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Seeks to identify the recurrent tensions, the blatant points of emphasis, the recurring indications of conflict and polemic. Framing the issue of the disposition of the Scriptural heritage in broad terms, this book says that the answer is self-evident.

The central theme of Making God s Word Work is that, throughout the rules and norms of the Mishnah, and beneath their surface, is a governing theological pattern which defines the detail relating to social conduct and brings to the fore a coherent system of analysis, thought, and argument.

Shows that in its generative theology, Rabbinic Judaism in its formative age invoked the perpetual presence of God overseeing all that Israelites said and did. This title states that it conceived of Israel to transcend the movement of history and to live in a perpetual present tense, and that Israel located itself in a Land like no other.

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Wherever Jews have settled and whatever languages they spoke, they created a community with a single set of common values. A single book explains how this came about - the Talmud. This book introduces readers to the Talmud, defining it, explaining its historical context, and illustrating why it remains relevant.

The documentary hypothesis of the Rabbinic canon of late antiquity maintains that complete documents form the smallest whole building blocks of the Rabbinic system. These two volumes compare the rhetorical/formal and exegetical traits of two entire, kindred documents. What makes it surprising is the result: they have nothing in common.

This is the second volume of a set of anthologies that sets forth the statements of the formative canon of influential Rabbinic Judaism on three large topics: the calendar, the life cycle, and theology. Focusing on the seminal period of normative Judaism, the editor Jacob Neusner presents in three parts the teachings of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, the first six centuries of the Common Era.

Comparing Religions Through Law presents an innovative and sometimes controversial study of the comparisons and contrasts between the two religions and offers an example of how comparative studies can lead to mutual understanding.

A concise and lucid introduction to the foundations of Judaism and Christianity, using key documents to examine the similarities and differences between the two faiths.

These two immensely distinguished writers show how the writings of the early church emerged from communities which defined themselves in Judaic terms even as they followed Jesus; how the early movement is best seen as 'Christian Judaism'.

With over 600 wide-ranging and informative entries, this dictionary serves as a reference aid to all areas of the religion. Topics covered include: the religion's forms and history; its institutions, religious practices and life cycle rites; key texts and people, symbols and holy days; and theological terms, doctrine and philosophy.

This provocative volume provides a unique and controversial analysis of the genesis and evolution of Judaeo-Christian intellectual thought.

Do Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims tend to experience pain in fundamentally different ways? Are suffering and human evil equally difficult problems in these particular religious traditions? How is each person to deal with or overcome suffering?In Evil and Suffering, acknowledged experts in each religion offer clear answers to these and similar questions. Through their discussions, the history and diversity of the traditions are also revealed.In this volume, editor Jacob Neusner address the topic from the standpoint of Judaism, Bruce Chilton presents the perspective of Christianity. Jonathan Brockopp discusses Islam, Brian K. Smith presents Hinduism, and Charles Hallisley discusses Buddhism.

This volume in "An Essential Guide series consists of six chapters: - What Is Rabbinic Literature? Why Is It Important.?- The Oral Torah- The Rabbinic Canon: Law (Halakhah)- The Rabbinic Canon: Theology (Aggadah)- Rabbinic Literature and the Hebrew Scriptures- Rabbinic Literature and the Christian Scriptures

Jacob Neusner, the preeminent Judaic scholar who is himself a Jew and a Zionist, here explores the issue he believes to be at the very heart of American Judaism: how two events remote from the experience of most American Jews have become the twin pillars upon which their world view is built. These two events, the murder of six million Jews between 1933 and 1945 and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel, form what Neusner calls the myth of the Holocaust and redemption. 'Stranger at Home' scrutinizes the paradox of a central myth generated out of events never witnessed and a place never inhabited by the majority of American Jewry. Written over a period of nearly twenty years, these systematically related essays begin with an analysis of the social and psychological problems confronting American Jews. The second and third set of studies concern the implications of the two elements that constitute the mythic vision that begins in death, the Holocaust, and is completed by rebirth, Israel. Finally the author offers his view of the actual and desirable role of Zionism for the Jewish community outside of Israel. Neusner's penetrating exposition sheds light on the search of an American minority culture for identity in the context of freedom and free choice and on the process of adaptation of an archaic religious tradition to modernity.

Produced ca. A.D. 600, the Babylonian Talmud--or Bavli-- serves as the single authoritative statement of Jewish law and theology. In this fourth volume of his examination of major formative texts of Judaism, Jacob Neusner explains how and why the Bavli came to define the Jewish faith from its time to ours. Through an analysis of the text, its sources and editorial organization, he traces the history of the composition of the Babylonian Talmud, clarifies its relation to the earlier corpus of canonical literature, and clearly establishes its philosophical, religious, and cultural context. Because there is little objective, external evidence from which to interpret the Bavli's development, Neusner uses the signs of redactional layering within the literature to discover the motivations and techniques by which the Talmud was formed. His use of the critical, secular methods of modern literary and historical study is unique in Talmudic exegesis and provides an entirely new perspective for understanding the Bavli in relation to the Mishnah and Yershalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud. Much of Neusner's research compares the use of the various literary forms of the Mishnah by the editors of the two Talmuds. Offering detailed examples and statistical lists to buttress his analysis, he argues that only in the Bavli have the editors achieved a genuine redactional synthesis between the Mishnah and Hebrew Scriptures, the two major sources of the Jewish tradition. In conclusion, Neusner spells out the religious significance of Bavli's achievement and shows how this unique combination allows for the tradition's continual renewal.

Jacob Neusner has--in over sixty scholarly works, fourteen textbooks, and thirteen collections of essays--laid the foundation and completed the structure for a new understanding of the history of Judaism. The present volume is the capstone effort to date in this endeavor. Neusner reconstructs and interprets the Mishnah's intellectual history, presenting a picture of the beginnings and first major expression of Judaism. What makes this account distinctively historical, writes Neusner in his Introduction, will be our sustained effort to relate the unfolding of the ideas of the Mishnah to the historical setting of the philosophers of the document, to compare context and concept, to ask about the interplay between idea and social, material reality. Neusner succeeds in this specific task and in the greater task of providing a work with methodological significance for the entire field of the history of religions.

In this close analysis of 'The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan', a sixth-century commentary on the Mishnah-tractyate '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 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.

In this first-ever comprehensive state-level analysis of the economic reforms in India, the authors show that, unlike China, the acceleration of growth in the 2000s has been broad-based with nearly every state growing faster than during any other decade. The authors outline state-level reforms in agriculture, land and labor markets, urban development, and infrastructure that are required for speedy economic transformation.