God, Self, and Death: The Shape of Religious Transformation in the Second Temple Period

Shannon Burkes

ISBN 10: 9004129545 / ISBN 13: 9789004129542

Published by Brill Academic Pub, 2003

About this Item

287 pages. 9.50x6.25x1.00 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # __9004129545

Bibliographic Details

• Title: God, Self, and Death: The Shape of Religious Transformation in the Second Temple Period
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004129545
• ISBN 13: 9789004129542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.7 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

This volume considers the emerging Jewish interest in an afterlife during the second temple period in relation to developing views of the deity and the self. In some circles God is understood as increasingly distant from the human sphere, and so justice must occur in another world or after death; at the same time, more autonomous constructions of the self in response to community breakdown suggest that reward and punishment come not only collectively, but also on the individual level in a post-mortem realm. The book traces the interconnections between these themes in Job and Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira and Daniel, then Wisdom of Solomon and 4 Ezra, crossing genre boundaries in an attempt to offer a more encompassing historical investigation.

About the Author

Shannon Burkes, Ph.D. (1997) at the University of Chicago in Hebrew Bible, is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University. Her previous book was Death in Qoheleth and Egyptian Biographies of the Late Period (Scholars Press, 1999).