Die Frage der Beziehung zwischen dem Jesajabuch und dem Buch der Zwoelf Propheten ist angesichts vielfaltiger Beruhrungen sprachlicher und motivischer Art zentral, jedoch hinsichtlich der damit verbundenen moeglichen Implikationen bislang nur ungenugend bearbeitet. Im Rahmen eines internationalen Kongresses, der vom 31.Mai bis 3.Juni 2018 an der Katholischen Universitat Eichstatt-Ingolstadt stattfand, suchten Fachleute des Zwoelfprophetenbuches bzw. des Jesajabuches mit unterschiedlichen methodischen Ansatzen ein umfassenderes Bild der verschiedenen Arten von Beziehungen oder thematischen Beruhrungen zu erarbeiten, die entweder fur die beiden Corpora als ganze oder fur spezifische Teile beider charakteristisch sind, um daraus entsprechende Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen. Das Ergebnis ist ein UEberblick zur Vielfalt der semantischen, intertextuellen, literarischen, redaktionellen, historischen und theologischen Aspekte der Beziehungen zwischen dem Jesajabuch und dem Zwoelfprophetenbuch, die einlinigen Loesungsvorschlagen zur Erklarung des Zustandekommens dieser Bezuge widerstreiten.

Reimagining the Bible collects a dozen essays by Howard Schwartz. Together the essays present a coherent theory of the way in which each successive phase of Jewish literature has drawn upon and reimagined the previous ones. The book is organized into four sections: The Ancient Models; The Folk Tradition; Mythic Echoes; Modern Jewish Literature and the Ancient Models. Within these divisions, each of the essays focuses on a specific genre, ranging from Torah and Aggadah to Kabbalah, fairy tales, and the modern Yiddish stories of S.Y. Agnon and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Arguing the important thesis that there is a continuity in Jewish literature which extends from the Biblical era to our own times, over a period of more than 3,000 years, this collection also serves as a guide to the history of that literature, and to the genres it comprises.

Although the ideas of ""tradition"" and ""modernity"" may seem to be directly opposed, David Ellenson, a leading contemporary scholar of modern Jewish thought, understood that these concepts can also enjoy a more fluid relationship. In honor of Ellenson, editors Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers have gathered contributors for Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition to examine the permutations and adaptations of these intertwined forms of Jewish expression. Contributions draw from a range of disciplines and scholarly interests and range in subject from the theological to the liturgical, sociological, and literary. The geographic and historical focus of the volume is on the United States and the State of Israel, both of which have been major sites of inquiry in Ellenson's work. In twenty-two essays, contributors demonstrate that modernity did not simply replace tradition in Judaism but rather entered into a variety of relationships with it: adopting or adapting certain elements, repossessing rituals that had once been abandoned, or struggling with its continuing influence. In four parts - Law, Ritual, Thought, and Culture - contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the role of reform in Israeli Orthodoxy, traditions of twentieth-century bar/bat mitzvah, end-of-life ethics, tensions between Zionism and American Jewry, and the rise of a 1960s New York Jewish countrerculture. An introductory essay also presents an appreciation of Ellenson's scholarly contribution. Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many discplines. Contributors Include: Adam S. Ferziger, Jack Wertheimer, Jonathan D. Sarna, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Michael A. Meyer, Steven M. Lowenstein, William Cutter, Riv-Ellen Prell, Carole B. Balin, Arnold J. Band, Paula E. Hyman, Zvi Zohar, Elliot N. Dorff, Isa Aron, Dalia Marx, Arnold M. Eisen, Michael Marmur, Rachel Adler, Lewis M. Barth, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Wendy I. Zierler.

According to narratives in the Bible the threats of the people's end come from various sources, but the most significant threat comes, as learned from the Pentateuch, from God himself. What is the theological meaning of this tradition? In what circumstances did it evolve? How did it stand alongside other theological and socio-political concepts known to the ancient authors and their diverse audience? The book employs a diachronic method that explores the stages of the tradition's formation and development, revealing the authors' exegetical purposes and ploys, and tracing the historical realities of their time. The book proposes that the motif of the threat of destruction existed in various forms prior to the creation of the stories recorded in the final text of the Pentateuch. The inclusion of the motif within specific literary contexts attenuated the concept of destruction by presenting it as a phenomenon of specific moments in the past. Nevertheless, the threat was resurrected repeatedly by various authors, for use as a precedent or a justification for present affliction.

View the Table of Contents. Read Chapter 1.

ait is essential reading for advanced students and scholars who perhaps think that they possess anything near an understanding of the impact of athe tremenduma that is Holocaust.a
--Choice: Recommended

"An invaluable text. The individual essays are gems, written by recognized authorities in their respective disciplines, and they work as a seamless whole to address the fundamental issues raised by the Holocaust. The volume offers both as a challenge and a stimulus for future thought. . . . Erudite and pathbreaking."
--Alan L. Berger, Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies, Florida Atlantic University

"This is a serious book...The scholars represented here wrestle with substantial issues."
--"Jewish Book World"

The theological problems facing those trying to respond to the Holocaust remain monumental. Both Jewish and Christian post-Auschwitz religious thought must grapple with profound questions, from how God allowed it to happen to the nature of evil.

The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology brings together a distinguished international array of senior scholars--many of whose work is available here in English for the first time--to consider key topics from the meaning of divine providence to questions of redemption to the link between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Together, they push our thinking further about how our belief in God has changed in the wake of the Holocaust.

Contributors: Yosef Achituv, Yehoyada Amir, Ester Farbstein, Gershon Greenberg, Warren Zev Harvey, Tova Ilan, Shmuel Jakobovits, Dan Michman, David Novak, Shalom Ratzabi, Michael Rosenak, Shalom Rosenberg, Eliezer Schweid, and Joseph A. Turner.

This volume is a collection of fresh essays in honor of Professor John T. Townsend. It focuses on the interpretation of the common Jewish and Christian Scripture (the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) and on its two off-shoots (Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament), as well as on Jewish-Christian relations. The contributors, who are prominent scholars in their fields, include James L. Crenshaw, Goeran Eidevall, Anne E. Gardner, Lawrence M. Wills, Cecilia Wassen, Robert L. Brawley, Joseph B. Tyson, Eldon J. Epp, Yaakov Elman, Rivka Ulmer, Andreas Lehnardt, Reuven Kimelman, Bruce Chilton, and Michael W. Duggan. "an engaging and impressive scholarly work." - Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 81.3 (2019)

In this second volume of his long-anticipated five-volume collection of parashat hashavua commentaries, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks explores these intersections as they relate to universal concerns of freedom, love, responsibility, identity, and destiny.

Chief Rabbi Sacks fuses Jewish tradition, Western philosophy, and literature to present a highly developed understanding of the human condition under Gods sovereignty.

Erudite and eloquent, Covenant & Conversation allows us to experience Chief Rabbi Sacks sophisticated approach to life lived in an ongoing dialogue with the Torah.

This first verse-by-verse commentary on the Greek text of the Testament of Abraham places the work within the history of both Jewish and Christian literature. It emphasizes the literary artistry and comedic nature of the Testament, brings to the task of interpretation a mass of comparative material, and establishes that, although the Testament goes back to a Jewish tale of the first or second century CE, the Christian elements are much more extensive than has previously been realized. The commentary further highlights the dependence of the Testament upon both Greco-Roman mythology and the Jewish Bible. This should be the standard commentary for years to come.

This work presents to the scholarly world the hitherto unpublished trove of over 500 catchwords that were attached to Masoretic doublet notes in the Leningrad Codex. All the doublets with their catchwords are listed both in the chronological order of their first appearance in the Bible and again on their second appearance. The nature of the catchwords, their purpose, and their relation to other Masoretic notes are described in detail, and suggestions are made how they can be of value to biblical scholars.

This book is a first attempt to examine the thought of key contemporary Jewish thinkers on the meaning of tradition in the context of two models. The classic model assumes that tradition reflects lack of dynamism and reflectiveness, and the present s unqualified submission to the past. This view, however, is an image that the modernist ethos has ascribed to the tradition so as to remove it from modern existence. In the alternative model, a living tradition emerges as open and dynamic, developing through an ongoing dialogue between present and past. The Jewish philosophers discussed in this work Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, David Hartman, and Eliezer Goldman ascribe compelling canonic status to the tradition, and the analysis of their thought discloses the tension between these two models. The book carefully traces the course they have plotted along the various interpretations of tradition through their approach to Scripture and to Halakhah.

In 1980, Sholom Groesberg changed his life's course. He resigned as dean of engineering at Widener University in order to pursue a career in the rabbinate. Accepted at the Academy for Jewish Religion, he was ordained in 1984. Ten years later Rabbi Groesberg encountered the Jewish Renewal movement Its approach to creating an authentic identity within the context of living as a Jew resonated strongly within him. He became an ardent adherent of the movement.

"Jewish Renewed: A Journey" is a combination academic study and personal memoir written for the educated lay reader. It traces the movement's history, explicates its ideology and practices, and examines the future challenges facing the movement Among others, this book will interest:

History buffs*****Educators*****Spiritual seekers*****Environmentalists Alienated Jews seeking a "home"*****Practitioners in the helping professions

This book will also appeal to those of a philosophical bent searching for answers to questions of Ultimate Concern; answers that invest our lives with meaning
"Why bother to be Jewish?
Can secularism and religiosity be bridged?
Why do new religious movements survive-or fail?
Are the Kabbalah's teachings relevant to contemporary times?
How can a modernist Jew conceptualize the significance of God?

Ingrid Hjelm examines the composition of the Books of Kings, using the Hezekiah narratives in 2 Kings 18GCo20 as a focus. She argues that this narrative is taken from that of the book of Isaiah, with which it shares linguistic and thematic elements. In Kings, it is used with the specific purpose of breaking the compositional pattern of curse, which threatens to place Jerusalem on a par with Samaria. Jerusalem traditions are examined against theories of a late Yahwist author and the PentateuchGCOs origin within a Jerusalem cult. While the Pentateuch in its final form became a common work, acceptable to all groups because of its implied ambiguity, the Deuteronomistic HistoryGCOs favoring of David and Jerusalem holds a rejection of competitive groups as its implied argument.

This is the first study to compare the allusions to scribal culture found in the Aramaic Story of Ahiqar and the Hebrew Tale of Jeremiah and Baruch's Scroll in Jeremiah 36. It is shown that disguised in the royal propagandistic message of Ahiqar is a sophisticated Aramaic critique on the social practices of Akkadian scribal culture. Jeremiah 36, however, uses loci of scribal activity as well as allusions to scribal interactions and the techniques of the scribal craft to construct a subversive tale. When studied from a comparative perspective it is argued that the Story of Ahiqar, which has long been associated with the well-known court tale genre, is an example of a subgenre which is here called the scribal conflict narrative, and Jeremiah 36 is found to be a second example of or a response to it. This observation is arrived at by means of rigorous manuscript examination combined with narrative analysis, which identified, among other things, the development of autobiographical and biographical styles of the same ancient narrative. This study not only provides new perspectives on scribal culture, Ahiqar studies, and Jeremiah studies, but it may have far reaching implications for other ancient sources.

E. P. Sanders's monumental Judaism: Practice and Belief inaugurated vigorous debates about the extent and significance of commonality and diversity in ancient Judaism. Common Judaism gathers a host of scholars to present the state of our understanding of what was common ground in Second-Temple Judaism. By examining the tensions between a "common Judaism" and local settings, partisan Judaism, and the influence of Hellenism, these essays set contemporary discussion on a secure footing. An important resource for scholars and students alike, the contributors include: Lee I. Levine, Boaz Zissu, David Amit, Susan Haber, Albert I. Baumgarten, Anders Runesson, Cecilia Wassen, Anne Moore, Tessa Rajak, David Miller, Eliezer Segal, Seth Schwartz, and Ian W. Scott.

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both. From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar 'formations of the formless'. Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern 'chaos theories' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

The disengagement of recent academic biblical study from church and synagogue has been widely noted. Even within the discipline, there are those who suggest it has lost its way. As the discipline now stands, is it mainly concerned with studying and listening to the texts, or with dissecting them in order to examine hypothetical sources or situations or texts that might lie behind them. Christopher Bryan seeks to address scholars and students who do not wish to avoid the challenges of the Enlightenment, but do wish to relate their work to the faith and mission of the people of God. Is such a combination still possible? And if so, how is the task of biblical interpretation to be understood? Bryan traces the history of modern approaches to the Bible, particularly "historical criticism," noting its successes and failures-and notably among its failures, that it has been no more able to protect its practitioners from (in Jowett's phrase) "bringing to the text what they found there" than were the openly faith-based approaches of earlier generations. Basing his work on a wide knowledge of literature and literary critical theory, and drawing on the insights of the greatest literary critics of the last hundred years, notably Erich Auerbach and George Steiner, Bryan asks, what should be the task of the biblical scholar in the 21st century? Setting the question within this wider context enables Bryan to indicate a series of criteria with which biblical interpreters may do their work, and in the light of which there is no reason why that work cannot relate faithfully to the Church. This does not mean that sound biblical interpretation can ignore the specificity of scientific or historical questions, or dragoon its results into conformity with a set of ecclesial propositions. It does mean that in asking those questions, interpreters of the biblical text will not ignore its setting-in-life in the community of faith; and they will concede that although textual interpretation has scientific elements, it is finally an exercise in imagination: an art, and not a science.

Jewish life in Europe has undergone dramatic changes and transformations within the 20th century and also the last two decades. The phenomenon of the dual position of the Jewish minority in relation to the majority, not entirely unusual for Jewish Diaspora communities, manifested itself most distinctly on the European continent. This unique Jewish experience of the ambiguous position of insider and outsider may provide valuable views on contemporary European reality and identity crisis. The book focuses inter alia on the main common denominators of contemporary Jewish life in Central Europe, such as an intense confrontation with the heritage of the Holocaust and unrelenting antisemitism on the one hand and on the other hand, huge appreciation of traditional Jewish learning and culture by a considerable part of non-Jewish Europeans. The volume includes contributions on Jewish life in central European countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, and Germany.

The contributions in this volume are focused on the historical origins, religious provenance, and social function of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, including so-called 'Gnostic' writings. Although it is disputed whether there was a genre of 'apocalyptic literature,' it is obvious that numerous texts from ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and other religious milieus share a specific view of history and the world to come. Many of these writings are presented in form of a heavenly (divine) revelation, mediated through an otherworldly figure (like an angel) to an elected human being who discloses this revelation to his recipients in written form. In different strands of early Judaism, ancient Christianity as well as in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Islam, apocalyptic writings played an important role from early on and were produced also in later centuries. One of the most characteristic features of these texts is their specific interpretation of history, based on the knowledge about the upper, divine realm and the world to come. Against this background the volume deals with a wide range of apocalyptic texts from different periods and various religious backgrounds.

After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.

This first full-scale account of Leviticus by a world renowned anthropologist presents the biblical work as a literary masterpiece. Seen in an anthropological perspective Leviticus has a mystical structure which plots the book into three parts corresponding to the three parts of the desert tabernacle, both corresponding to the parts of Mount Sinai. This completely new reading transforms the interpretation of the purity laws. The pig and other forbidden animals are not abhorrent, they command the same respect due to all God's creatures. Boldly challenging several traditions of Bible criticism, Mary Douglas claims that Leviticus is not the narrow doctrine of a crabbed professional priesthood but a powerful intellectual statement about a modern religion which emphasizes God's justice and compassion.

This useful volume, edited by noted theologian Darrell Jodock and including leading thinkers both Christian and Jewish, explores the shared theological framework, special historical relationship, and post-Holocaust developments and current trouble spots that situate the Jewish-Christian relationship today. Covenantal Conversations is a special gift to students, scholars, and Christians of all descriptions who wish to understand the vital link and special promise that Jews and Christians share. Eight topics or talking points get special attention from the chief contributors and their dialogue partners: Judaism Then and Now Covenants Old and New Law and Gospel Promise and Fulfillment Difficult Texts Promised Land and Zionism Healing the World and Mending the Soul Jewish-Christian Relations in a Pluralistic World

In Law's Dominion, Jay Berkovitz offers a novel approach to the history of early modern Jewry. Set in the city of Metz, on the Moselle river, this study of a vibrant prerevolutionary community draws on a wide spectrum of legal sources that tell a story about community, religion, and family that has not been told before. Focusing on the community's leadership, public institutions, and judiciary, this study challenges the assumption that Jewish life was in a steady state of decline before the French Revolution. To the contrary, the evidence reveals a robust community that integrated religious values and civic consciousness, interacted with French society, and showed remarkable signs of collaboration between Jewish law and the French judicial system. In Law's Dominion, Jay Berkovitz has gathered and meticulously mined a dazzling array of rich and complex rabbinic texts and records from Western Europe during the early modern period, including the pinkas of the rabbinic court of Metz that he previously rescued from oblivion. What emerges is a remarkably fresh depiction and incisive comparative treatment of central aspects of Jewish law, religion and family, which will have far-reaching ramifications for all future studies in these disciplines. -Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature, and Law at Yeshiva University