Description
Book SynopsisThe Persian period (539-332 BCE) sits somewhat awkwardly within the study of Second Temple Judaism. Amidst a myriad of issues and debates, the approach to the Persian period is fundamentally complicated by the difficulty in labelling communities -- whether or not the communities in the province of Yehud, in Egypt, or in the Eastern Diaspora can even be called Jewish, a label denoting a type of ethnic and religious symbiosis that some scholars are hesitant to identify any time before the mid-2nd century BCE. This uncertain position of the Persian Period in Jewish memory is nothing new -- in fact, it can be traced back to nearly two thousand years. Yet it can lead contemporary scholars to exercise too much caution when dating, analyzing, and discussing ancient scribal texts. Utilizing recent tools to examine scribal methods, Mark Leuchter takes a definitive approach. An Empire Far and Wide focuses on a careful selection of literary test cases to better understand how Jewish scribes in Pe
