Search results for ""Author Jacob Neusner""

This theological commentary to the Rabbinic Midrash explores a simple proposition, in three parts: I. The reading of Scripture by principal parts of the Rabbinic Midrash is formed by compositions and composites that are animated by a cogent theological system. II. These primary components of the Midrash-compilations, further, are in part aimed at systematic demonstrations of theorems of a theological character. III. While forming a principal part of a large theological structure and system, each document is unique.

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Pesqita deRab Kahana constitutes a whole that vastly exceeds the sum of the parts. The theology of the document is stated by that whole, on its own but also through the parts. The components of the document derive from the common theology of Rabbinic Judaism. Most are interchangeable, serviceable for other documents of a comparable character. The theology particular to this document comes to expression only when the entirety of the composite comes into view.

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This book provides an introduction to Judaism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for all students of Judaism and world religions, and covers major movements that have been developed. Written by a leading teacher and researcher, each chapter features a clear and authoritative introduction to its subject, accompanied by a reading by a specialist in the particlular field.

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This theological commentary to the Rabbinic Midrash explores a simple proposition, in three parts. I. The reading of Scripture by principal parts of the Rabbinic Midrash is formed by compositions and composites that are animated by a cogent theological system. II. These primary components of the Midrash-compilations, further, are in part aimed at systematic demonstrations of theorems of a theological character. III. While forming a principal part of a large theological structure and system, each document is unique. This commentary in its concluding chapter presents what is common to the animating theology of Rabbinic Judaism in all its documentary components and what is unique to Leviticus Rabbah.

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This research report answers the question, how and specifically in what passages do the distinct Rabbinic modes of discourse, Halakhah and Aggadah, intersect? How do they make a statement in common? Halakhah is given priority. Then where and how does Aggadah play a role in Halakhic discourse? What is at stake is the context of thought and expression established by systematic composites, compilations of many discrete facts in the service of a coherent argument. What is catalogued is the intersection of large aggregates of well-composed Aggadic data in a Halakhic composite or of Halakhic ones in an Aggadic setting. The upshot is simple. The Aggadic documents rarely introduce Halakhic materials in their exposition of Aggadic propositions, and the contrary is also the case. The exposition of the Halakhic components of the Halakhic documents, meaning, nearly the entirety of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Yerushalmi, and the greater part of the Bavli, only rarely requires Aggadic complements or supplements. Yet while the Aggadic documents rarely resort to Halakhic materials to make the case they wish to set forth, in some of the Rabbinic documents of the formative age the presentation of the Halakhah is accompanied by a massive Aggadic component. Why, and with what outcome? The answers to all of these questions are spelled out in this three-volume account of the data.

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This concise volume provides a lucid introduction to the genesis and development of Rabbinic Judaism.Jacob Neusner outlines and examines the four stages in which the initial period of the historical development of Rabbinic Judaism divides, beginning with the Pentateuch and ending with its definitive and normative statement in the Talmud of Babylonia. He traces the development of Rabbinic Judaism by exploring the relationships between and among the cognate writings which embody its formative history.

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In this close analysis of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, a sixth-century commentary on the Mishnah-tractate The Fathers (Avot), Jacob Neusner considers the way in which the story, as a distinctive type of narrative, entered the canonical writings of Judaism. The final installment in Neusner's cycle of analyses of the major texts of the Judaic canon, Judaism and Story shows that stories about sages exist in far greater proportion in The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan than in any of the other principal writings in the canon of Judaism of late antiquity. Neusner's detailed comparison of The Fathers and The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan demonstrates the transmission and elaboration of these stories and shows how these processes incorporated the newer view of the sage as a supernatural figure and of the eschatological character of Judaic teleology. These distinctions, as Neusner describes them, mark a shift in Jewish orientation to world history. Judaism and Story documents a chapter of rabbinic tradition that explored the possibility of historical orientation by means of stories. As Neusner demonstrates, this experiment with narrative went beyond the borders of rabbinic preoccupation with rhetorical argumentation focused on the explication of the Torah. The sage story moved in the direction of biography, but without allowing biography to emerge. This development, in Neusner's account, parallels the movement from epistle to Gospel in early Christianity and thus has broad implications for the history of religions.

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