Achievements and publications
Project Achievements
The first aim of our project was to work out a new terminological framework for the analysis of ancient Jewish literature. This Inventory gathers together all the basic literary options available to ancient Jewish text makers and puts them into a systematic order. This framework -- the "Inventory of Structurally Important Literary Features in the Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literatures of Antiquity" -- has now been published in PDF and web-based formats, and is available here.
The Inventory identifies literary structures found in any one of the anonymous or pseudepigraphic works of ancient Judaism. The corpus on which the Inventory is based includes the Pseudepigrapha, the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls (only near-complete texts are included), and rabbinic literature to the end of the Babylonian Talmud. Each feature is illustrated by one or more ancient text containing it.
The categories reflect insights drawn from a large variety of modern disciplines, including philology, literary studies, text linguistics, discourse analysis, narratology and post-structuralism.
The Inventory will also lead to a new "typology" of anonymous and pseudepigraphic ancient Jewish literature, and will be explained in a book to be published after 2011.
The second aim is to create a short literary profile of every document from antiquity which is Jewish, survives intact (so that we can judge its overall shape), and is anonymous or pseudepigraphic. This excludes authored works such as those of Philo and Josephus. It covers the period roughly from 200 BCE to 700 CE. The project documents consist of four corpora of sources which are essential for understanding ancient Judaism as well as the milieu of emergent Christianity: the pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, the apocrypha of the Old Testament, the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls (insofar as they are complete), and rabbinic literature to the end of the Talmud, including Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud and Midrash. This makes an estimated total of about 375 works, if the Tractates of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmuds are counted separately. The literary profiles will be published in a database and made openly accessible on the Internet from 2011. The documents themselves are all well known to scholarship, and are available, in original and translation through scholarly publications and increasingly also online. Only their literary profiles, not their texts, will be part of our database.
The third aim is to contextualise the genres of ancient Jewish literature by comparing them to other cultures of antiquity with which Jews were in close contact. We were joined by experts in Graeco-Roman literature and ancient near Eastern documents at a Symposium devoted to this purpose in Manchester on 19-21 January 2009 (click for further information). The papers from that Symposium will be published in due course. Furthermore, in July 2011 we held an International Workshop on "The Literary Structures of Ancient Jewish Literature" (click for further information).
The fourth aim is to provide a criticism of some of the dominant genre labels used in current scholarship on the ancient Jewish sources. This will be part of the book devoted to the first aim (explained above), or published separately.
Project Publications
Aramaic Studies Summer 2011 Issue
We are pleased to announce the publication of an issue of Aramaic Studies devoted to the use of the Inventory of Literary Features in profiling ancient Jewish texts.
The issue runs to almost 250 pages, and contains articles by Alex Samely, Philip Alexander, Robert Hayward and Rocco Bernasconi, each of which explores different aspects of the text profiles. The issue also features a number of database profiles, the latest draft of the Inventory and an introduction to the project and the Inventory’s usage.
The issue is available through the Aramaic Studies website, and some articles are also available for download as PDFs here:
- A. Samely, "Introduction" (PDF)
- A. Samely, "The Targums within a New Description of Jewish Text Structures in Antiquity" (PDF)
- A. Samely, "Profile Targum Genesis Onkelos" (PDF)
- P. Alexander, "Targum a misnomer for Midrash? Towards a Typology for the Targum Sheni of Esther" (ingentaconnect)
- P. Alexander, "Profile Targum Esther Sheni" (ingentaconnect)
- P. Alexander, "'Translation and Midrash Completely Fused Together'? The Form of the Targums to Canticles, Lamentations and Qohelet" (ingentaconnect)
- P. Alexander, "Profile Targum Qohelet" (ingentaconnect)
- P. Alexander, "Profile Targum Canticles" (ingentaconnect)
- P. Alexander, "Profile Targum Lamentations" (ingentaconnect)
- R. Bernasconi, "A Literary Analysis of the Genesis Apocryphon" (ingentaconnect)
- R. Bernasconi, "Profile Genesis Apocryphon Overall (Fragment)" (ingentaconnect)
- R. Bernasconi, "Profile Genesis Apocryphon Lamech Part-Text (Fragment)" (ingentaconnect)
- R. Bernasconi, "Profile Genesis Apocryphon Noah Part-Text (Fragment)" (ingentaconnect)
- R. Bernasconi, "Profile Genesis Apocryphon Abram Part-Text (Fragment)"(ingentaconnect)
- A. Samely, P.S. Alexander, C.T.R. Hayward, R. Bernasconi, "Inventory of Structurally Important Literary Features in the Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literature of Antiquity" (PDF)