Dr. Robert Jones, Assistant Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State, will offer a presentation on “Priests and Scribes in Ancient Judaism.” The post-exilic period of Jewish history saw the replacement of royal authority with priestly authority and the gradual replacement of oral prophecy with scribal exegesis as the primary mode of encounter with the voice of the divine. This talk will explore the shifting religious and political dynamics in ancient Judaism in the Persian and Hellenistic periods with examples from the Bible and beyond.
