The term Torah/ torah can be understood as the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch) or more generally as "law", "instruction", or "teaching" including the authoritative interpretation of the Pentateuch. This volume offers innovative studies by a range of scholars regarding the various ways early Jewish texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, understood and practiced Torah and torah .

Torah is a topic of keen interest among scholars of the Bible and Second Temple Judaism. The Hellenistic age especially witnessed an undeniable textual pluriformity of not only the Pentateuch (Torah), but of a host of other works concerned with traditions of authoritative "teaching" or "instruction" ( torah ) that was related in complex ways to books that would become part of the Hebrew Bible. In the Second Temple period, the term torah was thus a robustly multivalent term, deployed in discourses emerging from different contexts, and toward a range of rhetorical ends. The essays in this volume employ a plethora of methodologies to offer innovative studies of a range of early Jewish literature - including texts from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint - that is concerned in different ways with Torah / torah .

Autorentext
Born 1974; BA, MA, and PhD degrees from University of Haifa, Israel; Professor of Jewish Studies at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. Born 1966; AB from the University of California, Davis; MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary; PhD in Hebrew Bible from Emory University; Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University.

Inhalt
Ariel Feldman/Timothy J. Sandoval: Introduction Richard J. Bautch: The Pentateuchal Redaction: An Exercise in Scribal Imagination Steven D. Fraade: "Bringing the Messiah(s) Through Law": Reflections from the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Some Successors Carol A. Newsom: Access to Knowledge and Resistance to Genesis 2-3 in Mid-Second Temple Texts Daniel A. Machiela: An Ancestral Pattern for Diaspora Life in the Aramaic Literature from Qumran Ariel Feldman: The Song of the Sea in the Writings of Early Judaism Joseph McDonald: Exodus as Chosen Trauma, Exodus as Chosen Glory: Group Identity Formation among Ancient Israelites, Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora, and Modern Ethiopian Jews Jonathan Kaplan: Leviticus and the Rewriting of the Torah in 1QWords of Moses (1Q22) Jeremy L. Williams: The Rhetorical Use of Blasphemy for Criminalization from Leviticus 24:10-23 to Acts 6:8 - 7:60 Timothy J. Sandoval: Satirical Elements in Tobit? Tobit's Torah Ethics in GII versus GI Judith H. Newman: Trickery as Virtue? Reworking the Torah's Trickster in the Book of Judith Kelley Coblentz-Bautch: The Law and the Prophet: Reading 1 Maccabees in the Days of John Hyrcanus