Pedagogical Seminar for Educators in Jewish Schools – France
In this essay, I treat the work of Richard L. Rubenstein as attempting to inherit key elements of Mordecai M. Kaplan’s theological project and carry them forward into the post-Holocaust era. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rubenstein... more
A historical process that happened within the development of secularization, and that has received no attention by scholars, was the gradual silencing of the Holy Scriptures. From its origins, like all ancient books, the Bible was read... more
The foremost objective of the present paper is to unfold the existential Mythopoesis components in the Midrashic texts that appeared in the Jewish cultural tradition. The study will stress the variety of meanings, which are embedded with... more
An introduction to Martin Buber as an interpreter of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.
This paper traces the recovery of the unity of the book of Isaiah in recent decades but then goes on to consider some of the problems in reading the book which this raises. The version of the paper presented here is not the published... more
from following the rigorous command to love their neighbors as themselves. Some liberation-influenced readers may criticize Brueggemann for not going far enough in his critique of power and economic injustice, especially since he... more
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Conservative Movement in North America published a Torah commentary reflecting its historical and theological elucidation of Judaism. This commentary, Etz Hayim, evinces a number of... more
is rightly acclaimed as the greatest Jewish thinker to have emerged from the American Jewish context. Though born in Europe, he came to America as a young boy and received his most important schooling in this new environment. It is well... more
On the place of biblical criticism in the world of the believing Jew. Includes a critique of the approaches of Jacobs, Heschel and Kasher, and proposes an alternative Maimonidean approach.
What does God's voice sound like and how do we know?
Somehow, Pharaoh has wormed his way onto the cover of the Book of Books. You will find him front and center on the dust jacket of Exodus, the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel's debut volume, represented by the thirteenth-century-BCE... more
The Quest for the Staff When Graham Phillips arrived at the ancient Nabatean city of Petra in modern-day Jordan, he believed he was on the verge of another monumental discovery. The self-proclaimed finder of the Holy Grail and the tomb of... more
In recent years the book of Isaiah has moved to centre stage in the discussion of the relative merits of synchronic and diachronic exegesis of biblical literature in ways that would have been unthinkable as little as a generation ago.... more
At first glance, it seems obvious that the secret with which Franz Rosenzweig is occupied in his 1928 essay "Secret of the Form of Biblical Narratives" is the inexplicit form through which the Bible transmits the meaning of its... more
On the Use of Traditional Jewish Exegesis in the Modern Literary Study of the Bible. In Tehillah le-Moshe. Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg.
Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. 1997. Pp. 173-183.
Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. 1997. Pp. 173-183.
This ia book review of D. A. Baer, and R. P. Gordon (eds.), The Tongue of a Teacher: Leshon Limmudim. Essays on the Language and Literature of the Hebrew Bible in Honour of A. A. Macintosh, LHBOT 593; London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
The topic of Bible translation has come to the fore recently with Robert Alter's The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary 1 , a work that completes Alter's decades-long project of translating the entire Tanakh. I want to put this... more
A century ago scholars of the Book of Mormon began to seriously study what H. Grant Vest called "the problem of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon." The problem itself being that scholarship on the book of Isaiah had shown then as it does now... more
This class is designed for seminarians who have already laid a foundation in exegetical method by means of IBS, basic Hebrew grammar (OT501), and an Introduction to the history and literature of ancient Israel. Beginning with the larger... more
The Hebrew Scriptures relate that God reveals His Presence through personal experience (as frequently in Psalms) or through control of history (the Exodus from Egypt, the fall of Babylon). Alternatively, He may issue instructions or laws,... more
Review of Carasik, Michael. The Commentators’ Bible: The Rubin JPS Miqra’ot Gedolot. 5 vols. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 2018. 1798 pp. Hardcover. USD 360.00.
shrift to suggestions that Jews in Rome put pressure on Nero to persecute Christian believers. MacBride analyzes the later New Testament writings from the perspective of minority group rhetoric. He questions any automatic assumption that... more
The Reconstructionist category of holiness, reflecting the essence of God in traditional Judaism, is a challenge both to contemporary Jewish thought and to theological thought in general. This paper attempts to explain why and how... more
Early followers of Jesus and later rabbinical Jews, two divergent branches of Judaism emerging respectively from the Second Temple and Post-Second Temple eras, both drew upon the cultural memory of Sinai to establish their identity. This... more
Critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible a hundred years ago held a much lower estimation of the role of law in the religion of ancient Israel and of the value of biblical law than do scholars today. Julius Wellhausen, for example, whose... more
Not least among the bittersweet gifts of modernity to the Jews is the complication of dealing with the Bible both as sacred scripture and as a document subject to the same canons of inquiry as any other historical, or putatively... more
This is an allegory that tells the tale of Isaiah scholarship from the 18th century up to the present. Instead of the dull "history of scholarship" recitals in books and in class, this piece attempts to tell the story in a way that can... more
SECTION С. REVELATION 15 Revelation in the Jewish Tradition EMANUEL LÉVINAS The Content and Its Structure The Problem I think that our fundamental question in these lectures concerns less the content ascribed to revelation than the actual... more
With the Ten Commandments as a case, the overall focus of this article is how a reader’s a priori concept of a text influences how he or she allows textual content and interpretive context to interact. The frame of the article is the... more
Biblisch-theologische Studien, no. 44 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001). That volume addresses the question of how biblical texts become the objects of theological reception at different stages and contexts in the history of... more
The foremost objective of the present paper is to unfold the existential Mythopoesis components in the Midrashic texts that appeared in the Jewish cultural tradition. The study will stress the variety of meanings, which are embedded with... more