The Latin Iliad is a concise adaptation of the Homeric Iliad. The identity of its author remains uncertain but the work is attributed to Baebius Italicus, a Roman dignitary of the second half of the first century CE. The Hebrew translation of this short epic retains the unique poetic language of the original as well as its meter.

This play is a love story in the shape of a parody. The god Jupiter, father of the gods and humans, a relentless womanizer who never grew up and has a never ending stock of passion. He desired the wife of the warlord Amphitruo who left the city to fight in a war. Jupiter takes Amphitruos' shape and makes love to his wife. When Amphitruo comes back from battle then starts a comedy of mistakes which ends in Amphitruos' wife giving birth to two sons - one for each man.

The articles in this volume: Naama Alfasi-Weiss The Biblical Story of the Announcement of Isaac’s Birth : A Structural Analysis Avraham (Rami) Reiner On the Origins of the Expression Amen, amen, amen sel Rella Kushelevsky Between the Heritage of the Middle Ages and the Winds of the Renaissance: The Midrash of the Ten Commandments in the Parma Manuscript 2269 (De Rossi 473) Tal Goitein Elijah’s Cup: An Unknown Fifteenth-Century Depiction of the Custom in the Erna Michael Haggadah Noga Rubin ‘ The Legend of Three and Four’: An Account of Jewish Story-Telling Tradition in Prague of the Seventeenh Century Tsila Zan-Bar Tsur ‘ A woman is like a stew, warm and nourishing’: Kitchen and Femininity in the Folk Culture of Afghan Jews Yael Zilberman ‘ I would have died had God not sent me Elijah the Prophet’: Class, Body, and Sexuality in the Life Stories of Elderly Oriental (Mizrahiot) Women of Beer Sheva Noga Libi Cohen ‘ In the merit of a woman – the miracle happened’: Conformism and Subversion in the Story of Judith as Told by an Ultra-Orthodox Woman Towards a History of Folkloristics Rina Benari Blessing Scrolls and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Case of the Blessing Scroll from Mława – 1925 Book Reviews Yael Guilat Material-Culture Research in Israel [On: Aviva Muller-Lancet, Garments with a Message: Ethnography of Jewish Wear in Islamic Lands, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010, 389 + 67 pp. (in Hebrew)] Haim Weiss Current Aspects of Folklore Research [On: Regina F. Bendix & Galit Hasan-Rokem (eds.), A Companion to Folklore (Blackwell Companions to Anthropology, 15), Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 660 pp. (Paper edition, 2014)] Dani Schrire Encyclopedic Knowkege and Jewish Folklore [On: Raphael Patai & Haya Bar-Itzhak (eds.), Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2013, 2 volumes, 680 pp.] English abstracts at the end of the book.

The Chronographia is a historical account of the rule of fourteen Byzantine emperors (11 emperors and three empresses), chronologically, from 976 to 1077. Michael Psellos, who served the Byzantine emperors for over thirty years as a senior minister, described in these fourteen biographies the emperors as humans, with all their faults and merits. Psellos lived in a society which underwent dramatic changes: he lamented the citizen's growing greediness, the loss of values and order, the Nouveau Riches of his days and warned against the inflation of honorary titles and benefactions which were offered to the citizenry by weak emperors who sought the population's political support. The eleventh century was a watershed in the history of the Byzantine empire. At the beginning of the century, Byzantium stood at the height of its political and cultural strength. Prosperity began to decline when the Seljuq Turks started raiding eastern Anatolia in the 1030's. The rule of the central government in the eastern parts of the empire declined until these areas were finally lost in the wake of the Manzikert battle of 1071. Although Psellos did not focus on the description of battles but rather on the imperial court and the capital's politics, the Chronographia is one of the important sources of 11th century Byzantium . A literary, no less than a historical work, the Chronographia brings to life emperors and empresses, lovers, mistresses, rebels and even the ordinary people of Constantinople , in an unwavering effort to reveal the human traits of its heroes. Translated from the Greek with introduction and Notes by Shay Eshel

A collection of war stratagems selected from ancient historians, arranged according to their content in four books, with an introduction and a commentary, and an appendix of selected passages from the books of Julius Caesar and Livius. Frontinus, an outstandingly talented man, made his name and career under five Roman emperors (1st and 2nd century AD), he fought with distinction in Britania, was a senator, managed provision of water for Rome, was a writer and intellectual. He wrote several books, but only two of them survived entirely, The Aqueducts of Rome and The Stratagems , a sequel to his technical book on warfare that was lost. In the preface to Stratagems he writes: 'I feel obliged, in order to complete the task, to summarize excelent operations of generals, examples of wisdom and foresight, to serve and foster the generals' power to conceive and execute stratagems of their own, and not to fear their result , if they could be compared with achievements already successful. Introduced, translated from Latin and annonated by Prof. Dwora Gilula.

The biographies in this volume comprise the concluding part of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. Their main subjects are the events of the Roman Empire during the years 235-284. These were the days of the so called Illyrian Caesars on the throne of Rome. The Empire was compelled in those days to face too often and too dangerous incursions of barbarians, as well as tireless efforts of various provincials trying to free themselves from Roman mastery. Rome was forced to recruit more and more barbarians to fill up the ranks of her soldiery and officers. Rome even experienced a strong shortage of silver and gold metals to coin her Denarii and Aurei. These deficiencies revealed Rome's weakness abroad and caused disquiet and instability within the borders of the Empire. However in spite of inflation, overtaxing and blackmailing bureaucracy the people of Israel in their country managed to continue their recovery due to the failed uprising in the century passed. The author-editor of these biographies remains anonymous. Although one may presume he had been a fifth century Roman of the senatorial circles. The author-editor did not pretend to be a professional biography writer. Nevertheless, it is clear that he had been a man of letters who made great efforts to provide a vivid and reliable account of those stormy days, the last generations of pagan Rome.

Mount Carmel of Graf von Mülinen is a translated, edited and annotated edition of the monumental Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Karmels , written by Graf Eberhardt von Műinen, a well-known Swiss researcher and diplomat. His book was first published in Leipzig by Baedeker Publishing in 1908 . The work constitutes a meticulous and professional exploration of Mount Carmel in the beginning of the twentieth-century, and an important stepping stone in the chronology of the field. This Interdisciplinary study of the mountain covers a range of fields such as Arabic dialectology, botany, zoology, general geography, geology, climate, anthropology, religion, archaeology and folklore . This book is dedicated to the 44 casualties of the devastating fire on Mount Carmel in December 2010 .

A hundred texts by over thirty French intellectuals of the 18th century translated into Hebrew.

The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West’s greatest thinkers. But the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within the Greco-Roman world from polytheism to monotheism, he argues that the cause for this shift can be found not so much around the Mediterranean as in the Near East . The End of Sacrifice points to the role of Judaism, particularly its inventions of new religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.. The end of animal sacrifice gave rise to new forms of worship, with a concern for personal salvation, for scriptural study, for rituals like praying and fasting, and with the rise of religious communities and monasticism. It is what Christianity learned from Judaism about texts, death, and, above all, sacrifice that allowed it to supersede Greco-Roman religions and transform religion itself.

This book is dedicated to a comprehensive study of two subjects: crossing the boundaries between earth and heaven, between the visible and invisible realm. The first subject - dreams and their meanings in the literature of the classical world. The second subject - ghosts, daemons and haunting possessions in the culture of the Jewish culture and other religions. In twenty one articles the authors spread for the reader a diverse and Multidisciplinary image which shows how human beings have been attempting to peer behind the curtain and to give a lingual-literal expression to the experience of meeting unreachable worlds.