Jewish Hermeneutical Theology

Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Trained in biblical studies, he also writes constructive hermeneutic theology.

Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Trained in biblical studies, he also writes constructive hermeneutic theology.

"In Fragile Finitude, the long-awaited follow-up to Sacred Attunement(2008), Fishbane clears new ground for theological experience and its expressions through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. His reinterpretation is based on the traditional four types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis: the contextual plain sense; the rabbinic legal and theological sense; the figural philosophical and spiritual sense; and the symbolic mystical sense. The first focuses on worldly experience; the second on communal forms of life and thought in the rabbinic tradition; the third on personal development; and the fourth on transcendent and cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the Divine and our fellow humans"--

Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Trained in biblical studies, he also writes constructive hermeneutic theology.

Nicholas Ellis examines the interplay present in early Jewish literature between authors' theological assumptions on divine agency in evil and their readings of biblical testing narratives. Ellis takes as a starting point the Epistle of James, and compares this early Christian work against other examples of ancient Jewish interpretation. Ellis shows how varying perspectives on the divine, satanic, and human roles of testing exercised a direct influence on the interpretation of popular biblical testing narratives such as Abraham and Isaac, Job, and the Trials in the Wilderness. Read in light of the broader Jewish literature, Ellis argues that the theology and hermeneutic found in the Epistle of James as such relate to divine testing are closely paralleled by the so-called 'Rewritten Bible' tradition. Within James' cosmic drama, God stands as righteous judge, with the satanic prosecutor indicting both divine integrity and human religious loyalty.

In the timeless time of eternity, does God have a pre-history? What was God "before" (so to speak) God became GOD? Was there some terrible mistake involving culpability? If so, how did this God of pre-history handle His mistake? Availing himself of certain currents found in Scripture and in classical Rabbinic sources, the author makes the case that God is a being with moral fault. The author argues that how God handled His mistake was the process which allowed God to become the celebrated: THE GREAT THE MIGHTY THE TERRIBLE GOD who remains steadfast to his covenant and loving bond. [Nehemiah 9:32] And it all started with Noah: But Noah found grace/favor in the eyes of Hashem. [Genesis 6:8]

"In this almost painfully beautiful book... Fishbane... explores the question of the kind of canon, privileged status, or Logos, the Torah actually has for the post-modern Western Jew. " -- Theology Today "A book well worth reading." -- The Jerusalem Post "This wonderful volume documents the intellectual and spiritual odyssey of one of North America's foremost Jewish biblical scholars." -- Shofar

This work covers the typological relation of rabbinic Judaism to Christianity, and provides a re-examination, by going back to the roots, of a rabbinic Judaism that would not manifest some of the deleterious social ideologies and practices that modern orthodox Judaism generally does.