jesus-believers have incorporated rituals and ideas that have traditionally been associated with Judaism into their contemporary religious practice and understanding of the New Testament. The other phenomenon explored is how varieties of self-identified Jews have incorporated practices and figures that have traditionally been associated with Christianity into features of the contemporary Jewish landscape. In exploring the first phenomenon, I examine the following two case studies: (1) attempts by Christians of varying denominational affiliations to incorporate Jewish rituals associated with Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath) observance into Christian practice and (2) attempts by academic Jesus-believers, self-identified as Gentile Christians and Messianic Jews, to underscore the continuing significance of the territoriality of the land of Israel in the New Testament. In exploring the second phenomenon, I examine the following two cases studies: (1) attempts by Jews of varying denominational affiliations to incorporate a sense of mission traditionally associated with Christianity into Jewish practice for the purpose of Jewish outreach or advocacy in support or opposition to the State of Israel and (2) attempts by Jewish filmmakers to incorporate the figure of Jesus into Israeli films. In analyzing the aforementioned case studies relating to ritual observance, biblical exegesis, ideological identity, and visual arts, I hope to show how the supposed boundaries between self-identified Christians and Jews remain, as in the past, fluid and contested.

“American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System” is an investigation of the religious complexity present in religious food reform movements. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four field sites. These field sites are a Jewish organic vegetable farm where the farmers begin their days with meditation, a Christian raw vegan diet center run by Messianic Jews, a Christian family that raises their cattle on pastures and sends them to a halal processing plant for slaughter, and a Jewish farm where Christian and Buddhist farm staff helped to implement shmita, the biblical agricultural sabbatical year.

The religious people of America do not exist in neatly bound silos, so in my research I move with the religious people to the spaces that are less clearly defined as “Christian” or “Jewish.” I study religious food reformers within the framework of what I have termed “free-range religion” because they organize in groups outside the traditional religious organizational structures. My argument regarding free-range religion has three parts. I show that (1) perceived injustices within the American industrial food system have motivated some religious people to take action; (2) that when they do, they direct their efforts against the American food industry, and tend to do so outside traditional religious institutions; and finally, (3) in creating alternatives to the American food industry, religious people engage in inter-religious and extra-religious activism.

Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, literature review, and methodology overview. Chapter 2 focuses on the food-centered Judaism at the Adamah Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT. In Chapter 3, I discuss the Hallelujah Diet as prescriptive literature and as it is put into practice at the Hallelujah Diet Retreat Center in Lake Lure, NC. Chapter 4 follows cows as they move from the grassy hills of Baldwin Family Farms in Yanceyville, NC to the meat counter at Whole Foods Markets. In Chapter 5, I consider the shmita year, the biblical agricultural sabbatical practice that was reimagined and implemented at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, MD during 2014-2015. Chapter 6 will conclude this dissertation with a discussion of where religious food reform has been, where it is now, and a glimpse of what the future holds.

My dissertation elucidates the roles feasts played in constructing the social order for different Jewish communities from approximately the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Feasts - defined in this work as events based on the communal consumption of food and drink conscientiously differentiated from quotidian meals - punctuated the rhythms of the lives of Jews throughout ancient Palestine and the Diaspora. Jews convened feasts before and after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to mark seminal moments in Jewish history and to commemorate the roles God and his intermediaries played in these events. Jews also held feasts on a number of other occasions. Individuals and groups of Jews may have held feasts upon the visitation of foreign dignitaries, the completion of a major building project, after the safe return of a family or friend from a journey abroad, or during important life-cycle events. Regardless of the occasion, feasts consisted of a host of practices that provided Jews with the means to establish, maintain, or contest social hierarchies and group cohesion. How individuals and groups of Jews manipulated the constitutive elements of feasts during the period under investigation to actuate the social order within their communities is the focus of this dissertation.

To achieve this dissertation's objective, I will examine the textual and archaeological evidence for the performances of feasts within two domains that were central to the construction of Jewish society: privately owned Jewish domiciles in Palestine and the communal and religious institution of the synagogue located in the Diaspora and Palestine. There have been previous studies that have examined both the textual and archaeological data for the functions of feasts convened within these locations, but they have been temporally limited and have not taken into account recent anthropological and ethnographic studies demonstrating the dynamic functions of feasts. My analysis of the literary and archaeological evidence for feasts held within Jewish domiciles and synagogues shows that these repasts provided Jews with various opportunities to determine their relationships with one another, advance their economic and political agendas, seek power, and establish and/or contest broader tenets of the social order. I hope that my study will lead to further investigations into the social dynamics of Jewish feasts as well as their role as a catalyst for the transformation of economic, political, and religious institutions that shaped Jewish society in antiquity.

This dissertation asks how Europe’s multinational states legitimized themselves in the face of new, nation-based theories of sovereignty around the turn of the twentieth century. It answers this question by analyzing the production, reception, and circulation of the concept of “empire” in and between Central and Eastern Europe, and between the European continent and European colonies. It argues that a binary distinction between “modern,” unitary, mononational states and backward, decentralized, multinational “empires” emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century among European nationalist jurists, who used these paired concepts to justify both ethnonational homogenization and overseas expansion. It also shows that Habsburg subjects in linguistically and religiously diverse regions of the Dual Monarchy, and especially Hapsburg Jews, successfully challenged this discursive construction of multinational states as abnormal, archaic, and “imperial.” The redefinition of Austria as an “empire,” that is, an association of nations with historic rights to territory, posed challenges that could only be overcome, scholars from the Monarchy realized, by replacing the dichotomy of nation and empire with a new set of legal, political, and sociological concepts. Social analysis of the state provided, they believed, the means by which to produce these new concepts. A century before the “imperial turn” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, legal scholars from Habsburg Austria turned to the sociology of the state and articulated an influential, if now forgotten, critique of the increasingly hegemonic nationalist legal principles that both undergirded European imperial projects and threatened the continued existence of pluralistic multinational states.

Identifying the major figures and institutions involved in the elaboration of this critique, this dissertation reveals an alternative to Britain, France, and Germany’s national-imperial sociologies and a distinct tradition of international law. Members of this alternative school reconfigured “society” as a transnational category of analysis and the state as a space of competition and negotiation between interest groups. They also highlighted the processes of internal colonization that produced supposed nation-states and drew attention to the hazy boundary between the European metropole and colony. Some even questioned the distinction between “multiracial” Western European and “multinational” Eastern European states and the reality of the nation as a transhistorical entity. The Bukovinian-Jewish sociologist of law Eugen Ehrlich, for example, reframed international law as an already-existing global network of transborder normative communities and legal pluralism as a fundamental element of, rather than hindrance to, political modernization, while the Galician-Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz advanced the thesis that the origin of states, including supposed nation-states, lay in foreign conquest and imperial expansion, rather than in the organic growth of pre-existing ethnic units. These jurists-turned-sociologists were enthusiastically received by scholars in other ethnolinguistically diverse and stratified regions of the European periphery, such as by Manuel González Prada in Peru and Benoy Kumar Sarkar in Bengal, who creatively adapted Habsburg critiques of the European nation-state to their own political needs.

By offering a transnational legal and intellectual history of “empire” and its contested transition from a discursive to an analytical category, this dissertation contributes to larger debates about the viability of Europe’s multinational monarchies, the roots of twentieth-century federalism and internationalism, and the relationship between the social sciences, nationalism, and imperialism. It bridges the divide between two transformational moments in twentieth-century global history: the partial, though, to many, deeply significant, nationalization of European empires before 1918 and the frustrated efforts of anticolonial leaders to construct multiracial, democratic European empires in the era after 1945. Methodologically, my research challenges historians to look beyond more familiar intra-imperial and inter-colonial networks of exchange, to reconsider our use of “empire” and “nation-state” as units of comparative historical analysis, and to break down the artificial distinction between “Europe” and non-Europe that was drawn by nationalist social scientists in the late nineteenth century. Most significantly, it compels us to see methodological nationalism as a geographically and temporally limited phenomenon whose rise to dominance in the twentieth century was resisted by both European and non-European actors.

The question of Matthew’s missiology in modern scholarship frequently centers the relationship between contradictory commissions in 10:5-6 and 28:19-20. Does Matthew believe that the mission to Israel is the primary focus of the nascent church, or that the gentile mission has replaced it? Or does Matthew believe that the mission that began in Israel has now expanded to include all nations? The goal of this dissertation is to complicate this question by expanding our object of study to other passages in the Gospel that discuss missions. We begin with Matt 10. In Matt 10, missionary work is an ethnically and geographically limited project. Missionaries are sent as envoys of Jesus. They depend on their targets for hospitality. They focus on Jews, though gentiles are present as onlookers. The missionary project forces confrontation with Jewish leadership, particularly Pharisees. Neither Jews nor gentiles are singled out as persecutors. The mission is associated with imminent eschatology, and it is underway when Matthew writes. We compare this missiology with five passages that precede the final commission: the parable of the tenants (21:33-46), the wedding banquet (22:1-14), the woes against scribes and Pharisees (chapter 23), the tribulation (chapter 24), and the parable of the sheep and the goats (25:31-46). What becomes clear is that Matthew’s missiology is unified. He entertains a mission that is no longer restricted, but other tropes from Matt 10 reappear. This continuity reemerges again in the final call to international mission (28:16-20). Matthew’s missiology is not discontinuous, but stable. He introduces a missionary task in 10:5-42, places it in Israel, and expects that this work will continue in the rest of the world. Outreach to Jews and gentiles bleeds into each other from the beginning, given Matthew’s awareness of gentiles in Palestine and of Jews in the Diaspora. The question of whether Matthew intends his message to go to Jews, or gentiles, or both, therefore, is significantly more complicated than it first appears.

Despite the vast research on Jewish law (halakhah), fairly little has been done to analyze the contemporary responsa literature, particularly in the United States and particularly within the Conservative Jewish movement. These responsa can be defined in two ways: by their methodology and by their outcome. In this paper, I begin by reviewing the origins and development of the halakhah and the power of rabbis within this halakhic system. I then describe the Conservative movement and particularly its halakhic outlook—that is, how the Conservative movement has defined its own relationship to Jewish law and how Conservative responsa utilize that body of law. Finally, by examining contemporary Conservative responsa, I introduce a novel approach to analyzing contemporary halakhah. This approach separates methodology, categorizing it as “systematic” or “aggadic,” from halakhic outcomes, which I categorize as “traditional” or “progressive” depending on the extent to which they advocate halakhic change. I conclude that nearly all responsa use a blend of systematic and aggadic methodologies and that the methodology deployed has little to no bearing on the progressiveness of the halakhic outcome.

This study examines how rabbinic texts from the land of Israel explain and respond to poverty. Through this investigation, I also analyze images of the poor in this literature, asking whether the rabbis considered poor persons to be full participants in communal religious life. Within the context of rabbinic almsgiving, this study describes how Palestinian rabbis negotiated both the biblical commands to care for the poor and Greco-Roman notions of hierarchy, benefaction and patronage.

The sources at the heart of this study are Tannaitic texts: the Mishnah, the Tosefta and Tannaitic midrashim; and Amoraic texts: the Yerushalmi (Palestinian Talmud) and the classical Amoraic Midrashim - Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta de Rab Kahana. Other texts such as Babylonian Talmud, non-rabbinic and non-Jewish texts are included in this study only when they are able to shed light on the texts mentioned above. In reading rabbinic texts, I pay close attention to several textual features: distinctions between Tannaitic and Amoraic compositions, as well as between rabbinic texts from the land of Israel and the Babylonian Talmud, and evidence of texts that were influenced by the Babylonian Talmud. This method of careful assessment of texts according to their time of composition and geographic origin forms the basis of this investigation.

The investigation yields several key findings:

I suggest various factors that shaped Palestinian rabbinic approaches to poverty and almsgiving, including: the biblical heritage, the Greco-Roman and Byzantine environments, the diverse socio-economic status of the rabbis, and their adherence to "measure for measure" as a key hermeneutic principle.

The study also portrays how the rabbinic charitable system evolved as an expansion of the biblical framework and through engagement with Greco-Roman notions and practices. This unique system for supporting the poor shows evidence of the adoption of select Greco-Roman customs and views, as well as the rejection of other aspects of its hegemonic patterns. We have seen that the language of patronage is absent from the Mishnah's articulation of the rabbinic charitable model.

Several of the texts analyzed in this study indicate that, for the rabbis, the poor were not necessarily outsiders. Following the main stream of biblical thinking, where the ordinary poor are rarely considered sinners who bear responsibility for their abject situation, Palestinian rabbinic texts seldom link ordinary poverty to sinful behavior. In these texts, the poor are not presented as passive recipients of gifts and support, but as independent agents who are responsible for their conduct. Moreover, rabbinic teachings about support for the poor reveal not only provisions for basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter but also attention to the dignity and the feelings of the poor, as well as their physical safety and the value of their time.

Sarcophagi belonging to Jewish patrons are an important source of evidence for reconstructing the variety of ways that ancient Jews interacted with visual culture in Late Antiquity. During this period, from the 2nd to 5th centuries C.E., the sarcophagus was the height of burial fashion across the Roman Mediterranean. Wealthy individuals across the late ancient world adopted sarcophagus burial not only to protect their bodily remains, but to visibly display and reinforce their social status, to demonstrate their cultural sophistication, and to memorialize and narrate their senses of self. In this regard, elite members of Jewish communities in Late Antiquity were no different (Chapter 2).

The following considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She'arim and Rome. This corpus captures the wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different geographic and cultural realities of diaspora and home, but also the immense diversity characteristic of the myriad visual and cultural resources of the Roman world. In order to make sense of this diversity, I contextualize the styles and motifs favored by Jewish patrons according to the cultural resources they engage, moving from local traditions of stone sculpture in Palestine (Chapter 3) to the influence of Roman portrait sculpture on Jewish patrons (Chapter 7).

I begin with local traditions of stone sculpture in Palestine in order to counter the dominant scholarly narrative that these sarcophagi primarily or even exclusively copy Roman models. I argue instead that many make extensive use of visual resources with a long history of use in Jewish contexts (Chapter 4). Moreover, the corpus of sarcophagi from Beth She'arim suggests that the preferences of sarcophagus patrons there were shaped by the provincial context of Roman Syria (Chapter 5). On the other hand, certain sarcophagi from both Beth She'arim and Rome reflect sarcophagus styles with pan-Mediterranean appeal (Chapter 6), and a small group of Jewish patrons in Rome even participated in the ‘portrait boom’ that began in the 3rd century by acquiring sarcophagi with portrait sculpture (Chapter 7).

The corpus of sarcophagi belonging to late ancient Jewish patrons demonstrates a significant degree of mastery of and willingness to engage the visual koine of the Roman world, as well as significant agency with respect to the adoption and appropriation of cultural resources. I argue that the majority of Jewish patrons at both Beth She'arim and Rome were familiar with ‘Roman’ visual culture first and foremost as it existed in their local environments and were comfortable with its usage. At the same time, I consider how different settings—diaspora and Roman provincial—could influence the choices made by sarcophagus patrons. I conclude that the use of sarcophagus burial by Jewish patrons was a highly variable mode of cultural interaction, representing an ongoing negotiation of Jewishness by different individuals from different communities in the context of enduring cultural (ex)change.

This dissertation examines the ideological developments and strategies of boundary formation which accompanied the sociological novelty of gentiles’ becoming Jews in the Second Temple period. I argue that the phenomenon of gentile conversion influenced ancient Jews to re–conceive their God as they devised new ways to articulate the now–permeable boundary between Jew and ‘other,’ between insiders and outsiders. Shaye Cohen has shown that this boundary became porous as the word ‘Jew’ took on religious and political meanings in addition to its ethnic connotations. A gentile could therefore become a Jew. I focus on an ancient Jewish author who thought that gentiles not only could become Jews, but that they should: that of Joseph and Aseneth. Significant modifications of biblical traditions about God, Israel, and ‘the other’ were necessary in order to justify, on ideological grounds, the possibility of gentile access to Jewish identity and the Jewish community.

One such rewritten tradition is the relationship of both Jew and gentile to the ‘living God,’ a common epithet in Israel’s scriptures. Numerous Jewish authors from the Second Temple period, among whom I include the apostle Paul, deployed this biblical epithet in various ways in order to construct or contest boundaries between gentiles and the God of Israel. Whereas previous scholars have approached this divine title exclusively as a theological category, I read it also as a literary device with discursive power which helps these authors regulate gentile access to Israel’s God and, in most cases, to Jewish identity. Joseph and Aseneth develops an innovative theology of Israel’s ‘living God’ which renders this narrative exceptionally optimistic about the possibilities of gentile conversion and incorporation into Israel. Aseneth’s tale uses this epithet in conjunction with other instances of ‘life’ language not only to express confidence in gentiles’ capability to convert, but also to construct a theological articulation of God in relationship to repentant gentiles which allows for and anticipates such conversion. A comparison of the narrative’s ‘living God" terminology to that of the book of Jubilees and the apostle Paul sets into relief the radical definition of Jewishness which Joseph and Aseneth constructs — a definition in which religious practice eclipses ancestry and under which boundaries between Jew and ‘other’ are permeable.

The endowment of land as a gift for religious institutions was a prominent feature of ancient society in the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. Landed plots could with proper care become enduring, remunerative assets to these institutions and their ownership a mark of honor and prosperity. Once endowed, such plots were regularly viewed across cultures as the property of a patron deity, his or her role modeling that of the absentee landlord. Tantalizing clues in the Jewish source material relevant to the Second Temple period (515 BCE-70 CE) demonstrate that the phenomenon was part of early Jewish life in this period as well, though it has hardly been considered in scholarship.

The source material consists of a diverse group of ancient Jewish texts. A utopian vision at the end of the book of Ezekiel discusses a sacred land endowment as part of a reform program for the Jerusalem temple and its economy (Chapter 2). A legislative addendum to the book of Leviticus presents regulations on the proper use of arable land as a means of dedicating assets from the farm (Chapter 3). A description by the Jewish historian Josephus of the founding of a schismatic Jewish temple in Egypt delegitimizes the cult of sacrifice there by calling attention to the impurity of its land endowment; a similar perspective emerges in 1 Maccabees from its literary use of the gifting of the Ptolemais hinterland to the Jerusalem temple (Chapter 4). A legal section of the Damascus Document is concerned with the consecration of property as an act of fraud (Chapter 5), while the apostle Paul quotes a halakhic teaching on field consecrations in a preface to his famous olive tree allegory (Chapter 6). A halakhic text (4Q251) from the Qumran repository reasserts the priesthood's claim to a specific type of sacred land donation and works to uphold its sanctity (Chapter 7).

I argue by virtue of these various Jewish texts that the category of "temple land" simply does not apply for greater Judea in the Second Temple period. In Jerusalem, the temple did not hold tracts of land and enter into leasing arrangements with agricultural entrepreneurs or small renters, as attested in other regions of the ancient world. Rather it seems to have encouraged a system where gifts of land went directly from benefactor to priest or stayed entirely in the hands of the benefactor, the land's products or monetary equivalent then dedicated toward sacred purposes. Only in Egypt do we see evidence of a Jewish temple holding land of the type well known in other societies.

I suggest that the Judean sacred landholding arrangements were part of an ethos whereby land cultivation and support for the temple were to remain in the hands of the people, the accumulation and leasing out of temple land seen as perhaps contradictory to this ethos if not also a mark of foreignness. Incidentally, by the later centuries of the era the Judean religious authorities sustained its sanctuary in Jerusalem quite effectively by encouraging the devotees of the religion to contribute an annual tax and visit the city bearing gifts on three yearly pilgrimage festivals. Landed gifts are indeed an overlooked feature of this temple economy but were probably not a major component of its revenues.

The canonical gospels are each concerned to present the significance of Jesus vis-à-vis the Jewish tradition. Yet the Gospel of John exhibits a particularly strained relationship with Judaism, especially through its frequent description of Jesus’s opponents as “the Jews,” its presentation of numerous hostile exchanges between Jesus and characters described as “Jews,” and its application of significant Jewish imagery (e.g., “the temple of his body,” “I am the true vine”) to the person of Jesus rather than to traditional Jewish institutions or figures. This dissertation argues that the Gospel of John presents Jesus as the one through whom the Jewish tradition realizes its eschatological hopes in continuity with the stories and symbols of its past. As the Fourth Gospel presents its theological vision for the significance of Jesus, it also criticizes the theological vision of a rival group—that is, “the Jews.” In the Fourth Gospel, “the Jews” represents an alternative—and for John, a rival—theological vision for how the Jewish tradition might live into its future in continuity with its past. Therefore, John’s affirmations of many aspects of the Jewish tradition are bound up with its negation of how another segment of the tradition would construe those same features of the tradition.

Methodologically, this study attends to how the narrative of John characterizes Jesus as the fulfillment of particular Jewish hopes and expectations, and also as the narrative of John states (or implies) the shortcomings of Jesus’s opponents insofar as they fail to bring the Jewish tradition into more thorough continuity with its storied past and prophesied future. Attention to John’s narrative does not override the importance of its historical location, however. Questions that were directly relevant to Second Temple and late first-century Judaism about how the tradition might live faithfully are pertinent to the structure of the Fourth Gospel and its presentation of Jesus and “the Jews.” John narrates the fulfillment present in Jesus and the failure represented by “the Jews” by drawing on discourses that were accessible within late first-century Judaism. Historical context is thus essential for understanding the logic of John and the terms in which the Gospel tells its story. This study concludes that the Fourth Gospel is a late first-century narrative that takes up the question of how the Jewish tradition might move into its future in continuity with its past. Through the vehicle of the Gospel narrative, John argues for Jesus as the one who enables the people of God to experience the future toward which the Jewish tradition had long been oriented.

The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are not often read against the backdrop of the sacrificial system of Leviticus, despite the fact that the Letter to the Hebrews and other New Testament texts do exactly this. Until recently, Hebrew Bible scholars had little insight into the function of many of the sacrifices of Leviticus. However, over the last thirty years, Jacob Milgrom has articulated the purgative function of the purification offering of Leviticus, the principal sacrifice offered for wrongdoing. The blood of the purification offering, which contains the animal's ,nefesh, best understood as the animating force of the animal, acts as a ritual cleanser. Milgrom has insisted that the purification offering only cleanses the sanctuary, never the offerer. This conclusion likely has kept many New Testament scholars from seeing the impact this sacrifice had on various New Testament authors. Thus although Milgrom's work has had a profound impact on Hebrew Bible scholarship, it has had little effect on New Testament scholarship on the sacrifice of Jesus.

Using source criticism and a close reading of the relevant Hebrew Bible texts and New Testament texts, this study argues that the purification offering of Leviticus can purge the offerer, as well as the sanctuary. Moreover, the logic of the purification offering of Leviticus informs many New Testament texts on the sacrificial offering of Jesus. Leviticus demonstrates that there is a relationship between the Israelites and the sanctuary. The wrongdoings and impurites of the Israelites can stain the sanctuary and sacrificial procedures done in and to the sanctuary can purge the Israelites. The purgation of the offerer takes place in two stages. In the first stage, described in Lev 4:1-5:13, the offerer moves from being guilt-laden to being forgiven. In the second stage, outlined in Lev 16, the sanctuary is purged of the wrongdoings and impurities of the Israelites. The Israelites shift from being forgiven to being declared pure. The Israelites cannot be pure until the sanctuary is purged and reconsecrated.

The Letter to the Hebrews, along with other New Testament texts, articulates the same process and results for the sacrificial offering of Jesus. The emphasis in Hebrews and elsewhere in the New Testament is on the power (typically the cleansing power) of Jesus' blood. Jesus' death is necessary but insufficient. Hebrews clearly asserts that it was through the offering of Jesus' blood in the heavenly sanctuary that the heavenly things were cleansed, and more importantly, that believers were cleansed. Hebrews also articulates a two-stage process for the transformation of believers. In the first stage, believers are cleansed by Jesus' sacrificial offering in heaven. However, believers anticipate a final rest after Jesus' return when their flesh will be transformed as Jesus' flesh was after his resurrection. This transformation allows believers to dwell in harmony with and in proximity to God. The logic of the purification offering of Leviticus, then, informs the Letter to the Hebrews and other New Testament texts.

Jews past and present have used the Book of Esther and the festival of Purim as a textual and liturgical site to work through key human questions: the legitimacy of violence amidst diaspora, persecution, and the need for self-defense; the perception of divine presence in a world where God seems distant more often than not; and carving out space for women’s gendered agency within a religious tradition that often limits or fails to acknowledge either that agency or the non-male gender of the agent. These issues—violence, God, and gender—stand at the center of biblical scholarship, which typically concerns itself with the textual analysis of the Book of Esther, the tracing of its receptions and social functions, and the continual project of articulating new readings of the text which draw on and speak to today’s Jewish and Christian communities.This dissertation engages those three interpretive questions through a novel lens: the way Jews copy, display, handle, embellish, and dispose of the material object of the Esther scroll—the megillah. These ritualized material practices, many of which take place in Jewish liturgy, reveal the role of the megillah in the Jewish bibliographic imagination. In this project I trace how Jewish tradition has related the material megillah to questions of violence, God, and gender. I also suggest my own novel readings of these perennial interpretive questions. I begin tracing these threads in the first chapter, where I review the ways in which biblical scholarship has imagined the authorship of the Book of Esther, suggesting that such scholarship has failed to attend to the possibility that the book narrates its own composition—a device well-known in other biblical books such as Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. Indeed, key Jewish traditions creatively and intentionally conflate the acts of writing narrated in the scroll with both the imagined authoring of the Book of Esther and the tangible scrolls in Purim liturgy. In these productive conflations, the material megillah becomes part of the biblical story—and the features of that megillah speak to the way Jewish tradition reads that story. The next three chapters build my argument for the various functions that the Esther scroll and its material aspects play in Jewish life. Chapter two begins by showing how Purim’s ritualized megillah reading functions as a form of liturgical memory that retells the story of Purim in light of a community’s present, and re-enacts the events of Purim to conflate the liturgical scroll with various written documents in the story. Chapter three sets forth the functions of the liturgical megillah as an iconic text: as a symbol of Purim, as a rhetorical device to persuade the audience of the miracle and authorize the festival, and as a hub of transitivity and enchantment that mediates networks of communication between humans past and present and between humans and God. This synthesis gathers concepts and methods from disparate fields often not brought into conversation: comparative sacred texts, material religion, media studies, art history, book history, and Masoretic studies. I also show how the megillah functions differently across time and space as the material aspects of scrolls change. Finally, in chapter four I begin with a seemingly obvious question: Why is Esther called a megillah? This innocuous investigation ends up showing the way in which the megillah’s enchantment creates connections both vertical (God and humanity) and horizontal (human to human), and how that relates to the halakhic construction of the megillah as an ambiguous kind of written document which is both a book (sefer) and a letter (iggeret). In chapters five, six, and seven, I apply my insights about the material megillah to the questions of violence, God, and gender. In chapter five, I respond to moral objections to the Jews’ violence in Esther 8-10 and the symbolic violence in Purim’s construction of self and other via the Israel-Amalek relationship. Drawing from less-examined Jewish sources, I examine alternative ways to ‘blot out the name of Amalek’ not with the sword, but with the scribal knife, the pen, and the book. These symbols allow me to examine practices of blotting out the name Haman as a nuanced memory of evil, scribal tropes of overwriting the narrative as victims’ empowerment, and an obscure aggadah that validates the power of Torah to erode the construction of Amalek as pure evil. In chapter six, I turn to the meaning of God’s seeming absence from the Book of Esther. Here I examine customs of writing God’s name in the megillah, as well as the liturgical act of unrolling the scroll as a metaphor for revealing divine truths and an echo of Ahasuerus’ reading the chronicles of Persia (6:1). These practices of copying and displaying the megillah in synagogue liturgy suggest that God is made present in Esther through the agency of scribes, cantors, and readers, who do not passively convey the story but make God present in it. Thus, every Jew encountering Esther is called to enact God’s plan through a seemingly secular book by listening—just as Ahasuerus did. Finally, in chapter seven I turn to feminist debates over models of gender and agency in Esther, which vacillate between favoring Esther’s accommodation to the Persian patriarchal system and Vashti’s rejection of the system. In dialogue with contemporary Jewish soferot (female scribes) writing Esther scrolls, who have inserted markers of their agency within halakhic parameters that limit scribal innovation, I suggest that Esther, like these women, enacts her own muted agency with the pen, just as some Jewish traditions depict her as author and/or authorizer of the Book of Esther itself. This agency, while hidden, is still valid agency—and as the contrast between Esther and Vashti shows, in this situation Esther’s agency proved more efficacious when it mattered most. This project constitutes the first substantive account of megillat Esther in book history, Jewish liturgy, and the bibliographic imagination. It propounds novel and nuanced views on perennial interpretive questions raised by the biblical text. Most importantly, it speaks to the need for biblical scholars to engage broader trends in the study of religion—especially how religions make meaning with stuff.