The Aramaeans

The Aramaeans

Author: Edward Lipiński

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 716

ISBN-13: 9789042908598

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In order to present the Aramean history during some six hundred years, down to the seventh century B.C., it was necessary to analyze a wide range of sources, mainly cuneiform, epigraphic, and biblical. Chapter I deals with Aramean pre-history and proto-history, while chapter II examines the question of the alleged relationship between the Hebrew forefathers and the ancient Arameans. Chapters III to XIV give a relatively accurate description of the territory of each historically attested Aramean group or state and present a detailed narrative of political events. Chapter XIV, the most extensive, considers the situation of the Arameans in Babylonia, also in relation to the Chaldeans and to the North-Arabian tribes. Chapters XV to XVIII deal with Aramean institutions, economy, legal practices, and religion. Special attention is paid to linguistic features of the available evidence, when they can help resolving historical questions. The book concludes with an extensive general index and with an index of biblical sources.


Forms of Rabbinic Literature and Thought

Forms of Rabbinic Literature and Thought

Author: Alexander Samely

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-04-12

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0191537993

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Alexander Samely surveys the corpus of rabbinic literature, which was written in Hebrew and Aramaic about 1500 years ago and which contains the foundations of Judaism, in particular the Talmud. The rabbinic works are introduced in groups, illustrated by shorter and longer passages, and described according to their literary structures and genres. Tables and summaries provide short information on key topics: the individual works and their nature, the recurrent literary forms which are used widely in different works, techniques of rabbinic Bible interpretation, and discourse strategies of the Talmud. Key topics of current research into the texts are addressed: their relationship to each other, their unity, their ambiguous and 'unsystematic' character, and their roots in oral tradition. Samely explains why the character of the texts is crucial to an understanding of rabbinic thought, and why they pose specific problems to modern, Western-educated readers.


Mishneh Todah

Mishneh Todah

Author: Nili Sacher Fox

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2009-06-23

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 1575066041

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Jeffrey H. Tigay, A. M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, master teacher and scholar extraordinaire, conservative rabbi and lifelong student of Torah receives due ovation in this exceptional volume, a tribute to his indelible impression on Jewish scholarship and pedagogy. The volume is arranged according to Professor Tigay’s primary topics of interest: deuteronomic studies, ancient Israelite religion and its Near Eastern context, and ancient Israelite literary tradition. The reader will enjoy diverse studies such as “Gender Transformation and Transgression: Contextualizing the Prohibition of Cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22:5,” “The Problem of Evil in the Book of Job,” and “Linen and the Linguistic Dating of P” and will value the erudition of scholars such as Moshe Greenberg, Emanuel Tov, Gary Rendsburg, William Hallo, and Baruch Levine. In the customary appreciations and throughout the volume, colleagues, students, and friends laud Professor Tigay’s intellectual tenacity, relational warmth, pedagogical prowess, and devotion to Torah. A former student aptly speaks for those who know him best: “A scholar’s immortality lies in his or her work. It rests too in his or her students and in the respect won from his or her colleagues. A Festschrift like this one for Jeff Tigay is merely a token of that legacy, the acknowledgment by his students and colleagues that the work is indeed worth celebrating.” This legacy will surely be a boon and delight to the reader.


The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-first Century

The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-first Century

Author: Marvin Alan Sweeney

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780802860675

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The approach to biblical interpretation known as "form criticism" has changed markedly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Front-ranking experts here survey the contemporary landscape of form criticism and explore significant patterns and trends now emerging in the field. Together these essays point to the continuing dynamism and vitality of form-critical theory as a significant tool for reading the Bible. Contributors: Bob Becking Ehud Ben Zvi Erhard Blum Sue Boorer Martin J. Buss Antony F. Campbell Michael H. Floyd Hyun Chul Paul Kim Won Lee Tremper Longman III Roy F. Melugin Martti Nissinen David L. Petersen Margaret S. Odell Thomas Romer Martin Rosel Marvin A. Sweeney Patricia K. Tull Raymond C. Van Leeuwen


Law from the Tigris to the Tiber

Law from the Tigris to the Tiber

Author: Raymond Westbrook

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2009-06-23

Total Pages: 1109

ISBN-13: 1575066378

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Raymond Westbrook (1946–2009) was acknowledged by many as the world’s foremost expert on the legal systems of the ancient Near East and a leading scholar in the study of biblical and classical law. This collection brings together the 44 most important articles that Westbrook published in the 25 years following the completion of his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1982. The first volume, The Shared Tradition, contains 16 articles that lay out Westbrook’s theory of a common legal tradition that spanned the ancient world from Mesopotamia to Israel and even to Greece and Rome. The second volume, Cuneiform and Biblical Sources, provides 28 articles that demonstrate Westbrook’s unique method of legal analysis that he applied to the numerous texts he worked with as an Assyriologist and biblical scholar, from law codes to contracts to narratives. Each volume contains its own comprehensive bibliography, as well as subject, author, and text indexes. Together, they represent the life’s work of one of the most important legal historians of our era.


Stories of the Law

Stories of the Law

Author: Moshe Simon-Shoshan

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-03-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0199773734

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Simon-Shoshan examines the neglected genre of rabbinic legal stories, arguing that this genre is crucial to understanding both rabbinic jurisprudence and rabbinic story-telling and challenging traditional distinctions between law and literature.


Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law

Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law

Author: Bernard S. Jackson

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2000-11-01

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0567578690

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This book explains and illustrates a variety of semiotic issues in the study of biblical law. Commencing with a review of relevant literature in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics and psychology, it examines biblical law in terms of its users, its medium and its message. It criticizes our use of the notion of 'literal meaning', at the level of both words and sentences, preferring to see meaning constructed by the narrative images that the language evokes. These images may come from either social experience or cultural narratives. Speech performance is important, both in the negotiation of the law and the narratives of its communication. Non-linguistic semiotic phenomena, utilizing other senses and involving such notions as space and time, also need to be taken into account. For the early biblical period, at least, conceptions of law based upon modern models need to be replaced by the notion of 'wisdom-laws'. Amongst the issues addressed in the course of the argument are the structure of the Decalogue, the role in the law of (Greenberg's) 'postulates', 'covenant renewal' and 'talionic punishment'.


The Laws of the Imperialized

The Laws of the Imperialized

Author: Chung Man Anna Lo

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1786410044

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Being the first legal corpus in the biblical canon, Exodus 19–24 is a law collection that belonged to a people living under the shadow of empire. Using an integrated approach of postcolonial studies and historical-comparative analysis, this important study analyzes the relationship between the laws given to the Israelites on Mount Sinai and cuneiform law collections. Dr. Anna Lo skillfully integrates postcolonial understandings of the colonized people to explore how the similarities and differences reflect the imperialized authors’ wrestling with the imperial legal metanarrative and subjugation of their time. This investigation into the dynamic of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance invites attention to this selection of Scripture as a work of conservative revolutionists. Dr. Lo’s thorough work provides an important way forward for scholars to consider responses of the imperialized to empires in the past as well as to reflect on their own response to hegemonic domination today.