Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature
Studies aroma in Jewish life and literature in Palestine in the late Roman and early Byzantine periods. Uses the history and material culture of perfume and incense as a lens to view daily activities.
Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur is the first major translation of one of the most important genres of the lost literature of the ancient synagogue. Known as the Avodah piyyutim, this liturgical poetry was composed by the synagogue poets of fifth- to ninth-century Palestine and sung in the synagogues on Yom Kippur, the Day ......
"The Bahir" is one of the oldest and most important of the "Kabbalah" texts. Until the publication of the "Zohar", the "Bahir" was the most influential and widely quoted primary source of Kabbalistic teachings.
Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets
Weems' pioneering study explores the puzzling ways in which the Hebrew prophets' portrayals of divine love, compassion and covenantal commitment became associated with battery, infidelity, and the rape and mutilation of women.
Zoomorphic Slurs and the Delegitimation of Deborah and Huldah in the Bab
In this book, Blazenka Scheuer demonstrates the multiple ways in which zoomorphic images were used as interpretative keys both in the formation of Deborah and Huldah stories in the Hebrew Bible and in their subsequent versions.
Leading scholars in the field of Holocaust studies place the Nazi era in full historical perspective. This book is a broad overview of the Protestant and Catholic responses, including institutional churches, the theological faculties, and theologians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Joseph Lortz. Included are assessments of the German Christian ......
From expulsions, exiles, and even genocide, for the past two millennia the Jewish people have become expert survivors. Author Terry Bookman discusses the challenges today's postmodern Jewish community faces and the ways in which it must develop a new agenda to change from merely surviving to thriving.
The proscription against using images in worship sets Judaism, together with Islam, apart from all other religious systems. This work sets out to explain the reasons for this prohibition and to demonstrate how influential it has been in determining important aspects of Jewish thinking.
A study of the Jewish proscription against using images in worship demonstrating how this "image-ban" influences seminal aspects of Jewish thinking. Kochan (Jewish politics, Oxford U.) argues that idol worship is a form of disobedience because what distinguishes God from "other gods" is his invisib