Jewish Studies

Tristram says "In the belief that this field was not yet exhausted, I spent, accompanied by a small party of friends, in 1863-4, a period of nearly ten months in the examination chiefly of the geology and natural history of the country."

A history of the Jewish people covering Old Testament history from Abraham to the captivity of Babylon; post-Biblical history from the captivity of Babylon to the taking of the city by Titus; and modern history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present.

This two-volume set is still a standard reference used today on the subject. It is one of the most detailed studies on OT Hebrew syntax.

The book provides easy-to-use tables that translate the calendars of over sixty civilizations into the Julian and Gregorian calendars. An indispensable tool for scholars.

This book stresses the need for unity among the believers of God: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. "We must read it – or rather we must travel with her, for truth guides her pen, as charity has guided her steps."--Prince de Polignac, Colonel of the French Army in Algiers (1897)

Leopold Zunz was the founding father of the "Wissenschaft des Judentums." This book deals with biblical interpretation and homiletics from the Bible up to his own time. It is still a standard work.

A contemporaneous and religiously meaningful retelling of biblical stories by a feminist who looks at intimate lives of people inhabiting the Bible. She rediscovers a past in which biblical women actively participated and suggests women’s leadership might lead to a better world.

Sun and Shield is a collection of devotional texts, featuring a unique combination of biblical, Jewish, pagan, Christian, Islamic and modern literary texts. Quotes from a diverse range of authors can be found, such as Goethe, Plutarch and Mohamed.

This study of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrash includes: a survey of previous research, a catalogue of textual witnesses and general conclusions about the multifaceted evolution of this important genre of midrashic literature.

This study applies form criticism to the stories of the earliest rabbinic midrashim. The results shed light on the literary personalities of the individual midrash collections and the relationships of transmission in the tradition. These stories are of particular interest from an inter-religious and comparative literary point of view because New Testament studies have often referred to certain narratives in the gospels as "midrashic." The author sets forth, in positive terms, an understanding of what functions historical anecdotes serve in the tannaitic midrashim, along with a catalogue of the rhetorical conventions used to fulfill those functions.

This book provides the first major reinvestigation and reinterpretation of the history of centralization of worship in ancient Israel since de Wette and Wellhausen in the nineteenth century. Old Testament scholarship has thus far relied on the consensus that the book of Deuteronomy is the product of late monarchic Judah (7th century BC). Pitkanen places the biblical material in its archaeological and ancient Near Eastern context and pays special attention to rhetorical analysis. The author suggests that the book of Joshua, as well as its sources (such as Deuteronomy) may have originated as early as before the disaster of Aphek and the rejection of Shiloh.

A stirring collection of fifteen articles, many of which have been previously published by the author who is a feminist Jew. The author unabashedly confronts difficult biblical and midrashic texts, without taking an apologetic stance.

Walenty Potocki was a young Polish nobleman who abandoned wealth, power, and unlimited worldly prospects to convert to new religion - Judaism. Potocki was betrayed by a member of the religious community he embraced and burned at the stake by the Church he left behind in 1749. This book examines eleven versions of this remarkable man’s story and the heated, previously unpublished, correspondence between the Potocki clan and one of his early biographers. Noble Soul is the record of one man’s defining faith, and of the compelling human need for personal spiritual fulfillment.

Lurianic mythology represents an intensely personal view, in which earlier cabalistic symbolism is used to express new and original ideas. The lurianic corpus can be seen as a metaphor for a relation between man and the deity which is not yet fulfilled. The cabalistic myths of his sources express the reality of the relations of being in the lurianic corpus. The lurianic system seeks to reformulate the relation of man and god, concentrating on the way that the being of the deity is revealed in man.

This work consists of a selection of papers from sessions during the first two years of SBL Consultation on Midrash. It demonstrates innovative approaches to midrashic texts and hermeneutic reflections on similarities and differences between interpretations of the Bible.

Translated for the first time, with annotations and useful additions, this long under-appreciated work of S. D. Luzzatto is now available to modern scholars. A history of both Hebrew and Hebrew scholarship, it is replete with valuable information and insight.

Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica was a unique thinker in the history of Hasidism with a highly personal vision of Judaism. His teachings, partially derived from the Przysucha-Kotsk school, adopted the concept of absolute divine providence as a cornerstone. He also reinterpreted the Lurianic concept of tiqqun, originally intended as a cosmological concept, to apply to the individual, creating a new path to spiritual self-perfection.

This book investigates the interaction between grammatical norms and poetic technique on the basis of a corpus selected from the oeuvre of the payyetan Eleazar be-rabbi Qillir. As a basis for this investigation, a descriptive/comparative analysis of the Qillirian dialect is offered. The first portion of the work is a grammar devoted mainly to morphology and syntax. The second portion of the work is an investigation of the poetic norms, as well as rhetorical techniques employed by Qillir, together with an assessment of their impact on the grammar. The overall aim of the project is to design an analytical framework within which a self-conscious poetic dialect might be investigated.

This volume incorporates all the articles and reviews published in Volumes 1-4 (1996-2003) of the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.

Through literary, historical, archaeological, and engendered readings, this collection of essays presents a multidisciplinary analysis of rabbinic texts. Such a conversation between diverse scholars illuminates the hermeneutical issues generated by the contemporary study of the Talmud and Midrash.

Literature of the Synagogue is a three-part introduction to the textual heritage of Jewish devotion in the formative stages of its development. Part One presents a varied selection of prayers and liturgies expressive of rabbinic theology and religious feeling. Part Two is devoted to sermons from the classical rabbinic period. Part Three is an anthology of sacred poems and devotional hymns by the great literary masters of the Hebrew Middle Ages.

The Dictionary of Jewish Proverbs offers the reader a comprehensive insight into the world of Jewish wisdom. It comes in the form of an A-Z Dictionary and represents probably the biggest single collection ever published, with a total of over 4,000 proverbs coming from sources from every corner of the globe. A truly absorbing read, Jewish Wisdom will be an indispensable manual for all lovers of wisdom from whatever religious persuasion and an absolute goldmine of witty and wise things to say when the time is right.

This volume illustrates how Targum Psalms creatively interprets selected psalms and how those interpretations relate to other Jewish and Christian traditions, including early translations of the psalms, rabbinic Midrashim, the New Testament and early Church Fathers. The study of these Psalms suggests viewing Targum Psalms as a creative partner in the world of biblical interpretation, as opposed to a compilation of already existing midrashic material. Edwards portrays the Targum as a link between the written and oral Torah that leads its readers on a path to tradition.

Neubauer addresses the related issues of the authorship of the Psalms and the individual psalm titles according to the early Jewish authorities. Beginning with a survey of what is known about music usage in Israelite worship, Neubauer launches into a thorough examination of what the Rabbinic material preserves regarding these issues.

The perennial source in English on the work of Wilhelm Gesenius, Miller’s monograph was one of the first to attempt such a study. In the years since its publication, Miller’s book has yet to be superseded. He also provides information on the editors of Gesenius’s material, Franz Dietrich, F. Muehlau, W. Volck, and Frants Buhl.