Queering History in Second Temple Jewish Literature

Scholars have long noted that Second Temple period books such as Esther, Tobit, Judith, and Daniel play fast and loose with history, sliding among eras and making liberal use of anachronism. However, as yet, there has been no systematic treatment of these texts using queer-theoretical concepts of time and history, which allow for viewing time as non-linear---or as not only linear. This book uses vocabularies of queer temporality to analyze the errors, oddities, repetitions, cameo appearances, and anachronisms of these four books, showing that the authors likely played with time and history as part of a rhetorical and theological program. To these ancient authors, getting the historical details correct was not only unimportant, but might even have been detrimental. This helps to explain why each of these texts sets forth persecution-and-rescue narratives, the details of which generally make little sense given what we know of ancient history, and why accounts within a single book often conflict with one another. Caryn Tamber-Rosenau additionally makes the case that the idea of history one gets from these ancient texts is alive and well in modern Judaism, with popular conceptions seeing Jewish history as a series of looping events that rhyme with one another. Tamber-Rosenau places into conversation theories of queer temporality and Jewish history and memory, each of which, mostly independently, has been the subject of serious scholarly inquiry over the past three decades. By juxtaposing the bodies of work on queer and Jewish time to read Esther, Tobit, Judith, and Daniel, Queering History in Second Temple Jewish Literature nuances both types of theory and proposes new directions for research.