A result of more than fifteen years of research and study, "Prophecy: Past, Present, and Future" examines the Bible's Book of Daniel and its predictions of some of history's major events.

Author Calev Ben Avraham explains how God uses the royalty as signposts in the prophetic time element-known by only a few biblical scholars-thus making it possible to pinpoint the exact time in prophecy for the end of days and the ending of Gentile rule over the earth. In "Prophecy: Past, Present, and Future, " Avraham refers to the Babylonian dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon; Cyrus, king of the Persians; Alexander, the great emperor of Greece; and the emergence of Christianity under the Roman emperor Constantine.

Through the Book of Daniel, he shows how the prophecy pertains not only to abdication for the royals but also to death by fatal accidents, such as Princess Grace and Princess Diana of England. He also explains how God will gather his people from the four corners of the earth back to the Holy Land in the very, very near future.

Expand your study of prophecy and gain a new understanding of the years to come.

This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian-born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitatsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler's philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Emile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group's sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology.

The Emancipation led Italian Jews to redefine themselves in fundamental ways, beginning a debate about integration and assimilation that continued until the Racial Legislation Laws of 1938. This groundbreaking study examines the numerous youth movements, newspapers, and cultural societies that attempted to revitalize Italian Judaism and define the "essence" of Jewish identity during this period. Throughout, author Cristina M. Bettin demonstrates how Jews integrated rather than assimilated, which became a unique and defining feature of Italian Judaism.

The Abadi Family saga begins when a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story between a Palestinian and a Jew ends in predictable tragedy. The family flees to America to mend, but encounters only more turmoil that threatens to tear the family apart.

In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US. As Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar's determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect.

This powerful debut novel explores Tamar's struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.

In the late eighteenth century, German Jews began entering the middle class with remarkable speed. That upward mobility, it has often been said, coincided with Jews' increasing alienation from religion and Jewish nationhood. In fact, Michah Gottlieb argues, this period was one of intense engagement with Jewish texts and traditions. One expression of this was the remarkable turn to Bible translation. In the century and a half beginning with Moses Mendelssohn's pioneering translation and the final one by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, German Jews produced sixteen different translations of at least the Pentateuch. Exploring Bible translations by Mendelssohn, Leopold Zunz, and Samson Raphael Hirsch, Michah Gottlieb argues that each translator sought a "reformation" of Judaism along bourgeois lines, which involved aligning Judaism with a Protestant concept of religion. Buber and Rosenzweig famously critiqued bourgeois German Judaism as a craven attempt to establish social respectability to facilitate Jews' entry into the middle class through a vapid, domesticated Judaism. But Mendelssohn, Zunz, and Hirsch saw in bourgeois values the best means to serve God and the authentic actualization of Jewish tradition. Through their learned, creative Bible translations, these scholars presented competing visions of middle-class Judaism that affirmed Jewish nationhood while lighting the path to a purposeful, emotionally-rich spiritual life grounded in ethical responsibility.

This is not just another book of records. The Guiness Book of World Records has done that job admirably, and it would be difficult to improve upon it. This book is primarily about the people who established or broke a record that had already been established.

Blech argues that both Christianity and Judaism are responsible for anti-Semitism in claiming divine revelation as the source of their scriptures.

This edited collection of essays critically examines how diverse religions of the world represent, understand, theologize, theorize and respond to disability and/or chronic illness. Contributors employ a wide variety of methodological approaches including ethnography, historical, cultural, or textual analysis, personal narrative, and theological/philosophical investigation.

After Jerusalem, Bethel is the most frequently cited sanctuary in the Hebrew Bible. The book offers a detailed analysis of Bethel and its sanctuary from archaeological and biblical evidence. It reconstructs the history of Bethel and by analysing the presence of pro- and anti-Bethel propaganda, it argues that the latter, with its own pro-Jerusalem/Judah bias, has resulted in an unfair denigration of Bethel as an idolatrous place of worship. The study suggests that Bethel was a legitimate Yahwistic shrine and continued to be so even after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians. Hence, Bethel in a real sense was the principal means of configuring Israelite identity.

This companion volume to "Judaism and Other Religions" provides the first extensive collection of traditional and academic Jewish approaches to the religions of the world, focusing on those Jewish thinkers that actually encounter the other world religions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism--that is, it moves beyond the theory of inclusive/exclusive/pluralistic categories and looks at Judaism's interactions with other faiths "in practice."

Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism have long been studied separately. Yet, scholars are becoming ever more aware of the need to merge them into a single field of Jewish Studies. This volume opens new perspectives and bridges traditional gaps. The authors are not simply contributing to their respective fields of Sephardic or Ashkenazic Studies. Rather, they all include both Sephardic and Ashkenazic perspectives as they reflect on different aspects of encounters and reconsider traditional narratives. Subjects range from medieval and early modern Sephardic and Ashkenazic constructions of identities, influences, and entanglements in the fields of religious art, halakhah, kabbalah, messianism, and charity to modern Ashkenazic Sephardism and Sephardic admiration for Ashkenazic culture. For reasons of coherency, the contributions all focus on European contexts between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

The book is concerned with a so called ethical midrash, Seder Eliyahu (also known as Tanna debe Eliyahu), a post-talmudic work probably composed in the ninth century. It provides a survey of the research on this late midrash followed by five studies of different aspects related to what is designated as the work's narratology. These include a discussion of the problem of the apparent pseudo-epigraphy of the work and of the multiple voices of the text; a description of the various narrative types which the work, itself as a whole of non-narrative character, makes use of; a detailed treatment of Seder Eliyahu's parables and most characteristic first person narratives (an extremely unusual form of narrative discourse in rabbinic literature); as well as a final chapter dedicated to selected women stories in this late midrash. As it emerges from the survey in chapter 1 such a narratologically informed study of Seder Eliyahu represents a new approach in the research on a work that is clearly the product of a time of transition in Jewish literature.

Redemption and Resistance brings together an eminent cast of contributors to provide a state-of-the-art discussion of Messianism as a topic of political and religious commitment and controversy. By surveying this motif over nearly a thousand years with the help of a focused historical and political searchlight, this volume is sure to break fresh ground. It will serve as an attractive contribution to the history of ancient Judaism and Christianity, of the complex and often problematic relationship between them, and of the conflicting loyalties their hopes for redemption created vis--vis a public order that was at first pagan and later Christian. Although each chapter is designed to stand on its own as an introduction to the topic at hand, the overall argument unfolds a coherent history. The first two parts, on pre-Christian Jewish and primitive Christian Messianism, set the stage by identifying two entities that in Part III are then addressed in the development of their explicit relationship in a Graeco-Roman world marked by violent persecution of Jewish and Christian hopes and loyalties. The story is then explored beyond the Constantinian turn and its abortive reversal under Julian, to the Christian Empire up to the rise of Islam.

In this innovative and important work Christl M. Maier argues that the way Israelites in the exilic and post-exilic periods spoke of Jerusalem as gendered space??????a "female" city??????helps us trace reactions to the crisis of exile and the emergence of a new national-religious identity. Taking up the Zion tradition in Isaiah of Jerusalem, Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Lamentations, Maier explores motifs of Jerusalem as mother, daughter, bride, whore, and injured victim. Her interpretation of gendered metaphors also helps us understand contemporary political and religious constructions of gender and political power.

This monograph provides a fresh perspective on judgment according to works by challenging both the majority scholarly view and the new perspective advocated by E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright. Employing intertextuality and early Jewish mediation of scripture, this study examines the idea of judgment according to works with reference to Psalm 62:13 in early Jewish literature and the New Testament. The originality of this study is to highlight the significance of Psalm 62:13 in the context of judgment according to works and to argue that the texts dealing with judgment according to works in the New Testament are to be understood as interpretations of Psalm 62:13 and its broad context.

In Josephus, the Emperors, and the City of Rome William den Hollander places under the microscope the Judaean historian's own account of the latter part of his life, following his first encounters with the Romans. Episodes of Josephus' life, such as his embassy to Rome prior to the outbreak of the 1st Judaean Revolt, his prophetic pronouncement of Vespasian's imminent rise to the imperial throne, and his time in the Roman prisoner-of-war camp, are subjected to rigorous analysis and evaluated against the broader ancient evidence by the application of a vivid historical imagination. Den Hollander also explores at great length the relationships formed by Josephus with the Flavian emperors and other individuals of note within the Roman army camp and, later, in the city of Rome. He builds solidly on recent trends in Josephan research that emphasize Josephus' distance from the corridors of power.

Jewish customs and traditions about death, burial and mourning are numerous, diverse and intriguing. They are considered by many to have a respectable pedigree that goes back to the earliest rabbinic period. In order to examine the accurate historical origins of many of them, an international conference was held at Tel Aviv University in 2010 and experts dealt with many aspects of the topic. This volume includes most of the papers given then, as well as a few added later. What emerges are a wealth of fresh material and perspectives, as well as the realization that the high Middle Ages saw a set of exceptional innovations, some of which later became central to traditional Judaism while others were gradually abandoned. Were these innovations influenced by Christian practice? Which prayers and poems reflect these innovations? What do the sources tell us about changing attitudes to death and life-after death? Are tombstones an important guide to historical developments? Answers to these questions are to be found in this unusual, illuminating and readable collection of essays that have been well documented, carefully edited and well indexed.

The product of many years of intensive work, this volume represents the first time a comprehensive study of such magnitude and scope has been prepared for the reading public. Combining the skills of journalist and scholar, the author has composed a work that is not only easy-to-read, but is meticulous in its factual information. Mr. Beller is a Canadian journalist who spent many years in Latin America studying all the communities and their people at first hand.