In the collection entitled Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews Gabriella Gelardini gathers fifteen essays written in the last fifteen years, twelve of which are in English and three in German. Arranged in three parts (the world of, behind, and in front of Hebrews's text), her articles deal with such topics as structure and intertext, sin and faith, atonement and cult, as well as space and resistance. She reads Hebrews no longer as the enigmatic and homeless outsider within the New Testament corpus, as the "Melchizedekian being without genealogy"; rather, she reads Hebrews as one whose origin has finally been rediscovered, namely in Second Temple Judaism.

This detailed examination of the "Torah" (the first five books of the Bible) lays particular emphasis on the role and character of the Torah's transcendent God, as its central protagonist. Viewing both the 'Torah' and its God as purely human creations, humanist Jordan Jay Hillman seeks in no way to devalue this hugely influential book. His aim instead is to reinterpret it as a still vital text that used theistic means appropriate to its time to inspire people toward their worthiest human purposes. It is thus for its 'timeless themes' rather than its 'dated particularities' (including its model of a transcendent God) that we should honour the 'Torah' in our time as both the wellspring of Judaic culture and a major influence on Christian and Islamic ethics and morals. From his humanist perspective and his background as a lawyer and professor of law at North-western University (now emeritus), Hillman offers many insights into the narrative and wide-ranging legal code of "Genesis", "Exodus", "Leviticus", "Numbers", and "Deuteronomy"- including their many contradictions and anomalies. His analysis draws on a broad scholarly consensus regarding the 'Documentary Theory', as it bears on the identities and periods of the Torah's human sources. This thorough explication of an often misunderstood ancient text will help humanists, and many theists alike, to appreciate the rich moral, ethical, and cultural heritage of the 'Torah' and its enduring relevance to our time.

The opening sections of some exegetical Midrashim deal with the same type of material that is found in introductions to medieval rabbinic Bible commentaries. The application of Goldberg's form analysis to these sections reveals the new form "Inner-Midrashic Introduction" (IMI) as a thematic discourse on introductory issues to biblical books. By its very nature the IMI is embedded within the comments on the first biblical verse (1:1). Further analysis of medieval rabbinic Bible commentary introductions in terms of their formal, thematic, and material characteristics, reveals that a high degree of continuity exists between them and the IMIs, including another newly discovered form, the "Inner-Commentary Introduction". These new discoveries challenge the current view that traces the origin of Bible introduction in Judaism exclusively to non-Jewish models. They also point to another important link between the Midrashim and the commentaries, i.e., the decomposition of the functional form midrash in the new discoursive context of the commentaries. Finally, the form analysis demonstrates how larger discourses are formed in the exegetical Midrashim.

First Order: Zeraim / Tractate Peah and Demay is the second volume in the edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, a basic work in Jewish Patristic. It presents basic Jewish texts on the organization of private and public charity, and on the modalities of coexistence of the ritually observant and the non-observant. This part of the Jerusalem Talmud has almost no counterpart in the Babylonian Talmud. Its study is prerequisite for an understanding of the relevant rules of Jewish tradition.

Jeremiah's Scriptures focuses on the composition of the biblical book of Jeremiah and its dynamic afterlife in ancient Jewish traditions. Jeremiah is an interpretive text that grew over centuries by means of extensive redactional activities on the part of its tradents. In addition to the books within the book of Jeremiah, other books associated with Jeremiah or Baruch were also generated. All the aforementioned texts constitute what we call "Jeremiah's Scriptures." The papers and responses collected here approach Jeremiah's scriptures from a variety of perspectives in biblical and ancient Jewish sub-fields. One of the authors' goals is to challenge the current fragmentation of the fields of theology, biblical studies, ancient Judaism. This volume focuses on Jeremiah and his legacy.

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.

Skandapurana IIb presents a critical edition of Adhyayas 31-52 from the Skandapurana, with an introduction and English synopsis. The text edited in this volume includes central myths of early Saivism, such as the destruction of Daksa's sacrifice and Siva acquiring the bull for his vehicle. Also included is an extensive description of the thirteen hells (Naraka).

Volume 12 in the edition of the complete Jerusalem Talmud. Tractates Sanhedrin and Makkot belong together as one tractate, covering procedural law for panels of arbitration, communal rabbinic courts (in bare outline) and an elaborate construction of hypothetical criminal courts supposedly independent of the king's administration. Tractate Horaiot, an elaboration of Lev. 4:1-26, defines the roles of High Priest, rabbinate, and prince in a Commonwealth strictly following biblical rules.

In a career spanning over fifty years, the questions Jacob Neusner has asked and the critical methodologies he has developed have shaped the way scholars have come to approach the rabbinic literature as well as the diverse manifestations of Judaism from rabbinic times until the present. The essays collected here honor that legacy, illustrating an influence that is so pervasive that scholars today who engage in the critical study of Judaism and the history of religions more generally work in a laboratory that Professor Neusner created. Addressing topics in ancient and Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaic context of early Christianity, American Judaism, World Religions, and the academic study of the humanities, these essays demarcate the current state of Judaic and religious studies in the academy today.

The context for the first part of this study is the community (sangha) of early Buddhism in India, as it is reflected in the religion's canon composed in the Pali language, which is preserved by the Theravada tradition as the only authentic record of the words of the Buddha and his disciples, as well as of events within that community. This book does not assert that the Pali Canon represents any sort of "original" Buddhism, but it maintains that it reflects issues and concerns of this religious community in the last centuries before the Common Era. The events focused on in part one of this study revolve around diversity and debate with respect to proper soteriology, which in earliest Buddhist communities entails what paths of practice successfully lead to the religion's final goal of nibbana (Sanskrit: nirvana). One of the main theses of this study is that some of the vocational and soteriological tensions and points of departure of the early community depicted in the Pali Canon have had a tendency to crop up in the ongoing Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka, which forms the second part of the study. In particular, part two covers first a vocational bifurcation in the Sri Lankan that has existed at least from the last century of the Common Era to contemporary times, and second a modern debate held between two leading voices in Theravada Buddhism, on the subject of what constitutes the right meditative path to nibbana.With a few notable exceptions, both members of Theravada Buddhism and the scholars who have studied them have maintained that the Pali Canon, and the ongoing tradition that has grown out of it, has a singular soteriology. The aim of this study is to deconstruct tradition, in the simple sense of revealing the tradition's essential multiplicity. Prior to this study, past scholarship--which preferred to portray early Indian and Theravada Buddhsim as wholly rationalist systems--has shied away from giving ample treatment on the noble person who possesses supernormal powers. This book examines the dichotomy between two Theravada monastic vocations that have grown out of tensions discussed in part one. The bifurcation is between the town-dwelling scholar monk and the forest-dwelling meditator monk. Scholars have certainly recognized this split in the sangha before, but this is the first attempt to completely compare their historical roles side by side. This is an important book for collections in Asian studies, Buddhist studies, history, and religious studies.

In his articles Stefan Reif deas with Jewish biblical exegesis and the close analysis of the evolution of Jewish prayer texts. Some fourteen of these that appeared in various collective volumes are here made more easily available, together with a major new study of Numbers 13, an introduction and extensive indexes. Reif attempts to establish whether there is any linguistic, literary and exegetical value in the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible for the modern scientific approach to such texts and whether such an approach itself is always free of theological bias. He demonstrates how Jewish liturgical texts may illuminate religious teachings about wisdom, history, peace, forgiveness, and divine metaphors. Also clarified in these essays are notions of David, Greek and Hebrew, divine metaphors, and the liturgical use of the Hebrew Bible.

Alejandro Botta locates the Aramaic legal formulary in context of the Egyptian legal tradition and looks at the influence of foreign legal practices on other formulae which do not have their roots in Egypt.This is a study of the interrelationships between the formulary traditions of the legal documents of the Jewish colony of Elephantine and the legal formulary traditions of their Egyptian counterparts.The legal documents of Elephantine have been approached in three different ways thus far: first, comparing them to the later Aramaic legal tradition; second, as part of a self-contained system, and more recently from the point of view of the Assyriological legal tradition. However, there is still a fourth possible approach, which has long been neglected by scholars in this field, and that is to study the Elephantine legal documents from an Egyptological perspective. In seeking the Egyptian parallels and antecedents to the Aramaic formulary, Botta hopes to balance the current scholarly perspective, based mostly upon Aramaic and Assyriological comparative studies.It was formerly the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement.

This book is a valuable and methodologically consistent learning and teaching academic resource for universities worldwide in this intriguing new discipline.

Subordinated King studies the conception of kingship, and its status, powers and authority in Talmudic literature. The book deals with the conception of kingship against the background of the different approaches to kingship both in Biblical literature and in the political views prevalent in the Roman Empire. In the Bible one finds three (exclusive) approaches to kingship: rejection of the king as a legitimate political institution - since God is the (political) king; a version of royal theology according to which the king is divine (or sacral); and a view that God is not a political king yet the king has no divine or sacral dimension. The king is flesh and blood; hence his authority and power are limited. He is a 'subordinated king'. Subordinated King is the first book to offer a comprehensive study of kingship in Talmudic literature and its biblical (and contemporary) background. The book offers a fresh conceptual framework that sheds new light on both the vast minutia and the broad picture.

In medieval Ashkenaz piyyut commentary was a popular genre that consisted of 'open texts' that continued to be edited by almost each copyist. Although some early commentators can be identified, it is mainly compilers that are responsible for the transmitted form of text. Based on an ample corpus of Ashkenazic commentaries the study provides a taxonomy of commentary elements, including linguistic explanations, treatment of hypotexts, and medieval elements, and describes their use by different commentators and compilers. It also analyses the main techniques of compilation and the various ways they were employed by compilers. Different types of commentaries are described that target diverse audiences by using varied sets of commentary elements and compilatory techniques. Several commentaries are edited to illustrate the different commentary types.

The impact of earlier works to the literature of early Judaism is an intensively researched topic in contemporary scholarship. This volume is based on an international conference held at the Sapientia College of Theology in Budapest, May 18 21, 2010. The contributors explore scriptural authority in early Jewish literature and the writings of nascent Christianity. They study the impact of earlier literature in the formulation of theological concepts and books of the Second Temple Period."