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Papers collected in this volume try to illuminate various aspects of philosophical theology dealt with by different Jewish and early Christian authors and texts (e.g. the Acts of the Apostles, Philo, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus), rooted in and influenced by the Hellenistic religious, cultural, and philosophical context, and they also focus on the literary and cultural traditions of Hellenized Judaism and its reception (e.g. Sibylline Oracles, Prayer of Manasseh), including material culture ("Elephant Mosaic Panel" from Huqoq synagogue). By studying the Hellenistic influences on early Christianity, both in response to and in reaction against early Hellenized Judaism, the volume intends not only to better understand Christianity, as a religious and historical phenomenon with a profound impact on the development of European civilization, but also to better comprehend Hellenism and its consequences which have often been relegated to the realm of political history.

This book focuses on places and instances where Solomon's legendary biography intersects with those of Jesus Christ and of Aristotle. Solomon is the axis around which this trio revolves, the thread that binds it together. It is based on the premise that there exists a correspondence, both overt and implied, between these three biographies, that has taken shape within a vast, multifaceted field of texts for more than two thousand years.

In this meticulously researched and compelling study, David Sim reconstructs the social setting of the Matthean community at the time the Gospel was written and traces its full history.Dr Sim argues that the Matthean community should be located in Antioch towards the latter part of the first century. He acknowledges the dispute within the early Christian movement and its importance. He defines more accurately the distinctive perspectives of the two streams of thought and their respective relationships to Judaism. A new and important work in Matthean studies.>

Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of Judaism seriously, and in eschewing a theology of multiple covenants. At the same time, it is critical, rejecting previous concepts of chosenness, and innovative, offering for the twenty-first century a fresh way of seeing the Jews' place in the world. On this foundation, Gellman suggests a new approach to inter-religious understanding from a Jewish point of view, and examines the impact of his proposal on traditional Jewish liturgy.

For nearly four millennia Judaism was essentially a unified religious system based on shared traditions. Despite the emergence of various sub-groups through the centuries such as the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Karaites, Shabbateans and Hasadim, Jewry was united in the belief in a providential God who had chosen the Jews as his special people and given them a code of law. In the modern period, however, the Jewish religion has fragmented into a series of separate denominations with competing ideologies and theological views. Despite the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish people are deeply divided concerning the most fundamental issues of belief and practice. Judaism Today gives an account of the nature of traditional Judaism, provides an introduction to the various divisions that currently exist in the Jewish world and identifies and discusses contemporary issues with which the Jewish faith engages in the twenty-first century. This refreshing new approach focuses on how Judaism is actually perceived and practised by Jews themselves and the problems currently facing Jews worldwide.

The question isn't whether grace is there for you in Judaism.The question is, do you have the courage to accept it?

"Chesed isn't a reward; it is reality. God s grace isn t limited to what we want to happen or might like to happen. God s grace is what is happening whether we like it or not. In short, God s grace is the giving of all to all." from the Introduction

Ask almost any Jew whether grace is a central concept in Judaism and an essential element in living Jewishly and, chances are, their answer will be no. But that s the wrong answer. This fascinating foray into God s love freely given offers you regardless of your level of Jewish involvement a way to answer that question in the affirmative.

Drawing from ancient and contemporary, traditional and non-traditional Jewish wisdom, this book reclaims the idea of grace in Judaism in three ways: It offers a view of God that helps you understand what grace is, why grace is, and how grace manifests in the world.It sets forth a reading of Judaism that is grace-filled: an understanding of creation, Shabbat and other Jewish practices from a grace-filled perspective.It challenges you to be embraced and transformed by grace, and to live life as a vehicle for God s grace, thereby fulfilling the promise of being created in God s image and likeness.

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Based on evidence taken from a wide range of source material, Christina Scham employs an innovative excl usive approach to the study of Jewish scribes and their role in the Second-Temple period. '

The ninth volume of this edition, translation, and commentary of the Jerusalem Talmud contains two Tractates. The first Tractate, "Documents", treats divorce law and principles of agency when written documents are required. Collateral topics are the rules for documents of manumission, those for sealed documents whose contents may be hidden from witnesses, the rules by which the divorced wife can collect the moneys due her, the requirement that both divorcer and divorcee be of sound mind, and the rules of conditional divorce. The second Tractate, "Nazirites", describes the Nasirean vow and is the main rabbinic source about the impurity of the dead. As in all volumes of this edition, a (Sephardic rabbinic) vocalized text is presented, with parallel texts used as source of variant readings. A new translation is accompanied by an extensive commentary explaining the rabbinic background of all statements and noting Talmudic and related parallels. Attention is drawn to the extensive Babylonization of the Gittin text compared to genizah texts.

The articles in this volume investigate changes in texts that became to be regarded as holy and unchangeable in Judaism and Christianity. The volume seeks to draw attention to the "empirical" evidence from Qumran, the Septuagint as well as from passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that have been shaped by the use of other texts. The contributions are divided into three main sections: The first section deals with methodological questions concerning textual changes. The second section consists of concrete examples from the Hebrew Bible, Qumran and Septuagint on how the texts were changed, corrected, edited and interpreted. The contributions of the third section will investigate the general influence and impact of Deuteronomistic ideology and phraseology on later texts.

These papers address the central question of how classical Christian images of Jews have been acted out or muted in interreligious encounters in the USA. The book is organized according to the salient issues that divide Jews from the Christian majority, with sections on anti-Semitism.

The present volume is one of the first to concentrate on a specific theme of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely the book of Genesis. In particular the volume is concerned with the links displayed by the Qumranic biblical interpetation to the inner-biblical interpretation and the final shaping of the Hebrew scriptures. Moshe Bar-Asher studies cases of such inner biblical interpretative comments; Michael Segal deals with the Garden of Eden story in the scrolls and other contemporary Jewish sources; Reinhard Kratz analizes the story of the Flood as preamble for the lives of the Patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible; Devorah Dimant examines this theme in the Qumran scrolls; Roman Viehlhauer explores the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; George Brooke and Atar Livneh discuss aspects of Jacob's career; Harald Samuel review the career of Levi; Liora Goldman examines the Aramaic work the Visions of Amram; Lawrence Schiffman and Aharon Shemesh discuss halakhic aspects of stories about the Patriarchs; Moshe Bernstein provides an overview of the references to the Patriarchs in the Qumran scrolls.

This study examines by a meticulous analysis of abundant rabbinic citations the pluralism of the Halakhah in the pre-70 period which stands in contrast to the fixed Halakhah of later periods. The Temple's destruction provoked, for political motives, the initiation of this significant shift, which protracted itself, in developmental stages, for a longer period. The transition from the Tannaitic to the Amoraic era was a consequential turning point on the extended path from flexibility to rigidity in Jewish law.

This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa 1:10-17; 43:22-28; and 58:1-14 and concludes that, even though the role of cult and ethics in each part of the book varies significantly, the underlying principles behind the teaching about ritual and social justice in the various parts of the book of Isaiah are the same. Furthermore, these principles are cultic in nature, and in accord with priestly teaching. Far from being anti-ritualistic, the studied texts are concerned with what can be labelled The Ethical Dimension of Cult. The reason behind the variations of the role of cult and ethics in the book called Isaiah seems to be cultic as well, namely the purity or impurity of the people and the land before, during, and after the Babylonian exile.

The monograph considers the relationships of ethical systems in the ancient Near East through a study of warfare in Judah, Israel and Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. It argues that a common cosmological and ideological outlook generated similarities in ethical thinking. In all three societies, the mythological traditions surrounding creation reflect a strong connection between war, kingship and the establishment of order. Human kings' military activities are legitimated through their identification with this cosmic struggle against chaos, begun by the divine king at creation. Military violence is thereby cast not only as morally tolerable but as morally imperative. Deviations from this point of view reflect two phenomena: the preservation of variable social perspectives and the impact of historical changes on ethical thinking. The research begins the discussion of ancient Near Eastern ethics outside of Israel and Judah and fills a scholarly void by placing Israelite and Judahite ethics within this context, as well as contributing methodologically to future research in historical and comparative ethics.

"The Blackwell Reader in Judaism" introduces Judaism in its own words, affording readers a direct encounter with this ancient and enduring faith.

The volume includes passages from Scripture, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic writings, medieval and modern Jewish philosophy and theology, and statements of modern movements in Judaism, all with editorial comment and guidance. The selection covers the historical development of Judaism and its doctrines, as well as representing contemporary debates.

The readings have been selected according to three guiding principles:
To stimulate thought and reflection and so to help readers or students draw inferences about a particular theme or problem.
To illustrate the essays in the accompanying "Blackwell Companion to Judaism" so that the expositions there are substantiated in real Judaic texts.
To exemplify an important trait in Judaism.

The 27 topics treated in the associated Companion expound the topics of Judaism, and the corresponding selections in this Reader illustrate important points with primary sources, in English, to complement the exposition. In this way, the editors talk about Judaism and let Judaism speak for itself. They present introductions for any reader interested in the subject, and do not take partisan or sectarian positions.

Millions of American Christians see U.S. support for the State of Israel as a God-ordained responsibility. Millions more see the ''special relationship'' between the two countries as a bond that should never be challenged, much less broken. Robert O. Smith provides an in-depth look at the English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation at the heart of this popular affinity. In 2006, John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel. Several high-level policymakers, both Christians and Jews, flocked to endorse the effort. Soon, however, questions rose about apparently anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic ideas contained in Hagee's preaching and writing. More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation explores the content of Christian Zionist attitudes, their resonance in popular American culture, and the history of the ideas that have contributed to present realities. After discussing polling data and exploring how Black Protestant views clarify general American attitudes, Smith revisits sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant interpretations of scripture and history. The Pope and the Turk figured significantly, identified by both Luther and Calvin as the two heads of the Antichrist. Protestant exiles from England carried these ideas back to Elizabethan England, provided a nationalist twist, and set Anglo-American history on a new path. The resulting English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation shaped Puritan identity, which was then transferred to New England, where it began informing the foundations of American vocation and self-understanding. Through its developments and adaptations, this Judeo-centric tradition provided English colonists and Anglo Americans with purpose and vision. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, many Americans readily welcomed it as a prophetic counterpart, a country whose preservation ''may be more desired then our owne salvation.''

Recent scholarship on ancient Judaism, finding only scattered references to messiahs in Hellenistic- and Roman-period texts, has generally concluded that the word ''messiah'' did not mean anything determinate in antiquity. Meanwhile, interpreters of Paul, faced with his several hundred uses of the Greek word for ''messiah, '' have concluded that christos in Paul does not bear its conventional sense. Against this curious consensus, Matthew V. Novenson argues in Christ among the Messiahs that all contemporary uses of such language, Paul's included, must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. In other words, early Jewish messiah language is the kind of thing of which Paul's Christ language is an example.
Looking at the modern problem of Christ and Paul, Novenson shows how the scholarly discussion of christos in Paul has often been a cipher for other, more urgent interpretive disputes. He then traces the rise and fall of ''the messianic idea'' in Jewish studies and gives an alternative account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention worked because there existed both an accessible pool of linguistic resources and a community of competent language users. Whereas it is commonly objected that the normal rules for understanding christos do not apply in the case of Paul since he uses the word as a name rather than a title, Novenson shows that christos in Paul is neither a name nor a title but rather a Greek honorific, like Epiphanes or Augustus.
Focusing on several set phrases that have been taken as evidence that Paul either did or did not use christos in its conventional sense, Novenson concludes that the question cannot be settled at the level of formal grammar. Examining nine passages in which Paul comments on how he means the word christos, Novenson shows that they do all that we normally expect any text to do to count as a messiah text. Contrary to much recent research, he argues that Christ language in Paul is itself primary evidence for messiah language in ancient Judaism.