"The Orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death by heart attack in 1919 set his widow and children free to leave Lithuania, the country that he insisted be their home. In light of the Holocaust that took place in Europe twenty years later, his death became, ironically, a gift of life: Heshel Melamed's family left Europe before the war and settled safely in South Africa." "In Heshel's Kingdom, Dan Jacobson recounts his journey in the 1990s to post-Communist Lithuania, where he searched for traces of his grandfather Heshel's world. More than a genealogical narrative, however, this deeply personal memoir becomes at times a philosophical tableau of secularism, religion, family, and modern Judaism." --Book Jacket.

A biographical record of contemporary achievement together with a key to the location of the original biographical notes.

Title on added t.p.: ha-Sipur ha-òhalufi °al pilug ha-mamlakhah be-Targum ha-shiv°im.

back cover is provided..just blue sky

This history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Judah is quite different from the usual narratives of biblical history. It parallels the same author's History of the Kingdom of Israel (OLA 275) and is mainly based on information provided by epigraphic sources dating from the 19th/18th century B.C. on, when Jerusalem and its rulers are first mentioned. The book is divided in seven chapters. The first one deals with the proto-history of Jerusalem in Bronze Age and Iron Age I. The second one concerns the Davidic dynasty whose lineage is followed until the mid-ninth century. Chapters III and IV continue the history of the kingdom until the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylonians in 587. After ca. 800 B.C. the name of the kingdom was changed from Beth David in Judah following internal dynastic problems. Chapter V examines some questions concerning religion in Jerusalem and Judah, especially the alleged "sacred prostitution" and the "molk-sacrifices". Chapter VI discusses the special case of the relations between the Yahwistic sanctuary of Bethel, annexed to Judah by king Josiah, and the theonym Bethel, attested in Jewish-Aramaean ambiences of the Persian period. Chapter VII deals with burial customs and the conception of the netherworld or Sheol, mainly from the monarchic period on.