Judæan,Judean. [adjective] Of or pertaining to Judæa or southern Palestine. [noun] A native or inhabitant of this region.¹

Jew. A person of Hebrew descent; one whose religion is Judaism; an Israelite.²

Judean, alsoJudaean. [adjective] Of, relating to, or characteristic of ancient Judea. [noun] An inhabitant of ancient Judea.³

Jew. A person belonging to the worldwide group constituting a continuation through descent or conversion of the ancient Jewish people and characterized by a sense of community;esp. one whose religion is Judaism⁴

Judean. [adjective] of or pertaining to Judea. [noun] a native or inhabitant of Judea.⁵

Jew. 1. A...

As opposed to the biblical books of 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings, and 1–2 Chronicles, which are each single works divided into two volumes, of which the second continues the first, the First and Second Books of Maccabees are totally separate works. Indeed, to some extent they tell the same story, from different points of view.¹ Both begin, after some obviously introductory material,² with the accession of Antiochus IV Epiphanes to the Seleucid throne in 175 BCE, and both proceed to recount that king’s dealings with the Jews, including the Hasmonean revolt against him. However, in contrast to...

About twenty years ago I published two articles on what I considered, and still consider, a significant difference between the ways ancient priests and rabbis typically understood Jewish law: I characterized the former as tending to realism and the latter to nominalism.¹ Since then, three things happened: (1) those studies elicited responses, pro and con, and they engendered additional thought; (2) I spent more than a decade exploring 2 Maccabees, work that spawned, inter alia, the comparison with 1 Maccabees suggested in the preceding chapter – and thus the ground was laid to consider the relation between the Judea/Diaspora dichotomy...

In 1965 Prof. Louis H. Feldman published, in the Loeb Classical Library, a volume titledJosephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books XVIII–XX. In 2000,in contrast, he published, in the new FJTC series, a volume titledFlavius Josephus: Judean Antiquities 1–4,and since then more volumes of the “Judean Antiquities” have also appeared in that series. Nevertheless, as Steve Mason, the editor of that series, has noted, the question of “Jews” vs. “Judeans” is one about which different translators have different tendencies.¹I am currently working on the last volume in that series, which is to includeAnt. 18–20...

The first three chapters of this book discussed examples of a basic dichotomy in ancient Judaism – one between Jews whose identity qua Jews centred on Judea, on the one hand, and Jews whose identity qua Jews centred on no place but, instead, on a more universal Judaism, on the other. In conformance with usual English usage, I term the former “Judeans” and the latter “Jews.” That dichotomy raises, for writers in languages such as English that supply two such terms, the question as to whether it is appropriate or useful to use only one of them when writing about...

Each of the first three chapters of this volume is dedicated to a different polarity: 1 Maccabees versus 2 Maccabees, priestly law versus rabbinic law, early Josephus versus later Josephus. Nevertheless, it seems that all three are, mutatis mutandis, different versions of the same basic dichotomy: one between the orientation and values of priestly Judea and those of diasporan Judaism – wherever the latter was found. The first chapter contrasted the values and orientation of a Jerusalemite spokesman of the high-priestly dynasty that ruled Judea with those of a Jewish author of the Hellenistic Diaspora. The second contrasted the values...