What is it about?
This book review concerns a monograph which explores possbile intersections between beliefs in demons and angels and scribal culture in the early Hellenistic period, mainly Enochic literature and Jubilees.
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Why is it important?
The book review provides a critical appraisal of hypotheses about ancient Jewish literature in the early Hellenistic period.
Perspectives
I found it interesting to encounter a synchronic focus on early Jewish literature in the third to mid-second centuries BCE, which differs from scholarly habits of a teleological approach to 'pseudepigrapha'. And yet there are cases in which diachronic perspectives would also have helped to situate certain features of language, authorship, and even angelology and demonology on a possibly longer continuum.
Albert Hogeterp
University of the Free State
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, written by Annette Yoshiko Reed, Journal for the Study of Judaism, May 2020, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15700631-12511292.
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