Project MUSE - Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

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Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural ExchangeComparative Exegesis in Context

Edited by Natalie B. Dohrmann and David Stern

Publication Year: 2013

Biblical interpretation is not simply study of the Bible's meaning. Historically, it has also served as a primary medium

for cultural and religious exchange between the great religious traditions of the West. Focusing on moments of

signal interest in the history of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptural interpretation from the ancient, medieval, and

early modern periods, Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange offers a unique comparative perspective.

Each of the essays treats its subject in relation to the larger cultural context and to other contemporary interpretative

traditions. Sources and authors examined in t . . . show more

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Cover

Download PDF (177.1 KB)

p. 1-1

Title Page, Series Page, Copyright


pp. 2-5

Contents


pp. v-vi

Preface


pp. vii-viii

This rich volume of original essays emerged from a year of learning, conversation, and fellowship for some twenty scholars who worked at the University of

Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies during the academic year 2001–2. All experts in the history and literature...

Introduction: On Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation


pp. 1-19

Over the last thirty years, the study of ancient and medieval biblical interpretation—Jewish and Christian alike—has undergone a sea change. Forty years ago, if a

scholar in Bible studies were asked about premodern biblical exegesis and its value, the answer would almost certainly...

1. Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105


pp. 20-36

This essay is about interpretation: my interpretation of Psalm 105 and the psalm’s interpretation of the Torah traditions from which it is fashioned. The latter brings us into

the domain of inner-biblical interpretation, a term designating the many ways in which one segment of the...

2. Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan?


pp. 37-50

One of the great achievements of recent scholarship on early biblical exegesis has been its discovery of a ‘‘new’’ period in its history—a period that is, in a sense, the

missing link between the Bible and early rabbinic and Christian exegesis. I am referring to the exegetical literature of the...

3. Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law


pp. 51-65

In Roman and rabbinic legal and literary sources from the first centuries of the Common Era, the institution of slavery exhibits a double nature. For both Jews and

Romans, slavery is a dreaded state of denigrated nonpersonhood, and yet in both legal worlds, slavery can be a site of acculturation...

4. Lessons from Jerome’s Jewish Teachers: Exegesis and Cultural Interaction in Late Antique Palestine


pp. 66-86

Jerome, alone among non-Jewish writers of Late Antiquity whose works survive intact, makes abundant and well-informed reference to Jews, to Jewish custom, and

above all to Jewish biblical interpretation. He attributes this knowledge not to Jewish literary sources but to oral instruction...

5. Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context


pp. 87-107

No biblical book’s ancient interpretation is more extensively documented than that of the Song of Songs. Nor is there another biblical book that has so clearly been

subjected to so many different exegetical approaches. In the case of Jewish exegesis in the late antique period...

6. Patriarchy, Primogeniture, and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam


pp. 108-123

Parallels in method, rhetoric, and content between qur’anic exegesis and ancient Jewish biblical interpretation were known to medieval Jewish and Christian scholars

and have attracted the attention of modern scholarship since Abraham Geiger’s famous doctoral thesis submitted to...

7. May Karaites Eat Chicken? Indeterminacy in Sectarian Halakhic Exegesis


pp. 124-138

In his invaluable history of Karaite Jewry in t wentieth-century Egypt, Mourad El-Kodsi writes briefly but enthusiastically about the community’s traditional cuisine. Among

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the fare he describes is a rich dish of chicken stuffed with ground meat, rice, and pine nuts.1 Delicious as it...

8. Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur’anic Wisdom (Ḥikma) Became the Sunna of the Prophet


pp. 139-160

Qur’a¯ nic exegesis appears among the very earliest intellectual tasksundertaken by Muslims, and so one is not surprised to find that com-mentaries on the Qur’a¯n

survive among the oldest preserved Arabictexts. The spread of Islam brought both the need and the opportunityfor explication of the Qur’a¯ n; many persons genuinely

needed to know...

9. Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages


pp. 161-181

Before the era of inexpensive printing and widespread literacy, the ordinary person’s encounter with Scripture was vicarious and quite selective—for although personal

study of Scripture by cultural and religious elites was encouraged,1 the principal encounter with Scripture was in a...

10. Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam’s Commentary on the Song of Songs


pp. 182-195

Rashi’s grandson Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir) lived and worked in northern France in the twelfth century, the period characterized by modern scholarship as ‘‘the

renaissance of the t welfth century.’’1 His exegetical method is marked by the adoption of the peshat —the plainmeaning...

11. Literal versus Carnal: George of Siena’s Christian Reading of Jewish Exegesis


pp. 196-213

In 1388, some decades into a long career teaching and preaching in Tuscany and beyond, a popular Dominican friar, George Naddi of Siena (d. 1398), compiled a

treatise detailing one hundred and sixteen Old Testament prophecies of Christ’s advent.1 Opening with a citation of John...

12. Christian and Jewish Iconographies of Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy


pp. 214-235

Throughout the Renaissance, the book of Job played a significant role in the intellectual exchanges between Italian Jewish and Christian scholars. Several

commentaries1 on this biblical text were composed between the second half of the fifteenth and the end of the sixteenth century; at the...

NotesDownload PDF (514.8 KB)

pp. 237-325

List of Contributors


pp. 327-337

Index of Persons


pp. 329-332

Index of Sources


pp. 333-340

Research Areas

Religion > Biblical Studies

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Project MUSE - Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange