The Halakhah embodies the complete Jewish Law, and contains commandments and guidelines for day-to-day living. The original commandments given by God to the Jewish people were enhanced by rabbis to offer a detailed framework to guide the lives of all Jews. In this complete, all-encompassing encyclopaedia of the Halakhah, the various laws are classified in such a way that a systematic and coherent structure is obtained. Each entry of the Halakhah is presented in a logical fashion. Where applicable, the original biblical wording is given, extended with literal abstracts from the Torah. Next,...

The Halakhah embodies the complete Jewish Law, and contains commandments and guidelines for day-to-day living. The original commandments given by God to the Jewish people were enhanced by rabbis to offer a detailed framework to guide the lives of all Jews. In this complete, all-encompassing encyclopaedia of the Halakhah, the various laws are classified in such a way that a systematic and coherent structure is obtained. Each entry of the Halakhah is presented in a logical fashion. Where applicable, the original biblical wording is given, extended with literal abstracts from the Torah. Next,...

During the formative age of Judaism, rabbis endeavoured to describe the world as God had intended it to be, resulting in the "Halakhah," law, and "Aggadah," lore, which encompassed "Scripture," This volume provides five systematic accounts of the "Halakhah" and the "Aggadah,"

Biblical Ambiguities poses as its central question: When we read a passage in the Hebrew Bible, how do we know whether the passage was meant literally or metaphorically? This study argues that our assumptions as to how language works influences the way we interpret biblical texts. Drawing upon contemporary linguistic theory, Aaron seeks to place before the reader a strategy for deciphering biblical idioms within a theory of semantics, using divine imagery in the Hebrew Bible as the primary focal point. This book presents a gradient model of meaning based on Relevance Theory and the...

History provides one way of marking time. But there are others, and the Judaism of the dual Torah, set forth in the Rabbinic literature from the Mishnah through the Talmud of Babylonia, ca. 200-600 C.E., defines one such alternative. This book tells the story of how a historical way of thinking about past, present, and future, time and eternity, the here and now in relationship to the ages, that is, Scripture's way of thinking gave way to another mode of thought altogether. This other model Neusner calls a paradigm, because a pattern imposed meaning and order on things that happened....

This monograph discusses the disagreement within the Jewish community concerning the medieval practice of active martyrdom, including slaughter of children and suicide, from the 11th until the 16th centuries.
It covers the mainly implicit reservations about and objections in Jewish society to this practice. It is suggested that such opinions existed throughout the period when this practice was accepted in halakhic (legal) terms and by the most outstanding Jurists. It is argued that this was the case during the persecutions of the First Crusade in Germany and in the following centuries in...

The book describes a fascinating encounter between astrology and magic, exposing how Hermetic magic seeped into Jewish literature and Jewish philosophy. Following astral magic in its convoluted course, this original work sheds new light on rationalist Jewish thought in the Middle Ages. Having attained its authority mostly from its use in medical practice, astral magic also developed a theology and provided a key to biblical interpretation. Judah Halevi, Nahmanides, and others explained the meaning and influence of the commandments according to magic-astral models and techniques, generating a...

Between Alexandria and Jerusalem examines the dynamics of Hellenistic and Jewish cultures. It begins by looking at the changes in mentality as reflected in papyri of Roman Egypt, the birth of a qualified audience looking for teachers and preachers and requiring a new culture. This same phenomenon emerged in Rabbinic society. Rabbinic literature was different not only from the Bible, but from Alexandrian exegesis as well. However, Alexandrian exegesis paved the way for rabbinic Midrash. The book defies the understanding of culture as a combination of various petrified 'patterns, '...

This detailed, systematic classification of Rabbinic narrative supplies these facts concerning the classification of narratives and their regularities: [1] what are the types and forms of narrative in a given document? [2] how are these distinctive types and forms of narrative distributed across the canonical documents of the formative age, the first six centuries C.E.? The answers for the documentary preferences are in Volumes One through Three, for the Mishnah-Tosefta, the Tannaite Midrash-compilations, and Rabbah-Midrash-compilations, respectively. Volume Four then takes up the types of...

This book answers the following question for Judaism: among all the things that happened in antiquity, what are the events that, seen from the perspective of the world that would endure, turn out to shape the long future? How did axiological events identify the focal points of the unfolding religious system, Judaism, in its formulation by the rabbinic sages of ancient times? This is the system that originated, in its own telling, with God's teaching to Moses at Sinai in the Torah, in written and traditional form. Of all that happened to the Jews in the millennium from the formation of the...