Get People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority PDF

By Moshe Halbertal

ISBN-10: 0674661117

ISBN-13: 9780674661110

ISBN-10: 0674661125

ISBN-13: 9780674661127

Whereas Scripture is on the middle of many faiths, between them Islam and Christianity, this publication inquires into the functionality, improvement, and implications of the centrality of textual content upon the Jewish neighborhood, and by means of extension at the better query of canonization and the text-centered neighborhood. it's a standard to notice how the landless and scattered Jewish groups have, from the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. till the founding of recent Israel in 1948, cleaved to the textual content and derived their id from it. however the tale is much extra advanced. The shift from the Bible to the Torah, from biblical faith to rabbinic Judaism mediated by means of the Sages, and the sealing of the canon including its carrying on with interpretive paintings demanded from the group, quantity to what will be known as an extraordinary obsession with textuality. Halbertal supplies us insights into the heritage of this obsession, in a philosophically subtle but simple narrative. humans of the e-book bargains the simplest advent on hand to Jewish hermeneutics, a booklet able to conveying the significance of the culture to a large viewers of either educational and common readers. Halbertal offers a breathtaking survey of Jewish attitudes towards Scripture, provocatively equipped round difficulties of normative and formative authority, with an emphasis at the altering prestige and features of Mishnah, Talmud, and Kabbalah. With a present for weaving complicated problems with interpretation into his personal plot, he animates historical texts through assigning them roles in his personal hugely persuasive narrative.

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Extra resources for People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority

Example text

Their prime guiding principle of interpretation is a value judgment concerning the optimal interpretative strategy, not an objective standard for interpretation. Moreover, according to Dworkin, in reconstructing the writer's intention we attempt to present it in the best possible light. Interpretation is thus closely linked to evaluation, and value serves as the ultimate standard for interpretation. 29 Dworkin seems to claim that this attitude defines the activity of interpretation in general, and it certainly does apply to canonical texts.

The sons reenact the deeds of the fathers, and there is nothing new under the sun. The book of Ecclesiastes, which not only contradicts the beliefs represented in the Bible but also expresses a radically different temperament and consciousness, is bound together with the rest of the Bible, just as the Epistle of James in the New Testament is found alongside the other Epistles. When Ecclesiastes was introduced into the body of the Scriptures, however, it was required to give up its unique and heretical message.

Both Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy were bold, innovative theological ventures, and they could be integrated in the tradition because they presented themselves as articulations of the Torah's hidden message. This grand interpretative move, which thoroughly transformed the most basic conceptions of Judaism, was sustained by complex theories of language and divine speech and by political and theological notions of esotericism. For one 33 34 People of the Book of the major achievements of both Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy was the development of new notions of Torah and language.

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People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority by Moshe Halbertal


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