Shem in the Tents of Japhet

Book excerpt: These essays, by some of today’s greatest scholars of Judaism and Hellenism in antiquity, explore a variety of ways in which these two great civilizations interacted. The common focus of these studies is the transition from one culture to the next – how words or concepts or conventions from the one came to be transplanted, and often modified in the process, in the other. Taken together, however, they provide something broader: a large, variegated picture of the cultural interaction that was to prove so crucial for the later history of Judaism and Christianity.