Anathea Portier-Young

A fresh and daring take on ancient apocalyptic books. The year 167 b.c.e. marked the beginning of a period of intense persecution for the people of Judea, as Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted — forcibly and brutally — to eradicate traditional Jewish religious practices. In Apocalypse against Empire Anathea Portier-Young reconstructs the historical events and key players in this traumatic episode in Jewish history and provides a sophisticated treatment of resistance in early Judaism. Building on a solid contextual foundation, Portier-Young argues that the first Jewish apocalypses emerged as a literature of resistance to Hellenistic imperial rule. She makes a sturdy case for this argument by examining three extant apocalypses, giving careful attention to the interplay between social theory, history, textual studies, and theological analysis. In particular, Portier-Young contends, the book of Daniel, the Apocalypse of Weeks, and the Book of Dreams were written to supply an oppressed people with a potent antidote to the destructive propaganda of the empire — renewing their faith in the God of the covenant and answering state terror with radical visions of hope.

The essay analyzes the edicts of Antiochus iii concerning Jerusalem (Ant. 12.138-46) within two contextual horizons: Ant. 12 and Jerusalem after the Fifth Syrian War. A dichotomous understanding of resistance and collaboration is inadequate to explain the dossier's functions. Between these poles were mediation, survival, reassembly, and redrawing of boundaries. A key to each was reshaping of political memory. In Ant. 12 the dossier contributed to an archival record of benefaction, loyalty, and respect that provided precedent and warrant for imperial grant of honor, status, and privileges to Judeans in the Roman empire. In the context of Jerusalem after the Fifth Syrian War, the edicts aimed to assert material evidence of imperial beneficence and glory in place of imperial aggression and the ravages of war. They also helped position Jerusalem within the empire's provincial urban network and furnished a script for local agency and resilience in the wake of trauma.

This essay examines the meaning of Wisdom in biblical wisdom literature, including detailed analysis of key passages in Proverbs and Job 28. According to biblical Wisdom literature, humans arrive at fear of God through awareness of human limitations. With this recognition humans can discern their place in creation, not at its center but in its midst. So too humans can see that wisdom is not buried in the deep but permeates all the earth, for she is the way of all creation. Through this awareness God invites humankind into a life of free, artistic, and attentive moral creation in relationship with God and all that God has made. If the sage finds wisdom, the sage will also find God. Wisdom is object and subject, accessible and hidden. It is the praxis by which we seek understanding of God, world, and human life. It is guiding principle. It is creativity and art, participation in God's creating and knowing.
In honor of William L. Portier, the essay also places this understanding of wisdom in conversation with Modernism in the American Catholic Church. In 1893 John Ireland declared in Baltimore's Cathedral of the Assumption that the church had a duty "to stimulate the age to deeper researches" and to leave "untouched no particle of matter that may conceal a secret ... no act in the life of humanity, that may solve a problem:' Despite his optimism, then as now, the findings of biblical criticism challenged cherished teachings of the church. The condemnation of modernism in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis included a caricature of so-called modernist biblical scholarship, including textual criticism, source and redaction criticism, and composition history, that was The encyclical paints a sharp dichotomy between objective knowledge, arguments, and articles of faith, on one hand, and subjective reasoning, appeals to experience, and claims to knowing, on the other. Toward the conclusion of his book Divided Friends, Portier writes that the stories of John R. Slattery, Denis J. O'Connell, William L. Sullivan, and Joseph McSorley “show the moral and religious complexities involved in pioneer attempts to deal with the subjective conditions of religious meaning and truth in an ecclesial world normed by one-sided theological objectivity and conceptualism.” For the sages of Israel, wisdom, as object and subject, was the dynamic force that might bridge this divide, even as it forms a bridge between humans and God.

The book of Daniel forms a bridge between Israel’s classical prophetic literature and the genre apocalypse. Daniel has often been classified among the prophets, but also stands apart. An examination of revealed knowledge and textual authority in Daniel clarifies the relationship among Daniel, earlier prophets, and Mesopotamian divinatory wisdom. Daniel’s apocalyptic imagination combines prophetic language and imagery with new visionary experience, offering readers powerful new language, symbols, and models for embodied practice. Cross-disciplinary studies of imagination suggest ways that Daniel’s prophetic and apocalyptic imagination allowed ancient readers to interact with the legacies of the Mesopotamian and Hellenistic empires while simultaneously rejecting their totalizing narratives. The book ignites a fuse in readers’ imaginations, inviting and empowering audiences to break out of the prison of imperial imaginaries and to imagine in their place an alternative structure of gove...

Modern accounts of the meaning of "fear of the LORD" in the Hebrew Bible have tended to distance this important concept from the emotion of fear, offering alternative understandings as worship, obedience, or wisdom. This essay examines phrases such as "fear of the LORD," "fear of God," and "God-fearer," across four sets of texts in the Hebrew Bible: 1) narratives in Genesis and Exodus; 2) Deuteronomy and other Deuteronomistic literature; 3) wisdom literature; and 4) Psalms. I argue that fear of the LORD/God in the Hebrew Bible typically does connote an emotional fear response that has in view divine power over life and death. The links between such fear and worship, and obedience, and wisdom that are attested in numerous biblical texts are not evidence of synonymy but a recognition of the fundamental link between emotion, cognition, and action. Recent developments in the study of emotion illuminate their interrelationship and the ways in which fear of the LORD/God is also socially shaped and shaping. Modern biblical scholarship has frequently attempted to distance the concept of "fear of the LORD" in the Hebrew Bible from emotional experience in general and a response to threat of harm in particular. 1 Some have argued that "fear of the LORD" does not refer to what modern readers would understand as fear, but instead denotes reverence, piety, or worship. Others, noting the repeated linking of fear and wisdom in the Bible's wisdom literature, have understood "fear of the LORD" to be a synonym for wisdom. And some have hypothesized that the phrase has multiple, distinct meanings, or that its meaning evolved over time, originally denoting an emotional fear response but later denoting an attitude of worship or a cognitive faculty of discernment. 2 1 In one recent example, Phillip Michael Lasater argues that "emotions" are not present in the Hebrew Bible, as they are a modern category, unknown prior to the eighteenth century CE (Philip Michael Lasater, The Emotions in Biblical Anthropology? A Genealogy and Case Study with yr', in: Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 4 [2017], 520-540). Using "fear" as a case study, he argues instead for an Aristotelean classification as a passion or affection. A key to Lasater's argument is that fear in the Hebrew Bible "relates to rationality and intentionality, including at a behavioral level" (535). These links contradict the modern understanding of emotion that Lasater traces, in which emotion is understood as "non-cognitive and involuntary" (526). As I explain later in this article, my understanding of "fear" in the Hebrew Bible as primarily referring to an emotion relies on a different, complex understanding of emotion as affect that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. 2 I address examples of these approaches later in this essay. For a helpful summary see Brent A. Strawn, The Iconography

Monster theory illuminates the construction of imperial and national identities in the portrayals of monstrous and human bodies in three early Jewish texts; Book of Watchers, Daniel, and 2 Maccabees. Book of Watchers expresses anxiety about Judean/Jewish identity in the shadow of empire through its portrayal of a vulnerable humanity terrorized by voracious giants and their demonic spirits. Daniel dehumanizes empire and its agents, imaging empire as a colossal statue, an animalistic were-king, and a series of monstrous beasts, while one like a human being poses an alternative to imperial rule. Second Maccabees, by contrast, demythologizes, decapitates, dismembers, and disintegrates the imperial body in order to portray the integral Judean political body (and soul) as mature, pure, capable, and ordered. Cannibal giants and a metal statue, a were-king and ten-horned beast, a headless general and living corpse: portrayals of monstrous and human bodies in three ancient Jewish texts, Book of Watchers, Daniel, and 2 Maccabees, reveal shifting relationships among Judeans and the empires that ruled them. Each text speaks from a distinctive historical moment. Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), likely written in the mid-third century BCE, emerges from the tumultuous era that followed the death of Alexander the Great. 1 Hebrew and Aramaic Daniel likely received its final form around 167 BCE, in response to Seleucid reconquest of Judea. Second Maccabees, likely written between

In the Old Testament, liturgy is political and the cosmos is contested domain. I argue here first that the Torah establishes an inextricable link between liturgy, cosmos, sovereignty, social justice, and ecological justice. This analysis will provide a framework for examining a text outside of Torah, namely Daniel 3, with special attention to an ancient Greek version commonly known as Theodotion. Portions of this Greek text will be well known to many in the form of the liturgical hymns or canticles Benedicite, omnia opera Domini and Benedictus es Domine and in readings for Easter Vigil services. In Daniel 3, a furnace becomes a temple. Prisoners of war reject imperial liturgy and convoke in its stead a counter-imperial, cosmic liturgy. Improvisational worship alongside angels, celestial bodies, waters, and whales pushes back against the practices of empire and industry and declares that God’s mercy and saving power are not only for human benefit, but for all the cosmos.

In recent decades, a lively debate on the Hebrew and Greek versions of Esther story has developed, focusing on their text-historical and theological relationship. The discussion is enriched further by taking into account the Old Latin Esther, fully edited some 10 years ago by Jean-Claude Haelewyck as part of the Beuron Vetus Latina series. The extant Latin text likely dates back to 330-50 CE and represents an older, now-lost Greek Vorlage. Its numerous peculiarities substantially widen our understanding of ancient Esther traditions. The English translation presented here aims to elicit a broader interest in the Old Latin Esther and to facilitate a fresh discussion of its significance.

This essay demonstrates that the book of Daniel is not a fixed but fluid text, a collection of traditions that developed over centuries and locations. The three major extant ancient versions of Daniel, represented by the Hebrew/Aramaic Masoretic Text and the " Old Greek " and " Revised Greek " translations, together participate in a complex dance of genres as they move between legend, folk-tale, prayer and song, vision and apocalypse, novella and saint's life. A greater appreciation of this multiplicity and fluidity complicates our understanding of biblical texts in ways that can enrich interpretation and interfaith dialogue.

The call for papers for the conference that occasioned this volume invited participants to ask "how pervasive was the apocalyptic worldview" in the Seleucid and Hasmonean periods, and to explore relationships "between apocalyptic and society" and the ways "different social groups and strata engage[ d] with apocalyptic thought and literature:' This paper focuses on what is meant by "worldview" in this context. In our scholarly literature we have often talked about something we call an apoca-lyptic worldview. We reconstruct this worldview from texts we call apocalypses, and we infer that the worldview is spread by means of these and other apocalyptic texts. In this essay I do not argue for or against the existence of apocalyptic worldview(s), nor do I define a specifically apocalyptic worldview. Rather, I examine the meaning and function of"worldview" as understood in sociological and related literature and consider ways that worldviews may spread. To the extent that we continue to speak of apocalyptic worldview(s), it is hoped that my contribution will promote greater precision in their characterization and offer a clearer picture of how widespread an apocalyptic worldview, or world views, may have been in early Judaism. In Part I, I enquire into the use of the phrase "apocalyptic worldview" by modern scholars who study ancient Judaism. In Part 2, I focus on the second part of the phrase, surveying scholarship from a range of fields, including philosophy, sociology, and psychology, concerning the meaning, nature, and function of "worldview:' In Part 3 I propose implications of this survey for how we might think about "apocalyptic worldview(s)': In Part 4, I highlight new perspectives on the Qumran scrolls and aspects of early Jewish novelistic literature that inform our understanding of the spread of apocalyptic worldviews in the Hellenistic period. Part 5 surveys social-scientific scholarship on the spread of norms, ideas, and ideologies to determine ways by which a worldview or its components might spread and suggest conditions that might have facilitated or impeded the spread of an apocalyptic worldview in the Hellenistic period.

This graduate seminar provides students with a broad overview of the literature contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the archaeology of the site at Qumran and possible identity and self-understanding of those who lived there, and the state of the field in studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Students will also work closely with several of the key texts from Qumran.

This class examines plural dimensions of embodiment in the Old Testament and its interpretation. Key topics include divine embodiment; bodily experience and metaphor in the Psalms; human body: parts and whole; ability and disability; gender, difference, and bodies in community; sexual violence; control of bodies; the celebration of the created body in the Song of Songs; the relation between body and image or representation; and bodily care.

This course combines scriptural exegesis with the study of literature on domestic violence and pastoral care and preaching relating to domestic violence (DV). It also includes guest lectures by experts in DV and third party training in responding to DV. Throughout, we seek to weave together the study of scripture with the study of contemporary contexts in order to cultivate a response to DV that is not only informed by scripture, but energized by the biblical witness and adept at marshaling a host of scriptural resources. Fulfills Gender, Theology, and Ministry Certificate elective, Prison Studies Certificate elective, and Practicing Theology and Ministry limited elective.