Description
Over the past 30 years, scholars of early Jewish mysticism have, with increasing confidence, located the initial formation of Hekhalot literature in Byzantine Palestine and Sasanian or early Islamic Babylonia (ca. 500-900 C.E.), rather than at the time of the Mishnah, Tosefta, early Midrashim, or Palestinian Talmud (ca. 100-400 C.E.). This advance has primarily been achieved through major gains in our understanding of the dynamic and highly flexible processes of composition, redaction, and transmission that produced the Hekhalot texts as we know them today. These gains have been coupled with greater appreciation of the complex relationships between Hekhalot writings and the variegated Jewish literary culture of late antiquity, both within and beyond the boundaries of the rabbinic movement. Yet important questions remain regarding the specific cultural contexts and institutional settings out of which the various strands of Hekhalot literature emerged as well as the multiple trajectories of use and appropriation they subsequently travelled. In the present volume, an international team of experts explores—from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (e.g. linguistics, ritual and gender studies, intellectual history)—the literary formation, cultural meanings, religious functions, and textual transmission of Hekhalot literature.
Chapter
Section I: The Formation of Hekhalot Literature: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Contexts
1. Noam Mizrahi: The Language of Hekhalot Literature: Preliminary Observations
2. Previous Linguistic Study of Hekhalot literature
3. Challenges for Historical-Linguistic Analysis of Hekhalot literature
II. Grammatical Case Study
1. Historical-Linguistic Background
2. Internal Diversity within MH
3. The Evidence from Hekhalot Literature
(d) Textually Doubtful Occurrences
III. Issues for Further Study
2. Peter Schäfer: Metatron in Babylonia
3. Michael D. Swartz: Hekhalot and Piyyut: From Byzantium to Babylonia and Back
From Byzantium to Babylonia
The New Sources and their Significance
4. Alexei Sivertsev: The Emperor’s Many Bodies: The Demise of Emperor Lupinus Revisited
The Demise of Emperor Lupinus in Context
A Talmudic Tale of the King’s Two Bodies: King Solomon as Emperor Lupinus’s Precursor
Lupinus, Justinian, and a Tale of Emperors’ Demonic Bodies
Emperors’ Shared Bodies and the Representations of Power in Late Antiquity
5. Klaus Herrmann: Jewish Mysticism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Merkavah Mysticism in 3 Enoch
Jewish Mysticism in Byzantium and the Legacy of Scholem’s “Anti-Byzantine” Position
Enoch in Apocalyptic and Rabbinic Tradition
From Merkavah Mysticism to Apocalypticism
A Gnostic in the Rabbinic Tradition? The Aher Episode in the Bavli and in 3 Enoch
“Two Powers in Heaven”: From Dualism to “Binitarianism” in Ancient Judaism
Enoch between Sonship and a Counter-Jesus
Byzantium versus Babylonia
A Forgotten Statement by Salo Wittmayer Baron and the Emergence of Byzantine-Jewish Mysticism in Resent Research
Enoch-Metatron and Iconography
6. David M. Grossberg: Between 3 Enoch and Bavli Hagigah: Heresiology and Orthopraxy in the Ascent of Elisha ben Abuyah
Appendix: Synoptic Presentation of b. Hagigah 15a and 3 Enoch
7. Moulie Vidas: Hekhalot Literature, the Babylonian Academies, and the tanna’im
Remembering the Memorizers
The Sar ha-Torah Narrative
Vision and Memory in Hekhalot Literature
Transformation, Esotericism and the Embodiment of Torah
A Recitation at the Throne of Glory
Section II: The Transmission and Reception of Hekhalot Literature: Toward the Middle Ages
8. Peter Schäfer: The Hekhalot Genizah
T.-S. NS 322.21 (G16) and Heb. e. 107.10 (G18)
T.-S. K 21.95.H (G10) and T.-S. K 21.95.J (G11)
9. Gideon Bohak: Observations on the Transmission of Hekhalot Literature in the Cairo Genizah
The Textual and Redactional Criticism of the Hekhalot Literature
The Relative Popularity of Different Hekhalot Texts in the Cairo Genizah
Personalized Hekhalot Texts from the Cairo Genizah
10. Ophir Münz-Manor: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Hekhalot Traditions in European Piyyut
Angelological Themes in Early Piyyut and their Connections to Hekhalot Literature
Angelology in Medieval European Piyyut and its Relation to Hekhalot Literature
Section III: Early Jewish Mysticism in Comparative Perspective: Themes and Patterns
11. Reimund Leicht: Major Trends in Rabbinic Cosmology
The Foundations: Ma‘aseh Vereshit and Cosmology in the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Yerushalmi
New Horizons: Cosmology in Gen. Rab. 1–12
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Ma‘aseh Vereshit and the Cosmological Discourse in the Babylonian Talmud
Unifying the Diversity: Cosmological Tracts in the Geonic Period
Epilogue: Echoes of Rabbinic Cosmology in Hekhalot Literature
12. Rebecca Lesses: Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature
Women – and Their Absence – in Hekhalot Literature
The Excluded Woman: Concluding Observations
13. Andrei A. Orlov: “What is Below? ”Mysteries of Leviathan in the Early Jewish Accounts and Mishnah Hagigah 2:1
Secrets of the Ḥayyot and Secrets of Behemoth and Leviathan
14. Michael Meerson: Rites of Passage in Magic and Mysticism
15. Annette Yoshiko Reed: Rethinking (Jewish‑)Christian Evidence for Jewish Mysticism
Christianity in the Historiography of Jewish Mysticism
“Jewish-Christian” Evidence for Jewish Mysticism?
From Parallel to Context: Rereading Ps.-Clem. Hom. 17.7
Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha
Jewish Hellenistic Writings
Other Late Antique and Medieval Sources
Hekhalot Literature in Context
：Between Byzantium and Babylonia
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