This volume concludes the edition, translation, and commentary of the third order of the Jerusalem Talmud. The pentateuchal expression lqkh 'AAh a oeto take as wifea is more correctly translated either as a oeto acquire as wifea or a oeto select as wifea . The Tractate QidduAin deals with all aspects of acquisition as well as the permissible selections of wives and the consequences of illicit relations.

Although in Second Temple literature we find a variety of songs concerned with the future of Jerusalem, little attempt has been made to analyse these comparatively as a generic group. In this study, three songs have been selected on the basis of their similarity in style, ideas and their apparent original composition in Hebrew. The texts have been subjected to a literary analysis both individually and then comparatively.

The addresses presented in this volume were delivered by the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel to a select group of students who comprised the "Prime Minister's Bible Study Circle." The issues with which Mr. Ben-Gurion wrestles, and the resolutions he proposes, will be of interest to all those interested in the sacred text, regardless of religion. Originally published in Hebrew in 1969.

Orthodox Muslims venerate the Koran as the sacred word of God, which they believe was literally revealed by dictation from the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad. This fundamentalist attitude toward the Muslim holy book denies the possibility of error in the Koran -- even though there are some fairly obvious self-contradictions, inconsistencies, and incoherent passages in the text. To justify the claim that the Koran is inerrant, the orthodox have simply pointed to centuries of hidebound tradition and the consensus view of conservative leaders who back up this interpretation. But does the very beginning of the Muslim tradition lend support to the orthodox view?
In this fascinating study of the origins of Islam, historian Mondher Sfar reveals that there is no historical, or even theological, basis for the orthodox view that Muhammad or his earliest followers intended the Koran to be treated as the inviolable word of God. With great erudition and painstaking historical research, Sfar demonstrates that the Koran itself does not support the literalist claims of Muslim orthodoxy. Indeed, as he carefully points out, passages from Islam's sacred book clearly indicate that the revealed text should not be equated with the perfect text of the original "celestial Koran," which was believed to exist only in heaven and to be fully known only by God.
This early belief helps to explain why there were many variant texts of the Koran during Muhammad's lifetime and immediately thereafter, and also why this lack of consistency and the occasional revisions of earlier revelations seemed not to disturb his first disciples. They viewed the Koran as only an imperfect copy of the real heavenly original, a copy subject to the happenstances of Muhammad's life and to the human risks of its transmission. Only later, for reasons of social order and political power, did the first caliphs establish an orthodox policy, which turned Muhammad's revelations into the inerrant word of God, from which no deviation or dissent was permissible.
This original historical exploration into the origins of Islam is also an important contribution to the growing movement for reform of Islam initiated by courageous Muslim thinkers convinced of the necessity of bringing Islam into the modern world.

The language, themes and imagery of the Bible have been rewritten into texts across time. In the Revelation of John, the Hebrew Bible echoes and is reinvented, just as in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) many explicit and implicit readings and interpretations of the Bible are offered. In Texts Reading Texts, these readings of the Bible, and the ways in which Revelation and Hogg's Confessions have themselves been read, are considered from the two postmodern perspectives of marginalization and deconstruction. By reading the two seemingly unrelated texts side by side from these perspectives, traditional readings of them both are disturbed and challenged.

In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest among both secular and religious Israelis in Talmudic stories. This growing fascination with Talmudic stories has been inspired by contemporary Israeli writers who have sought to make readers aware of the special qualities of these well-crafted narratives that portray universal human situations, including marriages, relationships between parents and children, power struggles between people, and the challenge of trying to live a good life. The Charm of Wise Hesitancy explores the resurgence of interest in Talmudic stories in Israel and presents some of the most popular Talmudic stories in contemporary Israeli culture, as well as creative interpretations of those stories by Israeli writers, thereby providing readers with an opportunity to consider how these stories may be relevant to their own lives.

For many millions of Muslims there is one and only one true Koran that offers the word of Allah to the faithful. Few Muslims realize, however, that there are several Korans in circulation in the Islamic world, with textual variations whose significance, extent, and meaning have never been properly examined. The author of Virgins? What Virgins? and Why I Am Not a Muslim has here assembled important scholarly articles that address the history, linguistics, and religious implications of these significant variants in Islam's sacred book, which call into question the claim of its status as the divinely revealed and inerrant word of the Muslim god. This work includes valuable charts that list the many textual variants found in Korans available in the Islamic world, along with remarks on their significance.

Going beyond Allan BlooM's "The Closing of the American Mind," Paul Eidelberg shows how the cardinal principles of democracy--freedom and equality--can be saved from the degradation of moral relativism by applying Jewish law to these principles. The author attempts to overcome the dichotomy of religion and secularism as well as other contradictions of Western civilization by means of a philosophy of history that uses thoroughly rational concepts and is supported by empirical evidence.

Eidelberg enumerates and elucidates the characteristics that make Jewish law particularly suited to reopening the secular mind and elevating democracy's formative principles. The author compares and contrasts Jewish law with political philosophy. His goal is to derive freedom and equality from a conception of man and society that goes beyond the usual political and social categories, avoiding both relativism and absolutism. In conclusion, Eidelberg attempts to overcome the perennial problem of democracy: how to reconcile wisdom and consent. This he does by sketching the basic institutions of a new community. This unique analysis should be read by political and religious theoreticians alike.

The scholarly study of the texts traditionally regarded as sacred in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has been an important aspect of Wissenschaft des Judentums and was often conceptualized as part of Jewish theology. Featuring studies on Isaak Markus Jost's Jewish children's Bible, Samson Raphael Hirsch's complex position on the question whether or not the Hebrew Bible is to be understood within the context of the Ancient Orient, Isaac Mayer Wise's "The Origin of Christianity," Ignaz Goldziher's Scholarship on the Qur'an, modern translators of the Qur'an into Hebrew, and the German translation of the Talmud, the volume attempts to shed light on some aspects of this phenomenon, which as a whole seems to have received few scholarly attention, and to contextualize it within the contemporary intellectual currents.

Gurtner provides the first publication of the Syriac of both the apocalypse and epistle with a fresh English translation on the opposite page. "2 Baruch" is a Jewish pseudepigraphon from the late first or early second century CE. It is comprised of an apocalypse ("2 Baruch" 1-77) and an epistle ("2 Baruch" 78-87). This ancient work addresses the important matter of theodicy in light of the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 CE. It depicts vivid and puzzling pictures of apocalyptic images in explaining the nature of the tragedy and exhorting its ancient community of readers. Also present in parallel form are the few places where Greek and Latin texts of the book. There is an introduction that orients readers to interpretative and textual issues of the book. Indexes and Concordances of the Syriac, Greek, and Latin will allow users to analyze the language of the text more carefully than ever before. This series focuses on early Jewish and Christian texts and their formative contexts; it also includes sourcebooks that help clarify the ancient world. Five aspects distinguish this series. First, the series reflects the need to situate, and to seek to understand, these ancient texts within their originating social and historical contexts. Second, the series assumes that it is now often difficult to distinguish between Jewish and Christian documents, since all early 'Christians' were Jews. Jesus and his earliest followers were devout Jews who shared many ideas with the well-known Jewish groups, especially the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the various apocalyptic groups. Third, the series recognizes that there were (and still are) many ways of understanding authoritative literature or scripture.

This book explores the possibility of a hermeneutics of the Qur'an. It starts from the presupposition that the Qur'an can be studied as a philosophical book. Thus the analysis is theoretical more than historical. Many philosophers commented the Qur'an and many supported their theories by resorting to the Qur'an. Thinkers like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi connected traditional theology and philosophy in their Qur'anic commentary. Others like Nasr Abu Zayd used philosophy to deconstruct the Qur'an paving the way for a modern humanistic hermeneutics. This book tries to go a step further: it aims to offer a path within the Qur'an that - through philosophy - leads to a fresh understanding of fundamental tenets of Islamic thought, most importantly tawhid - God's oneness - and to a fresh reading of the Qur'anic text. This book applies the phenomenological and ontological hermeneutics of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to the study of the Qur'an going far beyond Annemarie Schimmel's phenomenological approach that is neither philosophical nor properly phenomenological (in Husserl's sense).

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.

Patricia Crone's Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 1, The Qur'anic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qur'anic religious milieu. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world. The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness

Rosenberg looks to the Qumran scrolls for clues to the relationship of the Essenes or Sadoqites to the early Christians. He finds that many of their beliefs, including the expectation of a Moreh Sedeq or Correct Teacher, were taken on by the early Christians and shaped in the early days of the Church.

By comparing Qumran texts with New Testament materials, Rosenberg shows that, in Christian teaching, Jesus plays the part of the three separate persons who, according to the Sadoqites, were supposed to represent and embody sedeq or divine justice. This book will be of interest to all who are concerned with Judaism and the evolution of Christianity.

The Bible contains passages that allow both scholars and believers to project their hopes and fears onto ever-changing empirical realities. By reading specific biblical passages as utopia and dystopia, this volume raises questions about reconstructing the past, the impact of wishful imagination on reality, and the hermeneutic implications of dealing with utopia - "good place" yet "no place" - as a method and a concept in biblical studies. A believer like William Bradford might approach a biblical passage as utopia by reading it as instructions for bringing about a significantly changed society in reality, even at the cost of becoming an oppressor. A contemporary biblical scholar might approach the same passage with the ambition of locating the historical reality behind it - finding the places it describes on a map, or arriving at a conclusion about the social reality experienced by a historical community of redactors. These utopian goals are projected onto a utopian text. This volume advocates an honest hermeneutical approach to the question of how reliably a past reality can be reconstructed from a biblical passage, and it aims to provide an example of disclosing - not obscuring - pre-suppositions brought to the text.

Here in one compact volume is the "cream of Hindu philosophical thought," a collection of aphorisms, sayings, and proverbs culled from the Upanishads, the sacred writings of India, and assembled by one of the most influential writers and editors of the New Thought movement of the early 20th century, the adherents of which were profoundly interested in the collective spiritual wisdom of all humanity. This 1907 volume features the fruit of Hindu thinking on: . The Real Self . The Way . The Student . The Teacher . The Law of Karma . Spiritual Knowing . and more. American writer WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON (1862-1932) was editor of the popular magazine New Thought from 1901 to 1905, and editor of the journal Advanced Thought from 1916 to 1919. He authored dozens of New Thought books under numerous pseudonyms, some of which are likely still unknown today, including "Yogi Ramacharaka" and "Theron Q. Dumont."

The stories of Elisha the prophet have received scant attention in recent years, perhaps because they are so enigmatic. This study places the Elisha material firmly within the narrative of Genesis-2 Kings, and examines the effect these stories have on the reader's perception of the role of the 'prophet'. Using the narratological theories of Mieke Bal, David Jobling and others, Bergen shows that the Elisha stories present prophetism in a negative light, confining prophets to a rather limited scope of action in the narrative world.>