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Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engagement with the ‘other’. These stories typically involve a conflict over the interpretation of a biblical verse in which the rabbinic figure... more
Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engagement with the ‘other’. These stories typically involve a conflict over the interpretation of a biblical verse in which the rabbinic figure emerges victorious in the face of a challenge presented by the heretic. In this book, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal focuses on heretic narratives of the Babylonian Talmud that share a common literary structure, strong polemical language and the formula, ‘Fool, look to the end of the verse’. She marshals previously untapped Christian materials to arrive at new interpretations of familiar texts and illuminate the complex relationship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these Talmudic literary creations must be seen as part of a boundary-creating discourse that clearly distinguishes the rabbinic position from that of contemporaneous Christians and adds to a growing understanding of the rabbinic authors' familiarity with Christian traditions.
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The present volume comprises articles by renowned international scholars in academic dialogue with the work of Albert Baumgarten. They contextualize ancient Jewish texts not only for their own sake, but also as a way of shedding light on... more
The present volume comprises articles by renowned international scholars in academic dialogue with the work of Albert Baumgarten. They contextualize ancient Jewish texts not only for their own sake, but also as a way of shedding light on antiquity in general. They address texts taken from the elds of Greco-Roman studies, Hellenistic Judaism, Second Temple sectarianism, rabbinic literature, and various facets of early Christianity. Additionally, there are articles discussing comparative religion, sociology of knowledge, anthropology, and economic history. Together, the articles create an in-depth analysis of the social history of Jews in antiquity.
This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University. The contributions to the volume, written by colleagues and former students of Professor Fraade, reflect many of... more
This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University. The contributions to the volume, written by colleagues and former students of Professor Fraade, reflect many of his scholarly interests. The scholarly credentials of the contributors are exceedingly high. The volume is divided into three sections, one on Second Temple literature and its afterlife, a second on rabbinic literature and rabbinic history, and a third on prayer and the ancient synagogue.Contributors are Alan Applebaum, Joshua Burns , Elizabeth Shanks Alexander , Chaya Halberstam , John J. Collins, Marc Bregman, Aharon Shemesh, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Vered Noam, Robert Brody, Albert Baumgarten, Marc Hirshman, Moshe Bar-Asher, Aaron Amit, Yose Yahalom, Lee Levine, Jan Joosten, Daniel Boyarin, Charlotte Hempel, David Stern, Beth Berkowitz, Azzan Yadin, Joshua Levinson, Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novick, Devora Diamant, Richard Kalmin, Carol Bakhos, Judith Hauptman, Jeff Rubenstein, Martha Himmelfarb, Stuart Miller, Esther Chazon, James Kugel, Chaim Milikowsky, Maren Niehoff, Peter Schaefer, and Adiel Schremer.
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The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition?... more
The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition? This volume devotes itself to the methodological questions surrounding the use of diverse ancient sources for the construction of the other. The goal is to shed new light on ancient interactions between different religious groups in order to describe more accurately these relationships.
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The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers... more
The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers conceptualized a "parting-of-the-ways," after which the two religions evolved independently, new studies reveal a multi-layered set of interactions throughout the first several centuries CE. Until recently, this question was explored with the limited source material and limited tools to analyze it. While working on a limited set of data, from a specific corpus, this project offers a new set of methodological tools, borrowed from computer sciences, that could ultimately serve for understanding the connections between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. We generated models of interreligious Christian-Jewish networks that demonstrate the scope, nature, and advantages of network analysis for revealing the complex intertwined evolution of the two religions. The Jewish corpora chosen for this research are rabbinic writings from late antique Babylonia and Palestine. Christian texts range from the first through sixth centuries CE. Instead of representing interactions between people or places, as is typically done with social networks, we model literary interactions that, in our view, indicate historical connections between religious communities. This novel approach allows us to visually represent sets of temporal-spatial-contextual relationships, which evolved over hundreds of years, in single snapshots. It also reveals new insights about the relationships between the two communities. For example, we find that rabbinic sources exhibit a largely polemical approach towards earlier Christian traditions but a non-polemical attitude towards later ones. Moreover, network analysis suggests a temporal-spatial familiarity correlation. Namely, Jewish sources are familiar with early, eastern Christian sources and with both Eastern and Western Christian sources in later periods. The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts-that is, the key "nodes"-testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities. Finally, the network approach is a tool for pointing scholarly research in new directions, which only reveals itself as a result of this type of mapping. In other words, the network not only describes the known data, but it is itself a way to enlarge the network and lead us down new and exciting paths that are currently unknown.
This chapter explores connections between late antique Christian traditions
and rabbinic literature, with special emphasis on the Babylonian Talmud
The Rabbinic corpus is notoriously lacking in reflexive descriptions of the rabbinic period and its literary products. The rabbinic sources rarely explain what the rabbis were trying to do, and why; what the rabbinic corpora was meant to... more
The Rabbinic corpus is notoriously lacking in reflexive descriptions of the rabbinic period and its literary products. The rabbinic sources rarely explain what the rabbis were trying to do, and why; what the rabbinic corpora was meant to present. But a few sources do give us a glimpse into several reflexive depictions of the rabbinic project. One of the most well-known of these is the first tosefta in tractate Eduyot. The text is set, unusually, in a time and place: “when the rabbis entered Yavne,” and it contains three parts: a problem, biblical textual proof for the problem, and a solution enacted by the rabbis at Yavne. In other words, the text is explicitly set as describing a conscious change, a moment in time in which the rabbis had to deal with a problem, and decided to start some kind of a process. This was thus rightly seen as a uniquely self-reflexive text, describing the beginning of the rabbinic project itself. I offer a philological examination of the two versions of the tosefta, and identifying their respective difficulties, alongside a higher criticism approach to the content of the different parts of the tosefta, might contribute to more nuanced understanding of this rabbinic source.  According to my reconstruction, the tosefta is using two different tannaitic sources to discuss the fear of future loss of the Torah, due to both blending of all teaching without markers of their origin, and due to lack of organizing and grouping of similar things in a way that facilitate their use.
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How we should translate the term min(im) in the Babylonian Talmud? The current scholarly trend is to avoid translating it altogether, using the transliteration instead. This article demonstrate that this practice hinders our ability to... more
How we should translate the term min(im) in the Babylonian Talmud? The current scholarly trend is to avoid translating it altogether, using the transliteration instead. This article demonstrate that this practice hinders our ability to understand the stories’ intended uses within Late Antique heresy-making discourses. The article surveys the scholarly debate concerning the correct way to understand stories involving minim in rabbinic literature; and it claims, that at least with regard to several of the minim stories in the Babylonian Talmud, it is necessary to translate the Hebrew term into English as “heretics.”
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This article addresses Paul’s words in Galatians 4:21–31 proposing to focus on Isaiah 54:1 as the basis for the passage's overall argument. It proposes that Paul's argument is made clearer if we assume that the word בעולה in the verse was... more
This article addresses Paul’s words in Galatians 4:21–31 proposing to focus on Isaiah 54:1 as the basis for the passage's overall argument. It proposes that Paul's argument is made clearer if we assume that the word בעולה in the verse was interpreted in its Late-Hebrew meaning, “non-virgin,” and not its ordinary Biblical meaning, which is also reflected in the Septuagint’s τῆς ἐχούσης τὸν ἄνδρα “one who has a man.” This reading solves several interpretive problems pointed out by past readers of the Galatians passage and more specifically it explains the function of the Isaiah verse in Paul's words. It also accords with other uses of midrashic and Semitic-based traditions elsewhere in Galatians 4. Our reading finds support, in a parallel tradition, in the roughly contemporary writings of Philo of Alexandria. And it might shed light on the existence of Hebrew traditions in the Jewish Hellenistic world.
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The Tannaitic legal Midrashim did not all survive and are not all known to us in a complete independent form. David Zvi Hoffman was one of the first scholars to recognize the 13th century Yemenite Midrash, Midrash haGadol, written by R.... more
The Tannaitic legal Midrashim did not all survive and are not all known to us in a complete independent form. David Zvi Hoffman was one of the first scholars to recognize the 13th century Yemenite Midrash, Midrash haGadol, written by R. David of Aden, as a major source of the lost legal Midarshim. He published the Midrash Tannaim, containing all of the Tannaitic-looking paragraphs from Midrash haGadol on the book of Deuteronomy. However, the author of Midrash haGadol often introduced changes into the material he borrowed from rabbinic and medieval sources. The resulting passages often seem to be unparalleled tannaitic sources, when in fact they are not. This article proposes a re-examination of the Mekhilta material as found in the Midrash haGadol, in order to more accurately reconstruct the tannaitic text. We propose a methodology for contending with this challenge, via a new approximate-matching algorithm designed to identify modified sources of this sort. Using this algorithm, we first compared Hoffman’s Midrash Tannaim on Deuteronomy to the Sifre, filtering out all parts of the text that are simply reworkings of the Sifre, despite many interpolations, omissions, and modified words. Having removed the Sifre passages from within the Midrash Tannaim text, we then proceeded to the next stage, in which we investigated the presence of reworked Maimonidean excerpts within the remaining text. The Maimonidean excerpts pose a particular challenge, because their reuse in the Midrash haGadol involves not only modifications and interpolations, but also changes of order. We describe the modifications that were necessary to the algorithm in order to handle these out-of-order cases of reuse as well. We have thus far succeeded in identifying and remove the reworked material appropriated from the Sifre and from Maimonidies, and in the future we plan to tweak the algorithm such that it can successfully identify additional rabbinic passages as well, including the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudic material, and other midrashic compilations.  This will ultimately allow us to produce a final text approximating the original Mekhilta, to the greatest extent possible.
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Two sets of biblical verses deal with the Hebrew slave’s refusal to be set free at the end of his servitude (Exodus 21:5–6; Deuteronomy 15:16–17). I examine a series of derashot from Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael dealing with these two... more
Two sets of biblical verses deal with the Hebrew slave’s refusal to be set free at the end of his servitude (Exodus 21:5–6; Deuteronomy 15:16–17). I examine a series of derashot from Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael dealing with these two passages. I will claim that difficulties evident in this section stem from its derivative nature, and I will support this claim by showing that this passage is in fact using material from an earlier non-extant midrash on the parallel verses in Deuteronomy. The midrash in the Mekhilta adapts the earlier material in order to conform to the verses in Exodus, and demonstrates a Halakhic viewpoint that is in conflict with the midrash on Deuteronomy. The study has ramifications for wider scholarly issues, including the possibility of reconstructing lost midrashic material from later, reworked texts using careful philological examination and the findings of recent studies in the field of legal midrash.
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The use of sources outside the New Testament, from the writings of Qumran to those of the rabbis, can help clarify the semantic and theological field in which Matthew 5:22 should be understood. This article claims that the correct... more
The use of sources outside the New Testament, from the writings of Qumran to those of the rabbis, can help clarify the semantic and theological field in which Matthew 5:22 should be understood. This article claims that the correct interpretation of the Law stood at the center of arguments between different groups in the late Second Temple period and later; that the insults raka " empty " and mōre " fool " are connected to this polemical environment; and that it is within this setting that the Sermon on the Mount should be understood.

Matthieu 5 : 22 : L'insulte « insensé » et l'interprétation de la Loi dans les sources chrétiennes et rabbiniques Le recours à des sources extérieures au Nouveau Testament, depuis les manuscrits de Qumrân jusqu'à la littérature rabbinique, peut permettre de clarifier la nature du champ sémantique et théologique au sein duquel le verset 5 : 22 de l'Évangile selon Matthieu doit être compris. Cet article affirme que l'interprétation correcte de la Loi (mosaïque) figurait au coeur de disputes entre différents groupes juifs de la fin de la période du Second Temple et au-delà ; que les insultes raka (« vide ») et mōre (« insensé ») sont liées à ces polémiques ; et que c'est dans ce contexte que le Sermon sur la Montagne doit être replacé.
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In this article I wish to present a textual comparison between paragraphs in the rabbinic Avot deRabbi Natan and in the Apophthegmata Patrum, or Sayings of the Desert Fathers. I will argue that these passages in the two anthologies ,... more
In this article I wish to present a textual comparison between paragraphs in the rabbinic Avot deRabbi Natan and in the Apophthegmata Patrum, or Sayings of the Desert Fathers. I will argue that these passages in the two anthologies , rabbinic and Christian-monastic, share interesting features which will repay careful literary analysis. In this specific case, the comparison to the Christian-monastic text helps underline the textual process that shaped the two versions of the rabbinic text, a process that without this comparison would be difficult to reconstruct.1 In this article I wish to present a textual comparison between paragraphs in the rabbinic Avot deRabbi Natan and in the Apophthegmata Patrum, or Sayings of the Desert Fathers. I will argue that these passages in the two anthologies, rabbinic and Christian-monastic, share interesting features which will repay careful literary analysis. The analogies between these texts have the power to aid in our understanding of the two texts themselves through the process of " stereoscopic reading, " a term coined by Johan C. Thom for a method of reading that affords 1 This article picks up on a few sources already mentioned very briefly in my book (Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013]) and elaborates extensively on them. Rabbinic sources are quoted according to the manuscript version as found in Ma'agarim: The Historical Dictionary Project of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, online: http://maagarim.hebrew-academy.org.il/ Pages/PMain.aspx. The Apophthegmata Patrum is quoted in Greek based on the edition of Jacques P. Migne (PG 65:71–440) based on MS Paris Gr. 1599, and translated according to Ben-edicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Rev. ed.; Cistercian Studies Series 59; London: Mowbrays, 1981).
In Aramaic, the word עברא means ‘lock’ or ‘bolt’. We find the Hebrew use of this root in verbal form in one biblical verse, 1 Kings 6:21, where it means ‘to bolt’ or ‘to block’. This article suggests the identification of this rarer use... more
In Aramaic, the word עברא means ‘lock’ or ‘bolt’. We find the Hebrew use of this root in verbal form in one biblical verse, 1 Kings 6:21, where it means ‘to bolt’ or ‘to block’. This article suggests the identification of this rarer use of the verb עבר in three expressions in the rabbinic corpora. Understanding the verb עיבר in the D-stem, as well as the two expressions עיבור הדין and פרשת העיבור as tokens of this meaning of the verbal form, sheds light on their thus far difficult uses in the rabbinic context.
In this paper I lay the following: I accept and build on the findings of 'lived religion' researchers concerning the polysemous and multi-vocal nature of modern-day religions. Following their conclusion, I assume a similar nature of... more
In this paper I lay the following: I accept and build on the findings of 'lived religion' researchers concerning the polysemous and multi-vocal nature of modern-day religions. Following their conclusion, I assume a similar nature of ancient religions, and offer a possible viewpoint on the cultural bricolage of late antique Jewish and Christian texts. While the project to salvage a thick description of 'lived religion' has some obvious and serious methodological difficulties, a consideration of the genre of literature examined might have ramifications on the question at hand. I suggest that when a religious tradition is transmitted in anthologies, as opposed to edited (or) single writer texts, it might better represent its multi-vocality. The use of anthologies, redacted over time, can offer better glimpses into the multi-vocality of late antique religious societies, if not in practice, but rather in views and beliefs.
Mishnah Ḥagigah 1:8 provides three categories for conceptualizing the relationship between various rabbinic laws and Scripture: (1) laws flying in the air with nothing to lean on; (2) laws akin to “mountains hanging by a strand, since... more
Mishnah Ḥagigah 1:8 provides three categories for conceptualizing the relationship between various rabbinic laws and Scripture: (1) laws flying in the air with nothing to lean on; (2) laws akin to “mountains hanging by a strand, since they are little Scripture and many laws,” and (3) laws having “upon what to lean, and it is they that are the bodies of the Torah.” This article examines this self-reflection as to the nature of the rabbinic halakhic system and offers a new understanding of its content, focusing mostly on a philological examination of the enigmatic
metaphor of “mountains hanging by a strand.”
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Bar-Ilan University, 27 March 2017
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סוד: סודיות והסתרה בהיסטוריה ובתרבות היהודית | הסוד, הסודיות וההסתרה היו תמיד חלק מן הטבע האנושי, כמצב קיומי וכרעיון. אנו מוצאים לכך ביטויים רבים בספרות, ביצירה ובתיאולוגיה היהודית. הביטויים הגלויים והנראים לעין משקפים אך מעט מן המציאות.... more
סוד: סודיות והסתרה בהיסטוריה ובתרבות היהודית | הסוד, הסודיות וההסתרה היו תמיד חלק מן הטבע האנושי, כמצב קיומי וכרעיון. אנו מוצאים לכך ביטויים רבים בספרות, ביצירה ובתיאולוגיה היהודית. הביטויים הגלויים והנראים לעין משקפים אך מעט מן המציאות. מסכת שלמה ומפתיעה נגלית עם הסרת המסווה ועם חשיפת כפל הפנים של ההוויה.| בקורס המקורי והמרתק המוגש לכם נסקור את דברי ימי הסוד מתקופת המקרא ומתקופת חז”ל, דרך הפילוסופיה היהודית והקבלה בימי הביניים ועד לתיאולוגיה, לאומנות ולספרות של העת החדשה. נעסוק בסודם של הספרים החיצוניים ובנסתרות בכתביהם של ש”י עגנון וס’ יזהר; במאגיה בבבל התלמודית ובארץ ישראל הביזנטית ובמאגיה להגנה על החתן והכלה. נבחן את ההסתרה בתרבות החסידית ובספרות ברסלב וכן את חייהם של יהודים נסתרים, אנוסים ושבתאים. | התמונה שתיחשף בקורס תצביע על אספקטים רבים ומגוונים המדגימים כולם את נושא הסוד, הסודיות וההסתרה, מוטיב המלווה כל העת את ההיסטוריה היהודית ואת התרבות היהודית. |
https://www.shazar.org.il/product/%d7%a1%d7%95%d7%93/
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