Male circumcision is one of the oldest and most widespread rituals, it has been practiced for millennia across many parts of the world. Yet this prevalence and long history do not make circumcision self-evident: it has also long been a topic of reflection, discussion, and controversy and continues to be so today. As the cases in this volume show, already in Antiquity, Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians clashed over male circumcision. Then as now, concerns about identity, ritual, health, masculinity, and sexuality were a factor in these disputes. Very little is known about actual circumcision practices in the ancient world. Apart from depictions in art, the relation of which to daily practice is difficult to ascertain, we have historical access mainly through texts that reveal how the practice was discursively constructed, and that relate circumcision to wider cultural practices and ideas. This book therefore mainly discusses references to circumcision in literary sources, and the way these relate to other known cultural practices and ideas. These sources date from biblical times and Antiquity and their interpretations in medieval Jewish texts and recent scholarship.

Contained in this volume are the Proceedings of the Midrash session of the SBL's annual conferences in 2008 and 2009. This volume contains eight essays dealing with various aspects of rabbinic interpretation.

The third issue of Proceedings of the Midrash session at the SBL Annual meeting published in this series. This volume contains papers on religion in midrash (2006) and modes of biblical interpretation in rabbinic, Syriac and Islamic traditions (2007).

A collection of seven groundbreaking essays on Rabbinic midrash and related texts by a new generation of erudite scholars combining the themes of the 2004 and 2005 SBL midrash sessions: “Jewish and Christian Hermeneutics” and “Midrash and Cultural Studies,” this book is a must have for clergy, students, scholars, and laypersons interested in deepening their understanding of Rabbinic and Patristic biblical interpretation.

This work consists of a selection of papers from sessions during the first two years of SBL Consultation on Midrash. It demonstrates innovative approaches to midrashic texts and hermeneutic reflections on similarities and differences between interpretations of the Bible.