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Find out moreSee below for a selection of the latest books from Judaism: sacred texts category. Presented with a red border are the Judaism: sacred texts books that have been lovingly read and reviewed by the experts at Lovereading. With expert reading recommendations made by people with a passion for books and some unique features Lovereading will help you find great Judaism: sacred texts books and those from many more genres to read that will keep you inspired and entertained. And it's all free!
Migrating Tales situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars. Kalmin demonstrates the extent to which rabbinic Babylonia was part of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and part of the emerging but never fully realized cultural unity forming during this period in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia. Kalmin recognizes that the Bavli contains remarkable diversity, incorporating motifs derived from the cultures of contemporaneous religious and social groups. Looking closely at the intimate relationship between narratives of the Bavli and of the Christian Roman Empire, Migrating Tales brings the history of Judaism and Jewish culture into the ambit of the ancient world as a whole.
This ambitious and engaging book sets itself the task of combining a wide range of approaches to cast new light on the form and function of several ancient Jewish letters in a variety of languages. The focus of The Performance of Ancient Jewish Lettersis on applying a new emerging field of performance theory to texts and arguing that letters and other documents were not just read in silence, as is normal today, but were performed, especially when they were addressed to a community. A distinctive feature of this book consists of being one of the first to apply the approach of performance criticism to ancient Jewish letters. Previous treatments of ancient letters have not given enough consideration to their oral context; however, this book prompts the reader to listen sympathetically with the audience. The Performance focuses close attention on the ways in which the engagement of the audience during the performance of a text might be read from traces present in the text itself. This book invites the audience to hear a fresh reading of a family letter from Hermopolis, concerning ugly tunics and castor oil; festal letters, about issues surrounding the celebration of Passover, Purim and Hanukkah; a diaspora letter on how to live in a foreign land; and also an official letter concerning the building of the Jerusalem temple. These letters will help us understand a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely, MMT. Marvin L. Miller argues for the centrality of performance in the life of Jews of the Second Temple period, an area of study that has been traditionally neglected. The Performanceadvances the fields of orality and epistolography and supplements other scholars works in those fields.
The first part of the project Hebrew Bible / Old Testament deals with questions of the canon with regard to its interpretation from the Jewish, New Testament, rabbinic and patristic view and includes the time until Augustine. In Volume 2, well-known Jewish, Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars from North America, Israel and various European countries contribute to the question of the medieval interpretation and exegesis of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament (5th to the end of the 12th century). Geographically, they cover most of the world known from Renaissance to Enlightenment: from Syria to Spain, from Rome to the Rhine and the Seine. The penultimate Part III / 1 traces the long and complex history of the reception and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament through the various eras to the particular situation of the nineteenth century, with its new exegetical methods and problems. Broader historical knowledge in many areas and an expanding cultural context led to the phenomenon that 'history' became the object of an unprecedented fascination; 'History' became the new key concept - partly in the form of 'historicism'. In terms of biblical studies in general, and the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament in particular, a decidedly historical-critical approach arose that created tensions between the new methods and the traditional, scriptural interpretation of the church. This in turn led to relatively intense controversy between the opposing fronts. The indices (names, themes, references to biblical sources and a wide collection of relevant literature) represent the variety of information offered here.
