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The Parts of the Whole
Overview The Parts of the Whole, Christine Hayes, Open Yale Courses (Transcription), 2006. Primary sources Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra 14b-15a- The Order of Scripture Mishnah Yadayim 3-5- The Debate Over the Biblical Canon Tosefta Yadayim 2-14- The Biblical Canon and Divine Inspiration Josephus, Against Apion I, 37-43- Authenticity of Scripture Secondary sources Synopsis of the […]
The Jews emerged quietly from the early confines of recorded history, over three thousand five hundred years ago. As a small family, the first Jews emigrated from Mesopotamia to Israel many centuries before Buddha spoke half a continent away, and hundreds of years before Homer was to compose the classics of Greek literature. The daughter […]
Marc Zvi Brettler, Adele Berlin. The Jewish Study Bible. Oxford Unviersity Press, 2003. Marc Zvi Brettler. How to Read the Bible. Philadelphia- Jewish Publication Society. 2005. David Noel Freedman. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Doubleday, 1992. John J. Collins. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis- Fortress Press, 2004. James L. Kugel. How to Read the Bible- […]
Judaism is fundamentally a revealed religion. It is based on the belief that God revealed Himself to the Jewish people through the agency of Moses. For this reason, its development, both in the biblical period and beyond, can be understood only in terms of a reshaping and reinterpretation of the biblical heritage. The traditions of […]
PART ONE- TORAH (Instruction, Teaching) Genesis- Chapters 1-11 relate God’s creation of the world and the first humans, the stories of Adam, Eve Cain and Abel, the flood, the tower of Babel, and the invention of various human arts and industries. Chapters l2-50 contain the stories of the patriarchal and matriarchal ancestors of the Israelites- […]
You don’t need me to tell you that human civilization is very, very old. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the earliest stages of human civilization was quite limited for many centuries. That is, until the great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which unearthed for us the great civilizations of the Ancient Near East, […]
Excerpted from Lawrence H. Schiffman, Texts and Traditions, Ktav, Hoboken 1998, p.118-119. The Rabbis of the Talmud, in a baraita, listed the order of the biblical books in a way different even from the later Jewish Bibles. This passage shows that the tri-partite canon was the norm. The Rabbis also dealt with the question of […]
The historian, Josephus, argues the authenticity of the Jewish tradition by referring to the antiquity, accuracy, and divine inspiration of the Jewish scriptures. In the process, he obliquely refers to all the books of the Bible. He also testifies to Jewish loyalty to their holy texts. (37) …Everyone is not permitted of his own accord […]
Excerpted from Lawrence H. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition, Ktav Publishing House, Hoboken, NJ, 1991. The close of our discussion of the Persian period is an appropriate point to take up the question of the biblical canon, or corpus, and how and when it was defined. This problem will take us somewhat afield, since the process of […]