The Portrayal of Pagan Worship in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism

Jesse Mirotznik (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

255 Seiten

2026
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
9781009691970 (ISBN)

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How did Jews in the ancient world depict the practices of their pagan contemporaries? In this study, Jesse Mirotznik investigates the portrayal of pagan worship in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature. Scholars have assumed that the portrayals in these corpora are consistent over time. Mirotznik, however, shows that there is a fundamental discontinuity between earlier and later portrayals of pagan worship. In the Hebrew Bible, these forms of worship are, for the most part, simply assumed to be sincere. By contrast, in ancient Jewish texts from the 2nd century BCE and onward, such worship is increasingly presented as insincere, performed only instrumentally in the service of an ulterior motive. While the worshipers of other gods seem genuine in their devotion, as these texts contend, they too must recognize the folly of such worship. Mirotznik thus introduces the concept of “Bad Faith” as a lens through which to understand rhetoric about the Other.

Jesse Mirotznik is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

1. Introduction; 2. The biblical portrayal of transgressive worship; 3. The second temple/tannaitic portrayal of transgressive worship; 4. The idolatrous professional and the bad faith argument; 5. Sex and the bad faith argument; 6. Mishnah 'Abodah Zarah 3:4 and the bad faith argument; 7. Conclusion; Bibliography.

Erscheint lt. Verlag	31.3.2026
Zusatzinfo	Worked examples or Exercises
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Judentum
ISBN-13	9781009691970 / 9781009691970
Zustand	Neuware