Scriptural Vitality

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Scriptural Vitality challenges the view that the Persian and Hellenistic periods constitute a time of decay, a period of ’late Judaism’, languishing between an original, vibrant Judaism and the birth of Christianity. Instead, Hindy Najman argues that the Second Temple period was one of untethered creativity and poetic imagination, of dynamism exemplified through philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that gave birth to hermeneutic innovation. Building on Nietzsche’s critique of classical philology and drawing on new ways of reading the Dead Sea Scrolls, the author carries out a radical rethinking of biblical studies. Instead of seeking to reconstruct the original text and to find its original author or at least the original context of its production, Najman celebrates textual pluriformity and transformation, tracing ways in which texts and meanings proliferated within interpretive communities through new performances and fresh articulations of the past. Engaging with thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Peter Szondi, whom biblicists have rarely considered, biblical philology is reimagined as the forward-moving study of the poetic processes by which Jewish communities re-created their past and revitalized their present. The Second Temple period emerges as a golden age of creativity, whose traces may still be discerned in Judaism and Christianity today.

Hindy Najman, Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, Oriel College, University of Oxford

Hindy Najman is the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture and Director of the Oriel Centre for the Study of the Bible at Oriel College in the University of Oxford. She authored Seconding Sinai (2003), Past Renewals (2010), and Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future (2014). Previously she held positions at Yale University (2010-2015), the University of Toronto (2004-2010), where she was the Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies, and the University of Notre Dame (1998-2004), where she was the Jordan Kapson Chair of Jewish Studies.