Examines Judaism in Palestine throughout the Hellenistic period, from Alexander the Great's conquest in 334 BC to its capture by the Arabs in AD 636.

This book contains studies of the social, cultural, and religious history of the Jews in the Graeco-Roman world. Some of the sixteen contributors are specialists in Jewish history, others in classics. They tackle from different angles the extent to which Jews in this period differed from other peoples in the Mediterranean region, and how much Jewish evidence can be used for the history of the wider classical world. The authors make extensive use not only of types of evidence familiar to classicists, such as inscriptions and the writing of Josephus, but also Jewish religious literature, including rabbinic texts. The various studies demonstrate that, although Jews lived to some extent apart from others and with distinctive customs, in many ways this showed the cultural presuppositions and preoccupations of their gentile contemporaries. The book aims to encourage wider use of the Jewish evidence by classicists and will be important for all students of the classical world.

The book addresses critical issues of the formation and development of Jewish identity in the late Second Temple period. How could Jewish identity be defined? What about the status of women and the image of 'others'? And what about its ongoing influence in early Christianity?

'I am a Christian' is the confession of the martyrs of early Christian texts and, no doubt, of many others; but what did this confession mean, and how was early Christian identity constructed? This book is a highly original exploration of how a sense of being 'a Christian', or of 'Christian identity', was shaped within the setting of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world. Contemporary discussions of identity provide the background to a careful study of early Christian texts from the first two centuries. Judith Lieu shows that there were similarities and differences in the ways Jews and others were thinking about themselves, and asks what made early Christianity distinctive.

First Published in 1995, the main emphasis of this book is on the political history of the Jews in Palestine, where "political" is to be understood not as the mere succession of rulers and battles but as the interaction between political activity and social, economic and religious circumstances. A particular concern is the investigation of social and economic conditions in the history of Palestinian Judaism.

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