Mordechai Cogan's Books

Opening the Gates of Interpretation

Maimonides' Biblical Hermeneutics in Light of His Geonic-Andalusian Heritage and Muslim Milieu

By: Mordechai Z. Cohen

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Opening the Gates of Interpretation

Maimonides' Biblical Hermeneutics in Light of His Geonic-Andalusian Heritage and Muslim Milieu

By: Mordechai Z. Cohen

The biblical hermeneutics of the illustrious philosopher-talmudist Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) has long been underappreciated, and viewed in isolation from the celebrated philological schools of “plain sense” (peshat) Jewish Bible exegesis. Aiming to redress this imbalance, this study identifies Maimonides’ substantial contributions to that interpretive movement, assessing its achievements in cultural context. Like others in the rationalist Geonic-Andalusian school, Maimonides’ understanding of Scripture was informed by Arabic learning. Drawing upon Greco-Arabic logic, poetics, politics, physics and metaphysics, as well as Muslim jurisprudence, he devised sophisticated new approaches to key issues that occupied other exegetes, including a variety of interpretive cruxes, the reconciliation of Scripture with reason, a legal hermeneutics for deriving halakhah (Jewish law) from Scripture, and the nature of interpretation itself. "It is a valuable contribution to the entire study of medieval biblical exegesis and will undoubtedly serve as the basis of all subsequent discussions of Maimonides' hermeneutics." Daniel J. Lasker, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Page Count

596

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004210067

ISBN 13

9789004210066

The Hebrew Bible Reborn

From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books. A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism

By: Yaacov Shavit,Mordechai Eran

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The Hebrew Bible Reborn

From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books. A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism

By: Yaacov Shavit,Mordechai Eran

This work, the first of its kind, describes all the aspects of the Bible revolution in Jewish history in the last two hundred years, as well as the emergence of the new biblical culture. It describes the circumstances and processes that turned Holy Scripture into the Book of Books and into the history of the biblical period and of the people – the Jewish people. It deals with the encounter of the Jews with modern biblical criticism and the archaeological research of the Ancient Near East and with contemporary archaeology. The middle section discusses the extensive involvement of educated Jews in the Bible-Babel polemic at the start of the twentieth century, which it treats as a typological event. The last section describes at length various aspects of the key status assigned to the Bible in the new Jewish culture in Europe, and particularly in modern Jewish Palestine, as a “guide to life” in education, culture and politics, as well as part of the attempt to create a new Jewish man, and as a source of inspiration for various creative arts.

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Page Count

577

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter

Published Date

ISBN 10

3110200937

ISBN 13

9783110200935

Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor

From Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides to David Kimhi

By: Mordechai Z. Cohen

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Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor

From Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides to David Kimhi

By: Mordechai Z. Cohen

This volume explores how the poetic technique of biblical metaphor was analyzed within the Jewish exegetical tradition that developed in Muslim Spain during the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry and was then transplanted to a Christian milieu. Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides applied concepts from Arabic poetics, hermeneutics and logic to define metaphor and interpret it within their philological-literary readings of Scripture. David Kimhi integrated their methodologies with the midrashic creativity and sensitivity to nuance typical of his native Provence to create a new literary interpretive system that highlights the expressiveness of metaphor. This study is important for readers interested in metaphor, the Bible as literature, the history of biblical interpretation and the inter-relation between Arabic and Hebrew learning.

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Page Count

395

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004493816

ISBN 13

9789004493810

The Rule of Peshat

Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900-1270

By: Mordechai Z. Cohen

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The Rule of Peshat

Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900-1270

By: Mordechai Z. Cohen

An exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of the philological method of Jewish Bible interpretation known as peshat Within the rich tradition of Jewish biblical interpretation, few concepts are as vital as peshat, often rendered as the "plain sense" of Scripture. Generally contrasted with midrash—the creative and at times fanciful mode of reading put forth by the rabbis of Late Antiquity—peshat came to connote the systematic, philological-contextual, and historically sensitive analysis of the Hebrew Bible, coupled with an appreciation of the text's literary quality. In The Rule of "Peshat," Mordechai Z. Cohen explores the historical, geographical, and theoretical underpinnings of peshat as it emerged between 900 and 1270. Adopting a comparative approach that explores Jewish interactions with Muslim and Christian learning, Cohen sheds new light on the key turns in the vibrant medieval tradition of Jewish Bible interpretation. Beginning in the tenth century, Jews in the Middle East drew upon Arabic linguistics and Qur'anic study to open new avenues of philological-literary exegesis. This Judeo-Arabic school later moved westward, flourishing in al-Andalus in the eleventh century. At the same time, a revolutionary peshat school was pioneered in northern France by the Ashkenazic scholar Rashi and his circle of students, whose methods are illuminated by contemporaneous trends in Latinate learning in the Cathedral Schools of France. Cohen goes on to explore the heretofore little-known Byzantine Jewish exegetical tradition, basing his examination on recently discovered eleventh-century commentaries and their offshoots in southern Italy in the twelfth century. Lastly, this study focuses on three pivotal figures who represent the culmination of the medieval Jewish exegetical tradition: Abraham Ibn Ezra, Moses Maimonides, and Moses Nahmanides. Cohen weaves together disparate Jewish disciplines and external cultural influences through chapters that trace the increasing force acquired by the peshat model until it could be characterized, finally, as the "rule of peshat": the central, defining feature of Jewish hermeneutics into the modern period.

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Page Count

424

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812252128

ISBN 13

9780812252125

Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child

By: John Mordechai Gottman,John Gottman,Joan Declaire

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Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child

By: John Mordechai Gottman,John Gottman,Joan Declaire

Discusses a five-step program for parents to use when teaching their children to acknowledge and master their emotions.

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Page Count

246

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

0684838656

ISBN 13

9780684838656

Book's by Mordechai Cogan

Opening the Gates of Interpretation

Opening the Gates of Interpretation

The Hebrew Bible Reborn

The Hebrew Bible Reborn

Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor

Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor

The Rule of Peshat

The Rule of Peshat

Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child

Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child

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