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3 results

The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible
  • Edited by Bruce Wells
  • Published online:
    11 April 2024
    Print publication:
    18 April 2024
  • This Companion offers a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and legacy of biblical law.  Examining the debates that swirl around the nature of biblical law, it explores its historical context, the significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. The volume also interrogates key questions: Were the rules intended to function as ancient Israel's statutory law? Is there evidence to indicate that they served a different purpose? What is the relationship between this legal material and other parts of the Hebrew Bible? Most importantly, the book provides an in-depth look at the content of the Torah's laws, with individual essays on substantive, procedural, and ritual law. With contributions from an international team of experts, written specially for this volume, The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible provides an up-to-date look at scholarship on biblical law and outlines themes and topics for future research.

  • 35 - Torah in rabbinic thought: the theology of learning

    • By Marc Hirshman, The Melton Center of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Edited by Steven T. Katz, Boston University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Judaism
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    22 June 2006, pp 899-924

  • Summary

    Rabbinic literature is a complex anthology of more than half a millennium of Jewish thought, stretching from the sparse statements of the last two centuries BCE to the ample oeuvre of the first five centuries of the Common Era. This chapter selects the most powerful expressions of various rabbinic positions on the meaning and significance of the Torah and Torah study, culled from the classical period of rabbinic literature. These sources will be amplified by selections from contemporaneous Graeco-Roman and Christian literature on the one hand and by modern critical scholarship on the other. One can imagine that the struggle with the Church over the correct interpretation of Scripture led the Rabbis to emphasize the status of the oral law. The Torah, oral and written, was God's word, and closeness to God could be measured not simply by obedience to God's word but by constant recitation and study of the word.