Hindy Najman, *Scriptural Vitality: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.

This study contests the perspective that the Persian and Hellenistic periods signify a decline, often referred to as "late Judaism," situated between a once-vibrant Judaism and the rise of Christianity. 

Conversely, Hindy Najman contends that the Second Temple period was distinguished by unrestrained creativity and poetic imagination, characterized by philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that encouraged hermeneutic innovation. By building on Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of classical philology and exploring new interpretative methods for the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Najman initiates a radical rethinking of biblical studies. 

Rather than attempting to reconstruct the original text or identify its original author or context, Najman celebrates the diversity and transformation of texts, tracing how meanings and texts proliferated within interpretive communities through innovative performances and new articulations of the past. 

Engaging with thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Peter Szondi, who are rarely acknowledged by biblical scholars, biblical philology is reimagined as a forward-moving study of the poetic processes through which Jewish communities re-created their past and revitalized their present. 

The Second Temple period emerges as an extraordinary age of creativity, whose influences may still be observed in contemporary Judaism and Christianity.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hello, welcome to the Dialogues in Judaic Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat. Today it's my honor and privilege to engage in a dialogue with Dr. Hindi Nyman, and we will discuss her newly published book, Scriptural Vitality: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics, published in New York by Oxford University Press 2025. Hindi Nyman is the Oriel and Lang Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture and Director of the Oriel Center for the Study of the Bible at Oriel College and the University of Oxford. Previously, she held positions at Yale University between 2010 and 2015, the University of Toronto between 2004 and 2010, where she was the director of the Center for Jewish Studies, and the University of Notre Dame between 1998 and 2004, where she was the Jordan Capson chair of Jewish Studies. This study refutes the idea that the Persian and Ellenistic periods signify a time of decline, often termed late Judaism, caught between a once vibrant Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. Instead, Hindi Nyman argues that the Second Temple period was characterized by unrestrained creativity and poetic imagination, marked by philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that fostered hermeneutic innovation. By building on Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of classical philology and exploring new interpretive approaches to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hindi Nyman embarks on a radical rethinking of biblical studies. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the original text or identify its original author or context, Nyman celebrates textual diversity and transformation, tracing how texts and meanings proliferated within interpretive communities through innovative performances and new articulations of the past. Engaging with thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Peter Sondy, who are rarely considered by Biblicists, biblical philology is reimagined as a forward-moving study of the poetic processes through which Jewish communities have created and recreated their past and revitalized their present. The Second Temple period emerges as a remarkable age of creativity whose influences may still be observed in contemporary Judaism and Christianity. Hindi, it's an honor to be in dialogue with you today.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

To begin, can you tell us about yourself? Can you comment on your personal relationship to this particular book project? Could you contextualize it in the context of your personal academic journey? Where did your interest in Second Temple Judaism come from? Where did your interest in the Hebrew Bible come from? Can you say something that could help our listeners get to know you?

SPEAKER_03 3:50

Sure. So I was brought up in a religious Jewish home. So from a very early age, I was trained in biblical texts and traditional Jewish commentary and liturgy. So from a very early age, I was very interested in what I would now call hermeneutics or exegesis and poetics, you know, poetry. So, and I think for me a real moment of change was when I read James Kugel's idea of biblical poetry when I was an undergraduate at Stern College in a graduate seminar taught by Moshe Bernstein. And in that context, I was just radically transformed. I fell in love with the book, I fell in love with the footnotes, and I decided that this was the person I was going to work with. And I did fast forward a few years, I did PhD, a master's, and a PhD with James Kugel at Harvard University. My own interests, I would say the questions I raise in this book, in a sense, return to my very first book, Seconding Sinai, where I was trying to understand ways in which interpretation worked in distinctive and developmental ways and compositional practices. So I observed attribution to Moses, for example, in the book of Deuteronomy, and fought against or argued against that it was a forgery and instead understood it to be a hermeneutical category to develop and extend Moses and the Mosaic attribution as a kind of in Jewish terms, hala halamoshimai, in meaningful attribution, which was a way of growing something hermeneutically. So that's really where that book was. But this book picked up where I left off 20 years ago and tried to develop further issues of composition. And what I realized across my career was that I kept bumping up against uh presuppositions, what I would even call dogmata or articulations of faith that are embedded in the field of biblical studies in the name of science or truth, you know, value distinctions, right? So, and I and I understood many of these presuppositions to be riddled with historicism, positivism, and also supersessionism. And trying to both inherit the field that I was trained in, by which I mean Vissenchevka's Judentum's, the study of Judaism, as well as biblical studies broadly, you know, the legacy of Spinoza and Valhausen, but also believing, hopefully, kind of a radical hope that we could change and again change and innovate on the scholarship through critique and through a kind of intellectual optimism that allows us to engage the academy, to engage the history of interpretation, and also to integrate new, radical new findings that have changed the way we understand the history of the development of Judaism. And by these two major changes, I would, I would major findings and major, you know, changes, paradigm shifts, I would talk about the Cairo-Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

What were the most fulfilling aspects of your research and writing process? What aspects of this project engendered excitements and enthrallment for you as a thinker?

SPEAKER_03 7:33

So people who know me know that I'm kind of excited a lot of the time. I'm a very kind of, yeah, I think all parts of it. There aren't any parts of the writing of this book that were frustrating or difficult. It it developed over many years, partly because there were interruptions through COVID, really slowed me down, and there were certain challenges in in my job that meant that I needed to spend more time with my student community. So those were challenges, but those weren't unfortunate. I embraced those challenges with great delight. I think the thing I'm most proud of with the book is that it was able to deepen over time, through really through teaching my material. I say this in my introduction that, and I start my introduction and my acknowledgments with my students, and I and I mean that very deeply. This book is very much a tribute to them and to our conversations. You know, and my my hope is that I've, you know, you know, you plant seeds with a book and that, you know, a thousand flowers will bloom, you know, and that and that my students will be able to use, critique, eclipse my work in their own new work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

In light of what you've shared, you don't want to be asking, do you have any favorite Second Temple texts or biblical texts that speak to you on a rainy day or during a challenging time or that speak to you in the dark, so to speak?

SPEAKER_03 9:02

Yeah. So the answer is yes. And there are different texts that I've turned to at different points in my life and that have been both therapeutic and helpful and helpful for my students also. So I was really struggling to understand kind of darkness and destruction. And Fourth Ezra was a book I wrote a book called Losing the Temple, Recovering the Future that was published in 2014. And there I talk about revelation inflected by destruction, so that even though the formal band of prophets end, prophecy and inspiration don't end. And this is a book which is I used using a phrase borrowed from Jonathan Lear of Blessed Memory, radical hope. And so I talked about Fourth Ezra as embodying radical hope, but it's also a radical hope that you can find in other texts. Certainly, you can find it in Lamentations, Rabbah, Echarabah. You can find it in some extraordinary texts. One is called a non-canonical psalm, that is a psalm that is found in the collection of psalms of Tihilim at Qumran, but not in the biblical canon. And it's a psalm that um starts with Eskarich, Eskarich Livrachion. I remember you or I mention you as a blessing, O Zion. And it's directed to Zion. And it's an extraordinary hymn of hope, which looks a lot like a mismore, a psalm, but actually it's not included in anything we know of apart from 11 Q5. This is a text that I'm really excited about. Currently, if you said, Well, Hindi, what's your favorite text today? Two texts, I think I'm thinking about a lot. One are the last chapters of Isaiah, what we often call second Isaiah, towards the end of the collection. I'm thinking a lot about that in the way in which it thinks about redemption and light. Another Isaiah as a whole, and and it's, and so I've been working on Isaiah. The other texts that I'm writing a commentary for now are the Thanksgiving hymns. And I talk a little bit about that. That's the long discussion about Ma'amelah Shon being responsive or being ready to respond, both God and the reader or the one who's praying. Um, the reason why I'm so excited about these texts is the way in which they radically interpret, right? They transform interpretation into a new text in a really creative and poetic way, but in a way that exemplifies the period in which they're written, which is the Hellenistic period. So new ideas, and you can see signs of Hellenistic philosophy and thinking and concepts, but also inherit and transform especially the prophetic materials that they include and incorporate, as well as a lot of sapiential or wisdom texts. So that's another text I mean, you know, I I really love all of the texts I teach and work on. It depends on if if you if you ask me, you know, what what drew you to the Hodayot or the Fourth Ezra or to Yishayahu, to Isaiah, or I would say it really has a lot to do with the central questions I'm thinking about now, which is are both scholarly questions, interpretative questions, theological questions, philological questions. I'm really interested in the development of Hebrew as a vibrant and vital language, both in the vernacular and in its literary or liturgical register. So that really drives a lot of my interests. So on the one hand, it starts with the text, but it also alongside the text, it starts with a series of conceptual questions that I'm thinking about, or generic, like I'm thinking about genre, I'm thinking about form. So I'm particularly interested these days in poetry and poetic form. So I'm interested in looking at biblical poetry broadly and ancient Jewish Hebrew poetry broadly.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

What misconceptions about Second Temple literature does your research attempt to correct? Why do these misconceptions exist and persist?

SPEAKER_03 13:24

Yeah. Yeah, that's a really big question. It's a very important question. There are many answers. I have many ways of answering the question. One is that we're dealing with a fixed canon. And you get this from a number of different directions. The problem is not that there is not a list already of authoritative texts like Pentateuch and the Prophets, and the prophets would include Psalms. We get this in Ben Sira, we know this already. We have a number of books, right? The number which maps onto something like what we would call Tanakh, right? Josephus, depending on how you count Kings and Samuel, Josephus, fourth Ezra. I mentioned Ben Sira already. I think it's really important to understand that fixity with respect to collection is more fluid than we might have thought it was in the Second Temple period. And the reason why this is important is both because the texts themselves are growing and shaping and crystallizing and finding final forms, sometimes in the plural. And also, you know, that the real question about Ben Sira or Second Esdras or Fourth Ezra, you know, or which Psalms are in, which Psalms are out, and how the canon was shaped is an open question. It's not a closed question. And by understanding that it's open, we can also not be afraid of the openness, but think about vitality and growth and shaping. Whether you want to attribute it to scribes or priests or the men of the great assembly, this is work that's being done by treasured and revered authoritative scribes for Jewish community. So to have a more subtle understanding of the emergence of text, I often say, you know, when you're younger, you get, you know, certain concepts taught to you within a dogmatic, within a religious community, but those concepts should grow up with you and you should become more and more sophisticated and subtle in your thinking. So that's one corrective. Um, another corrective is how to perceive this is it runs, it's a theme that runs throughout much of my my many of my publications and throughout this book as well. Prophecy didn't end with Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, right? But rather it was transformed. And I continue to think about this in my book that you know, inspired interpretation in the context of new liturgy, new text, new law can continue to be part of a vibrant and vital Jewish community. So khidush, innovation, can be part of that. And it also is, I think, the life source of Judaism. Another corrective is that Hebrew did not die and turn into an artificial language in the Hellenistic period. Rather, it continued to be vibrant and vital. And even if we can't mark it as a vernacular, we can nevertheless mark it as a vibrant and vital literary language, which continues to surprise us in radical ways, using new words, new verbal forms, you know, influence from different languages, whether they're language, whether we're talking about Persian or Aramaic, influence of Greek terms and concepts. And it's an emerging, developing language. Another, a fourth corrective is about late Judaism. So people have often referred to the period in which I'm writing as a period of lowly, kind of denigrated late Judaism, which becomes obsessed with law or becomes obsessed with, you know, the details of practice as opposed to the spirit of prophecy. And I just think it couldn't be farther from the truth. It's a way of undermining the emergence of Judaism as such. And that's something I write about quite a lot in the book. Really building the shoulders of giants. There are others who've understood this and noticed this in different ways, whether it's Sholem, Conrad Schmid, Renee Blach, Friedam Hartenstein. My colleagues are worried about this and they're thinking about it a lot. And we really need to think about this period, this later period of the Hebrew Bible or of Tanakh as one that's vibrant and vital. But not not to say that the earlier period isn't interesting. It's super interesting and super relevant, but it's it's a way of reducing prophecy to scribalism and scribalism to legalism. It really doesn't capture the dynamic presence of mysticism, new liturgy, new composition, new rituals, and new thinking that emerges within Judaism through this concept of entanglement that I've borrowed from physics that I describe in my book, but entanglement, integration, um, a coming together of different cultures, which then gives birth to new concepts. We knew this was true in the earlier period. No one's surprised to talk about this in the Babylonian period. People aren't really so surprised to talk about this with Persian culture, but it's also true with the conversation with Greek, with Greek traditions. And it shouldn't be scary. It's just part of a new stage of revitalization. Qumran really helped us. The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls really helped us understand this in a much, much deeper way because of the cache of text that we found that we never knew existed prior to this finding. We knew that Judaism had a vibrant and vital interpretative tradition. And we saw signs of it in Psalms or in Chronicles of Tivre Hayamim, but we we didn't know the extent of it, and now we do. Or at least we get a glimpse of the extent of it.

SPEAKER_01 19:37

On pages 168 and 169, you read as follows. The goal of this volume is not to focus on what is missing from our discipline, but rather to highlight and integrate the contributions of literature and imagination during the Hellenistic period to the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and Judaism in antiquity more broadly. I cannot emphasize enough that the discoveries of the scrolls from the region of the Dead Sea are a profound contribution to this new perspective on the history of Judaism. The Hellenistic period is one of innovative thinking, poetic imagination, and expansion of text and tradition. The work of integration of text from this period has only begun to infiltrate the way we think about Judaism and Jewish thought from antiquity to the present day. Hermeneutics is at the essence of the vitality of Judaism from its earliest inception until the present day. This is a book committed to thinking about the dynamic between the oral and the written as the tradition grows through the performance meditation and study of traditions. It is a celebration of new textual findings as well as the established as well as established unknown texts. However, it is also a book that problematizes central tenets of the field of biblical studies, which we have inherited, so that we might ask ourselves what we are transmitting and repeating in our own teaching and scholarship. The goal is thus to offer new perspectives and orientations for the study of biblical text so that we can see trajectories that are exposed due to new findings. These findings across the past century help us to understand the formation of scripture, the interpretive genius, and the ongoing production of new texts, rituals, and understandings of the transforming and emerging traditions of Judaism. Why did you choose to end the book with these closing words? And what is the relationship between these closing words and the themes and contents in your book that you developed?

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Right. So two really good questions. So I I Wanted to end the book by creating pathways, not closing pathways. So these last words are meant to say, I've opened up a few pathways, but there's so many more texts to bring to bear once we think about, for example, the Dead Sea Scrolls as integrative in in Judaism, that it's not about sectarianism, but the thinking, the creativity, the liturgy, the law is the history is part of the history of Judaism. And it's it's a radical shift in the way we need to think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we need to read them with an open mind and an open heart, both with respect to Jewish mysticism, with respect to Jewish law, and with respect to Machara Israel, Jewish thought. Secondly, I really want to think about Greek and Hebrew texts, Jewish texts in Hebrew and in Greek in this period, whether it's the Septuagint, whether it's Philo, whether it's Ezekiel the Exagoge, whether it's Josephus, together with Qumran, together with the texts found at Qumran, to help supplement and grow together a body of literature that we can come to think of as you know, Judaism before the rabbis, as a way of thinking about a rich collection of texts that are variegated with respect to genre, with respect to style, with respect to theology. And so I wanted to signal all of that at the end as well. And to remind people, I guess, kind of one really important corrective towards the beginning of the passage you read is don't forget what I said about the Dead Sea Scrolls. They're a watershed. They can't be put in a corner as sectarian.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

How can this study engender cooperation between classicists and biblicists? What are some suggestions of how this can actually unfold, whether in a classroom or at a conference or within a department bureaucracy?

SPEAKER_03 24:24

Right. So there are many, many different ways to answer this question. I mean, I'll answer it in a bigger way and then I'll get like smaller and smaller. One is that I'm deeply committed, and this is what my center in Oriol is about. It's what the book series, the Bible and the humanities, is about. In order to survive Jewish studies, biblical studies, we need to be integrated into the academy and we need to look for the right partners. For me, the right partners, the best partners are two. One are literary people who work in literary theory, because so much of what we do in hermeneutics is kind of stuck. We're a little stuck in my field. And I want to look at different voices and different ways of thinking about hermeneutics. People just get stuck in like a Bachtin or Gautamer or Kristava. They just get stuck. And I we need to read more and we need to think more with people who work, you know, the people who are doing cutting edge work in literary theory and philosophy. The other is classics, because the classicists I work with are far more open around canon and how to think about textual criticism, by which I mean the right text, the earlier text, a textual edition, all of the work that goes into that, which is enormous. But in my experience, the field is less dogmatic than our field. And it can really help us open up intellectually and see the text for what they are. How to do this? Well, I've done it in many different ways. I've had many seminars with classicists, us with Constanza Gutenko. We've done seven or eight seminars on different ways of thinking about ethical reading between classics, biblical studies, Jewish studies, bringing in Sinologists and Islamicists and rabbinicists, you know, from all over. I taught a seminar with a colleague named Tobias Reinhardt, who's the Latin professor in Corpus Christi College. And we taught a seminar on Philo of Alexandria. And half of the students were my students working in Bible and early biblical interpretation, and the other half were classicists. So that's a way of integrating. And my students and his students learned so much, and numerous projects, an MPhil dissertation, a D a D Phil or a PhD dissertation was born out of it from my own students, and many publications ensued as well. So the other thing, the other way to do this is to create modules or collaborate collaborations between departments, which I've also been working on quite a lot between religious studies or theology or an elk department and classics. And this again, none of these things I do alone. I do them with colleagues, with friends, with administrators, with a humanities division in Oxford that's supportive. But this is about the future, about taking leadership for the future and also returning and reminding ourselves that biblical studies was born in conversation with classics between Wolf and Eichhorn, which I write about a little here, and I've written about more elsewhere. And the tearing apart of that of two siblings, I think is really a loss for both. So my colleagues with whom I collaborate, there's another wonderful colleague, René Perano from Harvard. We've published together, we've thought together, we taught together when I was at Yale. These collaborations are moments for opening up new trajectories and new thinking for how to teach and how to think about antiquity. It's also a way of correcting the silencing of Judaism in a period where it was vibrant and vital and contributive. So this is also an important corrective.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Can you explain what is meant by ethical reading?

SPEAKER_03 28:04

Yeah. So thank you for asking that. So in I started my position in Oxford in 2015, and the end of that first academic year, I gave my inaugural, which was called Ethical Reading: The Transformation of the Text and the Self. I include a developed version of that in the book, and I talk about it a little bit. What I mean by ethical reading is not prescriptive but descriptive, that is, to show what's happening in the context of texts that read other texts, to reflect on our own presuppositions ethically when we read and when we assume a practice of reading, whether we call it midrash or allegory or typology, whether we call it translation or targum, right? But to be very careful when we translate these terms or when we interpret these terms, we watch what we're carrying with us and we understand ourselves to be transformed by the text just as we're transforming the text through interpretation and understanding.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

What is meant by the term teuda testimony? Can you explain?

SPEAKER_03 29:16

So teuda is a really, really important term for me because it's important for Jubilees, a second century BCE interpretive work, which starts from the beginning of Genesis and ends in the middle of towards the middle of Exodus. It begins by talking about the Torah and Teuda, the law and testimony that organizes this work, which is the size of the book of Isaiah. So it's an enormous book. It borrows from the language of Isaiah 8:16, sorly Torah Teuda, and then bind it up for my students or Limudai, right? It's a very interesting moment because Jubilees uses Torah and Tuuda, possibly to mean text and interpretation, or possibly to mean the first and the second law, or the heavenly tablets and the written iteration of it. The most important part is testimony is a way of bearing witness to correct interpretation for the Book of Jubilees. Teuda, for me, in more recent times, about a year ago, I co-published an article with a colleague Jan Dietrich on Tavnit, and Teuda also played a very important role. So this blueprint of the heavens and then it being repeated on earth, a kind of copying, also bears witness to the revelation of the paradigm, the paradigm of temple, or the paradigm of the earth in the heavens, right? Or the paradigm of law in the heavens, a natural law and uh and an earthly law, an earthly iteration of the law with respect to Torah Moshe. So Te'uda is very powerful. It's also a way of bearing witness to covenant, a covenant not to destroy the world again, a covenant of peace, a covenant of right, a breach shalom, right? It's also bearing witness to revelation, right? This is about witness and concretizing that in the context of the law itself. So it's a very, very, very rich term. Just one other thing is a beautiful article by James Kugel where he plays with it's about to is played with almost midrashically about both warning Lahaid, right? Like to warn and to testify, right? And to mark, right, mark testimony. So okay, yeah, please, yeah, go ahead. Next.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Another term you use is entanglement. Can you explain it?

SPEAKER_03 32:02

And can you there's a little footnote in my book where I talk about Gavin Salam, who is a quantum physicist in Oxford, was a friend of mine, and we we talked about it a lot because a lot of people have been using the term entanglement, like medievalists. And I was trying to figure out how to kind of capture it. And we talked about it a lot in physics terms, and I brought it kind of back home to my book. And I talk a little bit about how there are moments when cultures come together, right? Using the metaphor borrowed from physics. So there are moments when concepts come together, but then they can fall apart again. So just because a Greek and Hebrew tradition come together for a little while, it doesn't mean that that's transmitted. So when I'm emphasizing the importance of, for example, of Greek philosophy in the context of Philo and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I've discerned certain ideas that can be linked to Greek thinking without taking away from the Jewishness of the text. But the cultural context is Greek philosophical concepts. Like, for example, Tavmit isn't just a you know a heaven, heavenly and earthly kind of correspondence, but it becomes very linked to the way in which Plato, I think, conceives of Tavmit or Paradigm or Arkotupos. So it's important for me to be able to talk about moments where culturals, cultures collide and influence one another or in tension with one another, but then they can also dissipate because it's not clear to me that this um connectedness between Greek and Jewish philosophical thinking is a linear development or an unbroken chain, like the rabbis talk about in Mishnah Abbot, right? It's not like that. It's actually, it breaks, and then it might come back together again in the context of Sajigaon or Maimonides or Rosensweig or Hermann Kohn or Levinas. Um, but I mean that's a philosophical moment. There are other kinds of moments, of course, as well.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

How does your research advance your understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

SPEAKER_03 34:07

How does my own research advance?

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 34:12

So I would say it the other way around. How does how do the Dead Sea Scrolls help advance my research? You know, the fact that they've been found and we work on them and we think about them. I'm learning from them every day. They teach me so much about what ancient Jewish communities thought, believed, practiced, and how they brought the texts of the Hebrew Bible to life again and again. I like to think that my research advances Dead Sea Scrolls research in a few different ways. One is I'm teaching them all the time. My students in Oxford, when I go to other universities, I talk about them, I teach them, and I also write about them in scholarship, which hopefully reaches a wide variety of people. That's one. The other is my own research in arguing that they are to be integrated in the history of Judaism really makes it a very strong argument for studying them and reading them. I'm not arguing that some of the interpretive Dead Sea Scrolls are meant to be part of, you know, you know, Shnei Mikrava Echad Targum, right? That you read it with like the Aramaic Targum and biblical text, so that you read it alongside Rashi. I'm just saying that from a scholarly standpoint, there's a lot of, there are a lot of riches that will help us understand the history of the development of Judaism in the Hellenistic period and beyond. I mean, I'll give you some examples. Like I mentioned a Mizmore earlier, a hymn, as Kareklitzion, Apostrophe to Zion, this direct address of Zion. It's so interesting, right? Um, I've actually, my sister is a rabbi Dina Nayman, and I asked her if we could read this on Tishab, because it's it's a psalm, like it actually interprets Psalm 137. And we we talked about it, and I showed it to her. Um, it's very much about mourning the absence of the temple, but it's also about recovery in the context of that, like Jeremiah 31, 32, or or Psalm 137, or the book of Lamentations itself. Well, that the research that I've done, I think has also enabled me to teach people about these texts, but also has mutually benefited the study of Judaism and the study of the scrolls. So they can cross-pollinate and mutually illuminate each other as collections of texts and textual communities, interpretive communities.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

In light of what you've said and have been saying, what can this book offer to readers at different levels of background? What does it offer to a specialist? What does it offer to an intermediate? What does it offer to a novice? What does it offer to a beginner, someone who's maybe just dipping their toes in this field?

SPEAKER_03 37:10

Yeah, I've had this discussion with very, very learned people who are not scholars. And I I don't think I wrote a book that is meant for lay people. I'll have to confess, I think it's really a scholarly book. I I hope that there are parts of the book that can be given to advanced undergraduates. It presupposes an awful lot. I it's not that I'm not capable of speaking to um a broader lay audience, but I wrote it in a series of Oxford University Press, which is a scholarly series, which is heavily annotated. I I take I take your question almost as a a kind of a challenge, right, to write parts or rewrite parts in a way that I could explain. I think with some, like with this podcast, I think people without as much background could begin to read the book and could kind of break down the parts. And maybe I would tell them, okay, you know, hear what I said, just read the section on the Hodayot on the Thanksgiving hymns, or just read the section on Jubilees and go back and read Jubilees and Hodayot, and then maybe come back. The stuff where I really reset the stage about how to conceive of the field and textual composition and challenge this impulse to recover the past and anything after that is somehow lesser. That's a very complicated scholarly discourse, which takes a long time to understand what the problem is in the first place and how I'm trying to correct it. But I am trying to correct it.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

What does your book's title mean? Can you explain it?

SPEAKER_03 38:59

Yeah, sure. So it means a lot of things. I talk about it a little bit at the beginning, and then I I try to use it as a red thread throughout the book. First of all, like scriptural, you know, biblical, textual. I tried all of those. I decided to go with scriptural because I did want a word that signaled that it's fundamentally a book about the Hebrew Bible, but it's not only the Hebrew Bible. So I kind of wanted process to be communicated in scriptural. Um, vitality, it's a term I've been kind of bouncing around with. I was really inspired to use this term by Sholam, by Gersham Shalom, who was thinking a lot about vitalized, a vitalized or revitalized tradition of Kabbalah, of mysticism and the way in which a tradition continues to stay alive. And for me, a third, a third thing that I mean by it, it's the opposite, right? It's the opposite of a late Judaism or a dead Judaism or a cadaver that's to be studied. The texts are alive and dynamic to the reader. This is also something I've meant by ethical reading. When you read a text, you're reconstructing it and it's reconstructing you. That vitality is two-way. It goes both ways. It's it's reciprocal. And vitality is to wake you up and for you to wake the texts up, but to be responsible politically, philologically, historically, philosophically, and to think carefully through that process. It took on a very different meaning, which is a personal matter. I was finishing the book when my mother was very, very sick, and I finished the last footnotes as she was dying. So, you know, I was sitting by her bedside when I finished the book. And so it's a very, and I read the dedication to her. So it's a kind of vitality that lives after, you know, after her memory or in her memory. So that's also a very uh special meaning because anyone that it would have met, my mother would have known that she was like the most dynamic, vital person. She walked into a room and the entire place was full of color and and life. So another, but I guess the last meaning I would talk about was, but this I already had the concept before I decided to choose the Kandinsky. But Kandinsky's painting, which I chose to put on the cover, is about their lines, there's fixity in their shape, like there is to canon or text or tradition, and yet there's a lot of possibility around it. So that's the meaning of black lines, um, in the way in which I've understood it. And I also spent a lot of time reading Kandinsky's work. It's it's also from the most vibrant and vital part of his own career, which was really the center, the centerpiece of his work.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

How can this study benefit a reader outside of the fields that are directly addressed, such as classics, Jewish studies, religious studies, biblical studies, Second Temple literature? What value does this study have to someone perhaps in other fields or subfields of the humanities? How can students and scholars in other disciplines and unrelated fields grow and benefit from the research that you've done?

SPEAKER_03 42:27

Well, you know, I'm it's funny that you asked because I'm going to a conference in Munich in about a week and a half, which will be filled with a room full of classicists, but mainly people who work in 18th and 19th century German literature and theory. And they want me to talk about Peter Sandy and the Hodayot and the Thanksgiving hymns. And I'm bringing the text to them, but we're also thinking together about what does hermeneutics or exegesis or parshanut mean for these texts? How are they reading? What are the practices of reading that are embedded? And how can they teach us more about the classical period, late antiquity, medieval, even early modern and contemporary modes of reading. So not just to learn from Goethe and Sandhi, uh, but also to bring these texts to the table and try to understand more about what hermeneutics is broadly conceived. So that's one example. Another example is just, you know, there are people who think about the Oxyrhynchus papyri and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Chairogeniza and Pompeii and Herculaneum. So I think part of what I do in the book also is to bring some current and contemporary and recent findings to the table.

unknown 43:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

If just as a follow-up, when you allude to Sandy, I'm sure you're aware of the circumstances surrounding his death. And I bring that up because many fields in the humanities are very interested in trauma and trauma studies. In light of your research, are there any ways that your insights can build a bridge to fields in the humanities that are thinking very seriously about trauma?

SPEAKER_03 44:13

Yeah. So I just was part of a big conference on trauma studies, on lamentations on Echa, but not only Echa. And I also wrote the afterward to the book, to the to the volume, and I talked about ancient destruction of Judaism and contemporary destruction and what it means to think now about trauma. My 2014 book and a few related articles were about trauma. And I I spent a lot of time looking at Walter Benjamin's arcades project and thinking about his Trousspiel, right, which is about trauma, stories about trauma and loss and how to cope with trauma. I think it's a very central part of what it is to study ancient Judaism. And I think we have a lot to learn for how writers like, and I've argued this elsewhere, like Second Ezra or Fourth Ezra dealt with the destruction of the Second Temple and the trauma around, you know, you know, the pillaging and the rape and the destruction of Jewish community, as he describes in the fourth vision, as a kind of it's early, it's Esther Chazon and Michael Stone have said it's the earliest kina that we have in the history of Judaism that we have extant to us. I mean, apart from something like Psalm 137 on the Harod Babel. So I think a lot about trauma studies and I think a lot about the history, but this book was meant to step away from trauma and move more towards the hope of radical hope and to try to think about how hermeneutics and light, right? Illumination fills the pages of a lot of these texts. And the only way to think of Judaism is not just, you know, the oi or the darkness, but you know, the oi mahayalanu, right? It's also about a hope which generates new interpretation. And I've been thinking a lot about tikvaor in the Greek Elpis and how hope is generative for interpretation and its relationship to nature and the cosmos. So I'm thinking about the flip side of trauma. Obviously, in these last few years, since the horrific tragedies of October 7th, it's very, very hard, you know, not to also work on trauma and think about trauma and anti-Semitism, which my work has done. But this book was not written as a response to October 7th at all. It came out shortly after, but that's not, that's not, it was the the book, the work and the book and the concept started long before. It's a book that ultimately has become quite timely because I'm challenging hate against Judaism in the book. But that's not where it started. It started really as a critique of the way in which biblical studies is thinking about uh how to understand composition, right? How to reconstruct composition.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

On page 56, you write as follows Innovation is also inhibit exhibited in hermeneutics prayer as well as translations, the earliest translations of what comes to be called the Septuagint, that is Greek Bible and the narrative surrounding the letter of Aristius exhibit tremendous creativity and innovation in the context of the early Greek materials. What we have come to understand is that the Hellenistic period is one of oasis, uh, imagination, new innovative composition, practices of refinement, editing, and expansion of legal, liturgical performance, scribal, and oracular. Can you say more about this?

SPEAKER_03 47:59

Yeah, sure. So, first of all, what I'm what I'm doing here, and I I have many colleagues in mind, especially Allison Salverson, who's a very dear friend and close colleague in Oxford. You know, think the new thinking about Septuagint studies is that it's innovative, it's part of the world of Midrash. So translation itself is creative, innovative, transformative, in the way that you would consider Targum uncle is to do the same, right? It's creative, it's innovative, but it's also a translation. So I'm thinking about the less obvious examples that exhibit this kind of vitality through making it in the end of Na Maya 8, um, verse 8, um some secho by Vinu Bamikra, apply insight in order to understand scripture, right? The text, the text, right? So I think, you know, this has become the classical source for writing Targum, right? For Aramaic Targum. And I think part of what I'm saying in the beginning of the passage that you just read out is, you know, this is not just trying to get a you know, word-for-word translation in a wooden way, but actually it's generative. And the Greek translation brings more life and new life and new places for the text. And, you know, the this language of Jewish texts being innovative, refinement, editing, expansion, this is often associated with Greek and Latin texts. You know, at the end of Ars Poetica, Horace talks about all the practices of writing and rewriting and editing of a text. And I want to say it's also part of the Jewish imagination. And I'm not protesting, I'm just showing, I'm showing what's happening in front of our eyes when we're reading these texts. It's wildly creative, heavy on the wild. I mean, there's so many different things that are happening in these texts. We have to watch carefully and think deeply about the mind behind the text.

SPEAKER_01 49:58

Can you explain the terms tselen, meaning image, and demut, meaning likeness?

SPEAKER_03 50:05

Yeah, so I started earlier to talk a little bit about tavnit, which is a paradigm or an archetype. And in the book, I also talk a little bit about how this image has a likeness, the the paradigm of the temple or has a likeness. And tsellim, the the image, right? But Selim Elohim Baratad Adam in the image of God, right? Adam, Adam, God created Adam Barat Adam, or like Bidmut Tavnitto, right, in the the the image or the the icon, right, of of his of his kind of paradigm or archetype. It's very interesting to think about the interpreter and the subject, right, as transforming through reading and the perfection, the aspiration towards perfection through study, through understanding. So I'm really interested in the way in which the work, for example, in a text like Psalm 119 or a discussion in Nehemiah 8, as I just mentioned, um, and also in Proverbs, right? That you, Mishlay, you see the emergence of a human being that through the study of law and through the keeping of the law, there's an aspiration towards to become more like God, to be more of Salem Elohim, to be more in the image of God, but never to be God. Um, I also talk about the fact that Salem and Demut can be negative things, right? It can be about creating an image which of God, which in order to imitate God physically or representationally, which is a bad thing, right? So the very thing that can be about aspirational and towards perfection, towards becoming whole or becoming better, or to become pure through improvement, if it's used in the wrong way, can also be destructive.

SPEAKER_00 52:08

What does the term spot judentum mean?

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Can you explain it?

SPEAKER_03 52:12

Yeah, yeah, spait judentum. So this is what I was talking about earlier. It literally means late Judaism, or sometimes people have called it middle Judaism, or they've called it fruitentum, early Judaism. All of these really don't capture what it is we want to say, which is Judaism continues. It's alive and vibrant to itself, to its community, and it continues. So I'm trying to say step away from judgment that freezes Judaism in time. Rather, release, let's release that characterization and instead talk about the Hellenistic period, the Babylonian period, the Hellenistic period, late antiquity, medieval, modern, early modern, right? Like let's let's try to step away from value-laden terms that characterize Judaism from a perspective of supersessionism, that Judaism is is late or uh forgotten or uncreative, and instead talk about Judaism, which is vibrant and vital and ever-changing. There's fixity in the context of texts, in the context of transmission. I already signaled the example of Perkaya both, the idea, the notion of transmission and fixity, but there's also constant change in innovation.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

In light of what you've said and what you've shared thus far, I was curious to ask you what value might your research and this book have to someone in the field of Islamic studies? The reason I bring this up is for is actually for actually two reasons. One is, as I'm sure you're aware, there's tremendous biblical and meteoroshic intertextuality in the Quran, in tafsir literature, and in many other Islamic sources. At the same time, in many Islamic sources, there's a similar, in a sense, skipping over of the Hellenistic period where in their line of prophets, it kind of goes Ezra and in some traditions Alexander and then Jesus. And there are stories in Al-Tabri's history that talk about Jesus' time, about Alexander's time, about Ezra's time, but there's a similar jumping over of the Hellenistic period. Is there any value in asking you about how someone in Islamic studies could benefit from this work?

SPEAKER_03 54:39

Yeah, I think they could benefit tremendously. I think the same vitality in tafsir exists in the Islamic tradition. I think it's vibrant, it's dynamic. I work with, you know, my colleagues in Oxford, especially, Frank Riffle just gave a great talk about um Islamic, you know, the classical period and the later period, which continues to be vibrant and vital and philosophically rich and innovative.

SPEAKER_02 55:03

Yeah, I think it's very, very relevant, very interesting, and a very productive comparative conversation.

SPEAKER_01 55:14

What does the term vitality mean separate from scriptural vitality?

SPEAKER_03 55:21

Yeah, so it's a funny thing. Ellie Friedlander, who's a philosopher from Tel Aviv, um, when he he was one of the first reviewers of my book, and he said, vitality is a beautiful term, but you forgot to talk about mortality. You know, and I think one way to balance this is that I'm really focused on um texts as living organisms, and I talk about that a lot in the book. They are alive to themselves and to the people who read them as though they are no moi msuhoi in soul laws, right? They have soul and they have spirit and they carry them, they carry them uh, you know, you know, in a community that reveres them, they are alive to them. They even have rules about how to care for them, how to put them in a Geniza, or bury them, or protect them, or not to write on them. Like this idea of that, the holiness that's associated with them, which is reciprocal between a human being and the human being that reads this text. I think I also think of texts as growing in the hands of the tradents, in the people that receive them and transmit them. So this vitality is shared with the you know, human beings that copy, transmit, maybe erroneously or correctly, or they interpolate and they add and they transform. So vitality is really about the history of a religious tradition which continues. And then to kind of think about when does it not continue? When does it die? When does it die out of destruction or out of exhaustion or out of giving up, like a kind of yayush? When does when does it text despair? And so I think it's important, and Ellie said this, not only to think about the living organism, but also about its loss.

SPEAKER_01 57:08

Can you say something about Reiner Maria Rilka's poem, Apollo Torso?

SPEAKER_03 57:14

Apollo torso, yeah, the Belvedere torso. So this torso is in the Vatican now. It's an extraordinary piece of art. The reason why this is such an important object for me is because of the way in which Rilke, you know, writes about how when much of the work we do, Ari, is we reconstruct fragments, you know, we we or we we we try to make whole what is incomplete, especially people who work on and in antiquity, both in material culture, archaeology, scrolls. And what Rilke says is that as you, as I am desperately trying to reconstruct this broken text and trying to figure out what the lacuna are, it's also transforming me. It's this intimate connection. So I reconstruct the arms, the eyes, the legs, the feet, the nose. And as I'm reconstructing it, it also has this intimate transformation on me who is entering into antiquity as this object from antiquity suddenly has relevance and resonance in the contemporary world.

SPEAKER_01 58:25

What do you mean by the term pleriformity? How is the term helpful in understanding the sources you examine in this work? And examples from literature, archaeology, or arts unrelated to biblical and second temple literature that could illustrate the concept.

SPEAKER_03 58:42

Right. So it's a great question to ask me because my new book is on pluriformity and hermeneutics. That's my next big project. So one there's a tension often, right, between a single form and plural form. So um, if we think about something like the mourner's kaddish, right, we know that in different communities it has a slightly different form in different communities. Or if you look at the Passover Hagadah, liturgical texts change and they vary from community to community, they vary from even synagogue to synagogue at times. Um, so we get the concept of plural formity in liturgical traditions. What we see in antiquity is that we even see biblical texts that are, we have multiple versions of them, but they're not all the same. And this is particularly poignant in the book of Esther or Jeremiah or the collection of psalms. And so I'm really interested in the ways in which ancient biblical texts are preserved in different communities in not exactly the same form. So there might be a longer chapter of Jeremiah, or there might be additional psalms that are included or excluded from a collection. And so that multiple versions of a collection or of a chapter is very, very interesting for understanding compositional practices, fluidity, scribal practices, and distinctive traditions within communities. Having said that, we have to constantly balance ploriformity with the monoform or with fixity.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

In light of what you've shared and suggested, what are the implications of your study for thinking about Josephus? From one perspective, in the context of Josephus as a chronicler of the Hellenistic period, but also in the context of the ways that he uh uh narrates biblical stories in the antiquities.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:45

Yeah, so first of all, Josephus will tell you, like in the book of Deuteronomy, Lo Yasuria me small. He didn't go to the right or to the left when he's retelling you a story, but we know that that's but it's a radical transformation of the text. So it's very interesting how he describes an interpretive process as being faithful to the text he's reading. I think Josephus is an extraordinary example of a reader who's deeply immersed in Greek culture and also Jewish culture, worrying about historical, the historical, you know, chronography, but also interpretation and also trying to understand what went wrong in history with respect to destruction.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:35

On page 167, you write as follows with an eye towards the interpretive and linguistic play with a series of theurgic, redemptive, and neurotological studies, we can see text being reread within the very text itself. It also goes beyond itself, insofar as it will continue in the afterlife of the text through its embeddedness in later writers and through the history of scholarship, through its new dimensions, the discovery of new fragments and new engagements with discourses of location, heavenly, earthly, liminal, and cosmic. What is important to this discussion with respect to philology as hermeneutics is that the practices of philology can be used to trace the lines of composition and emerging new readings in scholarly, poetic, and philosophical or theological engagements. Our responsibilities as scholars are urgent and sensitive. In our times, the work of the philologist must be as mindful of the future as we are of the past. Can you say more about this?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:56

So it's a pretty big passage. I mean, one is that I'm talking about the overflow of text through interpretation and dissemination, and that it continues to grow in different contexts. But I think the last part of this passage is a kind of warning that, you know, in the in the name of philology and careful reading, we mustn't think that all we're doing is just reading the text, that how we read the text and how we explain the text has political, social, even religious implications, ethical implications. So we're responsible for for that. And really trying to channel Nietzsche, who warned us of the same long before the Holocaust. You know, a lot of a lot of his insights into what's wrong with the academy and society are hauntingly prophetic.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:59

As we bring today's dialogue to a close, can you tell us where you've devoted your attention since completing this book?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:06

Yeah, thank you for asking. That's a great question. I've really moved in three directions since I finished the book. First, um, as I mentioned already, developing a project which grows out of this book on pluriformity and hermeneutics. And there I really develop a much more complicated account of fixity and fluidity. So these two poles, in a sense, between texts that continue to grow and are variegated, but nevertheless have an identity or a fixity to them that we can recognize, whether they're liturgical or legal or historical, and think about hermeneutics as an active and dynamic force in compositional variation. Um, a second ongoing project is thinking about the dynamic between nature and law and natural law, also fusis or nature or teva as a spiritual and hopeful framework for thinking about the creation of the world and a copy of that world on the earth in the form of um as as it's expressed by Philo and other writers from antiquity, an expression of God in this world or on this world. So we have a, you know, you you you fulfill law, you care for your parents, and that has an implication for the cosmos, right? So there's this correspondence, and I'm very interested in in correspondences. I've continued just completing a translation of Philo's on the creation of the world. I've been working a lot on Philo and returning to thinking about creation and nature in the context of that project. And finally, I've embarked on a new commentary on the Thanksgiving hymns on the Hodayot, where I'll bring together hermeneutics and philology, but also invite readers like Sandhi to think with me about, I mean, he's no longer alive, but. Sandi to think with me about how to read, how to read a collection of poetry, and how to think about its organization. So to continue to invite some of these really important literary theoretical minds to inspire new scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:22

I wish you the absolute very best on these irreplaceable new projects.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:29

Thank you. It's been such a pleasure to meet with you and talk with you, Ari.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:33

Thank you. I can hardly express enough how grateful I feel for your thoughtfulness and magnanimity throughout this conversation.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:41

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:43

As we end today, I'm signing off in gratitude as your host, Ari Barbalat, your host on the dialogues in Judaic Studies podcast. Today it's been my honor to engage a dialogue with Hindi Naiman. We have discussed her newly published book, Scriptural Vitality: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics, published in New York by Oxford University Press 2025. This study refutes the idea that the Persian and elite mystic periods signify a time of decline, often termed late Judaism, caught between a once vibrant Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. Instead, Indy Nyman argues that the Second Temple period was characterized by unrestrained creativity and poetic imagination, marked by philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that fostered hermeneutic innovation. By building on Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of classical philology and exploring new interpretive approaches to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hindi Nyman embarks on a radical rethinking of biblical studies. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the original text or identify its original author or context, Nyman celebrates textual diversity and transformation, tracing how texts and meanings proliferated within interpretive communities through innovative performances and new articulations of the past. Engaging with thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Peter Sondy, who are rarely considered by Biblicists, biblical philology is reimagined as a forward-moving study of the poetic processes through which Jewish communities created and recreated their past and revitalized their present. The Second Temple period emerges as a remarkable age of creativity whose influences may still be observed in contemporary Judaism and Christianity. Indy Nyman is the Oriel and Lang professor of the interpretation of holy scripture and director of the Oriol Center for the Study of the Bible at Oriel College and the University of Oxford. Previously, she held positions at Yale University between 2010 and 2015, the University of Toronto between 2004 and 2010, where she was the director of the Center for Jewish Studies, and the University of Notre Dame between 1998 and 2004, where she was the Jordan Capsen Chair of Jewish Studies.