This volume collects thirty essays by Shaye J.D. Cohen. First published between 1980 and 2006, these essays deal with a wide variety of themes and texts: Jewish Hellenism; Josephus; the Synagogue; Conversion to Judaism; Blood and Impurity; the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. What unites them is their philological orientation. Many of these essays are close studies of obscure passages in Jewish and Christian texts. The essays are united too by their common assumption that the ancient world was a single cultural continuum; that ancient Judaism, in all its expressions and varieties, was a Hellenism; and that texts written in Hebrew share a world of discourse with those written in Greek. Many of these essays are well-known and have been much discussed in contemporary scholarship. Among these are: The Significance of Yavneh (the title essay), Patriarchs and Scholarchs, Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus, Epigraphical Rabbis, The Conversion of Antoninus, Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity, and A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood.

While the rabbinic literature is often seen as a collection of miscellaneous responses to questions arising from study of the Hebrew Bible and its application to contemporary life, Neusner sees a system behind and embodied in the various writings. He discusses the ways in which the divine thought, and the human thinking that sought faithfully to interpret it, actually came to expression and treats what he calls the grammar of the divine self-expression in order to help us see the theological structure that it implies. Then he shows how this implicit system is expressed in the rules for the life of the people that God has chosen as his own. --from publisher description.