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Peter Schäfer who celebrated his 60th birthday on 29 June 2003 has left a decidedly firm imprint on the young discipline "Jewish Studies" in Germany, which could only be set up at a German university after the Shoah. For someone directing a “small” academic institution he has managed during his academic career to guide and influence a strikingly large number of students in their scholarly pursuits in the field.
The collected essays of this volume encompass quite a variety of topics, whereby the focal points in Peter Schäfer’s own research are not difficult to recognize in the themes chosen by his former students: mysticism and magic are most conspicuous, followed by Rabbinic Judaism and the studies on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern and Modern Periods. Of note is also the fact that the methodological approaches of these contributions are no less manifold than their themes. Part of the contributions of this book were submitted in English, and all the German-language texts have an English summary or abstract.

The essays collected in this volume investigate the development of prayers of penitence within Jewish literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The book provides a critical overview of the present state of research on these prayers, and leading experts in the field use a variety of methodologies to investigate afresh various texts from the Hebrew Bible, apocryphal (deuterocanonical) and pseudepigraphical works, and the Qumran corpus in order to provide new insights into this prayer tradition. Contributors include Russell C. D. Arnold, Esther G. Chazon, Daniel K. Falk, LeAnn Snow Flesher, Michael H. Floyd, Judith H. Newman, Bilhah Nitzan, Eileen Schuller, Pieter M. Venter, and Rodney A. Werline.

Seeking the Favor of God includes three volumes covering the origins, development, and impact of penitential prayer in Second Temple Judaism.

Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

Eusebius and the Jewish Authors examines Eusebius of Caesarea’s use of non-biblical Jewish texts (e.g. Philo, Josephus, Aristobulus) in his Praeparatio evangelica and Demonstratio evangelica. In the first part, Sabrina Inowlocki looks at the citation process in Ancient Greek Literature and in Eusebius’ own double apologetic work. She also analyzes Eusebius’ conception of Judaism. The second part is devoted to a detailed study of Eusebius’ methodology in appropriating these texts from both a philological and a philosophical/theological perspective.
Through the lens of his exploitation of Jewish quotations, this book defies the traditional perception of Eusebius as being a mere compiler and nuances the manner in which his presentation of the relation between Judaism and Christianity is often seen.
This study will be very useful to readers interested in the reception of Jewish texts in Christian literature, in the relations between Judaism and Christianity, and in Christian apologetics.
This translation was made possible through a generous grant from the Fondation Universitaire in Brussels (www.fondationuniversitaire.be).

The literary creation of the ancient Jewish teachers or Sages ‒ also called rabbinic literature ‒ consists of the teachings of thousands of Sages, many of them anonymous. For a long period, their teachings existed orally, which implied a great deal of flexibility in arrangement and form. Only gradually, as parts of the amorphous oral tradition became fixed, was the literature written down, a process that began in the third century CE and continued into the Middle Ages. Thus the documents of the rabbinic literature are the result of a remarkably long and complex process of creation and editing.
The volume here re-issued was a classic when published in 1987. It made lasting contributions through its careful and succinct analysis of specific natures of various documents, and their textual and literary forms. In its time it incorporated ground-breaking developments and it remains required reading for those who missed it the first time.
In the future CRINT plans to publish a revised and updated companion volume that is to reflect recent debate and a greater range of scholarly views, reference to developments in scholarship regarding Second Temple, Qumran and New Testament as well as to ancient Mesopotamian and Persian sources and archaeology. New methodologies from the Humanities and reference to digitation of source material will also be incorporated.

The emergence of penitential prayer represents a significant formal shift in the prayer tradition of Israel. The essays collected in this volume investigate the beginnings of penitential prayer literature in the Hebrew Bible in the Babylonian and Persian periods. The contributors offer a fresh look at various aspects of the shift from communal lament to penitential prayer as well as the relationship between them, in the process applying new approaches and methodologies to such questions as the meaning and importance of confession to penitential prayer and the necessity of penitential prayer as a prequel to repentance. The contributors are Samuel Balentine, Richard J. Bautch, Mark J. Boda, Michael Duggan, Judith Gärtner, Katherine M. Hayes, Jay C. Hogewood, William Morrow, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, and Rodney A. Werline.
Seeking the Favor of God includes three volumes covering the origins, development and impact of penitential prayer in Second Temple Judaism.

Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).