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Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism Paperback – November 1, 2018

by Malka Z. Simkovich (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 31 ratings
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For those unfamiliar with the many divisions within Judaism at that time or with Jewish life in other parts of the Roman Empire, this book offers an excellent introduction to a little-studied time period. Readers of Jewish history will definitely want to add this work to their shelves.—Rabbi Rachel Esserman, Reporter

Exploring the world of the Second Temple period (539 BCE–70 CE), in particular the vastly diverse stories, commentaries, and other documents written by Jews during the last three centuries of this period, Malka Z. Simkovich takes us to Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, to the Jewish sectarians and the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, to the Cairo genizah, and to the ancient caves that kept the secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As she recounts Jewish history during this vibrant, formative era, Simkovich analyzes some of the period’s most important works for both familiar and possible meanings.

This volume interweaves past and present in four parts. Part 1 tells modern stories of discovery of Second Temple literature. Part 2 describes the Jewish communities that flourished both in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora. Part 3 explores the lives, worldviews, and significant writings of Second Temple authors. Part 4 examines how authors of the time introduced novel, rewritten, and expanded versions of Bible stories in hopes of imparting messages to the people.

Simkovich’s popular style will engage readers in understanding the sometimes surprisingly creative ways Jews at this time chose to practice their religion and interpret its scriptures in light of a cultural setting so unlike that of their Israelite forefathers. Like many modern Jews today, they made an ancient religion meaningful in an ever-changing world.

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  1. Print length
    384 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY
  4. Publication date
    November 1, 2018
  5. Dimensions
    6.3 x 0.9 x 8.9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0827612656
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0827612655
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Well-designed to act either as a complete summary of the Second Temple corpus or as the first step into a larger world of study, Discovering Second Temple Literature makes its eponymous works fascinating."—Daniel Schindel, Foreword Reviews

"For those unfamiliar with the many divisions within Judaism at that time or with Jewish life in other parts of the Roman Empire, this book offers an excellent introduction to a little-studied time period. Readers of Jewish history will definitely want to add this work to their shelves."—Rabbi Rachel Esserman, Reporter

"This very informative and wonderfully accessible study by Jewish scholar Malka Simkovich, holder of the Crown-Ryan Chair in Jewish Studies at Catholic Theological Union, sheds welcome light on . . . [the Second Temple] period and the significant Jewish writings that emerged from it, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and other so-called pseudepigraphic literature and non-canonical writings. Her reflection on why these texts contribute to a modern understanding of Jewish identity will be of interest not only to Jewish readers but to Christian students of the New Testament as well."—Bible Today

"Whether reappropriating a heritage that was almost lost or discovering one readers never knew existed, this work will likely pique the interest of a broad audience."—James Wetherbee, Library Journal

“In this impressively erudite and popular volume, Simkovich reveals how audiences in the ancient world would have understood the writings of Second Temple authors that are often elusive to us. Moreover, she amply demonstrates why we should care about these works.”—Leonard Greenspoon, Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization, Creighton University Published On: 2018-03-03

“An excellent synthesis. Simkovich’s eminently readable and well-balanced account will help readers understand the contribution of the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Dead Sea Scrolls to Judaism and Christianity, as well as period literature in Outside the Bible.”—Lawrence H. Schiffman, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, and coeditor, Outside the Bible Published On: 2018-03-03

“A thorough and very readable introduction to the literature of Second Temple Judaism, Simkovich’s book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of Hillel, Shammai, Josephus, and Jesus.”—Steven Fine, Churgin Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva University Published On: 2018-03-03

About the Author

Malka Z. Simkovich is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and director of Catholic-Jewish studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She is the author of The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria and has published widely on the topic of Early Judaism.
 

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY (November 1, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0827612656
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0827612655
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 0.9 x 8.9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 31 ratings

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Malka Z. Simkovich

Malka Z. Simkovich

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
31 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

kid siegel
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent book
Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2023
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Malka S is a young scholar on the rise this book will give the layman and the more expert new and interesting information on this critical period in jewish history
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Boris Tuman
5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent survey of tee topic
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2019
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An excellent introduction to a broad range of subjects for the period.
The author is engaging and this book is hard to put down
2 people found this helpful
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Thomas Ryan
5.0 out of 5 stars Second Temple Literature can no longer be relegated to the sidelines
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2019
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This book is on the leading edge of the coming importance of Second Temple Literature to both the Jewish and Christian scholarly traditions.
5 people found this helpful
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Mitchell M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2019
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Obscure subject but interesting to read about Jewish life during the Greek/Roman periods
5 people found this helpful
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Jill Zeiger
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2019
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Great book! Well researched!
2 people found this helpful
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Glenn Richter
5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific book; pulls all the strands together
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2019
This is truly a wonderful book. It's readable, intelligent, and pulls together the many strands of history and literature of Jews and their Greek, Roman, Ptolmic and other neighbors during the time of the Second Temple to the second century CE. Instead of reading in different sources about historical and Jewish literary figures we know or should know, Dr. Malka Simkovich plies them into one cohesive, understandable strand. She has the ability to clearly tell you what you're about to learn, what you're learning, and what you've learned. Kol hakovod (kudos) to both Dr. Simkovich and the publishers for making a great read possible.
3 people found this helpful
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T. W.
2.0 out of 5 stars Lightweight book, shoddily written and edited
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2020
If your interest in Second Temple literature would be satisfied by some plot summaries and platitudes, with lots of repetitious bits, then this is the book for you. I believe most readers would be better served by an anthology of translated texts with introductions (search "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha," or, if you're rich or have library access, "Outside the Bible"), because (1) if you care about the subject you'll want to browse the actual texts, (2) this book stops well short of the level of the most basic introduction (honestly, Wikipedia is better), (3) those introductions would surely be written by a more expert and competent scholar of the material.

A major share of the Second Temple texts is in Greek, a language the author clearly does not understand. She mentions “daimonos, the Greek word for demon” on multiple pages, even using this nonexistent word (as any first-year Greek student who has gotten as far as the third declension will understand: the word is daimon) as a section heading. Politeia does not mean the same as politai. There are references to the “Exagogue” of Ezekiel, a work properly referred to as the Exagoge (Exagogue would have to be an Anglicization of exagogos, "waste-pipe"). If she doesn’t know basic Greek, she certainly doesn’t understand the editorial conventions for fragmentary texts of the kind she sometimes quotes (a Chester Beatty papyrus is cited, but the symbol [ indicating the broken edge of the papyrus is rendered meaningless by the removal of all line breaks). No one well read in the history of the time and place that are the subject of this book, who has read with attention even one book about Hellenistic culture, would refer repeatedly to the “Hellenist Empire.” No philologist would define a philologist as “one who studies historical records,” but that such glosses are given will tell you something about the flavor of the book. I have some education in Classics but I didn’t know about the “Greek model of the exemplum, in which a hero embodies all virtuous attributes” (this aspect of Second Temple tales is the core of what our author appreciates—she comes back to “heroes who possess the same qualities that characterize the heroes of the great Greek epics” in the second sentence of her conclusion and clearly regards this as a big take-away from studying these ancient texts).

But then the author’s knowledge of edited English prose is also not impressive. English words are often used mistakenly (borne/born, proscribed/prescribed, appellate/appellation, incorporated/incorporating). What is an “untampered collection”? These show a poor command of the meanings of words; the list would be longer if we included little grammatical mistakes and mere inconsistencies that should have been caught in proofreading (Ester/Esther, Ahikar/Ahiqar, Shehem). Sometimes the poor editing means we’re told things that make no sense (for “anti-Pharisaic,” read “contemporary and less anti-Pharisaic than Josephus”). A real scholarly expertise in the material covered by this book would also include knowledge of French, which seems dubious from reference to the “École français” and the random omission of a crucial word like “des” from a book title.

The book is useful if you want newspaper article-level human interest stories about the discovery of manuscripts, etc. If the Wall Street Journal ran an article asking whether the Vatican secretly houses the Temple Menorah, you can bet that will get mentioned here. Important theological and historical issues, not so much. Even in discussing such intriguing documents as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the author seems more interested in pedestrian musings on questions like “Why did the community need so many dishes?” than in the wide variety of issues that have absorbed a generation of scholars.

Where some extra sensitivity might have been called for—the bearing of Second Temple Jewish texts on the idea-world of earliest Christianity—there is absolutely none. The little section on Pharisees (pp. 150–3) might claim to deplore mutual Christian-Jewish suspicion but its coarse, careless, and dangerously sloppy content contributes to precisely that. Any reader not already committed to the certainty that the New Testament is extremely anti-Semitic will find this very embarrassing to read. Spend an hour reading or listening to N.T. Wright talk about Second Temple Judaism and Christianity (just to mention an educational resource available to anyone with an internet connection), and you’ll be many leagues deeper into the subject; the author of this book does not show signs even of this hour’s familiarity with the subject. When Simkovich writes that Gamaliel in Acts 5 “warn[s the Jews] against zealous behavior,” has she not read the chapter, or is this butchery her best attempt to say in English, “warns the Jews that it might not be profitable to rush into opposing zealous behavior, when tolerating it could serve just as well”? Simkovich spends more than an entire page on Malachi 4:5 without mentioning John the Baptist! The last page of the last chapter bizarrely suggests that messianic hopes may depend on the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Typical is Simkovich's blunt statement as that mid-1st c. followers of Jesus saw themselves as "nothing more than devoted Jews"; while there is a sense in which this can be agreed to be true, it comes across as deaf to nuance and contemptuous of differing perspectives.

Thumbing through the book, you may glean a reading suggestion or two, but the book is not worth reading or paying the asking price for. It’s just too pedestrian, the kind of book that will tell you, “Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, consist of prophetic speeches and oracles,” repeat factoids over and over, and never really venture a deeper engagement with the fascinating documents of Second Temple Judaism.
12 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

AB
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and accessible survey of the topic
Reviewed in Australia on April 30, 2022
Verified Purchase
I have been recently very interested in the Jewish context for the rise of Christianity, and came across the book “Discovering Second Temple Literature” which I just finished.

It was so well researched, written (in an engaging, accessible and understandable style), and provided me with an incredible survey of historical documents. It really pulled together so much of what otherwise would have been so difficult and frustrating to achieve.
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