Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future

Hindy Najman is Associate Professor of Ancient Judaism at Yale University. She is the author of Past Renewals: Interpretive Authority, Renewed Revelation and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity (2010) and Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (2003), as well as numerous articles on Second Temple Judaism, Philo of Alexandria, Rabbinics, and the Hebrew Bible. Prior to her appointment at Yale, she held the Jordan Kapson Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Notre Dame until 2005, and was the Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto until 2011.

• Preface; 1. Reboot; 2. The past and future Ezra; 3. The memory of scripture; 4. Re-centering the world; 5. Radical hope and the revitalization of scripture.

'This remarkable book is a brilliant piece of research, beautifully written and documented, which reveals to the reader the strategies adopted by the writer of 4 Ezra to restore hope after the destruction of the Temple. With the precision, clarity, and philosophical sophistication that characterize all of her writings, Hindy Najman articulates her analysis of the transformations of ancient Judaism in the wake of the destruction. A must-read for everybody interested in Second Temple Judaism.' Florentino García-Martínez, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven