Ancient Judaism questions a broad range of basic assumptions made by students of Second Temple Judaism and calls for a radical rethinking of approaches to Jewish history studies. Michael Stone challenges theologically conditioned histories of ancient Judaism devised by later orthodoxies, whether Jewish or Christian, and he stresses the importance of understanding religious experience as a major factor in the composition of ancient religious documents. Addressing the Dead Sea Scrolls and apocalyptic literature as well as recent theories, Stone emphasizes the stunning complexity of both the raw data and the resulting picture of Judaism in antiquity.
