The Archaeology and Material Culture of the Babylonian Talmud PDF Download

Author: Markham J. Geller
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004304894
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
The Babylonian Talmud remains the richest source of information regarding the material culture and lifestyle of the Babylonian Jewish community, with additional data now supplied by Babylonian incantation bowls. Although archaeology has yet to excavate any Jewish sites from Babylonia, information from Parthian and Sassanian Babylonia provides relevant background information, which differs substantially from archaeological finds from the Land of Israel. One of the key questions addresses the amount of traffic and general communications between Jewish Babylonia and Israel, considering the great distances and hardships of travel involved.

Author: Monika Amsler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009297309
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
In this book, Monika Amsler explores the historical contexts in which the Babylonian Talmud was formed in an effort to determine whether it was the result of oral transmission. Scholars have posited that the rulings and stories we find in the Talmud were passed on from one generation to the next, each generation adding their opinions and interpretations of a given subject. Yet, such an oral formation process is unheard of in late antiquity. Moreover, the model exoticizes the Talmud and disregards the intellectual world of Sassanid Persia. Rather than taking the Talmud's discursive structure as a sign for orality, Amsler interrogates the intellectual and material prerequisites of composers of such complex works, and their education and methods of large-scale data management. She also traces and highlights the marks that their working methods inevitably left in the text. Detailing how intellectual innovation was generated, Amsler's book also sheds new light on the content of the Talmud. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Author: Gwynn Kessler
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119113970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
An innovative approach to the study of ten centuries of Jewish culture and history A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism explores the Jewish people, their communities, and various manifestations of their religious and cultural expressions from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Presenting a collection of 30 original essays written by noted scholars in the field, this companion provides an expansive examination of ancient Jewish life, identity, gender, sacred and domestic spaces, literature, language, and theological questions throughout late ancient Jewish history and historiography. Editors Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm situate the volume within Late Antiquity, enabling readers to rethink traditional chronological, geographic, and political boundaries. The Companion incorporates a broad methodology, drawing from social history, material history and culture, and literary studies to consider the diverse forms and facets of Jews and Judaism within multiple contexts of place, culture, and history. Divided into five parts, thematically-organized essays discuss topics including the spaces where Jews lived, worked, and worshiped, Jewish languages and literatures, ethnicities and identities, and questions about gender and the body central to Jewish culture and Judaism. Offering original scholarship and fresh insights on late ancient Jewish history and culture, this unique volume: Offers a one-volume exploration of “second temple,” “Greco-Roman,” and “rabbinic” periods and sources Explores Jewish life across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived Features original maps of areas cited in every essay, including maps of Jewish settlement throughout Late Antiquity Includes an outline of major historical events, further readings, and full references A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: 3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, literature, and ethnic identity, as well as general readers with interest in Jewish history, world religions, Classics, and Late Antiquity.

Author: St John Simpson
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803274190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
This collection of essays offers an examination of the Sasanian empire based almost entirely on archaeological and scientific research, much presented here for the first time. The book is divided into three parts examining Sasanian sites, settlements and landscapes; their complex agricultural resources; and their crafts and industries.

Author: Hasia R. Diner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197554814
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Book Description
For as long as historians have contemplated the Jewish past, they have engaged with the idea of diaspora. Dedicated to the study of transnational peoples and the linkages these people forged among themselves over the course of their wanderings and in the multiple places to which they went, the term "diaspora" reflects the increasing interest in migrations, trauma, globalism, and community formations. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora acts as a comprehensive collection of scholarship that reflects the multifaceted nature of diaspora studies. Persecuted and exiled throughout their history, the Jewish people have also left familiar places to find better opportunities in new ones. But their history has consistently been defined by their permanent lack of belonging. This Oxford Handbook explores the complicated nature of diasporic Jewish life as something both destructive and generative. Contributors explore subjects as diverse as biblical and medieval representations of diaspora, the various diaspora communities that emerged across the globe, the contradictory relationship the diaspora bears to Israel, and how the diaspora is celebrated and debated within modern Jewish thought. What these essays share is a commitment to untangling the legacy of the diaspora on Jewish life and culture. This volume portrays the Jewish diaspora not as a simple, unified front, but as a population characterized by conflicting impulses and ideas. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora captures the complexity of the Jewish diaspora by acknowledging the tensions inherent in a group of people defined by trauma and exile as well as by voluntary migrations to places with greater opportunity.

Author: Jason Sion Mokhtarian
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520384040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Despite the Talmud being the richest repository of medical remedies in ancient Judaism, this important strain of Jewish thought has been largely ignored—even as the study of ancient medicine has exploded in recent years. In a comprehensive study of this topic, Jason Sion Mokhtarian recuperates this obscure genre of Talmudic text, which has been marginalized in the Jewish tradition since the Middle Ages, to reveal the unexpected depth of the rabbis’ medical knowledge. Medicine in the Talmud argues that these therapies represent a form of rabbinic scientific rationality that relied on human observation and the use of nature while downplaying the role of God and the Torah in health and illness. Drawing from a wide range of both Jewish and Sasanian sources—from the Bible, the Talmud, and Maimonides to texts written in Akkadian, Syriac, and Mandaic, as well as the incantation bowls—Mokhtarian offers rare insight into how the rabbis of late antique Babylonia adapted the medical knowledge of their time to address the needs of their community. In the process, he narrates an untold chapter in the history of ancient medicine.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004515690
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
This volume abandons the document-based approach of standard introductions and investigates aggregates of classical rabbinic texts through three broad perspectives – intertextuality, east and west, halakhah and aggadah – generating fresh insights that will reset the scholarly agenda.

Author: Ben Zion Rosenfeld
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004681965
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Credit is the oxygen of every society. In many cases we wonder why the rabbis prohibit certain business credit transactions considering them usury. The writer uses literary and epigraphic sources to decipher the rabbinic approach. This book shows how rabbinic legislation innovatively expand the Torah prohibition of usury in loans to all fields of credit. It is a pioneering inquiry regarding rabbinic literature compiled under Roman and Sasanid rule, helping to fill the void in research concerning credit. It also distinguishes various kinds of credit differentiating credit of money for money, or products, exposing the ramifications of the rabbinic legislation.

Author: Simcha Gross
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009280511
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete with stories and discussions that feature Sasanian kings, Zoroastrian magi, fire temples, imperial administrators, Sasanian laws, Persian customs, and more quotidian details of Jewish life. Yet, in the scholarly literature on the Babylonian Talmud and the Jews of Babylonia , the Sasanian Empire has served as a backdrop to a decidedly parochial Jewish story, having little if any direct impact on Babylonian Jewish life and especially the rabbis. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity advances a radically different understanding of Babylonian Jewish history and Sasanian rule. Building upon recent scholarship, Simcha Gross portrays a more immanent model of Sasanian rule, within and against which Jews invariably positioned and defined themselves. Babylonian Jews realized their traditions, teachings, and social position within the political, social, religious, and cultural conditions generated by Sasanian rule.

Author: Reuven Kiperwasser
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 1951498909
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This new book by Reuven Kiperwasser examines the social, cultural, and religious aspects of third- to sixth-century narratives involving rabbinic figures migrating between Babylonia and Palestine. Kiperwasser draws on migration and mobility studies, comparative literature, humor and satire studies, as well as social history to reveal how border-crossing rabbis were seen as exporting features of their previous eastern context into their new western homes and vice versa. Through their writing, rabbinic authors articulated the nature and legitimacy of their own scholastic practices, knowledge, and authority in relationship to their internal others.