Gender and Second Temple Judaism examines the myriad constructions of gender in Second Temple Judaism including early Christianity. The chapters examine the state of the field and methodology and hone in on specific texts.

Women were present at historical events, and it is not only their presence but also their significance at these events which should be recognized. Tal Ilan seeks to discover women in the public spaces and main events of Second Temple Judaism. Ilan investigates women s association with the Pharisees and other sects. She analyzes women s roles in the writings of Josephus, Ben Sira, and other important sources. Furthermore she discusses famous women like Beruriah and Berenice. Also, the Dead Sea Scrolls play an important part in her study.

Most studies about women, Jewish and other, are usually confined to the domestic sphere: the home, the family, the bed. Yet women were present at all historical events, and it is not only their presence but also their significance for these events which should be recognized. All the sources seem to militate against an approach which assumes the presence of women at public events. When dealing with politics, war and religion they ignore women; when dealing with women, they confine themselves to their prescribed region of the home.In this book Tal Ilan seeks to discover women in public places and at the main events of Second Temple Judaism. The primary principle guiding her work is that if by chance women are mentioned in sources, they should not be treated as a means for explaining the event but rather as an end in themselves. Thus sources showing women as remote or obscure turn out to yield much relevant material.Tal Ilan investigates women's association with the Pharisees and other sects, and analyses women's role in the writings of Josephus, Ben Sira and other important sources. Furthermore she presents us with new insights into famous women: Shelamzion Alexandra, Beruriah, Berenice and others. Special space is devoted to the importance of the Judaean Desert Documents for women's history.

The rule that exempts women from rituals that need to be performed at specific times (so-called timebound, positive commandments) has served for centuries to stabilize Jewish gender. It has provided a rationale for women's centrality at home and their absence from the synagogue. Departing from dominant popular and scholarly views, Elizabeth Shanks Alexander argues that the rule was not conceived to structure women's religious lives, but rather became a tool for social engineering only after it underwent shifts in meaning during its transmission. Alexander narrates the rule's complicated history, establishing the purposes for which it was initially formulated and the shifts in interpretation that led to its being perceived as a key marker of Jewish gender. At the end of her study, Alexander points to women's exemption from particular rituals (Shema, tefillin and Torah study), which, she argues, are better places to look for insight into rabbinic gender.

Judaism Since Gender offers a radically new concept of Jewish Studies, staking out new intellectual terrain and redefining the discipline as an intrinsically feminist practice. The question of how knowledge is gendered has been discussed by philosophers and feminists for years, yet is still new to many scholars of Judaism. Judaism Since Gender illuminates a crucial debate among intellectuals both within and outside the academy, and ultimately overturns the belief that scholars of Judaism are still largely oblivious of recent developments in the study of gender. Offering a range of provocations--Jewish men as sissies, Jesus as transvestite, the problem of eroticizing Holocaust narratives--this timely collection pits the joys of transgression against desires for cultural wholeness.

William Loader here investigates the Dead Sea Scrolls, mining every document of potential relevance for understanding ancient attitudes towards sexuality, aside from the biblical writings and there are many such documents. They include the Temple Scroll, 4QMMT, the Damascus Document, and a number of legal, liturgical, wisdom, and exegetical documents. These texts treat a wide range of matters pertaining to sexuality, from ritual and cultic concerns to visions of human community and family in future expectation. Far from the common view that the writers of the Scrolls held a low view of sexuality and marriage, Loader concludes that most of these sources reflect an affirmative stance towards sex and marriage within a framework of clear boundaries marking out where sex did and did not belong. / The Dead Sea Scrolls on Sexuality offers the first comprehensive treatment of this subject and comprises both detailed exegetical discussion of each work and a synthetic analysis of themes. The attention to detail displayed and the helpful summaries included make this book an indispensable resource for both scholar and general reader.

Gender differences between men and women are not just a matter of sexual differentiation; the roles that men and women play are also socially and culturally determined, in ancient Israel and post-biblical Judaism as in every other context. That is the theme of these ten studies. The first part of the volume examines the gender definitions and roles that can be identified in the Hebrew Bible's legal and ritual texts. The second part uses archaeological and anthropological perspectives to interrogate the biblical text and the society that formed it on issues of gender. The third part explores similar gender issues in a range of material outside the Hebrew Bible, from the Apocrypha through Josephus and Philo down to mediaeval Jewish marriage contracts (ketubbot). Among the questions here discussed are: Why are men, but not women, required to bathe in order to achieve ritual purity after incurring certain types of defilement? What understandings of masculinity and femininity underlie the regulations about incest? Was ancient Israel simply a patriarchal society, or were there more complex dynamics of power in which women as well as men were involved? What do post-biblical re-interpretations of the female figures of Wisdom and Folly in Proverbs 1-9 suggest about heterosexual masculinity? And what kind of rights did mediaeval Middle-Eastern Jewish women have within their marriage relationships?