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This chapter examines an array of rabbinic sources concerning the temple, including Mishnah, Midrash, and Talmud, drawing a number of contrasts with Qumran literature in particular. The Rabbis seem to agree with the sectarians that the temple was flawed, recalling instances of priestly greed, theft, and even murder. But the rabbis downplay the moral defilement of the temple and deny to the end that the temple was ritually defiled to any significant degree before its destruction by Romans in 70 CE. Unlike the sectarians, the rabbis took a stance toward the temple and its purity that was less idealistic, but more practical and permissive.

Explores the connection between the presence of written versions of rabbinic tradition and the emergence among Galilean sages of the third century c.e. of an explicit ideological claim that the entire rabbinic tradition originated in Sinaitic revelation to Moses as unwritten Torah in the Mouth. Of great comparative interest is the Greco‐Roman tradition of rhetorical education, represented in the tradition of rhetorical textbooks (Progymnasmata), which prized memorization of written texts for exclusively oral performances that included rule‐governed transformations and revisions of texts in the performative setting. The chapter examines Amoraic traditions of Byzantine Galilee (the Palestinian Talmud, Midrash Tanhuma, Midrash Pesiqta Rabbati) for evidence that they were mastered from written versions and intentionally revised in performative settings. From this comparative perspective, the chapter concludes that the rabbinic conception of Torah in the Mouth is designed to legitimate the authority of the sage in the setting of discipleship training.

This chapter takes issue with something fundamental in the overall outlook of many of the contributors to the volume. It sketches a traditional religious approach that nevertheless agrees with the critics on the ethical awfulness of some of what the Hebrew Bible attributes to God. The approach draws its inspiration from Jewish tradition, and focuses special attention on the Akedah and the Book of Job, stories that present extreme challenges to the conception of God as ethically perfect. These stories, it is argued, have great religious power and meaning, which is not to say that we understand God's role in them, his attitude towards his beloved, what he allows, commands, mandates. The chapter ends with some speculations about what we might make of God's treatment of Abraham and Job.

This chapter presents a synthesis of all chapters discussed in this book. Three specific concepts are emphasized. The first is that this book is an exploration of the morphologies of myth and mythmaking found in three distinct bodies of literature: the Hebrew Bible; clusters or anthologies of Midrash; and the book of Zohar. Second is that the myths studied are cultural forms and the concrete expressions of a vital mythic imagination found in classical texts of the Jewish monotheistic tradition. Finally, that the three literary corpora investigated provide different accounts of perceptions of what is called the theosphere and its relation to the biosphere.

This is the second of five chapters on the Old Testament and the reader, and presents an analysis of the Bible in Qumran (the site occupied by the early Jewish monastic community who lived near the shores of the Dead Sea) and early Judaism. The first part gives an account of the rediscovery of Midrash—a term initially borrowed from rabbinic literature, where it denotes the specifically rabbinic tradition of Bible exegesis—the commentary created in dialogue with the scared Scripture in early Judaism. The rediscovery of Midrash was prompted in particular by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947–1956), and the finding of the Codex Neofiti 1 in the Vatican library in 1953; these and other examples of Midrash have given rise to numerous monographs and articles over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The second part discusses the use of the Scripture and the Dead Sea sect of Qumran, and the third analyses the use of Scripture among other Jewish rabbinical groups in late antiquity. The last two sections look at the Scripture in the Alexandrian schools and among the early Christians, and at the emergence of Judaism and Christianity as ‘Religions of the Book’.

This chapter examines historical reconstruction and literary structures of rabbinic texts using the Leviticus Rabbah as an example. It explains that Leviticus Rabbah is a commentary on the Book of Leviticus which now forms part of Midrash Rabbah. It proposes ten theses about the special problems which the literary structures of rabbinic texts pose for the historian and analyses a section of the amoraic work of Leviticus Rabbah to describe some of those literary structures. The findings suggest that it is impossible to explain how the textuality of rabbinic sources worked and that many rabbinic works fill the same functional position in a text more than once.

The Hebrew text of Proverbs 22:6 has been interpreted in the following manner: “Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray”. The twin pillars of Jewish pedagogy are habituation and discipline: the inculcation of right thinking and behavior, and the chastisement of those who stray from them. Those halakhic prescriptions constitute a “pedagogical duty” imposed on the parents of young children. This chapter uses the interpretation of Proverbs 22:6 as a lens through which to view traditional Jewish attitudes about children and early childhood education. It cites commentaries that give clear examples of the intimate relationship between Jewish reading and Jewish living, and vivid demonstrations of the social and cultural relevance of biblical interpretation. Two distinct attitudes have emerged, traceable to the 9th-century Midrash on Proverbs and the 10th-century translation and commentary of Saadia Gaon—and ultimately to Aristotle's Ethics. The gist of the verse is an obvious principle: there is nothing more fundamental to the perpetuation of Judaism than the education of children.

This chapter analyzes the dozens of texts in rabbinic literature, including the Jerusalem Talmud and Midrashim, that describe the Persians as an imperial ethno-class. After explicating the range of scholarly debates, from Jacob Neusner’s pessimism to Yaakov Elman’s optimism, regarding the extent to which there exist Persian influences on the Talmud, chapter 3 investigates the rabbis’ attitudes and debates surrounding Persians as external others. For its part, the Babylonian Talmud discusses Persian cuisine, sex habits, fashion, festivals, and law in various places, typically as a means of contrast with rabbinic culture. Several common leitmotifs are found in these passages—namely, the Persians as haughty, horse riders, and bears (Dan. 7:5). Both exegesis and history play a role in the way in which the Babylonian rabbis depict the Persians. Notably, the Talmud does not focus on the Zoroastrian elements of Persian culture, thus downplaying the religious dimensions of the Jewish-Persian interface. This chapter also discusses at length the interpretation of Iranian loanwords in the Talmud.

This chapter takes issue with something fundamental in the outlook of many religious people. It sketches a traditional religious approach that nevertheless agrees with religion’s critics on the ethical awfulness of some of what the Hebrew Bible attributes to God. The approach draws its inspiration from Jewish tradition, and focuses special attention on the Akedah and the Book of Job, stories that present extreme challenges to the conception of God as ethically perfect. These stories, it is argued, have great religious power and meaning, which is not to say that we understand God’s role in them, His attitude towards his beloved, what He allows, commands, mandates. The chapter ends with some speculations about what we might make of God’s treatment of Abraham and Job.

This chapter centers around a close reading of Cohen’s introduction to Religion of Reason. By looking at Cohen’s own account of his project, we can gain insight into the proper way to read the main body of his text. The chapter begins by assessing Cohen’s critique of the inductive method of historicism. It then examines Cohen’s account of the basic structure relating reason, philosophy, and religion. Though his attempt to uphold both philosophy and religion as distinct sub-realms within reason seems leads to an irremediable contradiction, he does not reject or deprioritize either of the two. Without resolving this contradiction, he turns to the classical Jewish literary sources—including the Bible, Talmud, and Midrash—in order to highlight a mode of reasoning that encompasses theoretical multiplicity while maintaining practical unity, thus anticipating his own methodological approach.

This chapter surveys the contents of the rabbinic canon for two purposes. First, much of the argument of the book draws on the contents of these works, so that a historically grounded understanding of these works is essential. Second, the chapter argues that in the absence of other data, the works themselves must serve as historical artifacts, and studied for the evidence they provide of Rabbinic group-formation or institutionalization. The chapter also surveys some of the evidence for the emergence of the rabbinic movement in the late first and early second century, showing that the evidence is tainted by the concerns of the tradents and editors who preserved and promulgated the material. In a sense, we can document a Rabbinic movement with the production of the Mishnah in about 200. The historiographical task of reconstructing early history works backwards from that fixed point.

In the wake of the Destruction rose a new class of Jewish leadership in the rabbis. This chapter discusses the emergence and dominance of Rabbinic Judaism and its sacred literature after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce. The trauma of destruction encouraged the new leadership to develop a different approach toward dealing with conflicts between Jews and Gentiles.

This chapter shows how Rashi draws selectively on a range of midrashic sources (including Genesis Rabbah and Midrash Tanchuma) and adapts them by truncating and rearranging them to create a commentary that is very different from those it is based on. It traces the development of Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 22 from its midrashic sources through the manuscript tradition, and examines the strategies that help it present itself as arising directly from the biblical text. It shows that Rashi’s ideal reader reads the layered commentary of recombined midrash worked into the language of the biblical text in terms of two possibly contradictory medieval assumptions about the biblical text: that the Bible is self-glossing, and that the Bible requires a layer of authoritative, inspired exegesis in order to be understood.

This chapter analyzes the Quran, stressing the possible Jewish, Christian, Judeo-Christian, or Gnostic sources of inspiration for the Quranic revelation. Abraham emerges as a figure that is respected by the Bible and Quran. Although at first glance the Quranic depiction of Abraham “seems to be a modification of some earlier Jewish traditions,” Abraham is perceived in the Quran as a prophet, the father of the believers, and the first Muslim. The Prophet saw himself as the final prophet in the footsteps of Abraham, where true monotheistic religion was falsified by the Jews and Christians.

This chapter examines the pronounced variations in the expression of biblical monotheism found in commentaries written in the Roman Near East during the fourth and fifth centuries. In particular, it looks at a number of biblical commentaries composed in four different languages and four different scripts; all offer interpretations of the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis, accompanied by a remarkably free Jewish translation (Targum) into Aramaic of part of the same chapter. Five texts are analysed: the Jewish commentary, Midrash; its translation into Jewish Aramaic, Targum Neofiti; Ephrem's Commentary on Genesis; and the commentaries by Eusebius of Emesa and Jerome. These examples show the overwhelming importance of the Bible as a source of meaning, its currency in several different languages within the Near East, and the different traditions and methods of interpretation applied to it.

This chapter explores the “prehistory” of retroactive continuity, and its implementation in narratives that pre-exist its conceptualization as a term. It begins by discussing the transmission of narratives amidst oral cultures before moving on to explore retconning in Biblical writing, particularly Midrash. The chapter concludes with a look at three master storytellers who used retcons as a crucial part of their “world-building” as writers–Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, and H.P. Lovecraft.

This chapter explores a Jewish identity for which galut is one central pillar. It contends that even in modern times, galut cannot and should not be avoided. Rather than steering clear of the almost inbred Jewish sense of dislocation—one that we cannot quite lose even in our own Western diasporic setting—galut must be reckoned with. But such a reckoning does not necessarily issue in a bleak outlook. An ultimately positive take on the human and Jewish conditions requires that we give substantial weight to unpleasant, stubborn facts about human and Jewish dislocation. The chapter distinguishes two galut phenomena. First there is in the human condition called “normal dislocation.” Being the sorts of all-too-human creatures that we are, living in the sort of world we find ourselves in, has always meant big trouble. The second and specifically Jewish galut phenomenon is not normal; it is extraordinary. It relates to the following cataclysmic sequence of events: the churban, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e., the defeat of Bar Kochba in 135, and the attendant dispersion. The chapter sketches aspects of the Rabbinic response to the cosmic jolt and explores how a tradition smitten by and obsessed with galut develops practices and an outlook to cope. It focuses on a crucial theological aspect of the rabbinic response, specifically the super-anthropomorphizing tendency one sees so clearly in the commentary, Midrash Rabbah, on the Book of Lamentations.