Old Age in Ancient Judaism, Early Christianity, and Their Contexts: Senescence and Its Significations [Hardcover]

Foreword (Mira Balberg)

Introduction (Albertina Oegema and Seth A. Bledsoe)

Section 1: Old Age, Wisdom, and Authority

1. Old and Young in Philos Legatio ad Gaium (Barry Hartog)

2. O Glorious Wisdom in an Ugly Vessel: Old Age, Wisdom, and Wine in Rabbinic Literature (Lieve M. Teugels)

3. Old Age and Political System Change in Ancient Rome (Christoph Michels)

Section 2: Old Age, Gender, and Social Dynamics

4. Beyond Gender: Polycarps Martyrdom at the Intersection of Old Age and Masculinity (Peter-Ben Smit)

5. Wearing Clothes of a Young Woman: The Agency of Elderly Women in Tannaitic Literature (Albertina Oegema)

Section 3: Old Age, Anxiety, and Familial Discourse

6. Dying in Peace: Old Age and Death Anxiety in the Hebrew Bible and in the Ancient Near East (Klaas Spronk)

7. Diverse Representations of Old Age in Literary and Iconographic Works of Classical Athens (Silvana Dayan)

8. Old Age and the Ethical Discourse of Familial Reciprocity among the Aramaic Documents from Elephantine (Seth A. Bledsoe)

Section 4: Old Age, the Body, and Disability

9. Ambivalences in the Process and Prolongation of Ageing in the Hebrew Bible (Hugh Pyper)

10. A Disabled Patriarch: John Chrysostoms Use of Disability Discourse in His Characterization of Abraham (Chris L. de Wet)

The collection of chapters in this volume explores the significance of old age for Jews and Christians as well as Greeks and Romans in antiquity.

By examining a diverse range of sources, the authors in this volume elaborate on the manifold ways that old age functioned as a social discourse in ancient Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman contexts. The discusslãá