Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha

This article argues that the movement from Hannah's silent prayer in Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 50.5 (‘Hannah did not want to pray out loud’), to her bold declaration in 51.5 (‘I will speak my words openly’), interrupts a narrative trajectory involving violent zeal in Pseudo-Philo's rewritten biblical narrative. Throughout the narrative, the prayers of key individuals for God's merciful action on behalf of the people are rendered efficacious by acts of zeal (zelus) that are both public and violent (47.1–3). By contrast, Hannah's act of silent prayer (framed as ‘zeal’ in 50.5) is accepted as the accompanying act for the people's prayer (51.2). This vicarious action helps explain Hannah's expanded role as paradigmatic of all Israel in Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum and serves to deconstruct the notion that acceptable zeal from Israel's leaders must be manifested with violence.

That the fiscus Iudaicus was used to fund the Roman temple known as Jupiter Capitolinus is a commonly accepted fact in social histories of Judaism during the Principate. After discussing the tenuous evidentiary basis for this claim, this article suggests an additional datum in its favor. Namely, one of Martial's epigrams (11.94) makes a peculiar reference to the temple of the ‘Thunderer’ that may be previously unrecognized evidence for the temple's funding.

Both the Jewish and Christian faiths view prayer as dialogue with the God of Israel. Prayer assumes that God is near to those in need and is attentive to the cries of the saints. Those who pray to God can hope and believe that God will hear or acknowledge their prayers. Yet there exists a tradition in both early Judaism and early Christianity, especially in apocalyptic thought but not exclusive to it, that views prayers as something tangible and, therefore, requiring an intermediary to transport and present before God. This notion of prayer complicates the assumption that God hears all prayers, for according to this tradition the angel bearing the prayers of the saints and/or God's response to the prayers may face obstacles while transporting the prayers to God or God's response to humans.

The 2013 volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, edited by Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila and Alexander Panayotov, is a highly important contribution to the field of Pseudepigrapha studies, making previously unpublished material available for further study. This review essay discusses the editorial strategies that have shaped this volume, focusing in particular on the representation of its basic building block, the pseudepigraphon. Exploring two entries in the volume, ‘The Book of Noah’ and ‘The Story of Melchizedek with the Melchizedek Legend and the Chronicon Paschale’, this article demonstrates how privileging the early ‘work’ as the default mode of representation creates imaginations of pseudepigrapha that may not match the manuscript sources that have in fact survived.