A fascinating and revelatory introduction to the Talmud discusses the Talmudic mind, its conceptions of God, and its thoughts on social ethics, personal morality, law, and general human wisdom. Original.
Christians today are focused on two important creation topics: how the world came to be and how we should care for it. A highly respected Old Testament theologian recommends that before discussing these questions, we focus on God the Creator and God's ongoing work in creation. We should explore what the Bible tells us and let the text set the agenda for our reflections. Combining his storytelling gift with rigorous biblical exegesis and deep reflection, Ben Ollenburger describes the action of God the Creator as presented throughout the Old Testament. He shows how creation is about more than origins. It is about God acting against the hostile forces of chaos that can be historical, political, and military. About how God created a well-ordered world, and how human transgression ruptures God's relationship with humans and threatens creation. About how God responds as Creator to those threats by disturbing and reordering the disorder, bringing about what God intended--a world ordered in the social, political, and natural realms that is characterized by the justice, righteousness, and peace required for human flourishing.
This book analyses the data about Torah centers and rabbinic activity in Palestine during Mishnaic and Talmudic times, 70–400 CE—the Roman and early Byzantine periods. The research is an interdisciplinary inquiry. It encompasses rabbinic literature as well as archeology, geography, and sociology, thus enriching the discussion of the history and scope of rabbinic activity in the different regions of Palestine. Arranged in chronological order, the book highlights the changes generated by historical events, in particular the relocation of rabbinic centers following the upheaval of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. In spite of this upheaval, Torah centers continued to develop in Palestine for several hundred years, until the end of the period under discussion.
Throughout history, the relationship between Jews and their land has been a vibrant, much-debated topic within the Jewish world and in international political discourse. Identity and Territory explores how ancient conceptions of Israel—of both the land itself and its shifting frontiers and borders—have played a decisive role in forming national and religious identities across the millennia. Through the works of Second Temple period Jews and rabbinic literature, Eyal Ben-Eliyahu examines the role of territorial status, boundaries, mental maps, and holy sites, drawing comparisons to popular Jewish and Christian perceptions of space. Showing how space defines nationhood and how Jewish identity influences perceptions of space, Ben-Eliyahu uncovers varied understandings of the land that resonate with contemporary views of the relationship between territory and ideology.
This book opens windows onto Jewish legal culture, by offering fourteen exploratory essays, each of which focuses on an aspect of Jewish law, broadly understood. Each chapter is a self-contained journey, as it were, into a feature of the Jewish legal landscape. In other words, rather than taking a structural approach, and attempting to neatly circumscribe and define 'every' element of Jewish law, Windows onto Jewish Legal Culture takes a dynamic and holistic approach, describing diverse manifestations of Jewish legal culture, without seeking to fit them into a single structure.
The Book of Daniel is by far the least standardized of all the books that made it into both the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, with no less than 16 versions surviving from the classical and early medieval eras. The Septuagint manuscripts contain two versions, the standard version found in most manuscripts, and the 'Old Greek' version, which only survives virtually complete in the Medieval era Codex Chisianus. The common translation was done by the Jewish scholar Theodotion circa 150 AD, and supplanted the Old Greek translation as it was closer to the Jewish and Christian theology of the period. The Old Greek translation was the version originally in the Septuagint, however, the authenticity and accuracy of any and all versions of the Book of Daniel have always been in doubt. The Codex Chisianus is accepted as being the closest to the Old Greek translation. It claims to be a copy of the Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria's recension from circa 240 AD, and as the Syro-Hexaplar Codex, a Syriac translation of Origen's recension from 616 and 617 AD, is virtually identical, they are both accepted as Origen's work. Origen rejected both the shorter version of Daniel found in the Hebrew and Aramaic translation that the Jews of his day were using, and Theodotion's translation, which was largely based on the Hebrew and Aramaic text, and claimed the Old Greek translation was the closest to the original text of Daniel. When Theodotion made his translation, he primarily used the shorter Hebrew and Aramaic texts that the Jews were using at the time, and filled in the missing sections by copying from the Old Greek translation. The version of Daniel found in the Masoretic Text is the shortest version of Daniel to survive to the present, and is arguably the strangest, as it is a book retained in two languages. Chapter 1, and the opening lines of chapter 2 are in Hebrew, the rest of chapter 2, as well as chapters 3 through 7 are in Aramaic, and the rest is in Hebrew. This strange combination of Hebrew and Aramaic is also present in the surviving fragments of Daniel found among in the Dead Sea Scrolls, indicating the book was already half-Hebrew and half-Aramaic by the era of the Hasmonean Dynasty, which is when the Hebrew translations of most of the other Aramaic and Canaanite (Paleo-Hebrew) books first appeared.
The Persian and Hellenistic periods saw the production and use of a variety of authoritative texts in Israel. 'The Production of Prophecy' brings together a range of influential biblical scholars to examine the construction of prophecy and prophetic books during the Persian period. Drawing on methodological and comparative research and studies of particular biblical texts, the volume explores biblical prophecy as a written phenomenon, examining the prophets of the past, setting this within the general history of Yehud. The relationship between prophetic and other authoritative, written texts is explored, as well as the general social and ideological setting in which the prophetic books emerged.
This is the only complete English translation of the classic Jewish text known as Ein Yaakov. Ein Yaakov is a collection of all the agaddah (the non-legal) material of the Talmud, compiled by Rabbi Yaakov ibn Chaviv, the fifteenth century talmudist. Scattered among the more than 2,700 pages of the Talmud, aggadah focuses on the ethical and inspirational aspects of the Torah way of life. Through a wealth of homilies, anecdotes, allegories, pithy sayings, and interpretations of biblical verses, it has been said that the aggadah brings you closer to God and his Torah.
This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence over some 1,500 years of cultural florescence with far-reaching consequences. A seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.
This book has been written out of a deep concern to see Jewish believers in Yeshua-Jesus playing their part in the worldwide church of Messiah, using their knowledge of God's word, their Jewishness, their natural and spiritual gifts, and a humble, thankful heart. Knowledge of the truths of Scripture is a vital key to love for God and fruitfulness in his service, and this book focuses on both the Bible's unfolding story (biblical theology) and its specific doctrines and their interrelationship (systematic theology). Our aim is to build a biblical framework of thinking in the heart and mind. It is written from an evangelical understanding and in a way that interacts with the main forms of Judaism and Christianity. It is a study book, with questions to answer and further reading suggestions. Similar books of doctrine with the same scope have been written, but few if any take account of the context of Jewish readers and the issues which are important to them. The authors have attempted to achieve this within the context of the whole counsel of God. Error sets no one free but truth does; the hope of the authors is for readers to be free to love and serve the Lord with all their mind and heart.
Ehud Ben Zvi has been at the forefront of exploring how the study of social memory contributes to our understanding of the intellectual worldof the literati of the early Second Temple period and their textual repertoire. Many of his studies on the matter and several new relevant works are here collected together providing a very useful resource for furthering research and teaching in this area. The essays included here address, inter alia, prophets as sites of memory, kings as sites memory, Jerusalem as a site of memory, a mnemonic system shaped by two interacting ‘national’ histories, matters of identity and othering as framed and explored via memories, mnemonic metanarratives making sense of the past and serving various didactic purposes and their problems, memories of past and futures events shared by the literati, issues of gender constructions and memory, memories understood by the group as ‘counterfactual’ and their importance, and, in multiple ways, how and why shared memories served as a (safe) playground for exploring multiple, central ideological issues within the group and of generative grammars governing systemic preferences and dis-preferences for particular memories.
The three Shabbat meals offer an opportunity to think about life and connect with others. However, despite our best intentions, the lack of time and sufficient resources may preclude in-depth grappling with more significant and meaningful issues. Around the Shabbat Table addresses this problem. Its goal is to serve as a springboard for more personally stimulating and meaningful Shabbat conversations. Each unit can be read directly at the Shabbat table and no prior knowledge or preparation is necessary. The ideas presented are designed for Jewish adults of all backgrounds and religious denominations. They reflect a philosophy that the Torah belongs to and should be accessible to all Jews, whatever they think or believe, wherever they may be.
History, Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles presents a new way of approaching this key biblical text, arguing that the Book employs both multiple viewpoints and the knowledge of the past held by its intended readership to reshape social memory and reinforce the authority of God. The Book of Chronicles communicates to its intended readership a theological worldview built around multiple, partial perspectives which inform and balance each other. This is a worldview which emphasizes the limitations of all human knowledge, even of theologically "proper" knowledge. When Chronicles presents the past as explainable it also affirms that those who inhabited it could not predict the future. And, despite expanding an "explainable" past, the Book deliberately frames some of YHWH's actions - crucial events in Israel's social memory - as unexplainable in human terms. The Book serves to rationalise divinely ordained, prescriptive behaviour through its emphasis on the impossibility of adequate human understanding of a past, present and future governed by YHWH.
The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.
The book describes commercial activity in the Jewish community in Roman Palestine and the interactions between these different components of a controlled system. The book also discusses methods for determining prices and price enforcement, the views of the different marketors, and the status of the synagogue as center of commercial activity.
In The Ten Lost Tribes, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite shows for the first time the extent to which the search for the lost tribes of Israel became, over two millennia, an engine for global exploration and a key mechanism for understanding the world.
The articles in this volume were originally published in Hebrew in Shenaton Hamishpat Haivri and address Jewish law, both in its own context and in the context of contemporary jurisprudence. Contributions range from discussion of the rabbincal court to the doctrine of binding precedent, and from the basis of judicial authority to the legal defence
The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.
Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion begins the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. It is the first volume in Folktales of the Jews, the five-volume series to be released over the next several years, in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg's classic, Legends of the Jews. The 71 tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives, Named in Honor of Dov Noy, The University of Haifa (IFA), a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the Sephardic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This volume and the others to come will be monuments to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.
For fans of Cormac McCarthy, Phillip Meyer, Fargo, and Justified, a gritty rural noir thriller about family, drugs, and the legacy of violence. In an isolated town on the coast of southern Australia, Vernon Moore and his wife, Penelope, live in retirement, haunted by an unspeakable act of violence that sent their son, Caleb, to serve time in prison and has driven the couple apart. Ashamed, they refuse to talk about him or visit, but when a close friend warns Vernon that Caleb has been savagely beaten, he has no choice but to act to protect their only child. The perpetrator of the beating is a local thug from a crime family whose patriarch holds sway over the town, with the police in his pay. Everyone knows they trade in drugs. When Vernon maneuvers to negotiate a deal with the father, he makes a critical error. His mistake unleashes a cycle of violence that escalates to engulf the whole town, taking lives with it, revealing what has been hiding in plain sight in this picturesque rural community and threatening to overtake his son. Told from shifting perspectives at a sprint, in language that sometimes approaches the simple profundity of parable, this gritty debut was hailed on its Australian publication as “a darkly illuminating thriller that soars across genre constraints . . . [and] engages with pressing contemporary issues while exploring timeless questions. Hobson writes as if his life depends on it” (The Australian).
The focus in this book is on the historical consciousness of the Jews of Spain and southern France in the late Middle Ages, and specifically on their perceptions of Christianity and Christian history and culture. Ram Ben-Shalom offers a detailed analysis of Jews' exposure to the history of those among whom they lived. He shows that the Jews in these southern European lands experienced a relatively open society that was sensitive to and knowledgeable about voices from other cultures, and that this had significant consequences for shaping Jewish historical consciousness.
While previous research has illuminated the origins and development of the Zion tradition, this book is the first to make a thorough study of Zion as a theological symbol within the larger Jerusalem cult tradition. Drawing primarily on the Psalms and Isaiah of Jerusalem, Ollenburger shows that Zion serves pre-eminently to symbolize the kingship of Yahweh on Zion as creator and defender of world order. As such, Zion serves also to symbolize security and refuge, particularly for the poor. This study constitutes a powerful argument against the tendency of Old Testament theologians to devalue the cosmic Zion symbolism in favour of the historical theology of the exodus, especially when assessing the contemporary import of Old Testament theology. Zion symbolism is anything but an ideological tool legitimating a self-sufficient and self-serving monarchy. Instead it serves as the basis for a radical critique of the projects and pretensions of Judah's royal court.
Ben Zvi's Hosea features a comprehensive introduction and careful commentary with special attention to themes of exile and restoration, as well as extended discussion of didactic prophetic readings.
Genesis...the story of beginnings...sets the stage for everything we know about God, the natural universe, humanity, and good and evil. It lays the foundation for all the questions asked by philosophy about knowledge, meaning, free will, the soul, ethics, happiness, and success. It forms the basis for all biblical teachings.A scientist and a scholar team up to look at the scientific and theological issues addressed in the book of Genesis. A must-have for all Sabbath school teachers or for anyone wanting to understand the science, history, and theology packed into Genesis.
Ever been in a problem that looked like it would never end. Ever woke up in the middle of the night filled with groaning, pain and fear that made the night too long. Friends I have good news for you! Every problem and challenges have an expiring date. Only you can choose how long you stay in the situation or how fast you return the smiles to your face. You cannot take your rightful place until you understand that there is a key that can open the door to your joy, sound health and prosperity. It does not matter for how long you have been in that situation, the time has come for you to come out of that situation and this book presents you with the KEY. In this exciting and interesting to read book, you will discover a secret key called the MASTER KEY that will help you live a comfortable, fearless and tearless life. This book contains ancient secrets that would help you get out of your quagmire and turn your condemnation into commendation. All you need do is grab the MASTER KEY by getting a copy of this book and you will be sure glad you did.
This is the first book of a three-book series on the Messiah, the final end of days redemption, the ten tribes, and the war of Gog and Magog according to Judaism, which is based on authentic Torah sources. The book gives information on how to identify the real Messiah son of David and son of Josef based on his traits, such as where he was raised and his birth date, his talents, such as being a musician and man of war and administrator of Torah justice, appearance, skills, wisdom, his suffering and imprisonment, signs of the times preceding his coming, prophesies of the days of the Messiah, the anti-Christs Armilus and Gog, the role of Elijah the prophet and the Sanhedrin, what we can do to hasten his coming before the final end time, the divinity of Torah, the Noahide Covenant, overview of what is the end of days final redemption and the war of Gog and Magog, barriers to the Messiah and their destruction, Messiah as a world leader who establishes peace based on Torah justice and builds the third Temple, the importance of love and kindness for all, and a realistic Torah-based peace plan for the Palestinians.
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