Open Access Journal: Metatron: Revealing Ancient Knowledge

[First posted in AWOL 27 January 2022, updates 21 September 2024]

Metatron: Revealing Ancient Knowledge

An initiative of Bible and Religions of the Ancient Near East Collective (BRANE), hosted by Renewed Philology at Yale.

A journal of modern philology and the ancient imagination offering new vistas on the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Named after the mediating angel of Jewish mysticism, it is designed to open cutting-edge research to a broad intellectual community.

As an open-access, peer-reviewed journal, Metatron is designed to be:

Conversational but Focused: each volume presents a dialogue between scholars on a current topic. Contributors of diverse backgrounds and career stages approach the question from multiple perspectives.

Rigorous but Readable: Rather than mystifying readers with bursts of recondite theory or vast footnotes, Metatron focuses on short pieces designed to provoke thought and evoke dialogue. These are combined with companion case studies that share an important text, image, or site and work through it to illuminate new aspects.

Scope: Our scope covers ancient Western Asia and the Near East from the dawn of writing through late Antiquity and from philology and poetics to history and material culture. As an open-access publication, Metatron presents high quality works-in-progress designed to provoke creative discussion. An initial stage of double-blind peer review preserves the rigor of traditional publication, but an equally vital element of review is the discussions that make up the journal itself. The result preserves the scholarly values of traditional publication but focuses not on fully polished works but contributions that raise questions worth having a dialogue on.

Metatron logo by David Tibet.

• Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2022

  A summary by Sonia and three responses, from biblical, comparative, and Mesopotamian perspectives.

 

Vol. 1, Issue 2,  2021

Ancient Hebrew Literature Beyond “The Bible,” Part Two: “What is Scripture?

Recent scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism has emphasized that “Bible/biblical” is not an especially useful category when discussing ancient Israelite and early Jewish literature in its historical contexts of composition. There was no Bible to speak of prior to the first century of the Common Era. How, then, should these texts be categorized? The label “Scripture/scriptural” has come to fill this void in order to avoid the canonical imposition of “Bible/biblical” while still retaining some sense of the importance of these traditions. But what do we mean by “Scripture/scriptural”? What kinds of scriptural claims do we see in these texts? Is scripture a cross-cultural phenomenon? Does it vary over time? These questions sit at the center of this issue of Metatron, which puts forward a range of new proposals and challenges for understanding “scriptural” texts.

• Articles

  Introduction

  James Nati Seth Sanders

  Biblical scholarship has acknowledged that “Bible” is an anachronistic category when contemplating the contexts in which this literature emerged. “Scripture/scriptural” has taken its place, but what is Scripture?

  Abstract 

• Articles

  Preview: Is Bible “Scripture?”

  David Lambert

  Questioning whether it continues to remain helpful or adequate to use “scripture” as an obvious, natural, and universal concept for comprehending the function and history of certain kinds of texts.

  Abstract 

• Articles

  Response to David Lambert, ‘What is Scripture?’

  John Barton

  Argues that there have been three main stages in thinking about the biblical canon, and that Lambert is proposing a fourth stage, which moves the discussion on.

  Abstract 

• Articles

  On Media, Power, and Making Maps: A Response to David Lambert

  Laura Carlson Hasler

  This article argues for the utility of the term "scripture" in marking hierarchies among texts and other forms of ancient media.

  Abstract

• Article

  A Response to David Lambert’s “What is Scripture?”

  Chontel Syfox

  Continuing Metatron’s conversation about what ancient Jewish literature was, Chontel Syfox responds to David Lambert’s work in progress “What is Scripture? An Introduction to Biblical Assemblages.”

  Abstract

 

Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2021

Ancient Hebrew Literature Beyond “The Bible”: Part One

Part One of a series on Ancient Hebrew Literature Beyond “The Bible.” For the earliest Jewish readers and writers, there was no “Bible.” Instead the literature from this period constitutes a surprisingly broad spectrum of sacred texts from Genesis and the Books of Enoch to hundreds of different Psalms attributed to David but often not found in modern Bibles. If the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls along with decades of new research has proven that “Bible” is a misleading anachronism for the Second Temple period, can we create a new and better picture of Judaism and Christianity’s earliest known religious literature?

• Articles 

  Introduction

  James Nati Seth Sanders

  There was no “Bible” as such even by the end of the Second Temple period. How do scholars organize this corpus in the absence of the category?

  Abstract 

• Articles
  Towards a New Map of Second Temple Literature: Revelation, Rewriting, and Genre Before the Bible

  Molly M. Zahn

  How do we move beyond anachronistic frameworks for understanding ancient Jewish literature? A multivariable approach may help.

  Abstract 

• Articles
  On Making Manuscripts, Genre, and the Boundaries of Ancient Jewish Literature

  Elena Dugan

  This response to Zahn emphasizes how using literary qualities as variables rather than categories allows us to redescribe hybridity in our archive, and perhaps, reimagine some of our Qumran manuscripts.

  Abstract 

• Articles
  Plotting History and Textual Use on a New Map of Second Temple Literature: A Response to Molly M. Zahn

  Nathan Mastnjak

  This article suggests the relevance of textual history as a useful addition to Molly Zahn’s proposal and asks how her proposed classification scheme could improve printed anthologies.

  Abstract 

• Articles 
  New Maps of Early Jewish Literature Across the Boundaries of the Real: A Response to Molly M. Zahn

  Eva Mroczek

  Imagined or lost texts are still part of the ancient literary landscape, and should be mapped in our new cartography.

  Abstract

 

See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies