Agrippa I and Palestinian Judaism in the first century
A number of scholars have argued that Agrippa I, upo? becoming king of Judea, aligned himself with, or at least followed the practices of, the Pharisees. While by no means the unanimous opinion of modern scholarship, this assertion has found its way into almost all recent reference work.1 The religious orientation of Agrippa is significant not just for the biography of the king. It is relevant to issues in the history of first-century Judaism. Affiliation with the Pharisees on the part of a popular ruler would support the widely-held view that the former were an extremely influential group and/or that Pharisaism was the dominant form of Palestinian Judaism. A shrewd politician like Agrippa would be unlikely to adopt religious practices rejected by the majority of his Jewish subjects or to align himself with a peripheral faction lacking broad appeal. While such a posture is not impossible ? especially if Agrippa's motivation was genuine conviction rather than political pragmatism ? a Pharisaic orientation that involved "swimming against the stream" would presumably be reflected in the popular standing of the king,or at least in the sources concerning him. So if we were able to prove that Agrippa followed the Pharisees we would have a strong argument for the dominant position of the Pharisaic party.2 But if, as I hope to show, the Judaism of Agrippa was not Pharisaic in character our understanding of the religion of first-century Judea will be different. I shall argue that the practices of Agrippa in fact reflect the common form of first-century Judaism, but that the common form was not Pharisaic. I shall return to these issues below; first we must examine the available evidence concerning the Judaism of Agrippa. I begin with the testimony of Josephus and then I shall discuss the evidence of rabbinic literature. An appendix follows my conclusions in which I argue that a well known source about "Yannai the King" actually refers to Agrippa I.
The Clothing of the Primordial Adam as a Symbol of Apocalyptic Time in the Midrashic Sources
One relates to existential reality through the lenses that one's culture supplies. The culture of each society, in turn, includes the way it relates to time and, as a result, to history. Time as a physical quantity would appear to be a neutral concept, but its measurement is arbitrary. Time is certainly not neutral in any culture. It assumes various qualities, depending on the symbolic meaning that persons attribute to it. One therefore finds different approaches to history or to the writing of history in different cultures. The Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic eras and the Romans in the ancient world attempted to write history for its own sake and to satisfy intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians wrote chronographies, but not history in the western sense. Ancient Israel lies between these: one finds historiography in the Bible, but not history for its own sake. The Bible presents a view of divine providence in history, with God's essence being visible through historical deeds. Great importance thus attaches to remembrance through various rituals, in prayers and in celebrations on the Shabbat, festive days, and mourning and fast days. These do not, however, require those remembering to be historians. On the contrary, a society that molds its members in accordance with unequivocal memory patterns does not permit them to examine its history in a critical fashion; it constructs in them a collective memory, which transmits a single incontestable message.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.