OVERVIEWS

The sheer quantity and diversity of extant Jewish literature from this period perhaps acts as a deterrent against the production of broad synthetic overviews; certainly, studies of specific authors and texts are far more common. However, three large-scale synthesising works of recent years deserve mention. F. Siegert, Einleitung in die hellenistisch-jüdische Literatur: Apokrypha, Pseudepigrapha und Fragmente verlorener Autorenwerke (2016) provides a solid scholarly introduction to the whole corpus and must surely count as the definitive starting-point for anyone new to the study of these texts. S.A. Adams, Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era (2020) examines how an admirably broad range of Greek-writing Jewish authors engaged with Greek literary genres. Adams adopts an appropriately flexible view of genre: texts ‘participate’ in genre rather than being constituted or constrained by it: genres are themselves fluid, evolving and unfixed; and, as Adams repeatedly insists, literary texts very often participate in more than one genre. The favoured model is one of generic prototypes: certain precursor texts are taken by authors as pinnacular examples of a genre and illustrative of generic appropriateness, while others are sidelined or overlooked and, while the general cultural prestige of a text may make it more or less likely to be taken as prototypical, ultimately the choice of prototypes will vary from author to author. The study highlights the striking breadth of Greek genres in which Jewish authors participate, including epic (or epyllion), tragedy, oracular texts, commentaries, history, philosophy and biography, and notes that many surviving Jewish texts demonstrate extensive and sophisticated knowledge of a range of prototypical models and genre expectations. It also identifies marked tendencies within Jewish literature of this period towards generic blending and the creation of multi-genre texts, and it includes insightful comments on how engagement with Jewish as well as Greek prototypes shapes the surviving works. The book has much to say about the impact of the inequalities of cultural power that characterised Hellenistic and Roman rule, and it also, unusually, manages to fulfil a double function: it can serve as an excellent introduction to many texts that may be unfamiliar to Classicists while simultaneously going far beyond the limits of an introductory work in advancing an intellectually interesting thesis.

K. Berthelot, Jews and their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel (2021) considers a similarly broad range of literature, going beyond Greek-language works to consider rabbinic texts. The book is the fruit of the ERC-funded project ‘Judaism and Rome’, which also generated the excellent Judaism and Rome website, Judaism and Rome | Re-thinking Judaism’s Encounter with the Roman Empire, offering reliable modern translations of and short essays on a wide range of ancient evidence of all types concerning Roman imperial narratives and provincial responses to them, and functioning as an excellent teaching resource. The book’s thesis is that certain aspects of Roman self-understanding posed fundamental challenges to Jewish subjects of Roman rule because of their similarity to parallel tendencies in Jewish self-understanding, specifically the notions of Rome as an empire backed by the divine, of Romans as the givers of superior laws to the nations, and of Roman citizenship as a construct that breaks the connection between citizenship and descent and constitutes a widely-dispersed community of citizens bound by a particular law-code. Jewish texts of the Roman period respond to these problematic conceptions in a range of ways, but perhaps most persistently by suggesting comparability and rivalry between Jews and Romans. This is most visible in the famous rabbinic conception of Rome as Esau, the ‘evil twin’ of Jacob-Israel, but other expressions of the comparability of Romans and Jews are in evidence in earlier Jewish texts too. It might have been nice to see more expansive discussion of how these conceptions, which stress the similarity of Rome and Israel even as they insist on Jewish superiority, coexisted, sometimes in the same texts, with other formulations that stressed not comparability but radical alterity (e.g. Rome as the ‘evil kingdom’ or as Babylon). Nonetheless, Berthelot’s analysis is highly persuasive and deeply illuminative of how one colonised group responded to the authoritative claims of their imperial masters.

THE SEPTUAGINT

Scholarship on the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible continues to form an important foundation for the study of Jewish Hellenism more broadly. While strictly speaking the word ‘Septuagint’ only applies to the translation of the Torah/Pentateuch that was supposedly completed by 72 Jerusalem priests at the initiative of Ptolemy II, in modern scholarship the term tends to be expanded to cover the most widely-attested Greek versions of all the Hebrew biblical books. Traditionally, Septuagint scholarship has focused on several core areas of interest: the peculiarities of ‘Septuagint Greek’ and its degree of ‘Hebraism’; the relationship between the Greek translations and the formation of the biblical canon; and the significance of discrepancies between the received Hebrew texts and the Septuagint versions (potentially very important, because our texts of the Septuagint are significantly older than the Masoretic texts that form the basis of modern Hebrew bibles). These themes continue to stimulate contributions, but new focuses have recently emerged too. We have seen new interest in the sociocultural environment suggested by the Septuagint texts, a breaking down of the old notion of ‘Septuagint Greek’ with the growing appreciation of the range and variety of literary registers in different Septuagint books, and an interest in the relationship between the Greek of the Septuagint versions and various forms of literary and documentary Greek attested elsewhere (for a fuller survey of recent trends in Septuagint scholarship see W.A. Ross, ‘The Past Decade in Septuagint Research, 2012–2021’, Currents in Biblical Research 21 [2022], 33–77). Firstly, good news for the potentially perplexed Classicist: some recent contributions provide excellent introductions to the field of Septuagint studies. Two recent monographs offer readable initiations: E.L. Gallagher, Translation of the Seventy: History, Reception, and Contemporary Use of the Septuagint (2021), and G.R. Lanier and W.R. Ross, The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters (2021). Both these books seem primarily oriented towards providing an introduction to those engaged in the study of Christianity, which can bring its own set of assumptions and tendencies (Christianising assumptions are a common blight on scholarship on ancient Judaism); nonetheless, they are both accessible and interesting, and Gallagher in particular has some provocative points to make on the reception of the Septuagint. Introductory essays of various kinds are also provided in two recent handbooks, A.G. Salvesen and T.M. Law (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint (2021), and W.A. Ross and W.E. Glenny (edd.), The T&T Clark Handbook of Septuagint Research (2021), both of which collect essays by leading scholars on important themes. The best place to stay abreast of developments in the field is the Journal of Septuagint and Cognate Studies.

One of the most significant recent developments in the field is the beginning of the publication of Mohr Siebeck’s Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint. Only one volume, edited by E. Bons (2020), is currently available, of a proposed four. The work provides extensive commentary on selected key Greek terms in the Septuagint: insofar as it is possible to extract a lesson from a lexicon, perhaps the key lesson is how innovative, and ultimately influential, Septuagintal Greek usage would prove to be. Repeatedly, the lexicon illustrates how the difficulty of rendering Hebrew terms into Greek led to peculiarities when compared with usage of the same Greek terms elsewhere. Such peculiarities would influence the styles of later Jewish and Christian authors. Eventually, the Christianisation of the Roman Empire brought tremendous prestige to the Septuagint, as the principal means through which Greek speakers accessed the ‘Old Testament’. In this way, the peculiar and marginal Greek usages of the Septuagint would become widespread and mainstream. In sum, while we have long recognised that the translation of the biblical books into Greek transformed the biblical books, we are now much more aware of how that same process also transformed the Greek language. These latter observations suggest that reception is a major element of current Septuagint Studies. G. Dorival, The Septuagint from Alexandria to Constantinople: Canon, New Testament, Church Fathers, Catenae (2021) provides an important survey of the Christian reception of the translation, asking key questions about the extent of the Christianisation of the Greek Bible (rather limited, according to Dorival), its role in the formation of Christian identity and its relationship to other versions of the Hebrew Bible in circulation in the early Christian centuries. Finally, one significant instance of Septuagint reception is itself a vital ancient Jewish text, the Letter of Aristeas. A pseudonymous epistle supposedly written by a culturally prominent Greek Judeophile, the Letter combines the Septuagint’s ‘origin story’ as a prestigious royal translation project with a symposiastic philosophical discourse between Ptolemy II and the Septuagint translators. L.M. White and G.A. Keddie, Jewish Fictional Letters from Hellenistic Egypt: The Epistle of Aristeas and Related Literature (2018) provides a new English version together with helpful notes and commentary on this complex paraseptuagintal text, an illuminating window into Jewish literary culture in the Hellenistic world.

PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA

The first-century philosopher and exegete Philo of Alexandria was the most illustrious of the many Alexandrian Jewish intellectual luminaries of this cross-cultural period, demonstrating greater comfort and familiarity with Greek literary traditions than perhaps any other Jewish author from antiquity. Traditionally, Philo scholarship has sought to make sense of this author’s substantial intellectual legacy within Christianity, as well as his careful and complex negotiation of Jewish and Greek traditions; more recent work has engaged more closely with the impact specifically of Rome and Roman culture on his thought. The trend was provocatively initiated by M. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography (2018). Niehoff’s central argument is that Philo’s sojourn in Rome in connection with his embassy to Caligula fundamentally impacted his thought. Prior to travelling to Italy, Philo wrote Platonist exegeses of biblical works in a characteristically Alexandrian allegorising style targeted squarely at Jewish readers, but later he would write works addressed to a broader readership that resonated with contemporary Roman tastes in Stoicism and historiography. An attempt to study Philo’s intellectual development closely, paying serious attention to Rome as a cultural as well as a political force, is very welcome, and there is no doubt that Niehoff’s book is a significant contribution. Nevertheless, reservations remain. Chiefly, the dating of Philo’s works remains largely speculative, and there is a real danger of circularity in Niehoff’s approach. A few works contain internal grounds for at least a relative dating (e.g. On the Rationality of Animals explicitly presents Philo as an old man and so must be late; the same treatise and On the Special Laws contain what may – but also may not – be references to Philo’s embassy, and so might also be dated late). However, most of Niehoff’s judgements about dating derive from her perception of how Stoically-inclined any given series of works is. Thus, Stoicism is taken as a marker of late authorship, and then the fact that the ‘late’ works are marked by Stoicism is taken as an indication of how much of an impact Philo’s visit to Rome had on his thought. Sceptical readers may find it suspiciously convenient that one of the very few firm events in Philo’s biography should turn out to have been so determinative for his reconstructed intellectual development, and may also note that one did not need to travel to Rome to encounter Stoicism in Philo’s world. Nevertheless, all chronological reservations aside, the book serves as an excellent demonstration of Philo’s value as a witness to provincial engagements with Greek and Roman culture in the Early Principate.

Philo’s complex entanglement with the ‘classical’ is foregrounded in an edited volume, F. Alesse and L. de Luca (edd.), Philo of Alexandria and Greek Myth: Narratives, Allegories, and Arguments (2019). The contributions are wide-ranging and offer fascinating diverse insights into Philo’s engagements with Greek myth. On the one hand he can denigrate it as a source of profound error, but on the other he can employ it as a means of instruction in virtue and edifying exemplarity. Of particular note are the contributions by M. Alesso, who examines Philo’s simultaneous allegorical double-exegesis of the Bible and Greek myth in the case of Scylla, and by G.S. Gasparro, who reads Philo as a comparativist ‘historian of religion’. One further worthwhile consideration for Classicists and Roman historians, whose engagement with Philo’s corpus often begins and ends with his historical treatises In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, is that the rest of his works are increasingly accessible thanks to Brill’s ongoing Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series (edd. G.E. Sterling and D.T. Runia), which has already produced several high-quality volumes that do much to demystify individual treatises. Among Philo’s non-historical works, the one perhaps of the greatest potential interest to Roman historians, though largely neglected by them thus far, is On Joseph. Because of the biblical patriarch’s distinguished service at the court of Pharaoh, Philo reads Joseph as the archetypal homo politicus, and his treatise reads almost like a biblically informed guide to how to be a good provincial governor. It can thus profitably be read alongside In Flaccum, which provides the corresponding negative exemplum of bad Roman governance. F. Oertelt, Herrscherideal und Herrschaftskritik bei Philo von Alexandria (2015), which reads On Joseph and the second book of On Dreams carefully in the light of both Jewish and Greek traditions of thinking about statecraft, offers a compelling way into this intriguing treatise.

FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS

Scholarship on the works of the historian Flavius Josephus has been a major growth area in recent years, and the inundation shows no signs of abating. Only the briefest of samplings is possible here. While not a study of Josephus stricto sensu, S.N. Mason, A History of the Jewish War (2016) sees perhaps the most influential Josephus scholar of our times attempting to reconstruct ‘what really happened’ in the First Jewish Revolt. As one would expect, it includes many sophisticated and at times disconcerting reflections on the perils of using Josephus’ Jewish War as a source and also exposes just how deeply in thrall to Josephus’ interpretation of events modern scholarship remains. (The book has proved somewhat controversial, stimulating an edited volume in response: A. Giambrone [ed.], Rethinking the Jewish War: Archeology, Society, Traditions [2021].) Mason’s work more generally has strongly emphasised the Roman context in which Josephus’ texts were produced, and that focus is amply on display in his doctoral student E. Glas’s monograph Flavius Josephus’ Self-Characterisation in First-Century Rome (2024), which reflects carefully on Josephus’ pronounced autobiographical tendencies, illuminating his self-presentational practices in the light of a wide range of Greek and Latin comparanda and seeking to exonerate the historian from the traditional charge of naïve vanity. Exoneration is also a prominent feature of my own monograph, Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome: The Case of Josephus’ Jewish War (2023), which examines how Josephus approaches the difficult business of depicting Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, the imperial dynasts at the time of writing, as major characters in his contemporary history. Whereas previous generations of scholars invariably saw Josephus as a propagandist, and some more recent readers have regarded him as something of a dissident, my study finds processes of negotiation, with Josephus balancing courtesy towards the dynasty with the need to create his own, distinctly un-Flavian and non-propagandistic, reading of recent events. Josephus’ engagement with the classical canon is front and centre in V. Pothou, Thukydides Second-Hand bei Flavius Josephus: Zur Rezeption thukydideischer Motive im Bellum Judaicum (2023). The work is characterised by the Classicist’s conventional disdain for the ‘post-classical’, manifested here as a desire to denigrate Josephus at every opportunity while presenting Thucydides as a special magical unicorn whose work is beyond reproach. This is unfortunate, and it leads to evident double standards in how certain literary features are treated in each author. Nevertheless, Pothou has meticulously identified many significant Thucydidean resonances in the work, and this hard scholarly labour will be extremely valuable to students of the Jewish War for many years to come.

U. Westwood, Moses among the Greek Lawgivers (2023) also probes Josephus’ engagement with Hellenic literary traditions, reading Josephus’ account of the life of Moses in the first four books of the Jewish Antiquities in the light of Greek traditions about lawgivers (especially Plutarch’s slightly later nomothetic Lives). She highlights Josephus’ awareness of, and engagement with, an established tradition of nomothetic thought that was itself very fluid, as well as key innovations in Josephus’ presentation of the figure of the nomothete, above all his conflation of the figures of the lawgiver and the poet in the person of Moses. K. Czajkowski and B. Eckhardt, Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context (2021) directs our attention to another major figure in the works of Josephus, King Herod, and focuses on the question of Josephus’ sources. Going against the main direction of traffic of fifty or so years of historiographical scholarship, the authors set out partially to rehabilitate source-critical approaches, attempting to read Nicolaus of Damascus’ lost account of the reign of Herod ‘through’ Josephus’ works. Many readers (myself included) may feel that they are too optimistic about what can be reconstructed of Nicolaus’ work: a more extensive methodological discussion would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the book is a thoughtful and provocative intervention, and one which, incidentally, very persuasively demolishes the previously ubiquitous assumption that Nicolaus’ account of Herod’s reign must necessarily have been propagandistic.

However innovative the findings of these studies may be, questions of Josephus’ sources, politics and engagement with Greek literature are conventional. New areas of interest have emerged in recent years too. Most notably, the reception of Josephus’ works, once very inadequately addressed by scholarship, has received a remarkable boost, thanks in large part to an AHRC-project based at Oxford. The project stimulated the creation of the online Josephus Reception Archive, which presents short and lively encyclopaedia-style entries on elements of Josephan reception, as well as a special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (23 [2016]) and two highly worthwhile books, A. Schatz (ed.), Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture (2019) and M.D. Goodman, Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography (2019). Finally on this author, recent years have witnessed the publication of a number of works that help to make this difficult but rewarding historian comprehensible to newcomers. He has received his first companion, H.H. Chapman and Z. Rodgers (edd.), A Companion to Josephus (2016), containing many excellent introductory essays. While we are still lacking any Josephus ‘Green and Yellows’, the ongoing publication of Brill’s Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary project (ed. S.N. Mason) continues and is now approaching completion, providing an essential resource for anyone wishing to make sense of the details of the texts. My introductory, student-focused survey of Josephus’ works, Josephus (Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics 50 [2025]) offers a brief, comprehensible and up-to-date overview; and further introductory volumes are currently in production. A new translation of the Jewish War by M. Hammond in the Oxford World’s Classics series (2017) makes Josephus’ best narrative history feel fresh, lively and modern. In short, there has never been a better time for scholars of classical historiography or imperial Greek literature to introduce their students to this major historian of the early Principate, an author whose study is clearly in extraordinarily rude health.

PSEUDEPIGRAPHIC, APOCRYPHAL AND PARABIBLICAL LITERATURE

The great mass of pseudepigraphic, apocryphal and parabiblical literature produced in this period continues to attract attention; again, only a select few publications from what is an expansive field can be highlighted. (For those looking for broad recent overviews of this material, Siegert 2016 can serve this need, as can the complementary volumes D.M. Gurtner, Introducing the Pseudepigrapha of Second Temple Judaism [2020] and D.A. DaSilva, Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context, Significance [2018]). The books of 1–4 Maccabees (a much more diverse assortment than their shared titles suggest) are texts potentially of considerable interest to classical scholars. A good way to gauge key directions in their modern study is in the edited volume of the 69th ‘Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense’ in 2021, which was dedicated to these books (J.W. Van Henten [ed.], The Books of the Maccabees: Literary, Historical, and Religious Perspectives [2022]), which collects papers by many significant and emerging scholars in the field. In addition to the editor’s introduction, I would particularly recommend T. Rajak’s stimulating reading of 4 Maccabees through the lens of postcolonial hybridity, B. Eckhardt’s contextualisation of 1 and 2 Maccabees against the backdrop of the revival of local traditions in post-Seleucid kingdoms, and J. Alfaro’s reading of 2 Maccabees in the light of other extant Greek epitomes.

One surprising category of Jewish pseudepigraphic writing from our period is the Sibylline Oracles. Participating in sibylline discourse by producing oracles attributed to a Sibyl seems to have been a widespread literary practice in the ancient Mediterranean, engaged in by ‘pagans’, Jews and Christians alike. Although the extant collections of Sibylline Oracles have all received Christianising touches in the versions in which we possess them, several of them can be shown to be substantially Jewish compositions. Two recent feminist readings of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles have proved especially fertile and opened up promising new lines of inquiry on these extraordinary texts: A.L. Bacchi, Uncovering Jewish Creativity in Book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles: Gender, Intertextuality, and Politics (2020) and O.S. Lester, Prophetic Rivalry, Gender and Economics: A Study in Revelation and Sibylline Oracles 4–5 (2018). While these studies clearly share areas of interest, there are significant differences too. Bacchi reads the Third Oracle (probably the earliest in the corpus, dating to the second century bce) as strongly reflective of a hybridised Alexandrian Jewish context. The choice of the Sibyl as a mouthpiece for these oracles allowed the Jewish Sibyllists to place Jewish prophecy in the mouth of a female prophet, in opposition to a biblical prophetic tradition constructed as strongly masculine (although biblical exceptions like Deborah and Huldah are acknowledged and briefly discussed); the identification of the Sibyl as Noah’s daughter-in-law is simultaneously a universalising gesture and one that subordinates the Sibyl’s culturally-prestigious utterances to Jewish traditions; the Sibyl’s Euhemeristic readings of Greek myth position her as a rival to Homer and establish that the Jewish God, and not ‘false Phoebus’, is the true source of authentic prophecy. Overall, Bacchi sees the Sibyl as a prestigious figure whose independence elevates her above competing prophets and simultaneously liberates the Jewish Sibyllists from the gendered constraints of Jewish tradition. Reading the later Fourth and Fifth Oracles (first to second centuries ce), Lester emphasises not the independence of the Sibyl but her instrumentalised voice and her vulnerability to violence, often gendered and sexualised, at the hands of God. The gendered dominance of God over the figure of the prophet reduces her independence, at the same time as it validates her message as emanating directly from the deity and adds force to the many threats of divine violence against the wicked and the powerful that we encounter in the Oracles. Thus, while the Oracles attest to the general prestige of the prophet in broader culture, and while the Sibyl’s ability to comment on and struggle against the violence God inflicts on her lends her some limited independence, the overall picture is of a prophetess strongly dominated and constrained by both God and the Sibyllists. These stimulating studies hint that the extraordinary Oracles, sitting as they do at the intersection of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’ and containing illuminating insights into ancient gender, violence and economics as well as cultural and prophetic rivalries, deserve a more prominent place in the study of the Hellenistic and the Roman worlds more broadly.

One of the more intriguing, albeit methodologically difficult, pseudepigraphic works we possess is the text known to modern scholars as 1 Enoch. Full versions of 1 Enoch only exist in fourteenth-century Ge’ez manuscripts (the work is a canonical biblical book in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church). However, most of the work’s constituent parts are attested in fragmentary ancient manuscripts in a range of languages. It has long been recognised that 1 Enoch is in fact a library, a collection of five independent works of diverse content and character (most of which are composites of smaller and earlier textual units), all linked by some connection to the titular biblical patriarch Enoch, whom Jewish legend claims was taken up by God and transformed into the angelic scribe Metatron. One part of the 1 Enoch library is the so-called Animal Apocalypse (1 En. 85–90), a prophetic survey of Jewish history from its origins to the coming eschaton, which represents both the Israelites and the various peoples they encounter as different species of animals, and which is traditionally dated to shortly after the time of the Maccabean Revolt. E.L. Dugan, The Apocalypse of the Birds: 1 Enoch and the Jewish Revolt against Rome (2023) offers a bold new reading of this work, with potentially significant implications. Dugan begins by noting a ‘literary seam’ in the middle of the Animal Apocalypse, at 1 En. 89:59: at this point, the work introduces an entirely new chronological scheme, significant discrepancies in the terminology become apparent, and the latter portion is not attested among the ancient fragments from Qumran. Thus, she proposes that the Animal Apocalypse is a composite of two distinct works, the ‘Vision of the Beasts’, which dates to the Maccabean period, and the ‘Apocalypse of the Birds’, which dates to the First Jewish Revolt and reflects the views of an author sympathetic to the rebel cause. The arguments in favour of the division into two works are strong; one may quibble, however, with certain arguments that Dugan makes in order to redate the latter half, and she is at times guilty of mining the text of Josephus for ‘facts’ in a way that would make many modern Josephus scholars a little uncomfortable. It is too early to determine whether Dugan’s proposal will win general acceptance, but the temptation to believe is strong, because the rewards of belief would be remarkable: if Dugan is right, we now have access to a kind of source that we previously believed to be irretrievably lost, the voice of an enthusiastic Jewish rebel, precisely the kind of voice that Josephus works so hard to silence and delegitimise. Classicists approaching this study, habituated as they are to a corpus in which questions of authorship and date are for the most part settled, are likely to be struck not only by Dugan’s evident philological flair and the boldness of her thesis, but also by perplexity at how any scholar can claim certainty when dealing with such intractable material.

RABBINIC CORPORA

The great rabbinic corpora of late antiquity continue to attract much scholarship, some of which aims to situate these works in their broader Roman and Sassanian contexts. Two recent works consider the rabbinic sages in the light of the scholarly, literary and educational culture of the eastern Roman world. C. Heszer, Rabbinic Scholarship and the Rise of Scholasticism: The Case of the Talmud Yerushalmi (2024), examines the Jerusalem Talmud from this perspective. Heszer examines what can be reconstructed of the educational systems and transmission practices of rabbinic learning in comparison with Greek and early Christian parallels, and considers the compilatory practices that culminated in the Talmud in their broader context. She finds meaningful parallels between Talmudic compilation and both the philosophical and juristic compilatory activity of the age, especially in its preservation of multiple competing traditions, in contrast to Christian practice, which aimed at the attainment of one singular truth; at the same time, the rabbinic compilations remain distinctive in their lack of attribution to a single authoritative compiler or author. R. Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash (2017) provides readings of rabbinic exegetical, homiletic and legal texts informed by contemporary Greek rhetorical theory, detecting (with mixed plausibility, in my eyes) rhetorical influence from the wider culture as a pervasive and structural feature of rabbinic discourse. On a different plane, H.M. Zellentin, Rabbinic Parodies of Jewish and Christian Literature (2023) provides entertaining readings of parodic texts within the corpora. Zellentin identifies three categories of parodies: parody of previous rabbinic writings belonging to the same tradition; parodies of other traditions of rabbinic interpretation; and parodies of external groups (generally Christians). Chapter 4 in particular, a reading of b. Šabb. 116a–b detecting Gospel parody and even crafty allusions to attested ‘pagan’ anti-Christian traditions behind the amusing tale of Imma Shalom’s consultation with a corrupt philosopher, is a dazzling study, both scholarly and entertaining, with significant implications for the question of rabbinic engagement with Christianity. All these recent works, in different ways, serve to combat the perception of the rabbinic corpora as parochial and isolated bodies of work, and insist strongly on their engagements with the wider world beyond narrow rabbinic circles.