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Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography.

This monograph deals with the full spectrum of Jewish letter writing in antiquity, and compares it with early Christian epistolography. The research was especially complex as it required the collection and analysis of an extensive and varied body of primary sources spanning roughly a millennium (from letters at Elephantine to letters in the Talmudim) in five different languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Ethiopic). Some of the texts (e.g. Elephantine, Qumran, 2 Baruch, also rabbinic literature) could only be accessed in manuscript form, which proved both difficult and time-consuming.