Böcker av Yaacov Shavit

This book focuses on places and instances where Solomon¿s legendary biography intersects with those of Jesus Christ and of Aristotle. Solomon is the axis around which this trio revolves, the thread that binds it together. It is based on the premise that there exists a correspondence, both overt and implied, between these three biographies, that has taken shape within a vast, multifaceted field of texts for more than two thousand years.

This work, the first of its kind, describes all the aspects of the Bible revolution in Jewish history in the last two hundred years, as well as the emergence of the new biblical culture. It describes the circumstances and processes that turned Holy Scripture into the Book of Books and into the history of the biblical period and of the people - the Jewish people. It deals with the encounter of the Jews with modern biblical criticism and the archaeological research of the Ancient Near East and with contemporary archaeology. The middle section discusses the extensive involvement of educated Jews in the Bible-Babel polemic at the start of the twentieth century, which it treats as a typological event. The last section describes at length various aspects of the key status assigned to the Bible in the new Jewish culture in Europe, and particularly in modern Jewish Palestine, as a "e;guide to life"e; in education, culture and politics, as well as part of the attempt to create a new Jewish man, and as a source of inspiration for various creative arts.

This is a comprehensive study of Afrocentrist historical writing, which places the black race at the centre of human history, set against a broad background of creative histories from ancient times onward.

'Ambitious, elaborately structured and wide-ranging ... Shavit's book will be the fundamental work on Jewish Hellenism for a long time to come.' Tessa Rajak, Times Literary Supplement