Leyla Ozgur Alhassen’s book Qur’anic Stories: God, Revelation and the Audience (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) provides excellent analyses of several Qur’anic surahs, or chapters, to explore how Qur’anic stories function as narratives – but not just any kind of narratives: narratives with a theological purpose behind them. 

The specific stories she looks at include those of Maryam, Yusuf, and Musa primarily. Alhassen analyzes the literary themes present in these different chapters, such as the themes of control, knowledge, semantic echoes, and consonance, or themes of family, judgment, evidence, and secrets – whether it’s secrets that the text is withholding from the reader or secrets that characters are keeping from each other. One of the most important contributions that the book makes is to offer one possible and convincing explanation for why stories of the same characters are told in different ways in different chapters of the Qur’an. For example, God is woven into some stories as both a character and an omniscient narrator depending on the larger theme of the surah and the placing of the story; in some instances, God as the omniscient narrator shows the words of a beloved, righteous character as true, thus making a theological statement. Alhassen argues that in such renderings of a story, where it becomes unclear whether a certain quote is God’s or a character’s, the point the text is making there is that God merges His (or Her) words with characters as a reward from God. Other theological statements that the stories seem to be making are that they reveal some insight into divine intent.

In this interview, we discuss the origins of the book, how the Qur’an establishes structure and how Qur’anic stories serve as narratives, the main points of each chapter and story, and whether, and how, if at all, it matters that the Qur’an doesn’t give us identical quotes from characters in the various renditions of their stories in order to make an important stylistic choice.   

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Starting nearly a thousand years ago at the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo, worn-out books and scrolls were put in the genizah, a storage area for sacred texts. 

In The Illustrated Cairo Genizah: A Visual Tour of Cairo Genizah Manuscripts at Cambridge Univertity Library (Gorgias Press, 2024), Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee tell the story of the genizah and show the journey of discovery through more than 125 years of research, showcasing over 300 stunning full-colour images, revealing forgotten stories of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities over a millennium of world history.

In the nineteenth century, Scottish sisters Agnes and Margaret Smith brought manuscript pages back to England where Solomon Schechter recognized the lost Hebrew book of Ben Sira, also known as Ecclesiasticus or Sirach. Schechter then traveled to Cairo and toured the genizah, an attic chamber he described as a "windowless and doorless room of fair dimensions. The entrance is ... through a big, shapeless hole reached by a ladder." 

Over the millenia, hundreds and thousands of documents were buried in this attic crypt, vividly described by Schechter: "It is a battlefield of books, and the literary production of many centuries had their share in the battle ... some of the belligerents have perished outright, and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space".

In addition to images of the book of Ben Sira, the collection includes fragments of the oldest known Latin edition of St Augustine's sermons, Origen's Hexapla, and a 5th or 6th century copy of Aquila's translation of Kings, approximately 60 manuscripts written by Moses Maimonides, and a medieval copy of the 'Damascus Document' which was confirmed as an ancient text by the discovery of another copy among the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumram in 1947. 

See visual examples of the collection online.

Learn more about the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit.

Recommended reading: 

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one’s last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible.

A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter. It asks a simple set of questions: Where did late ancient Jews encounter the Psalms? How did they engage with the work? And what meanings did they produce? A. J. Berkovitz answers these queries by reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of religious practices performed with and on the Psalter, such as handling a physical copy, reading from it, interpreting it exegetically, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic and reciting it as an act of piety. His book draws from and contributes to the fields of ancient Judaism, biblical reception, book history and the history of reading.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review.

A. J. Berkovitz is Associate Professor of Associate Professor of Liturgy and Ancient Judaism at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.

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Today I talked to Joy McCorriston about Persistent Pastoralism: Monuments and Settlements in the Archaeology of Dhofar (Archaeopress Publishing, 2023).

In the Dhofar region of southern Oman, pastoralists have constructed monuments in discrete pulses over the past 7,500 years. From small-scale stone burial markers to platforms to settlements, these constructions could have been used as sites of gathering, landmarks, mnemonic devices, and religious rituals. Dr. Joy McCorriston’s archaeological teamwork in the region investigates how mobile pastoralists used monuments to link dispersed households into broader social communities. 

Over a broad swath of history from the Middle Neolithic ca. 5000 BC to the turn of the common era, their research tracks shifts in pastoralist lifestyles, social identities, and patterns of resource access and use, through pastoralists’ monuments. Despite and against these shifts, archaeological excavations show that pastoralism persisted in Dhofar even as agriculture developed. In this episode, Joy joins me to share the findings from her research in Dhofar and her insights into pastoralist monument-building and practices of mobility around monuments in ancient southern Oman.

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Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, translated by Michael Fishbein and James E. Montgomery, with a foreword by Marina Warner (Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press, 2022), is a vibrant new rendition of a literary classic that has captivated readers for centuries.

Rooted in ancient Indian storytelling and adapted into Arabic literature, this collection of fables uses allegorical tales of animals to convey profound lessons on ethics, leadership, and the human condition. This edition breathes fresh life into Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s masterpiece, emphasizing its timeless relevance and its role as a mirror of moral and political wisdom. Fishbein and Montgomery’s translation masterfully conveys the depth and beauty of these stories, making them accessible to a new generation of readers.

We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team constantly looking for ways to make the academic publishing industry grow and to promote groundbreaking academic publications to scholars, students, and enthusiasts globally. Based in the renowned publishing city of Leiden, we eat, sleep, and breathe publishing!

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The Jews of Ptolemaic Egypt: The History of a Diaspora Community in Light of the Papyri (De Gruyter, 2024) offers a comprehensive and nuanced history of the Jews of Egypt, who constituted an important ethnic minority ever since they first appeared in the country. As part of the Greek-speaking ruling class, the Jews played an active role in the political, social and cultural life of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Drawing on old and new documentary papyri supplemented by literary and epigraphic evidence, Szántó's book focuses on reconstructing an overall picture of the Egyptian Jewish Diaspora and discusses different aspects of their life: onomastics, military life, social and legal position, religious customs and anti-Judaism. The incorporation of non-Greek (Aramaic and Egyptian) textual evidence into the research is innovative and offers new perspectives on certain topics whose understanding was previously limited.

Szántó provides a diverse picture of Jewish life and demonstrates how the Jews integrated into Graeco-Egyptian society and, at the same time, preserved their ethnic identity.

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Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2022) illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Julia Kelto Lillis is Assistant Professor of Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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In The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West (Cambridge UP, 2022), Phillip Lieberman revisits one of the foundational narratives of medieval Jewish history--that the rise of Islam led the Jews of Babylonia, the largest Jewish community prior to the rise of Islam, to abandon a livelihood based on agriculture and move into urban crafts and long-distance trade. Here, he presents an alternative account that reveals the complexity of interfaith relations in early Islam. Using Jewish and Islamic chronicles, legal materials, and the rich documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza, Lieberman demonstrates that Jews initially remained on the rural periphery after the Islamic conquest of Iraq. Gradually, they assimilated to an emerging Islamicate identity as the new religion took shape, sapping towns and villages of their strength. Simultaneously, a small, elite group of merchants and communal leaders migrated westward. Lieberman here explores their formative influence on the Jewish communities of the southern Mediterranean that flourished under Islamic conquest.

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The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale UP, 2024) offers a bold rereading of Augustinian thought for a world still haunted by slavery.

Over the last two decades, scholars have made a striking return to the resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder. To confront a racialized world, the modern Augustinian tradition of political thought must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master.

Drawing Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought into extended dialogue, Matthew Elia develops a critical analysis of the enduring problem of the Christian master, even as he presses toward an alternative interpretation of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtue, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery. Amid democratic crises and racial injustice on multiple fronts, the book breathes fresh life into conversations on religion and the public square by showing how ancient and contemporary sources at once clash and converge in surprising ways. It imaginatively carves a path forward for the enduring humanities inquiry into the nature of our common life and the perennial problem of social and political domination.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Matt Elia is Assistant Professor of Theology, Race, and Environment at Saint Louis University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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In Delicious Prose: Reading the Tale of Tobit with Food and Drink (Brill, 2018), Naomi S.S. Jacobs explores how the numerous references to food, drink, and their consumption within The Book of Tobit help tell its story, promote righteous deeds and encourage resistance against a hostile dominant culture. Jacobs' commentary includes up-to-date analyses of issues of translation, text-criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and issues of class and gender. Jacobs situates Tobit within a wide range of ancient writings sacred to Jews and Christians as well as writings and customs from the Ancient Near East, Ugarit, Greece, Rome, including a treasure trove of information about ancient foodways and medicine.

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