EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash

Download or read book Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash written by Hermann Leberecht Strack and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gunter Stemberger's revision of H. L. Strack's classic introduction to rabbinic literature, which appeared in its first English edition in 1991, was widely acclaimed. Gunter Stemberger and Markus Bockmuehl have now produced this updated edition, which is a significant revision (completed in 1996) of the 1991 volume. Following Strack's original outline, Stemberger discusses first the historical framework, the basic principles of rabbinic literature and hermeneutics and the most important Rabbis. The main part of the book is devoted to the Talmudic and Midrashic literature in the light of contemporary rabbinic research. The appendix includes a new section on electronic resources for the study of the Talmud and Midrash. The result is a comprehensive work of reference that no student of rabbinics can afford to be without.

Book A Theological Commentary to the Midrash  Song of Songs Rabbah

Download or read book A Theological Commentary to the Midrash Song of Songs Rabbah written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2001 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This theological commentary to the Rabbinic Midrash explores a simple proposition, in three parts. I. The reading of Scripture by principal parts of the Rabbinic Midrash is formed by compositions and composites that are animated by a cogent theological system. II. These primary components of the Midrash-compilations, further, are in part aimed at systematic demonstrations of theorems of a theological character. III. While forming a principal part of a large theological structure and system, each document is unique. This commentary in its concluding chapter presents what is common to the animating theology of Rabbinic Judaism in all its documentary components and what is unique to Song of Songs Rabbah.

Book Commentary on Midrash Rabba in the Sixteenth Century

Download or read book Commentary on Midrash Rabba in the Sixteenth Century written by Benjamin Williams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printed editions of midrashim, rabbinic expositions of the Bible, flooded the market for Hebrew books in the sixteenth century. First published by Iberian immigrants to the Ottoman Empire, they were later reprinted in large numbers at the famous Hebrew presses of Venice. This study seeks to shed light on who read these new books and how they did so by turning to the many commentaries on midrash written during the sixteenth century. These innovative works reveal how their authors studied rabbinic Bible interpretation and how they anticipated their readers would do so. Benjamin WIlliams focuses particularly on the work of Abraham ben Asher of Safed, the Or ha-Sekhel (Venice, 1567), an elucidation of midrash Genesis Rabba which contains both the author's own interpretations and also the commentary he mistakenly attributed to the most celebrated medieval commentator Rashi. Williams examines what is known of Abraham ben Asher's life, his place among the Jewish scholars of Safed, and the publication of his book in Venice. By analysing selected passages of his commentary, this study assesses how he shed light on rabbinic interpretation of Genesis and guided readers to correct interpretations of the words of the sages. A consideration of why Abraham ben Asher published a commentary attributed to Rashi shows that he sought to lend authority to his programme of studying midrash by including interpretations ascribed to the most famous commentator alongside his own. By analysing the production and reception of the Or ha-Sekhel, therefore, this work illuminates the popularity of midrash in the early modern period and the origins of a practice which is now well-established-the study of rabbinic Bible interpretation with the guidance of commentaries.

Book The Midrash

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jacob Neusner
  • Publisher : Jason Aronson, Incorporated
  • Release : 1994-10-01
  • ISBN : 1461631580
  • Pages : 247 pages

Download or read book The Midrash written by Jacob Neusner and published by Jason Aronson, Incorporated. This book was released on 1994-10-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Midrash: An Introduction sets forth the way in which Judaism reads the Hebrew Bible. In this masterful presentation, the reader is introduced to the classics of Jewish Bible interpretation, with special attention to the way in which the ribbis of Talmudic times read the Pentateuch, the Book of Ruth, and Song of Songs. The seven Midrash compilations are introduced with a lucid account of their main points, accompanied by selections that give the reader a direct encounter, in English, with the Bible as Judaism understands it. The word midrash, based on the Hebrew root DaRaSH (“search”), means “interpretation” or “exegesis.” Midrash also more formally refers to the compilations of such interpretations of Scripture. As Dr. Jacob Neusner explains, these compilations “reached closure and conclusion in the formative stage of Judaism, that is, the first seven centuries of the Common Era, the time in which the Mishnah (ca. 200), Talmud of the Land of Israel (ca. 400), and Talmud of Babylonia (ca. 600) were written.” Midrash is not so much about Scripture as it is a subordinate part of Scripture: “They did not write about Scripture,” Dr. Neusner says. “They wrote with Scripture … much as painters paint with a palette of colors.” The Midrash: An Introduction is the second volume in Dr. Jacob Neusner’s series of introductory volumes on classical rabbinic literature. As with the first volume – The Mishnah: An Introduction – this book offers the layperson a concise description of the religious literature and, drawing on Dr. Neusner’s own translations of the texts, walks readers through the selections, providing them with firsthand experience with the document itself. As Dr. Neusner says in his preface to The Midrash: An Introduction, “In these pages I mean to make it possible for readers to know one such compilation from the other and so to begin studying their own.”

Book Images of Nebuchadnezzar

Download or read book Images of Nebuchadnezzar written by Ronald Herbert Sack and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images of Nebuchadnezzar attempts to probe the diversity of cultural attitudes reflected in the characterizations of this famous king through an examination of both the original cuneiform sources as well as the accounts of chronographers written in Greek, Roman, and medieval times. Included in this revised and expanded second edition are two new chapters that examine both Nebuchadnezzar's administrative policies and the impact that his death had on both contemporary and later cultures. Both the positive and negative images of the king are explored, with conclusions being developed as to what the authors of the various surviving accounts actually thought the king really was. In the process, the whole nature of historiography in the ancient world is analyzed, and a number of broad conclusions are developed. Anyone who has ever read Second Kings or the books of Daniel and Jeremiah of the Old Testament is familiar with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon who conquered the kingdom of Judah and destroyed Solomon's temple. As the second member of the Chaldean dynasty of Mesopotamia (626-539 B.C.), he ruled for forty-three years (605-562 B.C.), during which time he also led military campaigns into Syria and Lebanon. He also organized a number of building projects that were to transform Babylon into one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Among his noteworthy achievements were the construction of massive fortification walls around Babylon, the refurbishing of Marduk's temple in the city, and the building of huge palaces that served as the king's residences. Tales of these legendary achievements, as well as those of his father, Nabopolassar (626-605 B.C.), also found their way into the narratives of a number of Greek, Roman, and medieval historians and chronographers many centuries later. Unfortunately, much of the record of Nebuchadnezzar's achievements that was written in his own time has not survived. Instead, only secondary accounts of his military campaigns or his construction projects in Babylon written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Arabic are available for analysis. These stories vary greatly in content and emphasis and, in many cases, distort much of what we know from Nebuchadnezzar's own sources. The Hebrews, for example, described Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem in such a way as to consider it something that should never again be repeated. The Greeks, on the other hand, saw the building projects in Babylon as evidence of almost superhuman achievements, as monuments that were the result of efforts by a king who was almost godlike. Why, then, is there such diversity in the characterizations of Nebuchadnezzar? This book proposes answers to these questions.

Book Narrative and Document in the Rabbinic Canon

Download or read book Narrative and Document in the Rabbinic Canon written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author states in his preface: For a thousand years, from its earliest documents of the second century to the High Middle Ages, Rabbinic Judaism preferred to compose and collect anecdotes, not to construct of them sustained and connected biographies. This is a study of the inclusion of biographical narratives about sages in some of the components of the unfolding canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the formative age, the documents of the first six centuries C.E., exclusive of the two Talmuds. A sage here is defined as a man who embodies the Rabbinic system. A sage-story, then, is an anecdote about the life and deeds of a Rabbinic sage. A biographical narrative in general is the record of things done on a concrete and specific past-tense occasion by named individuals. The stories are not told as part of a sustained biographical account of those individuals' lives, birth to death. I am able in this way to correlate the unfolding of the authorized biography in the counterpart-Christian one. The documentary hypothesis yields the correlation between the advent of the Christian authorized biography and the advent of the sage-story in the later documents of the Rabbinic canon.

Book Encyclopaedia of Midrash

Download or read book Encyclopaedia of Midrash written by Jacob Neusner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Midrash provides a systematic account of biblical interpretation in Judaism. While emphasizing the Rabbinic literature, it also covers interpretation of Scripture in a number of distinct canons, ranging from the Targumic literature and Dead Sea Scrolls to the New Testament and Church Fathers. The Encyclopedia of Midrash provides readers with a depth and breadth of treatment of Midrash unavailable in any other single source. Through the writings of top scholars in each of their fields, it sets out the current state of the question for each of the many topics discussed in its pages. The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004141667).

Book Jethro and the Jews

    Book Details:
  • Author : Beatrice Lawrence
  • Publisher : BRILL
  • Release : 2017-06-12
  • ISBN : 9004348921
  • Pages : 188 pages

Download or read book Jethro and the Jews written by Beatrice Lawrence and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jethro and the Jews, Beatrice J. W. Lawrence examines rabbinic texts that address the biblical character of Jethro, a Midianite priest, Moses’ advisor and father-in-law, and the creator of the system of Jewish jurisprudence. Lawrence explores biblical interpretations in Midrash, Targum and Talmud, revealing a spectrum of responses to the presence of a man who straddles the line between insider and outsider. Ranging from character assassination to valorization of Jethro as a convert, these interpretive strategies reveal him to be a locus of anxiety for the rabbis concerning conversion, community boundaries, intermarriage, and non-Jews.

Book Targums and Rabbinic Literature

Download or read book Targums and Rabbinic Literature written by Zondervan, and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies is a multivolume series that seeks to introduce key ancient texts that form the cultural, historical, and literary context for the study of the New Testament. Each volume will feature introductory essays to the corpus, followed by articles on the relevant texts. Each article will address introductory matters, provenance, summary of content, interpretive issues, key passages for New Testament studies and their significance. Neither too technical to be used by students nor too thin on interpretive information to be useful for serious study of the New Testament, this series provides a much-needed resource for understanding the New Testament in its first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman context. Produced by an international team of leading experts in each corpus, Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies stands to become the standard resource for both scholars and students. Volumes include: Apocrypha and the Septuagint Old Testament Pseudepigrapha The Dead Sea Scrolls The Apostolic Fathers Philo and Josephus Greco-Roman Literature Targums and Early Rabbinic Literature Gnostic Literature New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Book The Burnt Book

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marc-Alain Ouaknin
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2024-05-14
  • ISBN : 0691268371
  • Pages : 355 pages

Download or read book The Burnt Book written by Marc-Alain Ouaknin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound look at what it means for new generations to read and interpret ancient religious texts In this book, rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin offers a postmodern reading of the Talmud. Combining traditional learning and contemporary thought, Ouaknin dovetails discussions of spirituality and religious practice with such concepts as deconstruction, intertextuality, undecidability, multiple voicing, and eroticism in the Talmud. On a broader level, he establishes a dialogue between Hebrew tradition and the social sciences, which draws, for example, on the works of Lévinas, Blanchot, and Jabès as well as Derrida. The Burnt Book represents the innovative thinking that has come to be associated with a school of French Jewish studies, headed by Lévinas and dedicated to new readings of traditional texts. The Talmud, transcribed in 500 C.E., is shown to be a text that refrains from dogma and instead encourages the exploration of its meanings. A vast compilation of Jewish oral law, the Talmud also contains rabbinical commentaries that touch on everything from astronomy to household life. Examining its literary methods and internal logic, Ouaknin explains how this text allows readers to transcend its authority in that it invites them to interpret, discuss, and recreate their religious tradition. An in-depth treatment of selected texts from the oral law and commentary goes on to provide a model for secular study of the Talmud in light of contemporary philosophical issues. Throughout, the author emphasizes the self-effacing quality of a text whose worth can be measured by the insights that live on in the minds of its interpreters long after they have closed the book. He points out that the burning of the Talmud in anti-Judaic campaigns throughout history has, in fact, been an unwitting act of complicity with Talmudic philosophy and the practice of self-effacement. Ouaknin concludes his discussion with the story of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who himself burned his life achievement—a work known by his students as "the Burnt Book." This story leaves us with the question, should all books be destroyed in order to give birth to thought and renew meaning?

Book Dual Discourse  Single Judaism

Download or read book Dual Discourse Single Judaism written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2001 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dual discourse tells a continuous story."--BOOK JACKET.

Book Ezekiel in Talmud and Midrash

Download or read book Ezekiel in Talmud and Midrash written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rabbis of classical Judaism, in the first six centuries of the Common Era, commented on the teachings of ancient Israel's prophets and shaped, as much as they were shaped by, prophecy. They commented on much of the Scriptural heritage and they made it their own. This collection of the Rabbinic comments on biblical books makes easily accessible the Rabbinic reading of the prophetic heritage and opens the way to the study of how normative Judaism responded to the challenge of the prophetic writings.

Book Meet the Rabbis

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brad H. Young
  • Publisher : Baker Academic
  • Release : 2007-06-01
  • ISBN : 1441232877
  • Pages : 244 pages

Download or read book Meet the Rabbis written by Brad H. Young and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet the Rabbis explains to the reader how rabbinic thought was relevant to Jesus and the New Testament world, and hence should be relevant to those people today who read the New Testament. In this sense, rabbinic thought is relevant to every aspect of modern life. Rabbinic literature explores the meaning of living life to its fullest, in right relationship with God and humanity. However, many Christians are not aware of rabbinic thought and literature. Indeed, most individuals in the Western world today, regardless of whether they are Christians, atheists, agnostics, secular community leaders, or some other religious and political persuasions, are more knowledgeable of Jesus' ethical teachings in the Sermon the Mount than the Ethics of the Fathers in a Jewish prayer book. The author seeks to introduce the reader to the world of Torah learning. It is within this world that the authentic cultural background of Jesus' teachings in ancient Judaism is revealed. Young uses parts of the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount, as a springboard for probing rabbinic method. The book is an introduction to rabbinic thought and literature and has three main sections in its layout: Introduction to Rabbinic Thought, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature, and Meet the Rabbis, a biographical description of influential Rabbis from Talmudic sources.

Book The Perfect Torah

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jacob Neusner
  • Publisher : BRILL
  • Release : 2003-06-01
  • ISBN : 9047402227
  • Pages : 236 pages

Download or read book The Perfect Torah written by Jacob Neusner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2003-06-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect Torah is the medium through which the one, unique God makes himself known. The Judaic statement of monotheism comes to expression in Scripture as perfected by the Oral Torah in its native category-formations, Halakhah, norms of behavior, and Aggadah norms of belief. The Halakhah of the oral Torah conveys monotheism in a philosophical mode, and the Aggadah, monotheism in a mythic mode. What is perfect about the dual Torah, written and oral, is the perfect match between the message and the medium, Halakhah for the philosophical monotheism, Aggadah for the mythic statement of the same monotheism. Chapters One and Two explain the former, Chapters Three and Four the latter. The question answered here concerns how one canonical corpus perfects its companion and produces in consequence perfection: the realization of the initial intent and program of the Written by the Oral Torah. That is addressed by the construction of large exemplary structures of comparison and contrast in the shank of the book. Four principles are established: [1] the perfection through the systematization of the law of the Written Torah by the Oral Torah, in Chapter One; [2] the perfection of the medium of the Halakhah for the message of philosophical monotheism, in Chapter Two; [3] the perfection of Scripture's anomalous writings through the dismantling of one document and the systematic recasting of another, in Chapter Three; [4] the perfection of the medium of Aggadah in its form of narrative for the message of theology concerning God's personality and activity, in Chapter Four.

Book Tales of the Neighborhood

    Book Details:
  • Author : Galit Hasan-Rokem
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2003-02-06
  • ISBN : 0520234537
  • Pages : 223 pages

Download or read book Tales of the Neighborhood written by Galit Hasan-Rokem and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-02-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Book The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism

Download or read book The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism written by Jacob Neusner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2003-12-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History provides one way of marking time. But there are others, and the Judaism of the dual Torah, set forth in the Rabbinic literature from the Mishnah through the Talmud of Babylonia, ca. 200-600 C.E., defines one such alternative. This book tells the story of how a historical way of thinking about past, present, and future, time and eternity, the here and now in relationship to the ages, « that is, Scripture's way of thinking » gave way to another mode of thought altogether. This other model Neusner calls a paradigm, because a pattern imposed meaning and order on things that happened. Paradigmatic modes of thought took the place of historical ones. Thinking through paradigms, with a conception of time that elides past and present and removes all barriers between them, in fact governs the reception of Scripture in Judaism until nearly our own time. Neusner here explains through the single case of Rabbinic Judaism, precisely how that other way of reading Scripture did its work, and why, for so many centuries, that reading of the heritage of ancient Israel governed. At stake are [1] a conception of time different from the historical one and [2] premises on how to take the measure of time that form a legitimate alternative to those that define the foundations of the historical way of measuring time. Fully exposed, those alternative premises may prove as logical and compelling as the historical ones. The approach follows the documentary history of ideas, and individual chapters describe the treatment of historical topics in the Mishnah, the Talmud of the Land of Israel (a.k.a., the Yerushalmi), Genesis Rabbah, that is, ca. 200, 400, and 450 CE, and Pesiqta deRab Kahana, ca. 500 CE.