Books by Jacob Neusner

The collection commences with historical theological essays: one on the apologetics of Judaism, the other on its soteriology. The second set of essays deals with the canon of Rabbinic Judaism. The final essay is an effort at constructive theology. Two brief reviews complete the collection of six months of work.

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.

First published in 1991. This is Volume XI, Part II of a set of twenty volumes of essays and articles on the religion, history and literature on the origins of Judaism. This text looks at to the canon, or holy literature, of Judaism. That literature covers what is called ¿the Oral Torah.¿ To understand the concept of the Oral Torah, we have to return to the generative myth of the Judaism that has predominated. For that Judaism appeals to a theory of revelation in two media of formulation and transmission, written and oral, in books and in memory. The written Torah is the Pentateuch and encompasses the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel (the ¿Old Testament¿). The Oral Torah is ultimately contained in and written down as the Mishnah, expanded and amplified by Tosefta, and the two Talmuds, on the one side, and the Midrash-compilations that serve to explain the written Torah, on the other.

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This is the second volume of a set of anthologies that sets forth the statements of the formative canon of influential Rabbinic Judaism on three large topics: the calendar, the life cycle, and theology. Focusing on the seminal period of normative Judaism, the editor Jacob Neusner presents in three parts the teachings of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, the first six centuries of the Common Era.

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.

This book is an exercise in the systematic recourse to anachronism as a theological-exegetical mode of apologetics. Jacob Neusner surveys the presentation of the prophets by the rabbis, beginning with Moses.

This analysis of how the Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash made Jeremiah one of their own shows how Rabbinic Judaism rehearses the Prophetic message. Jeremiah offered hope to renew the relation that was broken, and Yohanan ben Zakkai promised another mode of atonement, involving individual conviction, and conduct. Joining the two yields, the thesis of this book is: in the case of Jeremiah Rabbinic Judaism continues and recapitulates Prophetic Judaism. Prophet and Rabbi confront the same kind of crisis with the same theological outcome. The Prophetic response to and the Rabbinic reading of the event of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem- the certainty of God's pardon and love- intersect.The problem of this study of Rabbi Jeremiah is to describe precisely how the Rabbis of the formative canon in the case of Jeremiah naturalized to their system- thus Rabbinized- Prophecy. In taking over the heritage of ancient Israelite Prophecy and law, have the Rabbis subverted Prophecy's religious vision or adapted and adopted it, making that vision their own? By identifying the principal propositions of the Prophet and by examining both the Rabbinic reading of the Prophet and the Rabbinic theology of those same propositions, Neusner answers that question.

Deriving from details of legal expositions some of the Halakhah's theological propositions, this book aims to show how normative laws of conduct express the narrative monotheism of the Torah. An introductory overview of the Halakhic theological program, through topical expositions of law, compares Halakhic texts with Aggadic theological programs.

Rabbinic theological language has made possible a vast range of discourse, on many subjects over long spans of recorded time and in diverse cultural settings.

This book surveys the treatment of war and peace in the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity: to what does Judaism refer when it speaks of war and peace in the context of the Hebrew words "milhamah" (war) and "shalom" (peace)?

This collection of seven insightful essays draws on research completed in 2010. The book systematically analyzes and compares Judaism and includes commentaries on the current state of the academic study of Judaism.

This book recapitulates chapters in The Theology of the Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God (1999) and The Theology of the Halakhah (2001) to convey, as a single continuous narrative, the tale that the Halakhah and the Aggadah as theological constructions jointly tell.

This collection of essays draws on work done in 2010-2011. The author takes up several topics in the systemic analysis of Judaism, its literature, and its theology.

Rabbinic documents about David, progenitor of the Messiah, relay the scriptural narrative of David the king. But, he is also transformed into a sage by Rabbinic writings of late antiquity: the Mishnah, the Yerushalmi, and the Bavli. Consequently, the Rabbis' Messiah becomes a rabbi. Neusner explores this transformation in depth.

Neusner describes, analyzes, and interprets the transformation of one system of the Israelite social order by a connected but autonomous successor-system. He reviews the initial statements made in The Transformation of Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion. The book summarizes ten years of work, from 1980 to 1990.

Comparing Religions Through Law presents an innovative and sometimes controversial study of the comparisons and contrasts between the two religions and offers an example of how comparative studies can lead to mutual understanding.

This book examines the representation of Rome and Persia (Iran) in the successive groups of documents that comprise the Rabbinic canon of late antiquity.

The destruction of the First Temple (586 B.C.E.), destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.), and the defeat of the Bar Kokhba (132-135 C.E.) are discussed in great detail in the covenantal theology of the Torah and Scripture. This books uses extensive textual evidence to explore the importance of the second temple's destruction and the aforementioned events in the creation of Rabbinic Judaism.