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Hello, welcome to the new books in Jewish Studies channel of the new books network podcast. I am your host, Arivar Ballette. Today, I'm honored and blessed to be in dialogue with Robert Jones. He is Assistant Director of Jewish Studies and Assistant Research Professor of Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
We will be discussing his newly published book, Priesthood, Calton Temple, and the Air-Makes Grills from Coon Run, Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonian Jewish Literary Tradition, published in Leiden, Netherlands. By Brill, 2023. Robert, I am honored and grateful to be with you today. Well, hi, Ari.
The pleasure is all mine. It's great to be here with you and it's great to get to talk about this book. To begin, please tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up?
What formative events in your life catalyzed the scholar you become? Well, I grew up in Delaware and I was familiar with the Bible. I was familiar with much of the content of the Bible growing up, but I wasn't introduced to the historical critical study of the Bible until I found myself in a biblical studies course in university. And that was a pretty formative moment for me.
I was fascinated by the academic study of the Bible. I was fascinated and hooked by the idea that the Bible had history, that they were competing theories about how these texts came together about the development of biblical tradition. And it was kind of hooked from that point. I was introduced to the field of second temple studies, to the field of second temple Judaism, in the context of that undergraduate experience in biblical studies.
And it was there where I first read and encountered books like Tobit, First and Second Maccabees, First Enoch, or Thesra. And again, I was just fascinated by a whole new corpus of texts that I had never encountered before, and particularly about thinking about their relationship to some of the biblical books that I was much more familiar with. And so at that point, towards the end of my university career, I had decided to pursue a master's degree with the ultimate goal of obtaining a PhD in New Testament. Although I knew that my goal was to try to situate these New Testament texts within the context of early Judaism.
But when I got to my master's program, the more courses I took on second temple Judaism and its literature, the more I wanted to study ancient Judaism and ancient Jewish texts on their own terms and not just as background for understanding the New Testament. So more and more during my master's degree, I gravitated towards the study of ancient Judaism, the history of the second temple period, and the literature associated with that period. And so when it was time to pick a place to do my PhD, I ended up choosing McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, in part because there was such a rich tradition of studying ancient Judaism, in particular, the Dead Sea Scrolls there, and that sort of set me on the journey that led to the publication of this book last year. What inspired you to write this book?
What message do you hope to convey to readers? Well, this book began as my dissertation, and I came to the idea in the context of several different graduate seminars. And this idea, this project brought together a handful of different interests that I had cultivated during my master's and PhD programs. I came into my PhD program interested in the relationship between wisdom traditions and apocalypticism.
I was interested in the origins and development of apocalyptic literature. So that was one of my interests I came into the study of second temple Judaism with. I also became very interested in the nature and history of the second temple priesthood. In my mind, it was an institution that, on any understanding, was incredibly important within the context of second temple period Judea.
And I thought that there was a relative lack of studies devoted to the priesthood itself, and so that was a very strong interest of mine interest in the priesthood as an institution. And I also became very interested in what was once called rewritten Bible or parabiblical literature these later reworkings or retellings of traditions involving Israel's ancestral heroes. And when I first started reading these Aramaic texts from Khumran, the text signed up working on. I realized that a lot of these interests of mine converged in this collection of texts.
And being at McMaster where there is such a tradition of studying the Dead Sea Scrolls with people like Eileen Schuller and Daniel Mechela there at the time. It was just a natural fit for me to look at the Dead Sea Scrolls much more closely in the context of my PhD study. And so I guess the kind of origin of this project and the story that I wanted to tell was how these various interests of mine all related to one another, the history of the Jewish priesthood, the role of apocalyptic literature and second temple society, and the way in which these books, the book called biblical traditions, these traditions related to characters from the book of Genesis and Exodus for example, continue to have an afterlife in the second temple period and beyond. What are the primary themes in your book, what story and stories does your book relate?
Well, the primary theme or themes in the book is how is the priesthood represented in literature of the second temple period. So we know that the priesthood was a historical institution in ancient Judea, but the priesthood was also a topic that scribes and authors took up when they set out to write literature. And so I wanted to think about how various scribes and authors represented the priesthood and the institutions associated with the priesthood, including the temple and the sacrificial cult. So the goal and what I set out to do, particularly towards the end of the book was to, to the extent possible, retell the story of the priesthood in in Hellenistic period.
What first picture interest in this topic. I think the first thing was just noticing how central priests and the priesthood were in this literature. I first studied the Aramaic texts from Coomeron in the context of graduate seminar. And I just kept noticing that priesthood was everywhere in this material.
A lot of stories in these texts were about priestly ancestors, like Levi in particular, but also characters like Noah who are reimagined as priestly ancestors in this literature, that there was a strong, strong interest in the sacrificial cult in how sacrifices are meant to be performed, how priests are meant to prepare themselves for sacrifice. And there was also a strong interest in the temple. There are many visions in these texts about the temple and the operation of the temple. And so it just kind of sparked my interest in thinking about, well, why, why are these institutions so important to the authors of these texts, and what role do they play in the larger context of this literature.
So it was just first noticing that this theme seemed to be everywhere it seemed to proliferate this literature and not a lot had been written on that topic. And so I thought I was able to contribute something in that space. What was your aim in preparing this monograph? Well, I was fascinated by these texts.
I was fascinated by the Aramaic literature from Coomeron as I read them. I found them very interesting. I found them in many ways different from a lot of the ancient sources that I had read prior to encountering them. And I grew convinced that they were important for understanding Hellenistic period Judaism.
But beyond a relatively small circle of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, these texts were not very well known to other scholars of second temple Judaism to other scholars of the New Testament. And so while the book in some ways is quite technical in part because it started as a dissertation my ultimate goal in writing it and the reason I continue to work on these Aramaic manuscripts is because I wanted to demonstrate their importance for writing the history and the theology of ancient Judaism. So in some ways I wanted to introduce these texts to a broader audience of scholars beyond just the small circle of congruent Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. On page two, you write as follows, the Aramaic scrolls provide a remarkably consistent conception of the priesthood, priestly service, the sacrificial cult and the Jerusalem temple.
They trace the origins of the priesthood and its sacrificial prescriptions back to Israel's predoluvian and patriarchal past. Identify Levy and Aaron as prototypical priests and progenitors of an eternal priesthood and depict priests and priests like protagonists, not only as cultic functionaries, but as learned scribes, judges, teachers and visionaries. They give a great deal of attention to the proper stewardship of the sacrificial cult and go to great lengths to enumerate the details of cultic procedure without fundamentally contradicting each other or earlier pentatucal legislation. They situate the Jerusalem temple at the center of religious life, unrivaled by any other native religious cultural or political institution and present a religious vision involving a heavenly and eschatological temple without explicitly casting aspersions on the contemporary temple, except in two very specific cases.
The animal apocalypse and the apocalypse of weeks. Beyond these broad thematic and conceptual affinities moreover, there are a striking number of parallels in phraseology, which reflects a shared way of speaking about the priesthood temple and cult throughout the Aramaic scrolls. Many of these similarities and parallels are inextricably connected to their other traits that scholars have previously identified as uniting the Aramaic scrolls, such as their shared approach to the Hebrew scriptures and their apocalyptic outlook, focusing on the priestly and cultic aspects of the Aramaic scrolls, thus reinforces the basic contours of what several scholars have already argued in respect to the coherence of these compositions. It can also clarify and develop what it might mean to consider these compositions as a corpus.
Can you reflect on the above for us. Thank you for reading that Ari. I think you've done a good job of selecting a passage that really attempts to capture the basic point that I'm trying to make throughout the book. And so just a kind of set the scene a little bit.
I think in any comparative project in any tax in any project where you're comparing texts with one another, I think scholars can choose to emphasize how the texts are similar, or you can choose to emphasize how the texts are different. And what I chose to do in this project is is to emphasize the former to emphasize the ways in which these texts are similar. Now, that's not because I don't think there aren't any significant and important differences between the texts that make up this corpus and there certainly are there's a diversity of perspective found throughout this corpus. But I do think that especially on the question of the priesthood and priestly institutions and how those institutions are represented in these texts.
And there are some really striking similarities that offer some really important insights into how at least certain scribes are thinking about the priesthood in the Hellenistic period. And so this passage that you have just read sort of lays out the results of what was a much much more systematic and text by text analysis of this theme in the Aramaic scrolls. And so the book itself is in some ways a literary text by text close reading of about 14 or 15 different compositions from the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls and what I sought to do was to find the ways in which or to investigate the ways in which these texts represented the priesthood and the conclusions and the conclusion that I came to summarize here in this passage is that in many ways these texts reflect a shared perspective on the priesthood, a common perspective on the priesthood. And that involves things like the priestly genealogy, the importance of sacrifice, but also the other roles that priests play in Judean society.
And that's really something that I wanted to emphasize in this study. There's often a focus on priests as cultic as those who perform sacrifices in the temple and that certainly the major, the major priestly role in these texts as well. But these texts also present the priests as scribes, as writers, as visionaries, as judges and teachers. And so I wanted to offer a fully formed picture of what priests had looked like in the minds of these authors.
Can you specifically define the Qumran Aramaic corpus? How do you define the Aramaic scrolls specifically? How are they different from the other Qumran scrolls? Yeah, and that's a great question.
We've been talking about in this conversation the Aramaic scrolls, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the subject of this book. So I think it is helpful just to step back and define what I mean by the Aramaic scrolls for just a moment. So for audience members who are less familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls as a whole corpus, there are about 900 manuscripts, give or take among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And about 130 or so of those manuscripts were written in Aramaic, or about 15% of the total Qumran collection.
Now these 130 different manuscripts represent about 30 distinct compositions, most of which were completely unknown until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And this would be texts like the Genesis Apocryphon, the visions of Aram, the book of giants, New Jerusalem. There are about 30 of these texts, again, most of which were completely unaware, most of which we were completely unaware of prior to these manuscript discoveries. And a lot of these texts appear to have been very popular.
They were preserved in a number of different copies across a number of the different Qumran caves, but they were completely unknown until relatively recently. And for a long time in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the so-called biblical manuscripts or the Satori manuscripts attracted most of the scholarly and public attention. And very few people were working on the Aramaic manuscripts from Qumran in part because the publication of these Aramaic manuscripts was very slow and very sporadic. Some of these texts or parts of them were published here and there in different journal articles and books, but the vast majority of them didn't even appear in DJD editions.
That is the official published editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls until 2001 and 2010. So they were published relatively recently compared to many of the other Qumran texts. So at least compared to research on the biblical manuscripts from Qumran and Satori manuscripts from Qumran from Qumran, work on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls is still in its relative infancy, although at least among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, there's a growing interest in these texts. More and more books and articles are being written on them, but the study of these texts is still relatively new, again, especially compared to the study of the biblical and sectarian manuscripts.
And as scholars began to study these Aramaic texts more carefully, first scholars like J.T. Millick and Ben Zung, and later scholars like Dvor de Montes, Florentino Garcia Martinez, Daniel Coachella, my own PhD supervisor, and now scholars like Andrew Perrin and Annette Reed. And as scholars began to study these texts more carefully, many of them began to recognize that these texts share a lot in common that distinguish them from the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which were written in Hebrew. So just to kind of run through some of the distinguishing features of these texts, I think it would be helpful for a discussion.
Most of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls that were preserved are narrative texts. The first stories written about Israel's heroes, and the setting of these texts tend to be the time for Moses or the time after the Babylonian exile. So for example, on the one hand, there are many stories involving protagonists like Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Levi, on the one hand. And on the other hand, there are a lot of stories involving Exilic or post-Exilic characters like Daniel or Tobit on the other hand.
And most of these stories are written in the first person narrative voice. It's pretty clear that these texts and their authors are very familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, especially books like Genesis, but they relate to the Hebrew Scriptures in a way that's different from the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls. The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls rarely cite or quote the Hebrew Scriptures directly, even in texts that retell biblical events or involve biblical characters. So the Aramaic Scrolls typically don't cite or quote the Hebrew Bible directly.
The Aramaic Scrolls don't typically follow the biblical narrative all that closely. They either expand on the biblical story, or they tell completely new stories involving biblical protagonists. There's a high concentration of apocalyptic material, both apocalypses in the formal sense as well as texts that are not necessarily apocalypses in terms of their genre, but have many apocalyptic themes like dream visions, angels and demons, eschatological judgment. And finally, the Aramaic Scrolls also engage heavily with the culture and traditions of non Israelite or non Jewish peoples, especially traditions from Mesopotamia, from Egypt, Greece, Persia, and some scholars have called the Aramaic Scrolls cosmopolitan or international and they pointed to Aramaic, the language of Aramaic as a kind of natural vehicle for the spread of traditions from peoples across the ancient Near East and the Persian and Hellenistic periods.
And just one final point on this corpus, scholars who have worked on these texts have argued persuasively, in my opinion, that most of these Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls were written prior to the emergence of the sectarian movement associated with Congran, and probably were written even before the Maccabean revolt. So there's a growing recognition that these Aramaic traditions can help us understand what is really an otherwise very poorly documented period of Jewish history, that Persian and Hellenistic period. I know there was a lot, but I thought it was helpful just to kind of lay out what we're dealing with. And my book really argues that priesthood is another one of these themes that's a real strong characteristic of these texts.
So you should be light on the relationship between the Aramaic Scrolls and apocalyptic literature, or between the Aramaic Scrolls and apocalyptic criticism. Yeah, that's a great question. And that's a question that I hope to come back to through as I continue to work on these texts. I mean, one of the things that scholars noticed when they first encounter these texts is that many of the earliest, Jewish apocalypses were preserved among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls.
So here we're talking about parts of the book with Daniel, again, seven chapter seven, for example, the Enochic literature, so the book of watchers, the astronomical book, were preserved among the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls. So many of our earliest known apocalypses were preserved among these texts. But there was also a recognition that the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls preserved other apocalyptic texts that were completely unknown to us prior to this discovery, texts like New Jerusalem, texts like the book of giants. And so what I think these texts can do is to help us think in new ways about the earliest period during which apocalyptic literature was being written and during which these apocalyptic ideas were first generated.
If you look at many handbooks or introductory courses on apocalyptic literature, many of them, for good reason, continue to focus primarily on Enochic literature and Danielek literature as the earliest iterations of Jewish apocalyptic literature. But the Aramaic Scrolls have added so many more texts to the conversation. And I think incorporating these texts into the conversation can really help us have a fuller, more accurate understanding of the origins, the beginnings, the early formation of apocalyptic literature in tradition. How does your study advance our understanding of polemics, polemicism and polemical language.
Thanks for that question, Ari. I think this kind of cuts to the heart of the project as I envisioned it. I wanted to think carefully about what these texts were being written for who they were being who were they being written for what issues were they being written to address. And I think there are many studies on some of these texts that imagine them as engaged in polemics or disputes with the priesthood books like the book of watchers, the Aramaic Levi document.
There's a long scholarly tradition of interpreting them as polemicizing against the ruling priests in Jerusalem. And it's acknowledged that this polemic is often implicit. But but but nonetheless, there's a long tradition of interpreting these texts as being polemical in nature. And one of the things that I was trying to rethink was the extent to which it's useful to think about these texts as polemicizing against the Jerusalem priesthood.
And so when I look at this literature when I analyze the priestly themes that appear in these texts I think it's far less certain far less clear that these texts are engaged in active polemics against the Jerusalem priesthood. We certainly have cases elsewhere in ancient Jewish literature where it's quite clear that the authors are attacking the contemporary priests in Jerusalem. And so my book is trying to argue that in fact these Aramaic texts from Qumran are not only not engaged in that sort of polemical debate. But in fact much of what I find in these Aramaic sources is actually quite compatible with support for the contemporary Jerusalem priesthood.
And so I'm trying to rethink the way in which we understand the social location of these texts and their relationship to other groups within ancient Judaism. Can you explain the phenomenon of the perpetual endurance of the priesthood? Yeah, absolutely. One of the points that I make in the book is that the priesthood in texts like the Aramaic Levi document in texts like divisions of on ROM is envisioned as enduring forever enduring in perpetuity.
At least for these these authors the priesthood is an institution that endures from the predoluvian patriarchal periods of Israel's history all the way to the end of time essentially this is a perpetually enduring this is an eternal institution handed down from father to son within families for generations. And so I think this approach this analysis in part tries to think about how these authors understand the priesthood and its role in Jewish society. And what you encounter again and again is not only is the priesthood this venerated venerable institution kind of at the center of Jewish society but but this is an enduring institution that is envisioned at least according to these authors as enduring eternally perpetually into the future. What do you think about the organization of the priesthood?
Well, I think what the book teaches us is at least what the authors of the Aramaic scrolls understand as the ideal organization of the priesthood towards the end of the book. I do try to make some historical claims. I do try to situate these texts within a broader historical context. And I think that this is a very very argument about how these particular authors understand the organization of the priesthood.
And what I have concluded in the research is that the authors of the Aramaic scrolls offer a vision of the priesthood that uplifts or exalts certain of Israel's heroes as progenitors of this eternal priesthood. Levi is lifted up as the ideal or the prototypical priest, particularly in the text like the Aramaic Levi document where Levi from the book of Genesis, who is a kind of morally ambiguous figure in the Aramaic Levi document becomes this glorious ancestor of Israel's priesthood. Now a lot of people have made that observation about the Aramaic Levi document. And so there's a tendency to talk about this text and other texts related to it as portraying the priesthood as Levitical as offering a Levitical vision of the priesthood.
In contrast to a more typical Aaronide vision of the priesthood. And so there's there's often this idea that because Levi exists before Aaron and because the Aramaic Levi document lifts up Levi and presents Levi as this glorious figure that there is an implicit as a key figure in this organization of the priesthood. And so what I what I tried to demonstrate is that the Aramaic scrolls text like the Aramaic Levi document don't necessarily offer a Levitical vision of the priesthood in distinction or against an Aaronide vision of the priesthood. But these authors of the Aramaic scrolls attempt to demonstrate the continuity between Levi and Aaron by exulting not all of Levi's children without qualification, but by highlighting a particular line within Levi's family, namely the line that runs through Kahat and Amram and culminates with figures like Aaron and Moses as well.
How does your book recontextualize the Levitical Priestly genealogy as presented in the sources and texts that you examine? Yeah, so this idea of the Levitical Priestly genealogy is related to this point that I was making about the relationship between Levi and Aaron in the Aramaic scrolls. And so in these texts, particularly in texts like the Aramaic Levi document the testament of Kahat divisions of Amram and others. There's a sense in which Levi is presented as a prototypical priest and a particular segment of his genealogy.
Also becomes inheritors of the priesthood. So the testament of Kahat, for example, has a passage where Kahat passes on the priesthood to his children. So Kahat Levi's second son is elevated amongst his brothers and presented as the possessor of the priesthood. And the same is true of Amram Kahat's son.
Amram among all of Kahat's children is presented as next in line as presented as the one who will inherit from Kahat, the rights or the privileges associated with priesthood. And so on the one hand, the Aramaic scrolls sort of single out this one chain within the Levitical genealogy, namely Levi, Kahat, Amram and Aaron. But there's also a sense in which the Aramaic scrolls emphasize the continuity between that priestly genealogy and Israel's patriarchal genealogy. So this is the genealogy well known from biblical tradition of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
There's a sense in which Levi is presented as the favored son of Jacob that Levi is presented as closely associated with Jacob and Abraham with Isaac. And so the authors of the Aramaic scrolls create this genealogical chain that begins with figures like Noah and Abraham and runs in a straight line through Isaac and Jacob to this priestly genealogy of Levi, Kahat, Amram and Aaron. And so what I think the Aramaic scrolls are doing, what I think the authors are doing is firmly associating the priesthood and the priestly ancestors with the patriarchs of Israel. So there's a lot of text that emphasize that genealogical continuity from Noah and Abraham down the line to Amram and Aaron ultimately.
Can you define and specify the term Levites, the term Zazadokites and the term Aronites? Who were these specific groups? Can you describe the relations intentions between them? Well, the second part of that question is the most difficult answer who these groups were specifically.
There are lots of different theories about how the priesthood was constituted in the second temple period, which families or groups were involved, how they related to one another. And you're right, there is a tradition of talking about the second temple priesthood as comprised of rival groups, namely the Levites, the Aronites and the Zadokites. And the history of the second temple period is often told as a series of conflicts and agreements between these three different groups. I think what I try to do in the book is to question the extent to which the Zadokites were actually identified as a group unto themselves, that there was a coherent group organized around the identity of Zadok in particular.
I cite a number of scholars, for example, Alice Hunt, John Clovins, and others who argue that despite how common it is in second temple scholarship to talk about the priesthood is being dominated by Zadokites or the Zadokite priesthood. We actually don't find that many explicit references to Zadok or the sons of Zadok or the Zadokites in second temple literature. What we do find, however, are many, many references to the Levites or the sons of Levi and Aaron and the sons of Aaron. And so over and over again in the second temple period, what you see is a kind of bipartite division of the priesthood Levites on the one hand and Aaronites on the other.
And I think the Aramaic scrolls fit quite well into this paradigm as I've been trying to suggest in some of the answers to the earlier questions, namely that the Aramaic scrolls don't seem to be pitting the Levites against the Aaronites. They don't seem to be arguing that Levi is Aaron's arrival. Instead, Levi and Aaron are both uplifted as mythic heroes, mythic or prototypical priestly ancestors, and are stressing actually the continuity between Levi and Aaron. And so I think in some ways, the Aramaic scrolls actually fit rather nicely into what I think is the dominant paradigm in the second temple period, at least once we get to the late Persian early Hellnessic period of this bipartite division of the priesthood into Levi's and Aaronites.
What epistemological questions does your study address? What epistemological problems and epistemological dilemmas in here, the works and sources that you incorporate into your study and that you examine here? So I think the best way I can answer that question is to think about what I tried to do throughout the book. The vast majority of the book is in many ways a literary analysis of a number of different Aramaic texts from the Hellnessic period.
It's a case by case, text by text literary study where my primary goal is to think about how these individual texts portray and envision priests and the priesthood. And I attempt to, through some comparative work, draw some conclusions about similarities, the common ways that these texts think about priests and the priesthood. Now, in the final chapter, in many ways the boldest chapter in the book, is to try to think about how these literary portrayals of priesthood can help us think about the historical priesthood in Hellnessic period. Judea.
And so I think most of the epistemological dilemmas and problems lie in the question of how do we use literary sources in our historical reconstructions, and that is a perennial epistemological dilemma in biblical scholarship, because often what we have are texts and we're trying to get at historical questions. But there's a danger in relying on literary texts when we are trying to answer historical questions or do historical work. And so what I try to do at least in the final chapter of my book is not to simply rely on literary texts. I try to read these literary texts carefully.
I do think they can contribute something that can be a data point when we're trying to think about history and historical reconstruction. But I try my best to incorporate advances in archaeological research in new mathematics. I try to look at what documentary sources can help us understand about this period. And so anyone that is trying to use literary sources to get at historical questions, myself included will need to be aware of the pitfalls associated with over-reliance on literary sources.
But I do try to make the case that with all the necessary qualifications that these tax these aromatic texts can help us to learn something about the priesthood in the Hellnessic period. They're just one data point. They're one data point that needs to be used to help us learn how to do that. They're one data point that needs to be consulted alongside other diverse data points, but they can help us.
And so I do my best to acknowledge that any historical claims that I make or that I gesture towards need to be done so with humility. That there's a sense in which any claims that I make about the history of the Hellnessic priesthood need to be provisional subject to change. But I'm interested in historical questions. That's one of the reasons why I got into this work.
And so my goal was to carefully and cautiously and tentatively think about how these Aramaic sources can help us to understand the history of the second temple period. And I think what I hope to do in general is to show scholars and students of the second temple period and even scholars and students of New Testament and early Christianity that these Aramaic scrolls are an untapped resource for helping scholars to think about the Hellnessic period. You know, they're growing in popularity within circles of Dead Sea Scrolls and Kumran scholars, but they're still opportunities for scholars and second temple Judaism to incorporate these sources cautiously into our historical understanding of second temple Judaism. And as we bring today's dialogue to a close, can you tell us about where your attention and time of God since completing this book?
Well, in the time since I've completed this book, I accepted this position at Penn State University for which I'm very grateful. And so a lot of my time and attention has been devoted to teaching. I was co-teaching a course on apocalypticism and apocalyptic traditions. And that's something that has been occupying my thinking a little bit these days.
I mentioned earlier in our conversation that the Aramaic's roles have a lot to teach us about apocalyptic literature and about Jewish apocalyptic thinking. That's one aspect of these texts that I was not able to incorporate into my book per se, but it's a question that I'm interested in. And in the future, perhaps one question for me to think about is how these Aramaic sources can help us think about the relationship between priests and apocalyptic literature. This is a long standing debate within the study of second temple Judaism just what role priests had in composing and disseminating apocalyptic literature to what to what extent to apocalyptic texts like the book of the watchers, polemicized against priests.
So I think that the book that I've written now can help me to kind of launch in a new direction, particularly thinking about the relationship between apocalyptic literature and the priesthood. But I'm in a phase of exploration right now of going back to the sources of reading, text again and thinking about new directions from my own work. Overwhelmingly grateful for your erudition and eloquence throughout the course of today's dialogue. I can hardly thank you enough for the wisdom that you bestowed on us during the course of the conversation.
Well, thank you. I really appreciate you reading the book so carefully. I really appreciate you crafting questions that really allow me to speak to the heart of the argument in the book and I appreciate your time and preparation. It was a pleasure.
I'm truly grateful. As we end today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbalette, your host on the new books into a studies podcast to dampen and dialogue with Robert Jones. He is assistant director of Jewish studies and assistant research professor of Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University.