Hermeneutics of Holiness

Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community

By: Naomi Koltun-Fromm

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Hardcover | 20 August 2010

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Hardcover
328 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
16.5 x 24.1 x 2.5

Hardcover

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In Hermeneutics of Holiness, Naomi Koltun-Fromm examines the ancient nexus of holiness and sexuality and explores its roots in the biblical texts as well as its manifestations throughout ancient and late-ancient Judaism and early Syriac Christianity. In the process, she tells the story of how the biblical notions of "holy person" and "holy community" came to be defined by the sexual and marriage practices of various interpretive communities in late antiquity.
Koltun-Fromm seeks to explain why sexuality, especially sexual restraint, became a primary demarcation of sacred community boundaries among Jews and Christians in fourth-century Persian-Mesopotamia. She charts three primary manifestations of holiness: holiness ascribed, holiness achieved, and holiness acquired through ritual purity. Hermeneutics of Holiness traces the development of these three concepts, from their origin in the biblical texts to the Second Temple literature (both Jewish and Christian) to the Syriac Christian and rabbinic literature of the fourth century. In so doing, this book establishes the importance of biblical interpretation for late ancient Jewish and Christian practices, the centrality of holiness as a category for self-definition, and the relationship of fourth-century asceticism to biblical texts and interpretive history.

Industry Reviews

"Committed first-century sectarians, apocalyptic ascetics, Persian Christians, and Babylonian Jews: Koltun-Fromm ranges across a vast historical terrain as she seeks to understand how these various ancient peoples enacted holiness by hearing in the Bible a call to sexual renunciation. This is a riveting story, and a historical tour de force." --Paula Fredriksen, author of Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism "From the Hebrew Bible to Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, Naomi Koltun-Fromm carefully analyzes how sexuality, by being either denied or restrained, is transformed into a means of holiness, whether private or communal. In spite of obvious differences, she finds significant correlations between the approaches of Aramaic-speaking Rabbis and Syriac Christian authors of Mesopotamia. Her book opens new and promising avenues for the study of Jewish-Christian interaction in Late Antiquity." --Lucas Van Rompay, Professor of Eastern Christianity, Duke University "Naomi Koltun-Fromm has made an important contribution to the study of rabbinic Judaism by highlighting and clarifying the role of sexuality in the rabbinic construction of holiness. She also masterfully demonstrates how the existence of commonly held exegetical traditions connects post-biblical Judaism's ambivalence toward sexual asceticism and the privileging of sexual renunciation in Syriac Christianity." --Eliezer Diamond, author of Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture

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