Last semester I taught a graduate seminar on Race, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (see here). As a class project we began to compile a relevant bibliography and provide some minimal annotations. That bibliography is on Zotero (as a public group) under the title RaceReligionEthnicityAntiquity (link here). This is the first time I have done anything like this, so I invite you to add to, improve, or otherwise comment on it.
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New PDFs
It is that time of year: CV updating, annual reports, and general housekeeping. Toward that end I just added two new PDF articles to my Research page. One is an article entitled “Jew or Judaean,” and the other, “What Does Love Have to Do With It? Sibling Relationships among Judean Jews in the First-Third Centuries CE.”
Beggar at the Banquet
At this year’s Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting I will be presenting two papers. The first of these, entitled “Beggar at the Banquet,” will be given in a joint session sponsored by the Meals in the Greco-Roman World Section and the Meals in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Consultation (S23-330). The topic of the session is “Meals and Justice.”
In this paper, I explore rabbinic discussions, primarily stories, that involve giving food to the poor against both the reality of poverty in the ancient world and the most famous of such stories, Odysseus’s appearance in the disguise of a beggar at the banquet of suitors for his wife Penelope in books 17-18 of the Odyssey. The rabbinic stories fall into three broad categories that I chart on a spectrum from least to most “intense”: incidental encounters with beggars seeking alms (for or in the form of food); beggars who come to a householder’s field or door; and finally the few rabbinic stories that depict beggars at a banquet. Unlike the story in the Odyssey, these latter narratives in particular recognize the importance of giving alms to the truly poor, not just to those of the same social class who are seen as temporarily down on their luck. Like the Odyssey, though, these stories hardly recognize the humanity of the poor and treat them instead instrumentally, as presenting opportunities or tests to the wealthy.
Sibling Relationships among Jews in Antiquity
A new essay of mine just appeared: “What Does Love Have to Do with It? Sibling Relationships among Judean Jews in the First-Third Centuries CE,” in Ehe-Familie-Gemeinde (eds. Dorothee Dettinger and Christof Landmesser), 103-16. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlangsanstalt, 2014.
PDF available here.
New Course: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean
Yes, I have the privilege of teaching two new courses this fall. Herein is the Syllabus for my graduate seminar. The description is below:
The terms religion, ethnicity, and (less frequently) race are often used in discussions of the ancient Mediterranean. In recent years, however, they have been coming under increasing interrogation: Do the ancients themselves think in such categories? Even if they do not, can the categories be analytically useful for modern scholars? This is intended to be a deeply comparative course to which students bring their own sets of expertise in order to create a cross-cultural conversation.
If you have any thoughts, please let me know before it is too late!