Preface
The last fifty years or so have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the field
of Second Temple Jewish Studies. This interest has been prompted in
large part by the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there has also
been renewed interest in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and in the
Greco-Jewish writings from the Diaspora. TheEerdmans Dictionary of
Early Judaism,published in 2010, was a first attempt to provide a compre-
hensive reference work for this expanding field.
Naming and delimiting the field have posed, and continue to pose, a
problem. The old German labelSpätjudentum(Late Judaism) had deroga-
tory connotations, and in any case was largely based on the rabbinic litera-
ture, from a later period. The Second Temple period, strictly defined, in-
cludes most of the Hebrew Bible, while several major nonbiblical,
nonrabbinic works (Josephus, some apocalypses), were composed after
the destruction of the Temple in 70c.e."Early Judaism" has been the ac-
cepted name for the Judaism of the Hellenistic and early Roman period in
the Society of Biblical Literature, and this is the name we have adopted
here. The boundaries of the period are admittedly fuzzy. The primary fo-
cus falls on the period between Alexander the Great in the late fourth cen-
turyb.c.e.and the emperor Hadrian and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the
early second centuryc.e.It is impossible to study this period, however,
without taking some account of the Persian period and the postexilic bibli-
cal books, on the one hand, and of the subsequent development of rab-
binic Judaism on the other.
The present volume reprints the thirteen major essays that constituted
the first part of theDictionary.We have made corrections and other emen-
dations, and added some recent works to the bibliographies, but the essaysviiEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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