Juxtaposing the shared emphasis on the basic human need for companionship in the Eden Narrative and the Epic of Gilgamesh provides new insight, both into how the texts respectively present companionship and into the issues of anthropology and gender that have previously distracted readers from this theme. Focus on parallels between Eve and Shamhat, who initiates Enkidu into human civilization, has obscured Eve’s resonance with Enkidu, created to be a match for Gilgamesh, as Eve was for Adam. The match created for the semidivine Gilgamesh is the male, semibestial Enkidu; however, Adam’s “helper” is a female, explicitly contrasted with the animals, and “bone of [his] bones and flesh of [his] flesh.” Though the heroes of the epic constantly struggle at the boundaries of human existence, the Eden Narrative depicts humans, male and female, together created distinct from god and animal, though likewise compelled to acknowledge their limitations.

In this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to another story and typified a style of writing that I characterize in the article as a heresiology. The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome deaths of women, was one way in which heresiological discourse frames rhetorical arguments for writers like Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, I purposely draw our attention to how Athanasian orthodoxy became reliant on gender-based violence.

This article provides edition, translation, and annotation of a Greek excerpt dealing with the christological issue of “whether there is an anhypostatos nature.” Until now unedited and recently catalogued as one of the fragments of Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Synousiastas, it in fact contains a close parallel to a famous passage from Leontius of Byzantium’s Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos concerning the distinction between hypostasis and enhypostaton. It is argued that the fragment was written in the aftermath of the Tritheist controversy and, more specifically, that it faces the doctrines of John Philoponus.

In the seminal work, Direction to the Duties of the Hearts, Baḥya ibn Paqūda (flourished 11th century) aimed to reconstruct Jewish existence on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” and the “duties of the hearts.” Baḥya’s intent was to instigate a transition towards the internalization of Jewish religious life. This paradigm shift was to take place not only by the shaping of an ideational formation and a new set of distinctions that Baḥya aimed at integrating in Jewish life, but also through a reflective consideration of the state of the Jewish tradition, its transmission mechanisms, historical trajectory, and contemporaneous challenges. As I will demonstrate in this article, in order to realize this transformation, Baḥya utilized a distinction that cross-cuts his work: the distinction between ẓāhir (“external” or “manifest”) and bāṭin (“inner” or “hidden”), that mostly indicates the relation between the manifest sphere of one’s actions and the activity that takes place only in one’s mental space. However, as I argue, this distinction is also applied by Baḥya to the expanse of Jewish “tradition,” pertaining to what was disclosed in it and what was left unimparted, what was communicated and what was kept unsaid, what was remembered and what was neglected.

In the esoteric writings of the Medieval German Pietists, nocturnal female demons, known as lilioth, preyed upon mortal men who crossed their paths or who laid down to sleep in their territory. These lilioth could smell the scent of a man, whose body carried with it the additional value of sexual allure, and would hunt them down with their finely attuned olfactory sense. Another odor discussed in these texts, the smell of flying ointment, guaranteed invisibility and offered invulnerability to night-time travelers of both sexes which mirrors the phenomenon known in contemporary Latin sources under the term cursus. In these texts, Jewish mystics, before the dawn of the Kabbalah, rewrote the widely known folklore traditions and fairy tales common to both Jewish and Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. The study presented here is therefore aimed to provide insight into a previously underestimated chapter in Jewish esoteric and kabbalistic sensorium, namely, the olfactory experience.

This study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized perception of rabbinic thought is deeply embedded in anti-rabbinic Protestant works, whose framework aids him in shaping his own unique outlook. By analyzing Mendelssohn’s deployment of the notion of contradiction, this article shows how his argumentative strategies in Jerusalem efficaciously counter well-known Protestant patterns of critique against rabbinic Judaism. By focusing on his idiosyncratic quotations and insinuations, it recovers the Christian works that he draws on and appropriates for his apologetic objectives and establishes that he uses Johann A. Eisenmenger for his depiction of the nature of rabbinic discursive practices while speaking out against “many a pedant” for their assertion that the rabbis disregarded the principle of noncontradiction. This article argues that Mendelssohn is alluding to eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who unreservedly follow Eisenmenger’s anti-rabbinic perspective and elaborates on how Mendelssohn entirely reframes this view as a conceptual strength of Judaism’s dialogical essence, thus rendering it compatible with the Enlightenment-based Weltanschauung.