Eva Mroczek, “The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity” (Oxford UP, 2016)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Dec 23, 2016 · 49m

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to revealed books not found in our canon. Despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, Bible and a bibliographic one, book. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2016) suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged. In many Jewish texts, there is an awareness of a vast…