Elisa Uusimäki – författare

Moving away from focusing on wisdom as a literary genre, this book delves into the lived, embodied and formative dimensions of wisdom as they are delineated in Jewish sources from the Persian, Hellenistic and early Roman eras. Considering a diverse body of texts beyond later canonical boundaries, the book demonstrates that wisdom features not as an abstract quality, but as something to be performed and exercised at both the individual and community level.The analysis specifically concentrates on notions of a ‘wise’ person, including the rise of the sage as an exemplary figure. It also looks at how ancestral figures and contemporary teachers are imagined to manifest and practice wisdom, and considers communal portraits of a wise and virtuous life. In so doing, the author demonstrates that the previous focus on wisdom as a category of literature has overshadowed significant questions related to wisdom, behaviour and social life. Jewish wisdom is also contextualized in relation to its wider ancient Mediterranean milieu, making the book valuable for biblical scholars, classicists, scholars of religion and the ancient Near East and theologians.

Moving away from focusing on wisdom as a literary genre, this book delves into the lived, embodied and formative dimensions of wisdom as they are delineated in Jewish sources from the Persian, Hellenistic and early Roman eras. Considering a diverse body of texts beyond later canonical boundaries, the book demonstrates that wisdom features not as an abstract quality, but as something to be performed and exercised at both the individual and community level.The analysis specifically concentrates on notions of a ‘wise’ person, including the rise of the sage as an exemplary figure. It also looks at how ancestral figures and contemporary teachers are imagined to manifest and practice wisdom, and considers communal portraits of a wise and virtuous life. In so doing, the author demonstrates that the previous focus on wisdom as a category of literature has overshadowed significant questions related to wisdom, behaviour and social life. Jewish wisdom is also contextualized in relation to its wider ancient Mediterranean milieu, making the book valuable for biblical scholars, classicists, scholars of religion and the ancient Near East and theologians.

This book provides a novel, cultural-historical perspective on travel in the ancient world by exploring a wide range of women’s (in)voluntary journeys and relocations, such as can be derived from passing references, short sections, and extended narratives found in the early Jewish corpora that remain to us.The selected sources include a large body of literary texts from the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and the New Testament, together with some documentary sources indicating the existence of certain types of travel up until early second century CE. They reveal a variety of mobile girls and women such as brides, businesswomen, captives, diplomats, diviners, economic and forced migrants, knowledge-seekers, midwives, musicians, nurses, pilgrims, refugees, sages, (semi)nomads, slaves, tourists, and war leaders. The book delivers a more nuanced notion of the past by challenging and demonstrating the need to move beyond the binary idea of “female stayers” and “male movers.” In doing so, it foregrounds a previously overlooked aspect of travel history: female mobility, its many facets and inherent complexity as a sociocultural phenomenon, and its multiple transformational effects.Women, Travel and Transformation from the Bible to Bar-Kokhba is of interest to students and scholars working on travel history, early Jewish literature, and women in antiquity, as well as those in biblical studies, religious studies, ancient history, and classics.