Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature

Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: Simcha Fishbane
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047420187
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This study of early Rabbinic texts provides fresh and fascinating insights into the attitudes of the Rabbis towards “outsiders.”

Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature

Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: Simcha Fishbane
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047420187
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book

Book Description
This study of early Rabbinic texts provides fresh and fascinating insights into the attitudes of the Rabbis towards “outsiders.”

Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature

Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: Simcha Fishbane
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004158332
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This study of early Rabbinic texts provides fresh and fascinating insights into the attitudes of the Rabbis towards "outsiders."

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: Mira Balberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520280636
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbisÕ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between oneÕs self and oneÕs body and, more broadly, the relations between oneÕs self and oneÕs human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: DR. S Mira Balberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958217
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one’s self and one’s body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one’s human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

The Literature of Early Rabbinic Judaism

The Literature of Early Rabbinic Judaism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description


Blood for Thought

Blood for Thought PDF Author: Mira Balberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520295927
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Introduction -- Missing persons -- The work of blood -- Sacrifice as one -- Three hundred passovers -- Ordinary miracles -- Conclusion: the end of sacrifice, revisited

Rabbinic Tales of Destruction

Rabbinic Tales of Destruction PDF Author: Julia Watts Belser
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190600470
Category : RELIGION
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
"Rabbinic Tales of Destruction examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem from the perspective of the wounded body and the scarred land. Amidst stories saturated with sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, the book argues that rabbinic narrative wrestles with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial domination. It brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud's longest account of the destruction of the Second Temple, the book reveals the distinctive sex and gender politics of Bavli Gittin. While Palestinian tales frequently castigate the "wayward woman" for sexual transgressions that imperil the nation, Bavli Gittin's stories resist portraying women's sexuality as a cause of catastrophe. Rather than castigate women's beauty as the cause of sexual sin, Bavli Gittin's tales express a strikingly egalitarian discourse that laments the vulnerability of both male and female bodies before the conqueror. Bavli Gittin's body politics align with a significant theological reorientation. Bavli Gittin does not explain catastrophe as divine chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect of Jewish suffering, it evokes God's empathy with the subjugated Jewish body and forges a sharp critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to pierce the power politics of Roman conquest, to protest the brutality of imperial dominance, and to make plain the scar that Roman violence leaves upon Jewish flesh"--

Meals in Early Judaism

Meals in Early Judaism PDF Author: S. Marks
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137363797
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This is the first book about the meals of Early Judaism. As such it breaks important new ground in establishing the basis for understanding the centrality of meals in this pivotal period of Judaism and providing a framework of historical patterns and influences.

The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law

The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law PDF Author: Pamela Barmash
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0199392668
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
Major innovations have occurred in the study of biblical law in recent decades. The legal material of the Pentateuch has received new interest with detailed studies of specific biblical passages. The comparison of biblical practice to ancient Near Eastern customs has received a new impetus with the concentration on texts from actual ancient legal transactions. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law provides a state of the art analysis of the major questions, principles, and texts pertinent to biblical law. The thirty-three chapters, written by an international team of experts, deal with the concepts, significant texts, institutions, and procedures of biblical law; the intersection of law with religion, socio-economic circumstances, and politics; and the reinterpretation of biblical law in the emerging Jewish and Christian communities. The volume is intended to introduce non-specialists to the field as well as to stimulate new thinking among scholars working in biblical law.

Execution and Invention

Execution and Invention PDF Author: Beth A. Berkowitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190292539
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
The death penalty in classical Judaism has been a highly politicized subject in modern scholarship. Enlightenment attacks on the Talmud's legitimacy led scholars to use the Talmud's criminal law as evidence for its elevated morals. But even more pressing was the need to prove Jews' innocence of the charge of killing Christ. The reconstruction of a just Jewish death penalty was a defense against the accusation that a corrupt Jewish court was responsible for the death of Christ. In Execution and Invention, Beth A. Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and offers a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the early Rabbis used the rabbinic laws of the death penalty to establish their power in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. Following recent currents in historiography, Berkowitz sees the Rabbis as an embattled, almost invisible sect within second-century Judaism. The function of their death penalty laws, Berkowitz contends, was to create a complex ritual of execution under rabbinic control, thus bolstering rabbinic claims to authority in the context of Roman political and cultural domination. Understanding rabbinic literature to be in dialogue with the Bible, with the variety of ancient Jews, and with Roman imperialism, Berkowitz shows how the Rabbis tried to create an appealing alternative to the Roman, paganized culture of Palestine's Jews. In their death penalty, the Rabbis substituted Rome's power with their own. Early Christians, on the other hand, used death penalty discourse to critique judicial power. But Berkowitz argues that the Christian critique of execution produced new claims to authority as much as the rabbinic embrace. By comparing rabbinic conversations about the death penalty with Christian ones, Berkowitz reveals death penalty discourse as a significant means of creating authority in second-century western religious cultures. Advancing the death penalty discourse as a discourse of power, Berkowitz sheds light on the central relationship between religious and political authority and the severest form of punishment.