Ancient Jew Review

New podcast episode! Mike Motia interviews Caroline Johnson Hodge about The God of This House: Christian Domestic Cult Before Constantine. newbooksnetwork.com/the-god-of-t...

Email ancientjewreview@gmail.com with your draft or pitch!

Before we know it the Fall semester will be here. Did you try something new in the classroom? Consider sharing it with colleagues in Ancient Jew Review's August pedagogy series. Short essays that share activities, assignments, or philosophies that enhance teaching about the ancient world.

New podcast episode! Mike Motia interviews Andrew Tobolowsky about Israel and its Heirs in Late Antiquity. newbooksnetwork.com/israel-and-i...

New Books in Late Antiquity episode! Mike Motia interviews Stefanie Lenk about her book, Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity. newbooksnetwork.com/roman-identi...

The Case for Retraction of Academic Authentications of Forged Fragments — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW This position paper issues a call for editors and publishers with oversight over peer-reviewed publications of inauthentic post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments to embark on the processes that…

Jonathan Klawans issues a call for retraction of publications using forged Dead Sea Scrolls.

New Books in Late Antiquity episode! Mike Motia interviews Krista Dalton about her book, How Rabbis Became Experts. newbooksnetwork.com/how-rabbis-b...

Divine Names and Numinous Power: Onomastic Tools to Help and Harm — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW Power in the Name contributes to this growing body of work unbeholden to the myopic strictures of materialism and (more broadly) scientism by comparatively analyzing examples of humans changing…

Today on AJR, Joseph L. Kimmel writes about his new book, Power in the Name: A Comparative Analysis of Onomastic Invocations (De Gruyter, 2025). Our latest article in our #publication series!

Review | The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source, from Creation to the Promised Land — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW Ultimately, Feldman is doing two things in this book: she is making a source-critical argument about the Pentateuch, and she is translating P. These are two separate, and significant, tasks. They’re…

Sarah Shectman reviews Liane Feldman's translation of the Priestly Source for the Ancient Jew Review. www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2025/5/18/book-review-the-consuming-fire

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW Paula Fredriksen begins Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years with a question: considering the variety of gods and local deities present in both the ancient Mediterranean and the…

Today on AJR, Joseph Foltz reviews Paula Fredriksen's Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2024).

New Books in Late Antiquity episode! Mike Motia interviews Andrew Griebeler about his book, Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean. newbooksnetwork.com/botanical-ic...

Introducing the Text Lab: Helping Students Engage with Ancient Sources — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW This article introduces a classroom activity called a Text Lab, which helps students engage critically with ancient texts while familiarizing them with the tools and scholarship necessary to analyze…

New teaching resource! Alexander Chantziantoniou and Isaac Soon share their "Text Lab" approach to teaching critical text study. Including a handy pdf template!

New podcast episode! Lydia Bremer-McCollum interviews Monika Amsler about The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture. newbooksnetwork.com/the-babyloni...

New podcast episode! Michael Motia interviews Cam Grey about Living With Risk in the Late Roman World (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025). newbooksnetwork.com/living-with-...

From Dinner to Donor: the Social Exchanges at the Heart of Rabbinic Expertise — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “This book plunges us deep into the social relationships that made the production of rabbinic expertise possible. Weaving together accounts of tangible material support with sites of contact between…

New publication preview of Krista Dalton's How Rabbis Became Experts (Princeton University Press, 2025). Out TODAY!

New podcast! Michael Motia interviews Mara Nicosia about Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies. newbooksnetwork.com/syriac-lexis...

Israelite Religion A panoramic, thousand-year history of Israelite religion, from the Iron Age to the birth of Judaism, by a renowned biblical scholar   From its Iron Age begi...

You can preorder Karel van der Toorn's Israelite Religion: From Tribal Beginnings to Scribal Legacy here. Published NEXT WEEK from Yale University Press on April 15th 2025.

Publication Preview | Writing a History of Israelite Religion — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “Cultural difference does not condemn us to incomprehension. It forces us to go beyond our own cultural horizons in an effort to make sense of what is going on in the world of others. Ancient…

New Publication Preview! Karel van der Toorn introduces Israelite Religion: From Tribal Beginnings to Scribal Legacy (Yale University Press, 2025). Available for preorder now with an April 15th publication date.

The Nominating Committee of the North American Patristics Society is still accepting nominations for positions on the board and other committees. Help shape the future of our society! Self-nominations welcome! #NAPS2025

Want to learn more from Dr. Rafael Neis? They will be teaching a mini course with Judaism Unbound on "Untangling Tselem Elohim" on Tuesdays April 22nd-May 6th. For information, visit: www.judaismunbound.com/2025-courses....

Author Response | Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “I view my book not only as a celebration of resemblance and its nonsensical relations, but also an interruption of an exceptionalized and recurring image: that of God. The play of resemblances that…

Rafael Neis offers a response to panelists, highlighting the unique position of both author and artist.

The Theory of the Raven — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “The book, in re-centering this vibrancy, enacts a refusal of closure by demanding that we remain open to the persistence of heteronormative and androcentric patriarchy alongside queerness,…

Sarah Pierce Taylor explores the theoretical framing of Neis's When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven.

New podcast episode featuring Sarah Bassett's Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking with Mike Motia at the New Books Network.

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash: A short response to Rafael Rachel Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “What does a human look like? What does a raven look like? What happens when you look at them for long enough to see something like yourself? And then you look even longer? –and there is something…

"What does it mean for the offspring of a human to look like a raven?" Mike Chin explores the images with Neis's When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven.

The Method-Image — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “Critical to this argument, and worthy of further reflection, is Rafael’s deployment of their own artistic practice to communicate their book’s ideas and to produce a meta-argument about history and…

Roland Betancourt applies an art historian's lens to the artwork within Neis's When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven.

Rabbinic World-Making and Imagining Multiplicity — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “In When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven , Neis uncovers a world of reproductive uncertainty, making a convincing case for taking the rabbis’ scenarios and debates at face value – as constitutive of…

Next Andrea Dara Cooper explores aspects of rabbinic world-making through the lens of science fiction.

Classification for Networks of Care — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “Rafe’s book invites us to revisit what it meant in the rabbinic world to take care of another being, to rely on and be relied upon, and to be enmeshed with another being physically and psychically.”

Join us over the next few weeks as we publish the review panel of Rafe Neis's When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven. First up is Beth Berkowitz who extends Neis's work to networks of kinship and care.

Ancient Jew Review | Substack Ancient Jew Review is a sub­scrip­tion-free dig­i­tal journal for the study of ancient Jews and their neighbors. ancientjewreview.com. Click to read Ancient Jew Review, a Substack publication. Launche...

You can now read Ancient Jew Review on Substack! ancientjewreview.substack.com

Review | In the Beginning Was the State: Divine Violence in the Hebrew Bible — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW “Ophir insists that he is not simply claiming the modern sovereign as a “secularized political concept,” but something deeper: a deification of the state itself, as the one concept that we cannot…

Today Emily Filler reviews Adi Ophir's In the Beginning Was the State: Divine Violence in the Hebrew Bible (Fordham University Press, 2023).

My Next Guest Needs an Introduction: Proudly Presenting “Pseudo-Hegesippus” — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW The exceptional influence and popularity enjoyed by DEH from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, and its critical interface with Jewish historiography as a work both based on and source of …

Today Carson Bay "introduces" Pseudo-Hegesippus to the scholarly community.