This volume explores how the poetic technique of biblical metaphor was analyzed within the Jewish exegetical tradition that developed in Muslim Spain during the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry and was then transplanted to a Christian milieu. Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides applied concepts from Arabic poetics, hermeneutics and logic to define metaphor and interpret it within their philological-literary readings of Scripture. David Kimhi integrated their methodologies with the midrashic creativity and sensitivity to nuance typical of his native Provence to create a new literary interpretive system that highlights the expressiveness of metaphor. This study is important for readers interested in metaphor, the Bible as literature, the history of biblical interpretation and the inter-relation between Arabic and Hebrew learning.

This work analyzes the treatment of biblical metaphor in a Jewish exegetical tradition originating in Muslim Spain that was transplanted to Christian Provence, yielding a variety of approaches that integrate Arabic poetics, hermeneutics and logic with indigenous Hebrew modes of reading.

The Bible was not written and received in a historical vacuum—in fact, the social and historical context of the Bible illuminates key understandings that may have been otherwise missed. Biblical scholars use many different approaches to uncover this context, each engaging various aspects of the social and historical world of the Bible—from religious ritual to scribal practice to historical event. In Social & Historical Approaches to the Bible, you will learn how these methods developed and see how they have been used. You will be introduced to the strengths and weaknesses of each method, so you may understand its benefits as well as see its limitations. Many of these approaches are still in use by biblical scholars today, though often much changed from their earliest form as ideas were revised in light of the challenges and questions posed by further research.

How do we understand the characteristically extensive presence of imagery in biblical prophecy? Poetic metaphor in prophetic writings has commonly been understood solely as an artistic flourish intended to create certain rhetorical effects. It thus appears expendable and unrelated to the core content of the composition—however engaging it may be, aesthetically or otherwise. Job Jindo invites us to reconsider this convention. Applying recent studies in cognitive science, he explores how we can view metaphor as the very essence of poetic prophecy—namely, metaphor as an indispensable mode to communicate prophetic insight. Through a cognitive reading of Jeremiah 1-24, Jindo amply demonstrates the advantage and heuristic ramifications of this approach in biblical studies.

Figuring Jerusalem explores how Hebrew writers have imagined Jerusalem, both from the distance of exile and from within its sacred walls. For two thousand years, Hebrew writers used their exile from the Holy Land as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did these writers bring their imagination “home” in the Zionist century? Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic conventions that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained throughout the first half of the twentieth century. And even after 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. It was only in the aftermath of the Six Day War that the temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred would become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture. Figuring Jerusalem ranges from classical texts, biblical and medieval, to the post-1967 writings of S. Y. Agnon and Yehuda Amichai. Ultimately, DeKoven Ezrahi shows that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of exile, as inscribed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of Jerusalem are to coexist.

This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges. The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education; pain, sexual consent, and ethics in the Talmud; the place of reason and devotion among Jewish thinkers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Taubes, Sarah Schenirer, Ibn Chiquitilla, Yair Ḥayim Bacharach, and the Rav Shagar; and Jewish law as a response to the post-Holocaust landscape. The authors are scholars of rabbinics, history, linguistics, philosophy, law, and education, many of whom also have traditional religious training or ordination. The result is a book designed for learned scholars, non-specialists, and students of varying backgrounds, and one that is sure to spark debate in the university, the Beit Midrash, and far beyond.