Jewish Studies

Has the Old Testament Psalter been purposefully arranged? Does this arrangement convey an overall message? This book enters into the growing discussion regarding the canonical arrangement of the Psalms by examining Book IV (Pss 90-106) and considering the book's overall theological and thematic message within the literary context of the Psalter. This volume argues that Psalms 90-106 have been purposely arranged as a rejoinder to the previous three books, in response to the rise and fall of Davidic kingship. This hypothesis is tested by examining how Psalms 90-106 may have been purposely organized as a collection.

This volume combines Targum studies with Judaic studies. The author assigns different Targums each to a respective particular “Sitz im Leben”, stressing the close connection between Targum and Midrash literature. She challenges the assumption that all extant Targums were compiled for the Synagogue. Instead, she suggests that Targum Onqelos might have fulfilled a function in the context of the early beth din and demonstrates that Pseudo-Jonathan can be linked with the rhetorical practices which abounded in later amoraic, educational circles.

This book is a response to the popular counter-reading of Ecclesiastes in the 1980s and 90s as a book of “joy” (rather than a pessimistic book). It examines the seven “joy statements” of Qoheleth in the light of analogies with scepticism and the literary form of irony. Irony, like scepticism, has the function to induce doubt and questions. The joy statements of Qoheleth are likely analogous to expressions of complex irony—whereby what is said is both meant and not meant. This examination highlights the complexity of the biblical book—while demonstrating how unlikely the “joy reading” may be.

Aside from being the content of speeches by characters in narrative, how do passages of laws in the Pentateuch interact with the surrounding narratives? This book proposes that certain passages of law in Leviticus and Numbers offer direction for the interpretation of adjacent segments of narrative. This 'direction' may serve to emphasize select themes and concepts in narrative. Alternatively, it may misdirect readers, or suggest alternative options to more accessible interpretations for a stretch of narrative.

This interdisciplinary study integrates textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible and comparable ancient Near Eastern material with social theory and archaeology in order to articulate the ancient Israelites' taken-for-granted understandings of natural disasters, their intellectual and theological challenges to those understandings, and their intellectual and theological reconstructions thereof.

Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, form criticism has diminished in popularity and use in recent years. Bryan H. Cribb’s studies demonstrates that, if appropriately modified, form criticism still has much to add to Old Testament studies. Using a synchronic and inductive approach to the text, Cribb engages in a form critical study of nine “death stories” in the Old Testament. In so doing, he not only provides substantial support for the existence of this genre, but he also shows how remarkably fruitful such a study can be in revealing the messages of these accounts.

An emerging consensus maintains that the exile was not as extensive as the Old Testament claims. However, that it held singular importance for the book of Jeremiah is beyond question. Modine argues that Jeremiah represents a range of options for understanding and responding to the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. This volume reads the diverse contents of Jeremiah as a kind of dialogue between competing perceptions of the exile. The author argues that coherence is to be found precisely in the incoherent, as it reflects the communal trauma of exile.

This book argues that it is the rejection of Paul’s claims to be an apostle in the same sense as the other apostles that ultimately underlies his “mission to the Gentiles.” This argument is advanced through a careful analysis of Paul’s references to his “conversion” in Galatians 1:15-17 and 1 Corinthians 15:8, paying particular attention to Paul’s evocative use of the language of abortion. The contextualization of this curious self-description in 1 Corinthians 15:8 draws upon a growing body of work concerning an area of ancient life that continues to fascinate and perplex moderns; the exposure of unwanted infants.

This book argues that the genre of the seven messages in Revelation 2–3 is a hybrid prophetic oracle. This oracle is influenced by the Old Testament covenantal elements functioning as a set of lawsuit exhortations. Graves defends this by demonstrating the influence of the Ancient Near Eastern vassal treaty structure in the seven messages. Written in a readable format this work is both an excellent introduction to the book of Revelation as well as a fitting work for the apocalyptic specialist.

The Coups of Hazael and Jehu offers a narrative reconstruction of the events surrounding the rise of Hazael to the throne of Aram-Damascus and Jehu to the throne of Israel in the mid-eighth century. These near-simultaneous dynastic changes were parts of a major shift in the political, military, and economic structure of the Levant, which took place as the mighty armies of Assyria pushed into the region. The book argues that Jehu’s bloody overthrow of Joram and Hazael’s irregular seizure of power after the death of his predecessor were not independent events, but responses to the Assyrian threat.

Profound in its conclusions and targeted toward the exegete, this volume offers a clear method for establishing flow of thought, text hierarchy, and literary macrostructure in biblical Hebrew prose. The study contributes both to hermeneutical theory and to the study of Deuteronomy by arguing for the application of discourse linguistics alongside stylistic and semantic analysis in the interpretation of OT texts. It includes a brief literary-structural and theological commentary on Deuteronomy 5–11 that models the text grammatical approach and shows its benefits for exegesis.

This book examines the development of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of the Jewish people and Judaism. Formulating a typological association between the biblical figure of Cain and the Jews, he crafts a highly intricate theology that justifies and even demands the continuing presence of Jews and their religious practices in a Christian society. Such a theology emerges out of his highly original interpretation of Genesis 4:1–15 and yet mirrors and theologically justifies the reality of Jews and Judaism in the late Roman Empire.

The Holocaust has provoked many different Jewish theological responses, yet upon closer inspection interesting commonalities can be observed between even seemingly antithetical thinkers. One of these common trends within Holocaust theology has been the rejection and replacement of traditional theodicies which explain and justify suffering, with responses centred on ideas of recovery, consolation and divine mystery. Another widespread, though largely unrecognized trend is use of Jewish mystical themes by Holocaust theologians. This study shows how the presence of Jewish mysticism can be explained, at least in part, by this post-Holocaust collapse of theodicy.

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 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 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.

The first edition of The Epistle of the Number, composed in Syracuse, Sicily, at the end of the 14th century. It is the first known Hebrew treatise to include extensive algebraic theories and procedures, exposing novel mathematical vocabulary, and enhancing our understanding of the linguistic mechanisms which helped create scientific vocabulary in medieval Hebrew.

Melilah is an interdisciplinary electronic journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras.

Morony compares conditions in late Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq in the seventh century AD and depicts both the emergence of a local form of Islamic society, and the interaction of Muslim conquerors from Arabia with the native population.

This volume contains selected proceedings of the Midrash Section sessions convened during the 2012-2014 meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. It is comprised of contributions by leading and emerging scholars that share a common focus on Rabbinic biblical interpretation as it intersects with a range of biblical texts and associated fields of study, including: Jewish legal literature; Hellenistic Judaism; post-biblical interpretation; biblical commentary; liturgical studies; and, cultural studies.

The first critical editions and English translations of the two Syriac recensions of a fascinating text which narrates the story of a young Jewish child, Asher. After converting to Christianity and taking the name ʿAḇdā da-Mšiḥā (‘slave of Christ’), he is martyred by his father. In a detailed introduction, Butts and Gross challenge the use of this text by previous scholars as evidence for historical interactions between Jews and Christians, reevaluating its purpose and situating the story in its Late Antique Babylonian context.

This volume presents case studies of the phenomena that contributed to group identity in late antique Syria-Mesopotamia, in particular traditions reflecting interactions between Judaism and Christianity, among various Christian groups, and among other religious traditions of late antiquity (such as Zoroastrianism or 'paganism'). By studying Christian, Jewish and other sources that deal with the establishment, modification and deletion of boundaries, the authors seek to create a frame of reference that will in turn explain and contextualise the existing evidence concerning communication and interaction between highly diverse groups in Late Antiquity.

This is the first-ever study of Judeo-Urdu, that is, the Hindi/Urdu language written in Hebrew script. It provides background and an introduction to the Judeo-Urdu corpus, presents nearly two hundred entries from one text — a Hebrew-Judeo-Urdu glossary — and analyzes the orthography, phonology, and morphology of Judeo-Urdu. Comparison is made to standard Hindi and Urdu, from which Judeo-Urdu diverges in many interesting ways.

The Scholastic Culture of the Babylonian Talmud studies how and in what cultural context the Talmud began to take shape in the scholastic centers of rabbinic Babylonia. Bickart tracks the use of the term tistayem ("let it be promulgated") and its analogs, in contexts ranging from Amoraic disciple circles to Geonic texts, and in comparison with literatures of Syriac-speaking Christians. The study demonstrates increasing academization during the talmudic period, and supports a gradual model of the Talmud's redaction.

This work is volume 1 of Boaz Cohen’s collected articles, with a new introduction by rabbinics scholar Natalie B. Dohrmann.