Category:Second Temple Studies--1500s

Paul Eber

Carlo Sigonio

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Second Temple Studies in the 1500s--Works and Authors

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Overview

The "rediscovery" of Josephus, now also in the original Greek texts, produced a large amount of new editions and translations. Scholarly work inspired by Josephus added new dramatic details to the characters (also known from the Bible) of the Maccabees, Herod the Great (and Mariamne), and Herod Antipas (Herodias, Salome, and John the Baptist), who experienced and unprecedented fortune in literature and the arts.

The Reformation promoted the study of ancient sources in their original language and inaugurated a greater attention to Jewish sources. In 1548, Paul Eber, Professor of Old Testament at Wittenberg, was the first to write a history of the Second Temple period in modern times, after the model of Josephus. Following the controversies at the Council of Trent, Taverner published in 1549 the first volume devoted to the OT Apocrypha as a distinctive corpus from the canon of the Hebrew Bible.

In the 1580s, Corneille Bonaventure Bertram and Carlo Sigonio offered a first reconstruction of Jewish political and religious institutions in post-biblical times.

The interest in Second Temple Studies also penetrated Jewish culture. Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto's Chronicle covered the Second Temple period. Samuel Usque devoted a long chapter of his work to the destruction of the Second Temple. Above all, Azariah de' Rossi was the first modern Jewish scholar to focus on Second Temple Judaism, its history, archaeology and literature (especially Aristeas, Philo and Josephus), and to use non-Jewish sources (secular and Christian) to supplement or check the data in Talmudic literature.