Books in the Studies in Judaism series

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.

This volume is a multidisciplinary contribution to Sephardic studies, including chapters by some of the best-known authorities in the field, interspersed with those of young scholars who have begun making their mark in current research.

Documents the entire structure of belief and system of behaviour in two distinct modes of discourse, Halakhic and Aggadic, or construed, statements of law and lore. This book shows how the Talmud of Babylonia account of normative action sets forth in a dual discourse the single, coherent theology.

The Book of Job deals with a variety of issues, on levels both superficial and profound. It has been the subject of scholarly debate and analysis ever since its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible. Scholars and theologians have set forth a variety of theories to explain the 'human condition' and justify the actions of the Divine toward humanity. The material differences in attempts by scholars to translate the Book of Job are evidence that these theories cannot be supported.

This is the dramatic story of how the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a voluntary, humanitarian organization supported by American Jewry, made its entry into the isolated, poverty-stricken world.

A companion volume to Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism (UPA, 1987), this book seeks to address the central issues of human life and meaning in the post-Holocaust world. Though representing a variety of disciplines and religious backgrounds, the authors are united by a fundamental recognition that after the Holocaust, the entire enterprise of being human has been called into serious question. Co-published with Studies in Judaism.

Assessed against comparable documents of Scripture and the Qumran library, the Mishnah shows itself as a triumph of imagination. It exhibits remarkable capacity to think in new and astonishing ways about familiar things. This study compares the Mishnah to four biblical codes and two codes found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In How Not to Study Judaism, Examples and Counter-Examples, Jacob Neusner presents a collection of essays and book reviews that identify the wrong way of conducting the academic study of Judaism. Pointing readers toward the right way to pursue the academic study of Judaism, Nuesner's focus is on the study of the literature of Judaism and the culture of the Jewish community.

The serpent symbol has been a part of western culture since antiquity. Throughout time, it has been misunderstood and misrepresented. The Serpent Symbol in the Ancient Near East is the first comparative study of the origins of the serpent symbol from its first attestations in Dravidian South India through Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East including, Egypt, Classical Greece, and as far west as ancient Carthage.

This book examines how some modern and contemporary Jewish thinkers and writers have imagined a Judaism without theboundaries and restrictions that go by the name of "religion." The book offers scholarly insights into some Jewish thinkers¿notably Martin Buber and Eugene Borowitz, some Jewish writers¿in particular the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik and the Yiddish author I.L. Peretz.

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 collection of essays draws on work done in 2011-2012. The author takes up several topics in the systemic analysis of Judaism, its literature, and its theology.

This book is a reprint of the first publication of the complete manuscript of Pesiqta Rabbati, Volumes I-III (1997-2002), a major rabbinic work from the Land of Israel from the 5th-6th century.

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 collection of essays was compiled in response to the proliferation of violence throughout the modern world. They constitute a multi-disciplinary approach to the intersection of violence with Jewish life and thought. Examined are ancient and modern examples of violence from the perspectives of Jewish studies, philosophy, history, psychology and sociology. Topics include the philosophical and psychological dimensions of violence and terror in Israel; religious Zionism; an overview of Jewish Law; religious societies in antiquity; anti-Semitism among American workers during World War II; British anti-Semitic symbolism; violence in Canadian Jewish communal life; issues of conscription in Britain during war time; and spousal abuse. In conclusion, David Shatz provides a Jewish perspective on the events of 9/11, followed by an examination of the halakhic response to the problem of evil by Moshe Sokol.

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.

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.

In a series of pointed and concise essays, Benjamin Edidin Scolnic, rabbi and scholar, interprets the Bible not as 'The Word' but as 'God's Words.' The open-minded reader will find contradictions at every turn and be forced to wrestle with difficult passages fraught with moral and spiritual complexity.

The Talmud is important because it sets forth the law and theology of Judaism in its authoritative statement, continuing for centuries to attract commentators and forming the curriculum for the culture of Judaism. In these pages, important and representative compositions afford an encounter with this classic, ancient document in its own terms and framework, but in English translation. Examples include the following: Law: "An Eye for an Eye" Bavli Baba Qamma 8:1/83b-84b; "In the case of anything of which I am liable to take care, I am deemed to render possible whatever damage it may do" Bavli Baba Qamma 1:2/9b-11a; "He who steals food and feeds what he stole to his children, or left it to them ¿ they are exempt from making restitution" Bavli Baba Qamma 10:1/111B-113a; "Atoning through the death penalty" Bavli Sanhedrin 6:2/42b-44a Theology: "All Israel has a portion in the world to come" Bavli Sanhedrin 11:1-2/90a-92a; "When will the Messiah come?" Bavli Sanhedrin 11:1-2/96b-99a; "By that same measure by which a man metes out to others, with that measure do they mete out to him" Bavli Sotah 1:7-9/9b-14a Narratives: "The law concerning the usurping occupant:" Adapting to historical events, the destruction of the second Temple in particular Bavli Gittin 5:6/55B-57b; "My master in wisdom, and my disciple in accepting my rulings:" Resolving Conflict in the Law Bavli Rosh Hashanah 2:8-9/25A-25B

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.

Neuser has collected some of the more ambitious ventures into the documentary hypothesis of the Rabbinic canon and its current recapitulations. Neusner begins with the article written by Professor William Scott Free for Encyclopaedia Judaica second edition, as Green places the documentary hypothesis into the context of Neusner's entire oeuvre.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because the tragedy of the Armenians is not deemed, by consensus, a genocide, many have long sought to connect it to the single event that is most clearly associated with the word genocide-the Holocaust. This book attempts to make this comparison in several distinct ways.

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.

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.

This book uses rhetorical analysis to illuminate one of the most fascinating and complicated speeches by Saint Paul: 2 Cor 10-13. The careful crafting of his discourse based on Christological principles ultimately speaks for qualifying it as a self-praise speech (periautologia) with a pedagogical, not defensive, purpose.