Rabbi Samuel Ben Meir's Commentary on Genesis PDF Download

Author: Samuel ben Meir
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
A translation of a little-studied 12th-century commentary on the book of Genesis, which should be of interest to scholars of medieval Judaica and modern Bible scholars."

Author: Matthew C. Genung
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161551505
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Genesis 37 narrates the basis of Israel's descent into Egypt. It is a chapter where literary tensions have given rise to several incompatible interpretations. Matthew C. Genung provides a fresh analysis of Genesis 37 along with a new explanation of its compositional history. The results impact the interpretation of the Joseph Story and pentateuchal criticism.

Author: Mayer I. Gruber
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
ISBN: 0827608721
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 927

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Book Description
In 2004, Mayer Gruber?s landmark Rashi?s Commentary on Psalms made one of the 11th-century scholar?s most important works accessible to a larger audience for the first time. The JPS paperback edition of this exceptional volume includes the complete original Hebrew text and acclaimed linguist Mayer Gruber?s contemporary English translation and supercommentary. Fully annotated by Gruber, Rashi?s Commentary on Psalms places Rashi, the most influential Hebrew biblical commentator of all time, in the larger context of biblical exegesis. Gruber identifies Rashi?s sources, pinpoints the exegetical questions to which Rashi responds, defines the nuances of Rashi?s terminology, and guides the reader to use the English translation as a tool to access the original Hebrew text. Gruber?s extensive introduction takes a critical look at Rashi and his enduring legacy.

Author: Albert van der Heide
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319475215
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
This book describes how medieval Jewish Bible scholars sought to answer the question of what is meant by the Angel’s message from God to Abraham: ‘Now I Know’, as written in Genesis 22 verse 12. It examines these scholars’ comments on the nineteen verses in Genesis that tell the story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his own son Isaac, the Aqedat Yiṣḥaq. It explores the answers they found to the question of what, indeed, this story is trying to tell us. Is it a drastic way to condemn the practice of child sacrifice? Does it call for replacing human sacrifices with animal sacrifices? Is it a trial by which the Almighty tests the fidelity of one of His followers? Or is it His way to show the world the nature of true belief? The book starts with an introduction to familiarize readers with the many and varied manifestations of the Aqedah theme in Jewish culture and with the developments of medieval Jewish Bible exegesis in general. Next, it offers translations and analyses of the classical medieval Jewish Bible commentaries that deal with the exegesis of Genesis 22, exploring the many angles from which the Aqedah story has been understood. No less than five centuries of medieval Aqedah exegesis are reviewed, from Saadya (882-942) to Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508). These texts from the commentaries are combined with hermeneutical key passages by Moses Maimonides, Joseph Ibn Kaspi, Ḥasdai Crescas, and others, which were familiar to the minds of the exegetes, or which, conversely, reflect the impact of biblical Aqedah exegesis on religious thought. Together, the passages discussed illustrate the growth and development of Jewish Bible exegesis in dialogue with the rabbinic sources and with the various trends of thought and theology of their times. The consistent focus on the Aqedah constitutes a unifying theme, while the insights presented here greatly advance our understanding of the various developments in medieval Jewish Bible exegesis.

Author: Mordechai Z. Cohen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004210067
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 596

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Book Description
The biblical hermeneutics of the illustrious philosopher-talmudist Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) has long been underappreciated, and viewed in isolation from the celebrated philological schools of “plain sense” (peshat) Jewish Bible exegesis. Aiming to redress this imbalance, this study identifies Maimonides’ substantial contributions to that interpretive movement, assessing its achievements in cultural context. Like others in the rationalist Geonic-Andalusian school, Maimonides’ understanding of Scripture was informed by Arabic learning. Drawing upon Greco-Arabic logic, poetics, politics, physics and metaphysics, as well as Muslim jurisprudence, he devised sophisticated new approaches to key issues that occupied other exegetes, including a variety of interpretive cruxes, the reconciliation of Scripture with reason, a legal hermeneutics for deriving halakhah (Jewish law) from Scripture, and the nature of interpretation itself. "It is a valuable contribution to the entire study of medieval biblical exegesis and will undoubtedly serve as the basis of all subsequent discussions of Maimonides' hermeneutics." Daniel J. Lasker, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Author: Christopher T. Paris
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1451482116
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A title, in which, the narrator occasionally obtrudes into the narrative to manage or deflect anticipated reader questions and assumptions, sometimes invoking the divine, sometimes protecting a favored character, in an interpretive stance that the author compares with the commentary provided by later rabbis and in the Targums.

Author: Hanna Liss
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004194576
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
R. Samuel ben Meir (b. 1085) wrote his Torah commentary at a point in time when the French masters of Bible collected their glossae, but he wrote it also at the point in time that we today consider to be the turning point in ‘lay literacy,’ when the Anglo-Norman aristocracy patronized the production of romances. In the first half of the 12th century, Northern France was a vibrant spot. It was an era in which composing, reading, and listening to narratives and stories intensified as a complex cultural phenomenon. This book presents the idea that Rashbam tried to compete with this new intellectual movement, claiming that the literary quality of the biblical texts was at least as good as that of the nascent courtly romances, or even on a par with one another.

Author: James Goodman
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805242538
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
“I didn’t think he’d do it. I really didn’t think he would. I thought he’d say, whoa, hold on, wait a minute. We made a deal, remember, the land, the blessing, the nation, the descendants as numerous as the sands on the shore and the stars in the sky.” So begins James Goodman’s original and urgent encounter with one of the most compelling and resonant stories ever told—God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. A mere nineteen lines in the book of Genesis, it rests at the heart of the history, literature, theology, and sacred rituals of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For more than two millennia, people throughout the world have grappled with the troubling questions about sacrifice, authority, obedience, and faith to which the story gives rise. Writing from the vantage of “a reader, a son, a Jew, a father, a skeptic, a historian, a lover of stories, and a writer,” Goodman gives us an enthralling narrative history that moves from its biblical origins to its place in the cultures and faiths of our time. He introduces us to the commentary of Second Temple sages, rabbis and priests of the late antiquity, and early Islamic exegetes (some of whom imagined that Ishmael was the nearly sacrificed son). He examines Syriac hymns (in which Sarah stars), Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade (in which Isaac often dies), and medieval English mystery plays. He looks at the art of Europe’s golden age, the philosophy of Kant and Kierkegaard, and the panoply of twentieth-century interpretation, sacred and profane, including the work of Bob Dylan, Elie Wiesel, and A. B. Yehoshua. In illuminating how so many others have understood this story, Goodman tells a gripping and provocative story of his own.

Author: Shaye J. D. Cohen
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161503757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
This volume collects thirty essays by Shaye J.D. Cohen. First published between 1980 and 2006, these essays deal with a wide variety of themes and texts: Jewish Hellenism; Josephus; the Synagogue; Conversion to Judaism; Blood and Impurity; the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. What unites them is their philological orientation. Many of these essays are close studies of obscure passages in Jewish and Christian texts. The essays are united too by their common assumption that the ancient world was a single cultural continuum; that ancient Judaism, in all its expressions and varieties, was a Hellenism; and that texts written in Hebrew share a world of discourse with those written in Greek. Many of these essays are well-known and have been much discussed in contemporary scholarship. Among these are: The Significance of Yavneh (the title essay), Patriarchs and Scholarchs, Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus, Epigraphical Rabbis, The Conversion of Antoninus, Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity, and A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood.

Author: Carol Bakhos
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 1628374721
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
For many, the Middle Ages in general evokes a sense of the sinister and brings to mind a world of fear, superstition, and religious fanaticism. For Jews it was a period marked by persecutions, pogroms, and expulsions. Yet at the same time, the Middle Ages was also a time of lively cultural exchange and heightened creativity for Jews. In The Jewish Middle Ages, contributors explore the ways in which the stories of biblical women, including, Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Zipporah, Ruth, Esther, and Judith, make their way into the rich tapestry of medieval Jewish literature, mystical texts, and art, particularly in works emanating from Ashkenazic circles. Contributors include Carol Bakhos, Judith R. Baskin, Elisheva Baumgarten, Dagmar Börner-Klein, Constanza Cordoni, Rachel Elior, Meret Gutmann-Grün, Robert A. Harris, Yuval Katz-Wilfing, Sheila Tuller Keiter, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Gerhard Langer, Aurora Salvatierra Ossorio, and Felicia Waldman. These essays give us a glimpse into the role women played and the authority they assumed in medieval Jewish culture beyond the rabbinic centers of Palestine and Babylonia.