William Robertson Smith wrote in 1885 that the biblical convention whereby aman is said to “go in” to his bride represents a linguistic trace ofonce widespread “beena marriage,” in which men joined the natal households of the women who took them as husbands. It was an error of literalist reductionism, but one that lent support to an imposing infrastructure of systematic kinship theory and evolutionism that continues to excercise an influenceon some contemporary scholars. Another way of saying this is that Robertson Smith failed to recognize a significant biblical metaphor—that of men enteringwomen's tents—when he saw one. This misapprehension of biblical poetics has had important consequences for the way in which he and his successors have interpreted the Hebrew Bible.

In the essay “Creed or Chaos?” written in the midst of the turmoil of World War II, British mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers defended the relevance of the creeds produced during the doctrinal debates of the fourth and fifth centuries to the lives of modern Christians. The theological dogmas contained in such documents as the Nicene Creed (325) or the Chalcedonian Definition (451) are not, she notes wittily, “a set of arbitrary regulations invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout of all-in dialectical wrestling,” but were “hammered out under pressure of urgent practical necessity” to resolve theological controversies that had real impact on the discipleship of ordinary Christians. To put matters at their simplest, the trinitarian controversies revolved around the question of whether Christ was divine, and so capable of saving humankind from sin and death. The christological controversies, at least in their earliest stage, debated whether Christ was really human, truly the God-made-man capable of healing wounded humanity and providing aviable role model for Christians to follow in the living of a redeemed life. At stake in both controversies was a convincing explanation of the central Christian tenet that “Jesus saves” for those who profess to be his followers.

This is a study of the emotional context of certain medieval anti-Jewish legends. It examines how the stories redefined the composition of society, the relation of this to popular devotion, and the paradox between a religious intention and its effect. After a brief survey of the phenomenon, I suggest that recent views of the psychological sources of the legends do not adequately account for the religious experience that they promote, nor do these explanations sufficiently account for the way the legends encouraged and reinforced social habits—“ruts in the pathways of the mind” that encouraged the maintenance of conformity among members of society. Part one will examine how the libels could help people imagine more specifically the general hostility against Jews widely propagated after the First Crusade and how this superimposed a social uniformity on the town. Part two describes the emotional context of that violence in devotion to the passion of Christ. Part three considers the moral dilemma posed by the function of these legends in popular devotion. My goal is to account for the religious content of anti-Jewish legend and an ethical problem within medieval piety, for which reason it will be necessary to draw on the diverse literature that shaped medieval Christian culture, both learned and popular, from the twelfth century, when the legends first appeared in Europe, to the eve of the Reformation.

Tal Ilan, in her recent “Notes and Observations On a Newly Published Divorce Bill from the Judaean Desert,” attempts to turn the “old view of Jewish divorce on its head.” She suggest that, “Perhaps in ancient Jewish practice women could divorce their husbands, and it is an accident of our transmission history that this fact is not amply illustrated.” This suggestion rests on her reading of Papyrus Se'elim 13, published and identified by Jonas C. Greenfield and Ada Yardeni as a receipt for the payment of the requisite money (“kethuba money”) promised at the time of marriage to be paid in the event of divorce. Ilan argues that this document is in fact a bill of divorce, and that it was given by a woman to her husband.