A couple of months ago I attended a meeting of the Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy. The conference, which included an extraordinary range of scholars, grappled with the meaning of the word and concept of “Torah” from the biblical period through Late Antiquity. There were a mix of session topics and formats and I have no intention of trying to summarize the many papers and areas of disagreement. The publication of the papers is being organized by William Schniedewind and Jason Zurawski. I will focus here on my own contributions to the conference and one important area of what I thought was consensus. My paper was entitled, “Torah: The Material Evidence.” In it, I posed a simple question: If we did not have the literature of the rabbis, what we would know about the Torah and its role in Jewish communities in Late Antiquity? Based on my survey of the artistic, archaeological, epigraphical, (meager) papyrological, and literary (law codes and patristic literature) I developed three main conclusions: Scrolls of the Torah were stored, and most likely read, in the synagogues; Writings from the Torah served an apotropaic role for Jews (and maybe non-Jews) in Late Antiquity; There is no evidence […]
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