Historical assessment of the Maccabean Revolt and the early Hasmonean monarchy poses an increasingly complex conundrum. While few scholars reject the essential facticity of the main figures and events, there has been a sea-change in modern assessments of the ancient literary evidence on which historians rely. Much recent scholarship focuses on how profoundly content and form were shaped by the authors’ motivations, ideology, rhetorical strategies and literary precedents. In concert with new archaeological evidence, this has led to a recognition of a number of political and social improbabilities and incongruities, and to hypotheses of authorial fabrications. Increasingly, reading the ancient accounts compels choosing between a perspective of factual reliability and engineered re-imagining.
How can we make sense of the implications of this new scholarship? To what extent does reevaluation and consideration of all evidence, literary and archaeological, from within and beyond Judea, affect our reconstruction of events? How should we integrate the breadth of this material and its attendant historical revisions into our readings of the ancient narrative accounts? What new insights into ancient narrators and their strategies might result? This conference will probe many of these questions, focusing especially on the era encompassing the two generations between the death of Judas and the reign of his nephew John Hyrcanus, c. 160-104 BCE.
Michael Satlow, Brown University, offers reflections on the 9th Enoch Seminar, which was held in Camaldoli, Italy on June 18-23, 2017.
"A couple of months ago I attended a meeting of the Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy. The conference, which included an extraordinary range of scholars, grappled with the meaning of the word and concept of “Torah” from the biblical period through Late Antiquity. There were a mix of session topics and formats and I have no intention of trying to summarize the many papers and areas of disagreement. The publication of the papers is being organized by William Schniedewind and Jason Zurawski. I will focus here on my own contributions to the conference and one important area of what I thought was consensus...." [click here to read more]
The Sense(s) of History: Ancient Apocalypses and their Temporalities
The main aim of the colloquium is to explore the varying historicities and temporalities present in ancient apocalyptic literature as a means to enhance our understanding of its historical and religious significance in terms of ontologies, epistemologies, and socio-political imaginations. To achieve this goal the colloquium will feature not only papers dealing with the better-known Jewish and Christian apocalypses of the Second Temple period and of Late Antiquity. Other ancient religious and cultural traditions will be part of the conversation and specific attention will be paid to the current and very lively debates that are taking place within anthropology of history. The 6th Enoch Seminar Reception at the SBL, held on the evening of November 18, will include a concluding panel of the colloquium.
Chair: Giovanni Bazzana (Harvard) Date:November 16-18, 2017 Location: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Major speakers include Judith Newman (University of Toronto), Loren Stuckenbruck (University of München), among many others. A provisional schedule and slate of speakers is available on the Colloquium webpage.
