Second Temple Period (Jewish Studies)

Introduction

Although it has its roots before the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE—that is, in the earlier pre-exilic period that is described in the Hebrew Bible—Jewish culture emerged in the so-called Second Temple period. This period begins when Jews in Judaea, Mesopotamia, and Egypt found themselves under Persian rule, and Jews were able to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The Second Temple period continues for six centuries, with Jews living under Persian, Greek, and Roman empires until the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. It is during the intervening centuries that Jewish culture developed a number of characteristics that define Jewish religious experience to this day—engagement with the Bible, institutions such as the synagogue, the notion of Judaism itself as a voluntary religious identity—but Jewish culture in this period was also quite diverse and different in many ways from the Judaism that would develop in Late Antiquity in the wake of the Talmud and rabbinic interpretive activity. Because of its importance for the later development of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, this period has received a lot of attention from scholars, but knowledge is limited by the relative paucity of the sources and the religious biases of scholarship that sometimes anachronistically projects later conceptions of Judaism or Christianity onto this earlier period. The sections of this bibliography have been arranged so as to contain sources that examine the Second Temple period both chronologically and thematically. The chronological sections are valuable for research into what conditions were like for Jews living under the different empires, while the thematic sections contain works that trace their topics throughout the Second Temple period. Because this bibliography addresses a very broad topic, it has not always been possible to include specialized works such as critical editions of primary sources, monographs on very specific topics, or essays published in journals. Because its intended audience is English speaking, the bibliography also does not attempt to represent the extensive and foundational scholarship that exists in languages such as German, French, and Hebrew, except where a major work has been translated into English. For such scholarship, readers are directed to related bibliographies on more-specialized topics such as Josephus and Second Temple archaeology.

General Overviews

Although not well documented in comparison with later periods of Jewish history, the Second Temple period is known to us through a number of literary sources—anonymous works that imitate or seek to interpret the Bible and were preserved by later Christian (the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) works by known authors writing in Greek, such as the 1st-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria and the historian Flavius Josephus; the assemblage of texts discovered in the caves of the Judaean Desert, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls; and other sources. From this literary evidence, augmented by archaeological evidence from Jerusalem, Masada, and other sites, scholars have been able to reconstruct a picture of how Jewish culture emerged out of the remnants of ancient Israelite culture and developed into what would later be known as Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Schürer 1973 is a revision of a classic survey of the history of the Second Temple period, still not displaced by more-recent surveys such as Davies, et al. 1984–2006 or Grabbe 2008, although the latter are extremely valuable for much additional information on specific topics, along with more up-to-date bibliography. For overviews of primary sources, Stone 1984 and Nickelsburg 2005 are especially valuable as guides for making sense of the literature from this period. Kraft and Nickelsburg 1986 introduces various methodological issues and approaches. Weitzman 2005 is not a survey but a broadly cast study that covers the period between Persian and Roman rule, focusing on the means by which Jews sustained their culture under such rulers.

Davies, W. D., Louis Finkelstein, William Horbury, John Sturdy, and Steven T. Katz, eds. The Cambridge History of Judaism. 4 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984–2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This four-volume work spans from the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE, through the development of rabbinic culture, to the 7th century CE, covering historical, literary, social and intercultural, and political issues throughout this millennium.
Find this resource:
Grabbe, Lester. A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. 2 vols. New York: T&T Clark, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A two-volume work that surveys historical methodologies for studying this period and examines history, daily life, religion, and politics of the Second Temple period, drawing on a variety of Jewish and non-Jewish sources.
Find this resource:
Kraft, Robert, and George W. E. Nickelsburg, eds. Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A multiauthor volume focusing on the sociohistorical contexts and literature of early Judaism in its Greco-Roman milieu, including a section on relevant archaeological finds.
Find this resource:
Nickelsburg, George. Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction. 2d ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A survey covering Jewish literature from the Babylonian Exile through the early rabbinic period, this straightforward volume includes sections on late biblical books composed in the Second Temple period, the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea scrolls, and other works.
Find this resource:
Schürer, Emile. A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135). 3 vols. Rev. ed. Edited by Géza Vermès and Fergus Millar. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An updated version of Schürer’s classic but dated survey, these volumes cover in great detail the literature, history, and social, political, and religious issues for the late Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Find this resource:
Stone, Michael, ed. The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A kind of companion for reading primary sources, not only providing relevant historical background information but also helping the reader to understand the sources themselves. Almost all the most important documents from this period are covered here.
Find this resource:
Weitzman, Steven. Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An exploration of the tactics developed in early Jewish culture to sustain its religious traditions under foreign rule, covering the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
Find this resource:
Primary Sources

Jewish sources from the Second Temple period are written in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic. Some were preserved by later Christian communities; others were recovered in modern times through chance discoveries or archaeology. The following offer access to the most important of these sources in English translation. Although dated, Charlesworth 1983 remains one of the standard translations of the Pseudepigrapha, works ascribed to biblical figures but really composed in the Second Temple period and Late Antiquity. There are also biblical-like books from this period known as the Apocrypha that are included in Catholic and Orthodox canons but are not included in the Jewish or Protestant canons, which are presented in Coogan, et al. 2010. Schiffman 1998 offers excerpts both of biblical and nonbiblical sources arranged thematically, providing a helpful cross section of a particular topic across various documents. Although there are many editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls available, Vermès 1997 provides an accessible translation that is ideal for a nonspecialist. From the Loeb Classical Library series, a popular series of primary sources from the classical world in Greek and Latin, Thackeray, et al. 1926–1965 provides translations of the works of Flavius Josephus, and Colson and Whitaker 1929–1962 offers translations of the works of Philo of Alexandria. For further research on Jews living in Egypt, Horbury and Noy 1992 is a good resource for research on Jewish inscriptions in Egypt. For those interested in the views that non-Jewish Greek and Latin sources expressed toward the Jews, Stern 1974 is an invaluable collection of primary texts and translations.

Charlesworth, James. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although first published in the early 1980s, Charlesworth’s two-volume work is still one of the primary standards for English translations of the Pseudepigrapha. Many of these works may have been composed or revised by Christians, but some are quite early, going back to the Hellenistic period, and offer insight into early Jewish biblical interpretation, apocalypticism, and other topics.
Find this resource:
Colson, F. H., and G. H. Whitaker, eds. Philo, with an English Translation. 10 vols. Translated by F. H. Colson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929–1962.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria in the 1st century CE and has left behind a massive body of work. These volumes reproduce that writing in the original Greek, with an English translation on the facing page. From the Loeb Classical Library series.
Find this resource:
Coogan, Michael, Marc Brettler, and Pheme Perkins, eds. The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of the writings known as the Apocrypha from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, along with notes on the text, and some maps and brief articles.
Find this resource:
Horbury, William, and David Noy. Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt: With an Index of the Jewish Inscriptions of Egypt and Cyrenaica. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume is based on earlier collections of inscriptions but has been revised and expanded, providing texts, translations, and brief comments for each inscription, as well as photographs of some.
Find this resource:
Schiffman, Lawrence, ed. Texts and Traditions: A Source Reader for the Study of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Stretching from the Persian period into the rabbinic, this volume collects primary texts arranged not only according to historical periods, but also by subject.
Find this resource:
Stern, Menahem, ed. Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. 3 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This three-volume set collects Greek and Latin non-Jewish sources (in their original language, along with an English translation) mentioning Jews and Judaism through the 6th century CE.
Find this resource:
Thackeray, Henry, Henry St. John, Ralph Marcus, and L. H. Feldman, trans. Josephus, with an English Translation. 9 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926–1965.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A multivolume series that includes Josephus’s works in the original Greek, with an English translation on the facing page. From the Loeb Classical Library series.
Find this resource:
Vermès, Géza, ed. and trans. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An English translation, from a top scholar, of all the Dead Sea Scrolls that also includes a few introductory articles as well as a short bibliography and indices.
Find this resource:
Commentaries and Bibliographies

The scholarship inspired by these sources is too voluminous to register in a compact bibliography. The following offer commentary and additional bibliography on individual sources or categories of sources. Annotated bibliographies, which are particularly useful starting points for research, are available for scholarship on Flavius Josephus (Feldman 1984) and Philo of Alexandria (Radice and Runia 1988). García Martínez and Parry 1996 also provides a nonannotated bibliography for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mason 2000– offers a newer translation of the works of Josephus than that of Thackeray, et al. 1926–1965 (cited under Primary Sources) and also adds a commentary. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature is a series of commentaries covering a wide range of early Jewish literature that will continue to grow as new volumes are released.

Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature. New York: de Gruyter, 2003–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
When completed, this series is to span nearly sixty volumes, providing translations and commentaries on Jewish writings from the 3rd century BCE through the 2nd century CE, and will examine manuscripts, social contexts, and religious and historical influence on each text. Although still incomplete, a number of volumes in this series have already been published.
Find this resource:
Feldman, Louis. Josephus and Modern Scholarship 1937–1980. New York: de Gruyter, 1984.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A massive annotated bibliography of scholarship on Josephus, covering thousands of books and articles through 1980. For a supplement to this volume, covering works through 1984, see Louis H. Feldman and Heinz Schreckenberg, Josephus: A Supplementary Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986).
Find this resource:
García Martínez, Florentino, and Donald W. Parry. A Bibliography of the Finds in the Desert of Judah 1970–1995. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A (nonannotated) bibliography of works relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls, published between 1970 and 1995. Arranged by author, with citation and subject indexes.
Find this resource:
Mason, Steve, ed. Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Flavius Josephus was a 1st-century Jewish historian and a general during the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome in 66–70 CE, who defected to the Romans and became a kind of propagandist for them after the war. His surviving writings, known in English as the Jewish Revolt and the Jewish Antiquities, along with a shorter response to critics, known as Against Apion, give us an overview of Jewish history and society in the Second Temple period as seen by a Hellenized Jew in the 1st century CE. Mason is producing a commentary series on the works of Josephus that provide both a new English translation and a commentary on the texts, covering a range of issues.
Find this resource:
Radice, Roberto, and David T. Runia. Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography, 1937–1986. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An annotated bibliography covering thousands of books and articles relevant for the study of Philo of Alexandria. A supplemental volume was published in 2000, which includes works published between 1987 and 1996 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill).
Find this resource:
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

Both for getting acquainted with a field and for building a bibliography, encyclopedias and dictionaries are indispensable research tools. Collins and Harlow 2010 is a convenient volume covering a wide range of issues in early Judaism. For more-specific research, Collins 1999 provides an in-depth encyclopedia for apocalypticism in Late Antiquity, and Schiffman and VanderKam 2000 does the same for the Dead Sea Scrolls. For an overview of archaeology and archaeological sites in the eastern Mediterranean, Stern 1993 is especially thorough.

Collins, John, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. Vol. 1, The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity. New York: Continuum, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The full three-volume set of the work extends into modernity, but the first volume focuses on apocalypticism in Late Antiquity and contains a collection of articles from important scholars.
Find this resource:
Collins, John J., and Daniel C. Harlow, eds. The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Containing encyclopedic entries on a wide range of topics and a bibliography for each entry, this dictionary is a helpful starting point for research in early Judaism.
Find this resource:
Schiffman, Lawrence H., and James C. VanderKam, eds. Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A two-volume encyclopedia spanning a broad spectrum of topics relevant to the Dead Sea Scrolls, with helpful bibliographies provided for each entry.
Find this resource:
Stern, Ephraim, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. 5 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This five-volume set surveys archaeological sites and concepts including but extending beyond the Second Temple period, with each entry accompanied by diagrams, photographs, and a bibliography.
Find this resource:
Journals

Much of the scholarship on the Second Temple period is presented in journal articles, many in the field of biblical studies but some now specific to the Second Temple period. Among the journals not connected to biblical studies per se, the following are especially important for readers of English. The Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period provides articles that encompass a wide range of topics in early Judaism, as does Henoch, which also covers the centuries following the Second Temple period. For those interested in more in-depth treatment of specialized topics, the Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha offers articles pertaining to the Pseudepigrapha, The Studia Philonica Annual presents scholarship on Philo of Alexandria, and both Revue de Qumran and Dead Sea Discoveries focus specifically on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Dead Sea Discoveries. 1994–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This triennial journal, which is dedicated exclusively to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ways in which they affect our understanding of early Judaism and Christianity, is useful for those seeking the most-recent scholarship.
Find this resource:
Henoch. 2005–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This international journal addresses topics relevant to early Judaism in the period between the Babylonian Exile and the rise of Islam.
Find this resource:
Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period. 1970–2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A journal for articles pertaining to Jewish literature, history, and religion of the Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha. 1987–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A forum for scholarship on the Pseudepigrapha.
Find this resource:
Revue de Qumran. 1958–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An essential journal for those seeking authoritative scholarship on a variety of subjects related to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this journal is published twice annually.
Find this resource:
Studia Philonica Annual. 1989–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This annual journal is dedicated entirely to Hellenistic Judaism, and especially Philo. In addition to articles, reviews, and notes on conferences, each issue also contains a bibliography of Philo scholarship.
Find this resource:
Major Events, People, and Encounters

The Second Temple period is named for the central institution in Jewish life in this period, the Jerusalem Temple built to replace the one destroyed in 586 BCE and later reconstructed by Herod the Great in the 1st century BCE. Like other labels used to describe this time period—“late Judaism” or “the inter-testamental period”—it is misleading, defining the period in terms of later religious interests and artificially distinguishing it from the cultures that preceded and followed it historically. In the view of most recent scholars, the defining experience of this period was foreign rule—first Persian rule under the Achaemenid dynasty that came to power around 550 BCE, Greek/Hellenistic rule after the defeat of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great in 332/1 BCE, and Roman rule that consolidated its control over the areas where many Jews lived in the 1st century BCE. It was during these centuries of imperial/foreign control that the Judaean culture of the pre-exilic/biblical period developed into what most scholars would refer to as Judaism, a process inseparable from the experience of living under and in close contact with non-Jews and non-Jewish culture. Organized according to the succession of these empires, the following works explore specific events, interactions, and individuals that shaped Jewish history in this period or else address the historiographical challenges posed by the sources.

The Persian Period

The Persian period is a poorly documented period in Jewish history, chiefly represented by two sources: late biblical books such as Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, and the Elephantine papyri found in Egypt. It is not possible to reconstruct a detailed history of this period, but the following give some sense of the sources, the material evidence, and the larger political context. Japhet 2006 provides a starting point for understanding the challenges facing scholars who work with literary sources from the Persian period, while Stern 1982 reviews the archaeological evidence. Porten 1968 examines the other major source of evidence for this period, the Elephantine papyri. A work that extends beyond Jewish culture of this period, Briant 2002 considers additional sources and provides valuable context for considering Jewish society in the Achaemenid Empire.

Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Translated by Peter T. Daniels. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A large, comprehensive overview of the rise and fall of the Achaemenid Empire. Although not specifically written as a resource for Persian-period Judaism, this book fills in the greater social, political, and historical context in which it developed. Those interested in the original French version can find the two-volume work under the title Histoire de l’Empire Perse de Cyrus à Alexandre (Leiden, The Netherlands: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1996).
Find this resource:
Japhet, Sara. From the Rivers of Babylon to the Highlands of Judah: Collected Studies on the Restoration Period. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Most of the literary sources for this period are books included in the Hebrew Bible, especially the narratives of Ezra and Nehemiah, which tell the story of the community that rebuilt Jerusalem in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. This collection of twenty-two essays by a leading scholar of this period addresses the major historiographical challenges that obstruct our understanding of this period.
Find this resource:
Porten, Bezalel. Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of the Jewish colony at Elephantine and various aspects of the lives of the people there, based on a study of the documents that this settlement left behind.
Find this resource:
Stern, Ephraim. Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period 538–332 B.C. Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1982.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An updated translation of the original Hebrew volume, this book examines the archaeological evidence for the Persian period and provides many drawing, maps, and photographs. Especially helpful for those interested in Persian influence on Israelite society in this period. The Hebrew version of this text can be found under the title Tarbut ha-Ḥomrit shel Erets-Yiśraʼel ba-Teḳufah ha-Parsit, 538–332 (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1982).
Find this resource:
The Hellenistic Period

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, his empire was divided among his successors, forming various successor kingdoms in Europe, the Near East, and Africa. Jews in Palestine first found themselves under the Ptolemaic kingdom, which ruled from Egypt, and then, around 200 BCE, the Seleucid kingdom, based in Syria, while Jews in Egypt lived under Ptolemaic rule throughout this period. The most significant event of the Hellenistic age is the so-called Maccabean Revolt, commemorated by the holiday of Hanukkah, but it is misleading to think of this period as one of conflict between Jews and Greeks. Jewish culture was influenced by larger Hellenistic culture in all manners of ways—indeed, some would argue that Judaism itself originated in this period as a variant of Hellenistic culture. Bickerman 1988, Hengel 1974. and Tcherikover 1959 represent the scholarship of three very important scholars who have helped to shape modern scholarly perception of the encounter between Jews and Greek culture. Goodman 1998, Gruen 1998, and Levine 1998 offer more-recent perspectives on the period that inject new archaeological evidence and more-refined understandings of the literary and historiographical issues. Shavit 1997 is a study of the categories of Judaism and Hellenism as they have played out over the course of later Western and Jewish thought, and suggests what was at stake in their encounter for later cultural history.

Bickerman, Elias J. The Jews in the Greek Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work focuses on the interactions between Jews and Greeks in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, examining a variety of social, political, and religious factors.
Find this resource:
Goodman, Martin, ed. Jews in a Graeco-Roman World. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of essays from some of the greatest scholars of the field, the articles in this book review ancient Jewish attitudes toward Hellenism, the extent of Jewish integration with Hellenistic culture, and the consonance and dissonance between these cultures.
Find this resource:
Gruen, Erich. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume from a leading classicist examines Greek texts from Jewish authors and analyzes the ways in which Jews living in the midst of a Hellenistic social milieu understood themselves in relation to their cultural surroundings.
Find this resource:
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book studies Hellenism in Late Antiquity and its political, economic, and cultural effects on Judaism. The early Hellenistic period is murkier and less well documented than later Hellenistic history. Among its contributions, this study by a major scholar of the period places biblical books such as Ecclesiastes in a Hellenistic context. Those looking for the German version of this work can find it printed as Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh. v. Chr. (Tübingen, West Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1969).
Find this resource:
Levine, Lee I. Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This overview of the interactions between ancient Jews and their Hellenistic neighbors focuses on three areas: Jerusalem in the Second Temple period, the synagogue in this era, and early Rabbinic Judaism.
Find this resource:
Shavit, Yaacov. Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism and the Making of the Modern Secular Jew. Translated by Chaya Naor and Niki Werner. Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book examines the emergence of categories such as “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” in Late Antiquity, but rather than providing a study in the interactions between these cultures, it traces out the implications of the development of these categories for modern Jewish identity. Relevant here because it examines the cultural categories that shape modern perceptions of this period. The original work in Hebrew was published under the title Yahadut bi-Reʼi ha-Yaṿanut ve-Hofaʻat ha-Yehudi ha-Helenisṭi ha-Moderni (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘oved, 1992).
Find this resource:
Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. Translated by S. Applebaum. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A classic work on the encounter between Judaism and Hellenism, this volume presents analyses of the historical, social, and political issues that shaped early Judaism both in Palestine, and in the Diaspora, developing yet another distinctive explanation for the Maccabean Revolt. Those interested in the original Hebrew edition of this book can find it under the title Ha-Yehudim veha-Yaṿanim ba-Tekufah ha-Helenistit (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1963). Readers should also be aware that in some publications the author’s name appears as Avigdor Tcherikover.
Find this resource:
The Maccabean Revolt and the Hasmoneans

Tensions between Jews and their Greek rulers came to a boil during the Maccabean Revolt, which began in 168 BCE in response to actions taken by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV. The leaders of this revolt, the Maccabees, would go on to found a dynasty, the Hasmonean dynasty, which would rule Judaea until the Roman period. The works listed in this section are in addition to the studies cited under The Hellenistic Period, which also address the revolt and its causes. Bickerman 1979 offers an original take on the conflict that led to the Maccabean Revolt, stressing the role of internal religious conflict among Jews. Bar-Kochva 1989 offers a kind of military analysis of the fighting, focusing on Judah the Maccabee’s leadership. Sievers 1990 examines each of the four Hasmonean rulers and the politics of their rule, while Eshel 2008 draws connections between this period and the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is much debate over the motives for Antiochus’s attempt to suppress Jewish religious tradition, the causes and consequences of the revolt that followed, and the reliability of the surviving literary sources, 1 and 2 Maccabees, supplemented by the Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts. Efron 1987 reexamines some of these sources and proposes some new interpretations of the data from them.

Bar-Kochva, Bezazel. Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle against the Seleucids. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511518522Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Judah the Maccabee was a leading member of the family that led the Maccabean Revolt, a successful revolt against the Seleucid Empire that won a measure of political autonomy for the Jews in the final decades of the 2nd century BCE. An analysis of the military clashes between the Maccabean and the Seleucid armies that examines the weapons, tactics, and makeup of each side.
Find this resource:
Bickerman, Elias. The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt. Translated by Horst Moehring. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1979.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A short but influential historical overview of the history of the Maccabees and the Maccabean Revolt, which develops a distinctive explanation for the origins of the revolt that locates it as a conflict between different kinds of Judaism. Those interested in the untranslated German edition of this book are directed to Der Gott der Makkabäer: Untersuchungen über Sinn und Ursprung der Makkabäischen Erhebung (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1937).
Find this resource:
Efron, Joshua. Studies on the Hasmonean Period. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1987.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this volume the author seeks to reevaluate sources that have been used for information on the Hasmonean kingdom, challenges previous assumptions, and sets out to establish a new foundation for scholarship on the Hasmonean period. The English edition is an update of the original volume written in Hebrew, which can be found under the title Ḥikre ha-Tekufah ha-Ḥashmonaʼit (Tel Aviv: ha-Ḳibuts ha-meʼuḥad, 1980).
Find this resource:
Eshel, Hanan. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Efforts by a leading Israeli scholar and archaeologist to enlist the Dead Sea Scrolls in the understanding of the Hasmonean period.
Find this resource:
Sievers, Joseph. The Hasmoneans and Their Supporters: From Mattathias to the Death of John Hyrcanus I. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Hasmoneans were the political dynasty that evolved out of the Maccabees and that ruled Jewish Palestine until the onset of Roman rule in the 1st century BCE. This book, which has separate chapters dedicated to each of the four Hasmonean leaders, focuses especially on their backgrounds and their politics.
Find this resource:
The Roman Period

The Romans consolidated their control over Palestine, Egypt, and other areas of Jewish inhabitation by the 1st century BCE and would dominate Jewish life until the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE, well beyond the destruction of the Second Temple. An overview of the political interactions between Jewish and Roman society is contained in Smallwood 1976. Other books listed here focus on the early period of Roman rule, the age of Herod, Jesus, Paul, Hillel, and Yohanan Ben Zakkai, which culminated with the Great Jewish Revolt in 66–70 CE, in which the Second Temple was destroyed. In this period, after displacing the Hasmoneans, the Romans initially opted to rule Judaea through a local royal dynasty, the descendants of an Idumean convert to Judaism named Antipater. Antipater’s son Herod (often known as Herod I or Herod the Great) is the best-known (or most infamous) member of this dynasty, ruling from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. The reign of Herod and his legacy of monumental building projects are reviewed in Richardson 1996, while Rocca 2008 emphasizes instead the various forces at play in Herod’s administration. Schwartz 1990 reviews the reign of Herod’s grandson Agrippa I, as described in Josephus’s history. This period is also documented by Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, who tend to focus on the political and religious elites of this age and their interaction with their Roman rulers, and it has received a lot of attention from scholars as the age in which both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism emerge. Some of the items presented here also cover events in Alexandria, where there were also a number of conflicts among Jews, the Greek residents of the city, and the Romans who ruled them both. The observations of Philo of Alexandria, a prominent Jewish resident of Alexandria in the 1st century BCE–1st century CE, are reviewed in Goodenough and Goodhart 1938. Both Goodman 2007a and Goodman 2007b provide overviews of the nature of interactions between Jewish society and the greater Greco-Roman world, with the latter focusing specifically on more-violent interactions. Horsley 1987 also examines both violent and nonviolent Jewish reactions to the Roman Empire, specifically in the context of the early Jesus movement.

Goodenough, Erwin, and Howard Lehman Goodhart. The Politics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An exploration of Philo’s legal and political thought, his relations with the government, and his views of society.
Find this resource:
Goodman, Martin. Judaism in the Roman World. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007a.
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004153097.i-275Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this volume, nineteen of Goodman’s essays are presented on a wide variety of topics relating to Late Antique Judaism as it existed in the Roman Empire.
Find this resource:
Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. London: Allen Lane, 2007b.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This substantial volume examines the relations between the Jews and the Romans in the early years of the Common Era and focuses especially on the events surrounding the Great Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the temple.
Find this resource:
Horsley, Richard. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A monograph on the modes of resistance in Late Antique Judaism, this volume reviews the politics of violence, forms of nonviolent resistance, and the role of the Kingdom of God in Jewish resistance, and it locates the early Jesus movement in this framework.
Find this resource:
Richardson, Peter. Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This monograph examines the life of Herod the Great and his building projects (including the expansion of the Second Temple) and locates him in the multicultural milieu of Late Antique Palestine.
Find this resource:
Rocca, Samuel. Herod’s Judaea: A Mediterranean State in the Classical World. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of the reign of Herod the Great, including sections on Jewish and Hellenistic ideologies of royalty, Herod’s court and army, the administration and economy of his kingdom, his death, and more.
Find this resource:
Schwartz, Daniel. Agrippa I: The Last King of Judaea. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This examination of the life of Herod’s grandson reviews Josephus’s writings about him and presents a biography including his early life and ascension to the throne, his administration under Caligula, and his death and place in history.
Find this resource:
Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian; A Study in Political Relations. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1976.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume provides an excellent review of the political history of Jewish society under the Romans in Late Antiquity.
Find this resource:
The Great Jewish Revolt

A turning point in Jewish-Roman relations was a major Jewish revolt against Rome that began in 66 CE and culminated with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, not the only Jewish uprising against Roman rule but the best-documented one. The most important source of information that we have for this revolt is the historian Flavius Josephus, whose works have been made more accessible through the Flavius Josephus Homepage, while Rajak 1983 provides an analysis of Josephus’s life and its relationship to his writings. The Jewish Revolt marked the end of institutions that had been central to Jewish life until then—not just the temple but the Herodian dynasty—and was a catalyst for the development of the non-temple-centered communities that became so important in the following centuries, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, both of which developed conceptions of God and religious life that did not depend on the temple or sacrifice. Goodman 1987 and Price 1992 provide examinations of the social and political pressures that ultimately led to the outbreak of the revolt, while the studies collected in Berlin and Overman 2002 reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the revolt and its repercussions.

Berlin, Andrea, and J. Andrew Overman, eds. The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of articles on the First Jewish Revolt, with emphases on the historical background, the effects of the war in the Galilee, and the aftermath.
Find this resource:
Flavius Josephus Homepage.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Maintained by G. J. Goldberg, this site offers free downloads of translations of Josephus’s works, commentaries on the works, and articles on a range of topics.
Find this resource:
Goodman, Martin. The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt against Rome A.D. 66–70. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511552656Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Goodman’s monograph sets out to explore the root causes of the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome in the 1st century CE and is centered on an analysis of social pressures among the ruling class that ultimately led to the war.
Find this resource:
Price, Jonathan J. Jerusalem under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66–70 CE. Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies 3. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A thorough examination of the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome, this book begins by reviewing the social factors that formed a background to the war and then proceeds to examine the history of the conflict and the eventual destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem.
Find this resource:
Rajak, Tessa. Josephus: The Historian and His Society. London: Duckworth, 1983.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of Josephus’s background, and an analysis of his accounts of the Great Jewish Revolt and the civil war in the Galilee.
Find this resource:
Cultural Geography

A chronological focus obscures the ways in which the development of early Jewish culture is tied to place, to the various locations in which Jews lived. It was during the Second Temple period that the so-called Diaspora emerged, sustained Jewish communities living outside Palestine (a conventional name for the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River developed in the Hellenistic–Roman period and without the political connotations that the term carries today). The following sections deal with Jewish life in different locations around the Mediterranean.

The Diaspora

There are numerous scholarly works dedicated to examining the ways in which Jews in the Diaspora understood their own identities as Jews vis-à-vis their non-Jewish neighbors, and as Jews living outside the land of biblical Israel. Included from such works are Rutgers 1998 and Gruen 2002. Some of these communities existed beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, in Babylonia in particular, which was under Parthian and Sassanian rule during the Roman period (see Neusner 1969), but the best known are those that existed within the Hellenistic world and Roman Empire, especially in Alexandria and Rome. Barclay 1996 offers a helpful conceptual structure for discussing Diaspora life and also provides a thorough treatment of Jews living in Egypt and other Mediterranean settings. Kasher 1985 focuses on the place of foreigners, and Jews in particular, in Egyptian society. The writings of one of the most well-known Egyptian Jews, Philo of Alexandria, are discussed in Niehoff 2001 as they relate to identity construction of the Jewish community in Alexandria.

Barclay, John M. G. Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of a variety of aspects of cultural interactions between Jews and non-Jews in the Diaspora, with an especially robust treatment of the Egyptian Diaspora. Barclay also provides a useful analytical framework for discussing these interactions.
Find this resource:
Gruen, Erich S. Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This survey examines diasporic Jewish communities during the Second Temple period and looks at what it meant for these communities to be living outside of the Jewish “homeland.”
Find this resource:
Kasher, Aryeh. The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: The Struggle for Equal Rights. Tübingen, West Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1985.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kasher seeks to locate Jews in Egyptian society, utilizing a wide variety of sources to shed light on the nature of ethnicity in Egypt under Greek and Roman empires and the ways in which nonnatives—and especially Jews—fit into social and political frameworks. The original Hebrew version can be found with the title Yehude Mitsrayim ha-Helenisṭit veha-Romit be-Maʼavaḳam ʻal Zekhuyotehem (Tel Aviv: Universitat Tel-Aviv, 1978).
Find this resource:
Neusner, Jacob. A History of the Jews in Babylonia. Vol. 1, The Parthian Period. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1969.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This first volume of a multivolume work that extends far beyond the Second Temple period provides a historical overview of the Jews in Babylonia beginning in the 2nd century BCE, a poorly documented community in this early period but an important one that would give rise to the culture that produced the Babylonian Talmud.
Find this resource:
Niehoff, Maren. Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The most extensive source for diasporic Jewish life in the Roman period is Philo, who lived in the city of Alexandria from around 20 BCE to 50 CE and was in a position to understand its political and cultural institutions and elite culture. This book investigates the writings of Philo and analyzes the ways in which he constructs Jewish culture and identity while living in a non-Jewish context.
Find this resource:
Rutgers, Leonard. The Hidden Heritage of Diaspora Judaism. 2d ed. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work reviews recent scholarship on diasporic Judaism and investigates both the relationship between Diaspora Judaism and Hellenistic culture and issues of identity formation among diasporic Jews, using both Jewish and non-Jewish sources.
Find this resource:
Palestine

Within Palestine itself there were also differences between Jewish culture in Jerusalem and the Galilee to the north, and between Jews in urban and rural settings. The following survey tries to capture some of this localized diversity. Both Edwards and McCollough 1997 and Meyers 1999 examine Jewish life in the Galilee, while Levine 1975 focuses on the city of Caesarea, a major Roman port on the Mediterranean coast. Jerusalem is treated in Levine 2002, and the famous site of Masada is detailed in Yadin 1966. Kasher 1988 looks at the relations between Jews and other smaller groups of people in this region.

Edwards, Douglas R., and C. Thomas McCollough, eds. Archaeology and the Galilee: Texts and Contexts in the Greco-Roman and Byzantine Periods. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
From the South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism series, this volume collects articles pertaining to the study of the Galilee, both from archaeological and literary perspectives.
Find this resource:
Kasher, Aryeh. Jews, Idumaeans, and Ancient Arabs: Relations of the Jews in Eretz-Israel with the Nations of the Frontier and the Desert during the Hellenistic and Roman Era (332 BCE–70 CE). Tübingen, West Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this volume the author sets out to explore relations between the Jews and Idumaeans and Arab tribes, relationships that have not previously been examined extensively. The work fleshes out the implications of these relations through the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Those interested in the original Hebrew work can find it under the title Edom, ʻArav ṿe-Yiśraʼel: Yehudim ṿe-ʻameme ha-sefar ba-teḳufah ha-Helenisṭit ṿeha-Romit (Tel Aviv: Yad Yitsḥaḳ Ben-Tsevi, 1988).
Find this resource:
Levine, Lee. Caesarea under Roman Rule. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1975.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Built by Herod, Caesarea was an important port city and base for Roman rule in Palestine. An examination of the city of Caesarea in the Roman period, this book covers the Jewish (including Samaritan) and Christian communities here during the first four centuries CE.
Find this resource:
Levine, Lee. Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period, 538 B.C.E.–70 C.E. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book traces the history of Jerusalem from the beginning of the Persian period through the destruction of the Second Temple. Levine investigates the role of Jerusalem in politics, religion, and Jewish society through this period.
Find this resource:
Meyers, Eric M., ed. Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures. Papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Galilee in Antiquity held at Duke University and North Carolina Museum of Art on 25–27 January 1997. Winona Lake, IN: Eisebrauns, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume contains essays on the Galilee from the Bronze and Iron Ages up through the early Medieval period but has plenty of articles pertaining to the Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand. Translated by Moshe Pearlman. New York: Random House, 1966.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Not a significant site of Jewish residence but one of the most memorable places from the Second Temple period, Masada was the location of a last stand between Jewish rebels and the Romans at the end of the First Jewish Revolt. Written by the archaeologist in charge of the excavations of Masada, this book introduces the site, along with photographs and a narrative accessible to the nonspecialist.
Find this resource:
Judaism as a Religion

What is of most interest about this period for many is the religious dimensions of early Judaism—the beliefs, institutions, and practices deemed significant as background for the rise of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Our understanding of the religious dimensions of early Jewish culture has been greatly expanded in recent decades, thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and intensive reexamination of sources such as Josephus and the New Testament. Among other insights, these sources reveal the great variety of Jewish belief and practice in this period, and the emergence of sects and other communities distinguished by their understanding of the Bible and by their religious behavior. It was also in this period that the biblical canon took shape, along with the translations and interpretive techniques that would shape the significance that it had for later Jews and Christians.

Early Jewish Belief and Practice

The various forms of Judaism in the Second Temple period and the ways in which Jewish beliefs changed in this time have been treated by numerous scholars. Nickelsburg and Stone 1983 provides a sampling of how different kinds of Jews in this period viewed different religious issues, while VanderKam 2001 and Grabbe 2000 offer a general overview of Jewish belief and practice. Boccaccini 1991 develops a distinctive view of how to understand Judaism in this period, in relation to what preceded and followed it. Sanders 1992 focuses on the religious practices shared by a majority of Jews, while Flusser 2007, collecting the work of an important Israeli scholar, develops many interesting, sometimes idiosyncratic views on a wide variety of topics bearing on Judaism as a religion in this period.

Boccaccini, Gabriele. Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 BCE–200 CE. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This monograph, from a scholar with distinctive ideas about Judaism in this period, aims to rethink how the Second Temple period is situated in relation to what precedes and follows it, and along the way it explores a variety of topics relating to Judaism between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE.
Find this resource:
Flusser, David. Judaism of the Second Temple Period. 2 vols. Translated by Azzan Yadin. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A two-volume set containing a collection of English translations of Flusser’s essays on a spectrum of themes. The first volume focuses especially on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes; the second volume, on Jewish literature in the Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
Grabbe, Lester L. Judaic Religion in the Second Temple Period: Belief and Practice from the Exile to Yavneh. New York: Routledge, 2000.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203461013Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Divided into two parts, the first half of this book surveys Second Temple–period belief and practice chronologically, progressing from the Persian period through the destruction of the temple. The second part then investigates specific topics such as the temple, scripture, sectarianism, eschatology, Hellenism, and more.
Find this resource:
Nickelsburg, George, and Michael Stone. Faith and Piety in Early Judaism: Texts and Documents. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume pulls together excerpts from the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other various sources and arranges them for an easy examination of different aspects of early Jewish belief such as sectarianism, temple practice, piety, deliverance, and wisdom.
Find this resource:
Sanders, E. Parish. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE. Philadelphia: Trinity International, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of how Judaism was practiced by Jews in the late 1st century BCE and the early 1st century CE, this book focuses primarily on Judaism in the land of Israel but also mentions diasporic Judaism. This book is especially useful for those wanting to know more about the practices of common people rather than the elite.
Find this resource:
VanderKam, James C. An Introduction to Early Judaism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This overview of the Second Temple period reviews the history of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods; investigates the literature produced in this era; and provides an overview of a number of topics such as the temple, synagogues, and Jewish sects.
Find this resource:
Religious Sects and Movements

Both Josephus and the New Testament suggest that by the 1st century CE there existed a number of sects or religious communities defined by their religious beliefs, scriptural interpretations, and ritual observance—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and others. A good starting point for researching such groups is Baumgarten 1997, which offers a good theoretical structure for conceptualizing religious sects, as is Cohn-Sherbok and Court 2001, which provides an overview of the different sects in this time period. The Dead Sea Scrolls include documents that seem to come from one of these communities, perhaps the Essenes. There also existed another religious community, the Samaritans, who were not Jewish but claimed descent from the ancient Israelites and shared the Torah and other inheritances in common with the Jews, and we know of still another religious community in Egypt, the Therapeutae. Much about these groups is debated, as is the status of what constituted normative or mainstream Judaism in this period. Many scholars have carried out in-depth examinations of these communities, such as in Crown 1989 on the Samaritans, Finkelstein 1966 on the Pharisees, and Hengel 1989 on the Zealots. Others have focused on the ways in which these different groups interacted in greater Jewish society, such as in Saldarini 1988 and Smith 1971. Other scholars have concentrated on analyzing our primary sources of information for these groups, in order to come to a better understanding of the lenses through which such evidence has been filtered. Both Mason 1991 and Pummer 2009 look at Josephus and the ways in which he describes the Pharisees and the Samaritans in his writings.

Baumgarten, Albert. The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
After establishing a framework for defining and understanding “sects” in early Judaism, this study considers a variety of social and historical pressures that contributed to sectarianism in this period.
Find this resource:
Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, and John M. Court, eds. Religious Diversity in the Graeco-Roman World: A Survey of Recent Scholarship. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This collection of essays provides brief overviews of a variety of different forms of early Judaism, including the Essenes and the early Jesus movement.
Find this resource:
Crown, Alan D., ed. The Samaritans. Tübingen, West Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1989.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
With chapters written by a variety of excellent scholars, this volume surveys Samaritan history, archaeological remains, beliefs, language, literature, and more.
Find this resource:
Finkelstein, Louis. The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of Their Faith. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Pharisees are an especially important movement in this period because they are thought to be the forebears of Rabbinic Judaism and were an important foil for Jesus and the early Christian movement. This two-volume set reviews the background of the Pharisees, their beliefs, and the social contexts through which they spread; also included are a number of supplementary chapters on the Sadducees.
Find this resource:
Hengel, Martin. The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 AD. Translated by David Smith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Primarily relying on Josephus, supplemented with several other sources, this work considers the evidence for the rebellious movement known as the Zealots, their development, their eschatological ideology, and their eventual collapse. This volume was initially printed in German with the title Die Zeloten (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1961).
Find this resource:
Mason, Steve. Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1991.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A more recent investigation of Josephus’s sometimes contradictory descriptions of the Pharisees, this book considers the evidence from Josephus’s The Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, and Life separately and within the greater context of each work.
Find this resource:
Pummer, Reinhard. The Samaritans in Flavius Josephus. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
From the Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism series, this monograph reviews references to the Samaritans in the writings of Flavius Josephus and examines the ways in which Josephus’s portrayal of the Samaritans results from his own views of them.
Find this resource:
Saldarini, Anthony J. Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach. Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A review of the various Jewish sects in the Second Temple period, from a historical-sociological perspective, this work discusses the greater society, the sources of information available to us, and interpretations of these sources.
Find this resource:
Smith, Morton. Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A reconstruction of the early religious disputes that may have led to the rise of sectarianism in the later Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
The Dead Sea Scrolls Community

As previously mentioned, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us insight into one of the religious communities that developed in Palestine in the Hellenistic–Roman period, but that is only one of their contributions to our understanding of this period: they also shed light on the development of the biblical text, ritual practice, the history of the Hebrew language, and many other topics. We cannot provide an adequate bibliography in this context, nor can we do justice to the many scholarly controversies sparked by the scrolls; the following is simply a sampling of more-recent scholarship that suggests the variety of approaches one might take to the scrolls or the nearby archaeological site that may have been home to the Dead Sea Scroll community: Qumran. An extensive bibliography can be found at the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, while Schiffman 1994 and VanderKam 2010 provide excellent overviews of the literature and the insights into religious life that can be gleaned from them (Schiffman 1994 also seeks to correct for the Christian biases of earlier scholars of the scrolls). The studies collected in Collins and Kugler 2000, from leading scholars in the field, focus on what the scrolls reveal about religious belief and practice, while Newsom 2004 is included as an example of some of the more innovative approaches to the scrolls developed since the turn of the 21st century. For one take on the archaeology of Qumran, see Magness 2002. For vocal dissent to mainstream interpretation of the scrolls, see Golb 1995.

Collins, John J., and Robert A. Kugler, eds. Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This collection of essays presents articles on various aspects of religion found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, including heavenly powers, prayer, law, apocalypticism, messianism, and more.
Find this resource:
Golb, Norman. Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Here, Golb challenges the traditional view that the Dead Sea Scrolls are connected to the Qumran settlement and the Essenes. He puts forth his theory that they were composed in Jerusalem and hidden near the settlement at Qumran during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
Find this resource:
Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book seeks to shed new light on the settlement at Qumran by analyzing the archaeological remains there; includes a section with photographs and sketches of archaeological remains.
Find this resource:
Newsom, Carol A. The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A volume from the Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah series, this book investigates the ways in which self and identity are constructed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a good example of how the study of the scrolls is evolving beyond the effort to publish, make sense of, and contextualize their content.
Find this resource:
Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The website of the Hebrew University’s Dead Sea Scrolls research center, which offers lots of resources on the scrolls.
Find this resource:
Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this volume, Schiffman examines the community at Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls and puts forth his theory that the scrolls are the product not of Essenes but of Sadducees.
Find this resource:
VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An introduction both to the Dead Sea Scrolls and to recent scholarship on the scrolls. There are chapters on the discovery of the scrolls, the manuscripts, hypotheses regarding Qumran, and the relationship of the scrolls to the Bible.
Find this resource:
Jewish Roots of Early Christianity

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other developments have led to new understandings of Jesus and early Christianity as a development out of earlier Jewish culture. The bibliography on this topic is also immense, and the reader should consult the bibliography compiled for Christianity and its origins; what follows is merely a small sampling of how scholars connect Jesus and early Christianity to Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple period. The biblical figure Paul is the author of the earliest textual evidence for Christianity, and Sanders 1977 is an effort to contextualize his thought within the context of the Judaism from that time; for a more recent attempt at such a project, see Boyarin 1994. Flusser 1988 offers a series of essays locating early Christianity in its Jewish context, Sanders 1985 and Vermès 2003 contextualize the figure of Jesus himself in the Jewish context of 1st-century Palestine, and Fredriksen 1999 fleshes out that context in an effort to better understand Jesus’ crucifixion. As an example of more-recent scholarship, Mason 2009 draws on the author’s revised understanding of Josephus to illumine the origins of early Christianity. Levine and Brettler 2011 offers an edition of the New Testament with annotations to help the reader situate it within its Jewish context.

Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume examines the writings of Paul in order to shed light on the ways in which he constructs Jewish and Christian identity.
Find this resource:
Flusser, David. Judaism and the Origins of Christianity. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This collection of essays from the author situates the early Jesus movement within its Jewish context. Flusser gives particular attention to relationships between the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christianity, apocalyptic movements, and information from later Rabbinic texts that may shed light on the origins of Christianity.
Find this resource:
Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book presents an examination of the historical Jesus, as placed in the social and religious contexts of his day, and seeks especially to explain why Jesus was crucified.
Find this resource:
Levine, Amy-Jill, and Marc Brettler, eds. The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A newly produced commentary on the New Testament, by scholars of Jewish studies, that aims to illumine its writings in light of the Jewish culture of the day.
Find this resource:
Mason, Steve. Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins: Methods and Categories. Edited by Michael W. Helfield. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Woven together from articles previously published elsewhere, this book centers around Josephus’s accounts of Judea in the 1st century CE as a background to the rise of the Jesus movement. His chapters on the use of Josephus as a historical source will be valuable to those using Josephus for other topics as well.
Find this resource:
Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work examines the writings of Paul within the context of Palestinian Judaism of the last two centuries BCE and the first two centuries CE, drawing on early Rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the letters of Paul.
Find this resource:
Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of Jesus, his teachings, and his reception in the Judaism of his time, this book considers information from a variety of biblical and nonbiblical sources as it provides a portrayal of Jesus’ life and death in the context of early Judaism.
Find this resource:
Vermès, Géza. Jesus in His Jewish Context. London: SCM, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Written to replace and expand the author’s earlier book Jesus and the World of Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), this book examines Jesus within the Jewish contexts of his life, as derived from Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Rabbinic literature.
Find this resource:
The Early Rabbinic Movement

This period is also the age to which Rabbinic Judaism traces its origins, although the earliest Rabbinic text, the Mishnah, would not be formulated until around 200 CE, and Rabbinic Judaism in general takes shape both in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The following are some studies that aim to bridge between the Second Temple period and later Rabbinic and Late Antique Jewish culture. Many of them, such as Boccaccini 2002, Schiffman 2003, and Jaffee 2006, draw lines of connection between Second Temple period and later Rabbinic Judaism, while Cohen 2006 casts Rabbinic Judaism as a reaction against the sectarianism of the Second Temple period. Neusner 1970 provides an extensive examination of Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the legendary founders of Rabbinic Judaism, raising the issue of what we can infer about this early period from later Rabbinic sources. Schwartz 2001 offers a broad overview that juxtaposes Late Antique Judaism with earlier Second Temple–period Judaism, focusing on how these cultures fit into the broader political and social landscape of Late Antiquity.

Boccaccini, Gabriele. Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History from Ezekiel to Daniel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this volume, Boccaccini examines the growth and changes to Judaism throughout the Second Temple period, as the Zadokites competed with rival forms of Judaism. While Boccaccini’s book is framed as an examination of this period as a foundation on which Rabbinic Judaism stands, it is nonetheless quite useful for anyone interested in the changing face of Judaism in the Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 2d ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Written for students and nonspecialists, Cohen focuses on the last two centuries BCE and the first two centuries CE and covers a broad range of topics, including Jewish religious belief, practice, and institutions; scripture; and the early Rabbinic period. Especially useful for understanding Rabbinic Judaism as a response to the sectarianism of the Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
Jaffee, Martin S. Early Judaism: Religious Worlds of the First Judaic Millennium. Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A very readable introduction for a nonspecialist, this book examines the various and sundry forms that Judaism took through the Second Temple period and into the Rabbinic era.
Find this resource:
Neusner, Jacob. A Life of Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai, ca. 1–80 CE. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1970.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In Rabbinic lore, a central figure in the transition from Second Temple–period Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism is the sage known as Yohanan Ben Zakkai, who, according to Jewish legend, was present during the First Jewish Revolt but managed to escape and laid the groundwork for Rabbinic life.
Find this resource:
Schiffman, Lawrence H. Understanding Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schiffman traces out the biblical roots of Second Temple–period religion and examines the manifestations of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, as well as into the early Rabbinic period. The author also reviews the sundry forms of sectarian Judaisms in the Second Temple period, including the early Jesus movement.
Find this resource:
Schwartz, Seth. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A recent work that reexamines traditional assumptions about Jewish society in Late Antiquity. Much of the work covers the Rabbinic period, but Part 1 is dedicated to the Jews in Palestine prior to the destruction of the Second Temple.
Find this resource:
Relationship with the Divine and Its Intermediaries

As was true of the religion reflected in the Hebrew Bible, the religious life of Jews in the Second Temple period was focused on the relationship with God, now supplemented by many supernatural beings, angels, prophets, and a personified Wisdom that populated the intermediate zone between humans and God. Angelic intermediaries are treated in Reed 2005 and Sullivan 2004, which provide examinations of the views on angels in this period, Sinnott 2005 explores personified Wisdom, and Jassen 2007 looks at prophecy and prophets, while Himmelfarb 1993 examines accounts of the heavenly journeys through which humans encountered some of these supernatural beings and penetrated into the divine realm. Also included in this section are studies of the savior figure known as the messiah, which also develops in this period. Charlesworth 1992 offers an overview of the Jewish concept of the messiah, while Collins 2010 traces messianism in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Charlesworth, James, ed. The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
With contributions from twenty-five scholars, this work explores the concept of messianism in the early Judaism, which provided the context for the rise of the early Jesus movement.
Find this resource:
Collins, John. The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collins examines the ways in which the concept of messianism as manifested in the Dead Sea Scrolls can enrich our understanding of Jewish messianism in Late Antiquity.
Find this resource:
Himmelfarb, Martha. Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Analyzing a number of apocalyptic texts from the 3rd century BCE through the 2nd century CE, Himmelfarb examines the depictions of ascents to Heaven in these works and the roles that such narratives play in their contexts.
Find this resource:
Jassen, Alex P. Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004158429.i-452Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of the concept of prophecy in a variety of non-Hellenistic sources from the Second Temple period, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, this book has been praised for its comprehensiveness in reviewing the evidence from this period.
Find this resource:
Reed, Annette Yoshiko. Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book traces a tradition about fallen angels from the Book of the Watchers, a section of the Book of Enoch, through its adaptations in early Judaism and Christianity, and investigates early Jewish-Christian relations through the framework of the reception and use of these traditions.
Find this resource:
Sinnott, Alice M. The Personification of Wisdom. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An attempt to trace the roots of the personified figure of Wisdom in Proverbs, Job, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and Baruch, this book examines Wisdom from the destruction of the First Temple through the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Find this resource:
Sullivan, Kevin P. Wrestling with Angels: A Study of the Relationship between Angels and Humans in Ancient Jewish Literature and the New Testament. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This monograph examines the interactions between humans and angels as depicted in Second Temple–period literature, including the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and early Christian writings.
Find this resource:
Religious Institutions

Jewish religious life was communal, with Jews’ relationship to God—and to one another—mediated through institutions such as the temple and the synagogue, the latter emerging in the Second Temple period as a site for prayer, the public reading of the Torah, and other communal activities. The following items explore the role of the temple and its priesthood in Jewish life in the Second Temple period (which is different from the role of the temple in the First Temple period) or else examine the origins and role of the synagogue in the Second Temple period and Late Antiquity. Fried 2004 examines the complex relationship between temple and empire in the Persian period, while Rooke 2000 and VanderKam 2004 offer more broadly cast investigations of the high priesthood that oversaw the Jerusalem Temple. Hayward 1996 presents textual evidence for the temple from nonbiblical sources, while Fine 1998 and Levine 2000 trace the rise of the synagogue in this time. Also included here is Ben-Dov 1985, a work that surveys the archaeological remnants of Herod’s Temple.

Ben-Dov, Meir. In the Shadow of the Temple: The Discovery of Ancient Judaism. Translated by Ina Friedman. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An account of the archaeological excavations of Jerusalem (in particular those of the temple complex of Herodian Jerusalem) and the different strata of remains found there. Written for the nonspecialist, with many helpful diagrams and photographs of artifacts. The untranslated edition of this volume exists with the title Ḥafirot Har ha-Bayit (Jerusalem: Keter, 1982).
Find this resource:
Fine, Steven. This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of Synagogues during the Greco-Roman Period. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Working from written documents and archaeological remains, this work traces the development of the synagogue and the ways in which it came to be considered “holy.”
Find this resource:
Fried, Lisbeth S. The Priest and the Great King: Temple-Palace Relations in the Persian Empire. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book analyzes the role of the temple in relations between the Achaemenid Empire and local priesthoods in Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Yehud in the 6th through 4th centuries BCE.
Find this resource:
Hayward, R. T. R. The Jewish Temple: A Non-Biblical Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of nonbiblical sources on the temple, this volume examines the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the Book of Jubilees, the writings of Philo and Josephus, and other documents in order to present an analysis of the significance of the temple in early Jewish belief.
Find this resource:
Levine, Lee I. The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This large volume traces the history of the synagogue as it developed in the Second Temple period and as it changed in the centuries after the destruction of the temple.
Find this resource:
Rooke, Deborah W. Zadok’s Heirs: The Role and Development of the High Priesthood in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A monograph that analyzes the office of the high priesthood from the end of the Babylonian Exile through the Hasmonean dynasty and its role in ancient Israel, including examinations of evidence from Elephantine.
Find this resource:
VanderKam, James C. From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A history of the high priesthood throughout the Second Temple period, complete with a list of the high priests and a brief bibliography for each.
Find this resource:
Religious Practice

The following items cover various aspects of Jewish religious practice as performed by nonpriests, including purification, martyrdom (Droge and Tabor 1992, van Henten and Avemarie 2002), magic (Bohak 2008), marriage (Satlow 2001), and burial (Hachlili 2005). Nitzan 1994 covers poetry in prayer in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this period, access to the temple was governed by early Jewish perceptions of purity and impurity, the latter a kind of contagion that had to be gotten rid of for access to the divine, and the effort to define and regular impurity had implications for group identity, as reviewed in Klawans 2000 and Hayes 2002. Not dependent on the temple cult, many of these practices would continue to develop in Late Antiquity.

Bohak, Gideon. Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In a learned survey of Jewish magical practice in the Second Temple and Late Antique periods, Bohak examines both Jewish magical texts and non-Jewish magical elements.
Find this resource:
Droge, Arthur J., and James D. Tabor. A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity. San Francisco: Harper, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book investigates the social views on suicide and martyrdom in early Judaism and Christianity and also reviews the Greco-Roman influences on these views.
Find this resource:
Hachlili, Rachael. Jewish Funerary Customs, Practices, and Rites in the Second Temple Period. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A thorough examination of funerary and burial customs in the Second Temple period, including case studies of several cemeteries; examinations of different types of tombs, coffins, ossuaries, and sarcophagi; funerary art; inscriptions; burial rites and customs; and more.
Find this resource:
Hayes, Christine E. Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1093/0195151208.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study of non-Jews and the Jewish system of purity, particularly as they pertain to intermarriage and conversion, reviews both the case of the Second Temple period as well as that of the Rabbinic period.
Find this resource:
Klawans, Jonathan. Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195132908.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Klawans examines the system of impurity in early Judaism and proposes a bifurcation of the biblical system of impurity into ritual and moral impurity, and then he traces both strains of thought through Second Temple–period literature.
Find this resource:
Nitzan, Bilhah. Qumran Prayer and Religious Poetry. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls, our most direct source for the practice and genres of prayer in the Second Temple period, this work examines the role of poetry in prayer from a variety of scrolls, including liturgical, eschatological, magical, and mystical poems.
Find this resource:
Satlow, Michael L. Jewish Marriage in Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This monograph investigates the laws, customs, rituals, and economics of Jewish marriage in Antiquity and distinguishes between different understandings of marriage held by different Jewish groups.
Find this resource:
van Henten, Jan W., and Friedrich Avemarie. Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Graeco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian Antiquity. London: Routledge, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of texts in translation from Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian sources relating to martyrdom in each, with each text accompanied by a brief introduction.
Find this resource:
Biblical Translation, Interpretation, and Canonization

Arguably the central religious practice for Jews in the Second Temple period was the reading of the Bible—the five books of Moses along with the other writings now included in the Jewish biblical canon. It was during the Second Temple period that the earliest Jewish biblical canons took shape; the first biblical translations into Greek and Aramaic emerge at this time as well. For a recent attempt to resituate the Greek translation of the Bible within the context of Jewish Hellenistic culture, see Rajak 2009. Jews developed new modes of biblical interpretation that allowed them to bridge between the biblical age and their own lives, and they began to emulate the Bible in their own literary compositions and ritual performance. Much of the Hebrew Bible’s content was composed in the centuries before the Second Temple period, but the idea of the Bible—its meanings and roles in religious life—took shape as Judaism itself developed in the Second Temple period. Both Hauser and Watson 2003 and Mulder 1988 address a wide range of issues related to this topic, while Kugel 1998 offers a systematic overview of biblical interpretation in early Judaism. Ulrich 1999 considers evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls to help shed some light on the processes of interpretation and canonizations, and Najman 2003 explores the ascription of texts of Moses and issues of interpretative authority.

Hauser, Alan J., and Duane F. Watson, eds. A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Ancient Period. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first of a two-volume set, this book provides a collection of essays on a variety of topics pertaining to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Late Antiquity, covering topics relating to the Septuagint, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more.
Find this resource:
Kugel, James. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume provides a valuable examination of the reception and interpretation of the Bible in the late Second Temple period, as these interpretations came to form the cores of early Judaism and Christianity. A version of this book designed for the general public has been published by the same author under the title The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1997); both volumes contain an extensive bibliography.
Find this resource:
Mulder, Martin Jan, ed. Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although each chapter is written by a different author, this volume is not a compilation of separate articles but rather a unified work that examines the production and transmission of texts in ancient Israel, as well as the interpretation and translation of these texts that eventually came to form the Hebrew Bible.
Find this resource:
Najman, Hindy. Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosiac Discourse in Second Temple Judaism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this book, Najman examines the use of “Mosaic discourse” in the Book of Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, and Philo’s writings, analyzing the ways in which these works establish claims of Mosaic authorship.
Find this resource:
Rajak, Tessa. Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Septuagint was originally a Greek translation of the Pentateuch, but the term was eventually applied to the Greek translation of the Bible in general used by early Christians and inherited from earlier Jews. This book explores the Jewish Diaspora and the Hellenistic context of this translation, as well as the role of language and scripture in Hellenistic Judaism.
Find this resource:
Ulrich, Eugene C. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the reasons the Dead Sea Scrolls are so important is that they give us our earliest evidence for the formation of the Bible as a text and for biblical interpretation as practiced within a specific community. This work uses the Dead Sea Scrolls as a means of examining the process of the canonization, and it also includes chapters on the Septuagint and the Old Latin translation.
Find this resource:
The Afterlife and the Future in Early Judaism

The Second Temple period saw intense interest not just in the biblical past but also in the future, the fate of the individual after death, and of the world at the end of everything. It was in this period, for example, that the phenomenon of apocalypticism arose in Judaism, closely associated with messianism and including speculation about the end of time and the changes it would bring. Collins 1984 and Horsley 2007 examine some of the apocalyptic literature produced in this time, in ways that place it in a historical and cultural context. It was also in this period, perhaps under the influence of Greek beliefs, that Judaism developed a notion of the afterlife as something more than the shadowy existence alluded to in the Hebrew Bible, including the notion that the dead are judged on the basis of their actions and rewarded or punished accordingly. Nickelsburg 2006 and Setzer 2004 offer examinations of different early Jewish notions of afterlife and resurrection, while Segal 2004 surveys the evidence within a much broader history of the afterlife in premedieval times. Also included in this section is Stern 2001, a study of how Jews perceived and measured time in general, which is a topic that intersects with religious belief and practice in various ways.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity. New York: Crossroad, 1984.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A survey of ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature that examines the connections between Jewish apocalyptic literature and early Christianity.
Find this resource:
Horsley, Richard A. Scribes, Visionaries, and the Politics of the Second Temple Judea. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work focuses on the books of Ben Sira, 1 Enoch, and Daniel and places them in the Hellenistic contexts of their composition, with particular attention given to the role of scribes, orality, and writing in the Second Temple period.
Find this resource:
Nickelsburg, George W. E. Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book examines the concepts of resurrection and eternal life through a variety of texts, including the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament.
Find this resource:
Segal, Alan. Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. New York: Doubleday, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although this investigation of views of the afterlife extends well beyond Second Temple Judaism, the chapters on Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan and classical Greece are also useful for those interested in locating ancient Jewish belief within the greater cultural context of the Near East in Antiquity and Late Antiquity.
Find this resource:
Setzer, Claudia J. Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition. Boston: Brill, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Setzer examines the development of conceptions of resurrection in early Judaism and early Christianity and the ways in which these conceptions functioned to create and maintain social identities and community boundaries.
Find this resource:
Stern, Sacha. Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE—Tenth Century CE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although the scope of this book extends far beyond the Second Temple period, it remains an invaluable resource for the Jewish calendar in early Judaism. Stern examines the ways in which the calendar affects social identity and social history, and from the Second Temple period discusses calendars from the Bible, Qumran, Philo, Josephus, and other sources.
Find this resource:
Sociology of Early Judaism

It was not just the beliefs and religious practices of Jews that changed in the Second Temple period: all aspects of their social existence changed as well—the nature of personal identity, Gender, Family and Social Interaction. Although they are constrained by the nature of the sources, usually reflecting the perspective of male, elite authors, social historians have begun to try to understand the social life of early Jews—to chart the emergence of new forms of Group Identity to fill in the experience of women, and to analyze the nature of social interaction—in light not just of the literary sources but also of the inscriptional record, and often with guidance from sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.

Group Identity

In this time period, competing social and political forces led to a multiplicity of ways of establishing one’s self-identity. Cohen 1999 and Collins 2000 examine how Jewish self-identity was composed, with an emphasis on Diaspora Jews in the latter work.

Cohen, Shaye J. D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of essays that explore the question of what it meant to be considered a “Jew” in the Second Temple period and early centuries of the Common Era.
Find this resource:
Collins, John J. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book looks at the formation of group identity in Late Antiquity and the specific ways in which diasporic Jews constructed their identity while living in non-Jewish social contexts.
Find this resource:
Gender

Since writings from this time period were generally composed by men, the experience of women is often overlooked; these works focus on presenting the lives of women in the Second Temple period. Ilan 1996 offers an overview of the lives of women in Late Antiquity Jewish society, while Kraemer 2010 examines what can be said given the sources of information that are available to us. Brooten 1982 explores the role of women in synagogues, and Taylor 2003 is an in-depth examination of the women of the Therapeutae/Therapeutrides, an Egyptian Jewish sect described by Philo.

Brooten, Bernadette J. Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Spanning the period between the Second Temple and Late Antiquity, this book draws on inscriptional evidence to probe the role of women as Jewish communal leaders.
Find this resource:
Ilan, Tal. Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This work on the role of women in Jewish society in Late Antiquity provides a vital and often-neglected perspective on the role of women in the history of this period.
Find this resource:
Kraemer, Ross S. Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kraemer explores what can and cannot be said about the religious experience of early Jewish and Christian women, in the context of broader Mediterranean society and in light of recent gender studies.
Find this resource:
Taylor, Joan E. Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s “Therapeutae” Reconsidered. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the few monographs to undertake a detailed study of the Therapeutae/Therapeutrides mentioned in Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa, this volume examines Philo’s accounts of this group and focuses on investigating the role of women.
Find this resource:
Family and Social Interaction

Family life and social dynamics were a major part of daily life in this time period. The essays in Cohen 1993 explore the web of relationships that constituted a Late Antique family, while Schwartz 2010 offers a recent attempt to deepen our understanding of how Jews in a Hellenistic-Roman context interacted with those outside the family structure.

Cohen, Shaye J. D., ed. The Jewish Family in Antiquity. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book presents articles from different scholars on a variety of topics relating to the family in Late Antiquity, including marriage, the relationships between parents and children and between slaves and masters, and more.
Find this resource:
Schwartz, Seth. Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An anthropologically oriented study that examines the relationship between Late Antique Jews and the Greco-Roman (or rather “Mediterranean”) social milieu in which they lived, focusing on the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the writings of Josephus, and the Palestinian Talmud.
Find this resource:
Judeophobia and Conversion to Judaism

The Greco-Roman period saw the first stirrings of anti-Semitism, or Judeophobia, as this phenomenon has recently been labeled, which included stereotyping of the Jews as misogynist and malevolent, ridiculing of their religious practices, and occasional and deadly bursts of anti-Jewish violence. The earliest known examples of Judeophobia are from Hellenized Egypt, but the phenomenon soon spread throughout the Hellenistic and Roman world and laid the groundwork for later Christian anti-Semitism that continued earlier stereotypes even as it added new theological dimensions. Gager 1983 and Schäfer 1997 offer overviews of Judeophobia in this period. Counterbalancing this evidence is the fact that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the Greco-Roman period was by no means always conflict laden—this period was also a time during which many non-Jews were drawn to or converted to Judaism, as is examined in Goodman 1994. Feldman 1993 considers favorable as well as unfavorable attitudes toward the Jews, in a nearly exhaustive overview of the evidence.

Feldman, Louis H. Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A comprehensive review of the attitudes of non-Jews toward Jews in the ancient world, both positive and negative, Feldman considers the situation both in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora. The author has been criticized for his naïve treatment of the sources, but there is not any work more comprehensive than this in its treatment of the relevant sources.
Find this resource:
Gager, John G. The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Gager examines Greco-Roman attitudes toward Jews in the Second Temple period as well as Christian attitudes in the first few centuries CE.
Find this resource:
Goodman, Martin. Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A printing of a series of lectures delivered by Goodman at Oxford University, this volume looks at proselytizing and conversion in Judaism both in the late Second Temple period and in the Talmudic period.
Find this resource:
Schäfer, Peter. Judeophobia: Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schäfer provides a new look at the evidence for hostility toward the Jews in the Greco-Roman world, along with the attributes through which non-Jews of this period constructed their conceptions of Jewish identity.
Find this resource: