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Unlike the holy books of other religions, it took almost 1,000 years for the completion of the Hebrew Bible. The 39 books it contains reflect the experiences of the people [...]

JILL HAMMER The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons (Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006) There are periods in one's life when time both moves too quickly [...]

Two studies of intellectual history are reviewed that compel the reader to think of the U.S. as a multi-religious, as well as a multicultural, society, to view American history as a complex web of inter-permutations between Protestant and Jewish thought. The books help in locating the exchange between Protestant and Jewish religious thought at the heart of domains usually thought of as secular, such as psychology or diplomacy, thus providing an opportunity to consider how the field alters as religion becomes progressively visible in American studies.

Three truly exceptional books appeared in the early 1930s--exceptional not only for their absolute brilliance but for emphasizing religion in history as well as modern times. In 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr [...]

Esther is a model text used for research, which clearly manifests novelistic features in the earliest layer. Both the Greeks and the Jews in the fourth century had an equal need to reimagine their identify in a changing world, while Esther and Ctesias reflects differing responses to the same basic need.

'and she laughs unto the end of days' (Prov. 31:25) In the opening scene of Parashat Vayera (Gen. 18:9-15), Sarah first hears that she will finally, at the age of [...]

The line numbers in the commentary correspond to the line numbers in the translation, which sometimes differ slightly from those of the Hebrew original. EPIGRAPH The epigraph and the prose [...]

JACOB GOLDENTHAL ESTABLISHED THE TEXT of his edition of Miqdash me'at (Vienna, 1851) on the basis of three manuscripts that have not yet been definitively identified. Today, fifty-nine manuscripts, containing [...]

This essay offers reflections on how to read Emmanuel Levinas's talmudic readings as historical documents. It suggests that existing scholarship, following the conventional wisdom and an interest in canonization, often [...]

Albright was above all else a historian of Israelite religion. The goal of his life's work was to trace the origin and development of Israelite religion based on the biblical texts and the archaeology of the biblical world. But Albright's vision of Israelite religion was clouded by his clear affinity for the strictly monotheistic religious attitude of the Hebrew Bible's latest editors and his own traditional Christian worldview. The author takes us through Albright's world, reconstructing the intellectual environment of the mid-twentieth century that helped to shape his thinking.

This article examines the manner in which women's sexuality and Jewish identity have been portrayed in rabbinic literature. Topics include ritual, circumcision, gender bias, and rabbinical authority.

To the memory of Rabbi William G. Braude, teacher, colleague, and friend Recently there has been much interest in the imahot - the Matriarchs, and their use in the liturgy. [...]

Introduction In various places in talmudic literature the ability of three books of the Bible - Esther, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes - to make one's hands unclean ([Hebrew text [...]

The black muslim group 'The Nation of Islam' would seem to be an improbable institution to search for evidence of Jewish influence. The group, after all, is known to be virulently anti-semitic and has been the object of much criticism from mainline Jewish and African-American groups. An examination of the biblical interpretations of its founder Elijah Muhammad, however, shows the presence of a striking parallel between Muhammad's exegesis and that of the Jewish 'midrash,' a term that refers to the hermeneutical technique developed by Rabbinic interpreters of the Bible.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like [...]

INTRODUCTION Outside of the fact that Habakkuk, together with Nahum and Zephaniah, are the last pre-exilic minor prophets, there is almost nothing known about him except for a reference in [...]

A discussion on how two writers, separated by half-a-century, treated the issue of success and religious fanaticism in their work is presented. American author Philip Roth published a collection of short stories in 1959, titled 'Goodbye, Columbus', that secured his reputation as perhaps the most radical critic of Jewish success, while in 1997 Hanif Kureishi, an Anglo-Pakistani-Indian author returned to the question of fanaticism and religious transformation in his short story 'My Son, the Fanatic'

Abstract [1] The martyr texts of 2 Maccabees record the deaths of three mothers who sacrificed their lives, along with those of their sons, in order to uphold Jewish law [...]

Amos Funkenstein devoted a significant amount of his scholarly attention to polemics between Jews and Christians.(1) He was particularly interested in how each religion borrowed motifs from the other and [...]

For many Bible critics, the discovery through archeology of various ancient-world mythologies and legal codes, of which the Hammurabi Code is probably the best known, is sufficient proof that the [...]

There are a hundred and fifty psalms, of which I will begin with a handful. The first psalm is a Wisdom psalm. It focuses on good and evil, and the [...]