The question we wish to answer
Most texts from Jewish antiquity are not by individual authors, or by authors who wish to identify themselves. They either remain anonymous, or they speak in the voice of a hero known from earlier, biblical texts — what modern scholarship calls pseudepigraphy.
Many of these texts pose grave problems to modern scholarship when it comes to understanding their purpose, original audience, literary genre or internal unity. A considerable number of them consist of episodes (when they are narratives), or appear to deal with disparate themes (when they are devoted to law or Bible interpretation).
This has led to confusion in modern scholarship's terminology for the literary genres of these documents. Terms such as "apocalypse", "wisdom", "law", "anthology", "Midrash", "rewritten Bible", "parabiblical texts", and many more either have no clearly defined or no agreed meaning. Yet they inevitably channel the scholarly work in particular directions.
The overall purpose of our project is to place our understanding of the literary features of these documents on a new basis. This involves an empirical investigation of all complete documents without making too many assumptions as to their genre (as labelled so far), historical context, or purpose. At the same time we address directly the questions that create difficulties for the modern reader: the sources' tacit reliance on unmentioned information, their apparent lack of order, and their weak coherence. (For more information, see "How we went about it")