Scriptures in the Making: Texts and Their Transmission in Late Second Temple Judaism

The volume examines how the making and the transmission of scriptures was shaped and influenced by major changes in the Second Temple societies. The book contains both detailed readings of biblical and related texts (the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, Qumran Scrolls, and the New Testament) and analyses of what can be known about the societal preconditions of their emergence and use. Many essays discuss the theoretical and methodological premises of our knowledge regarding various social, material, and religious aspects of life in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first centuries before and after the turn of the Common Era. The book offers critical and up-to-date insights into such questions as textual plurality, cultural interaction, the nature of scribal culture and spatial contexts of textual transmission. The essays clarify how the texts and their transmission became an integral part of religious and communal identity building strategies during the Second Temple period.