Mira Balberg, however, points to the shifting attitudes towards forgetfulness and forgetting as a pivotal moment in the history of the rabbinic movement, and in Fractured Tablets she offers a fresh new reading of the rabbinic construction of forgetting. The rabbis shaped their subject as a fallible and often confused human being, bumbling around the world, trying to observe God’s commandments.
Read MoreBook Note | Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism
Reed’s book highlights what might be finally termed a true period of the scribes: a time during which literature was produced not only by scribes but about them and for them, highlighting their special status and privileged lineage.
Read MoreBook Note | Pantheon
For students of the rabbis, Roman religion is often thought of as a constant. It is a yardstick against which we measure changing conceptions and ideas of the rabbis. But we would do well to remember that the period in which the rabbis, writ large, were active, is one of the headiest periods of religious change and upheaval in the Roman Empire.
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