$42.00

This book provides a critical edition and English translation of the Romanian version of the Testament of Abraham, an influential Jewish pseudepigraphon originally produced during the late Second Temple period. It examines how the Alexandrian Jewish text found social and cultural relevance in eastern Europe up until the modern period: the narrative was not slavishly reproduced by monastic scribes, but creatively adapted to engage contemporary readers and influence behavior toward fulfilling a monastic agenda. Using a multidisciplinary methodology-literary, historical, philological, and ethnographical-the author demonstrates the correspondence of text and social world.