This volume is devoted to the texts, traditions, and practices of the Land of Israel during the Talmudic period. Using a variety of critical methodologies, this collection offers a picture of rabbinic literature and Israelite cultures that are multi-layered and complex.

Stories from the main works of classical rabbinic literature, which were produced by Jewish sages in either Hebrew or Aramaic, between 200 and 600 CE.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

This popular textbook regards the Pentateuch as a literary whole, with a single theme that binds it together. The overarching theme is the partial fulfilment of the promises to the patriarchs. Though the method of the book is holistic, the origin and growth of the theme is also explored using the methods of traditional source analysis. An important chapter explores the theological function of the Pentateuch both in the community for which the Pentateuch was first composed and in our own time. For this second, enlarged edition, the author has written an Epilogue reassessing the theme of the Pentateuch from a more current postmodern perspective.

Seeking out the Land describes the study of the Holy Land in the Roman period and examines the complex connections between theology, social agenda and the intellectual pursuit. Holiness as a theological concept determines the intellectual agenda of the elite society of writers seeking to describe the land, as well as their preoccupation with its physical aspects and their actual knowledge about it. Ze'ev Safrai succeeds in examining all the ancient monotheistic literature, both Jewish and Christian, up to the fourth century CE, and in demonstrating how all the above-mentioned factors coalesce into a single entity. We learn that in both religions, with all their various subgroups, the same social and religious factors were at work, but with differing intensity.

Alongside the formal development of Judaism from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, a robust Jewish folk religion flourished—ideas and practices that never met with wholehearted approval by religious leaders yet enjoyed such wide popularity that they could not be altogether excluded from the religion. According to Joshua Trachtenberg, it is not possible truly to understand the experience and history of the Jewish people without attempting to recover their folklife and beliefs from centuries past. Jewish Magic and Superstition is a masterful and utterly fascinating exploration of religious forms that have all but disappeared yet persist in the imagination. The volume begins with legends of Jewish sorcery and proceeds to discuss beliefs about the evil eye, spirits of the dead, powers of good, the famous legend of the golem, procedures for casting spells, the use of gems and amulets, how to battle spirits, the ritual of circumcision, herbal folk remedies, fortune telling, astrology, and the interpretation of dreams. First published more than sixty years ago, Trachtenberg's study remains the foundational scholarship on magical practices in the Jewish world and offers an understanding of folk beliefs that expressed most eloquently the everyday religion of the Jewish people.

A comprehensive guide to Jewish spiritual practices, with explanations based on Talmudic and Midrashic texts as well as Hasidic and mystical stories, includes a survey of daily prayers, Shabbat rituals, holidays, Torah study, Jewish meditation, and more.