Sometime after the end of the Judahite monarchy, Jewish writers opened their eyes to the universe in an unprecedented way.¹ A new interest in the cosmos and its patterns appears in late-Persian and Hellenistic apocalyptic literature. For the first time in Jewish literature, we find astronomy and cosmic geography—secrets lying beyond the traditionally understood and immediately visible world—in theAstronomical Bookof Enoch and theBook of Watchers. Texts like the Aramaic Levi document and the Qumran physiognomies extend these interests from the stars to the measurement of materials and the human body. In these sources we find...

In his 1995 monographJewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern EuropeDavid Ruderman discusses the question of Jewish attitudes towards and involvement in science.¹ There is, as has long been noted, an intriguing problem here. Jews in modern times have made a massive contribution to the advancement of the natural sciences, a contribution out of all proportion to their numbers. How is this striking fact to be explained? Are Jews genetically predisposed to be good at science, as some have seriously but implausibly argued. Or does the explanation lie in cultural factors, such as the nature of traditional...

Enoch, so far as we know, was the first hero in the Jewish tradition with whom scientific material was associated. His area of scientific research and writing was astronomy, and an entire booklet containing his teachings on the subject has been preserved. TheAstronomical Bookof Enoch or theBook of the Luminariessurvives on a series of fragments from four manuscripts found in Qumran cave 4 (4Q208-211)¹ and to a greater extent though in a different form in a large number of Ethiopic copies. The Aramaic fragments preserve text in the original language of the composition; the Ethiopic version...

The earliest known Jewish scientific work is, probably not coincidentally, also the first known scientific work in Aramaic. This is theAstronomical Bookof Enoch, found at Qumran, the oldest manuscripts of which date to the 3rd century BCE The text is written in the cosmopolitan, high-cultural register of thelingua francaof the Babylonian and Persian empires known as Standard Literary Aramaic.³

Its contents consist of a series of rules for the movement of the heavenly bodies and the increase and decrease of hours of light over the course of the year, presented as visions seen by the antediluvian...

The papers presented here both offer fine introductions that identify and problematize our understanding of the EnochicAstronomical Bookas a product of emerging Jewish tradition that drew upon and departed from received traditions found in the Bible, Ancient Near East and Hellenistic ideas. To a considerable degree, these papers, despite their common focus on theAstronomical Bookand interaction with the definitions of “science” by Philip Alexander, complement one another.

The paper by Sanders is concerned with the interplay between etic and emic notions of “science” as it attempts to draw attention to helpful heuristic categories for analysis such...

The fragments of scientific literature discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls justify the title of the present book as a field of study. While previous studies in the field of the history of science pointed to systematic scientific activity among Jews only as early as the Islamic period,² it is now clear that science existed earlier in Jewish history. After the recent publication and discussion of the scientific material in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is now time to access this corpus by means of more general questions: why is it that scientific activity existed in the Dead Sea Scrolls...

What do we know about what ancient Jewish scholars knew about what Babylonian scholars knew?¹ In order to answer this question we can analyse the different scholarly texts at our disposal, Babylonian and Jewish, and look for similarities and differences. We can then explain which Babylonian elements were familiar to Jewish scholars and how they appropriated, used and reworked these. Such analyses usually work from specific Jewish texts and then look for Babylonian elements, retracing these in specific cuneiform texts.

The issue of tracking influences and cultural encounters between Babylonia and Jewish Palestine has another side to it, one not...

Even a decade or so ago, it might have been difficult to imagine an entire conference and volume devoted to “ancient Jewish sciences.” InJewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, for instance, David Ruderman noted how he had “originally intended to begin … with an overview of attitudes towards the natural world in ancient Judaism,” only to encounter “a vast body of material in an area that has not been fully studied.”¹ Such was the dearth of research that it warranted its own Appendix—a bibliographical essay sketching possible paths ahead.² Similarly, in 2002, when Y. Tzvi...