Michael Fishbane 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"--

Contemporary theology, and Jewish theology in particular, Michael Fishbane asserts, now lies fallow, beset by strong critiques from within and without. For Jewish reality, a coherent and wide-ranging response in thoroughly modern terms is needed. Sacred Attunement is Fishbane's attempt to renew Jewish theology for our time, in the larger context...

Exegesis - interpretation and explanation of sacred texts - is the quintessence of rabinic thought. This volume delineates the connections between biblical interpretation and Jewish religious thought.

"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

Contemporary theology, and Jewish theology in particular, Michael Fishbane asserts, now lies fallow, beset by strong critiques from within and without. For Jewish reality, a coherent and wide-ranging response in thoroughly modern terms is needed. Sacred Attunement is Fishbane's attempt to renew Jewish theology for our time, in the larger context of modern and postmodern challenges to theology and theological thought in the broadest sense. The first part of the book regrounds theology in this setting and opens up new pathways through nature, art, and the theological dimension as a whole. In the second section, Fishbane introduces his hermeneutical theology - one grounded in the interpretation of scripture as a distinctly Jewish practice. The third section focuses on modes of self-cultivation for awakening and sustaining a covenant theology. The final section takes up questions of scripture, authority, belief, despair, and obligation as theological topics in their own right. The first full-scale Jewish theology in America since Abraham J. Heschel's God in Search of Man and the first comprehensive Jewish philosophical theology since Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, Sacred Attunement is a work of uncommon personal integrity and originality from one of the most distinguished scholars of Judaica in our time.

An award-winning study which analyzes the phenomenon of textual analysis in ancient Israel, exploring the tradition of exegesis prior to the development of biblical interpretation in early classical Judaism and the earliest Christian communities.