The Rabbinic Targum Of Lamentations

This work provides a definitive translation into English of the Targum of Lamentations, based on a critical reading of all the extant versions, with textual annotations and extensive notes. An appendix offers, in addition, a translation and annotation of the Yemenite version.

"The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations" demonstrates how the targumist transformed the Book of Lamentations by absolving God of all guilt, declaring Israel's culpability for Jerusalem's destruction, and presenting the path towards reconciliation through repentance and rabbinic worship. A new translation of TgLam is included.

This work provides a definitive translation into English of the Targum of Lamentations, based on a critical reading of all the extant versions, with textual annotations and extensive notes. An appendix offers, in addition, a translation and annotation of the Yemenite version.

Bible scholar Christian Brady, an expert on Old Testament lament, was as prepared as a person could be for the death of a child—which is to say, not nearly well enough. When his eight-year-old son died suddenly from a fast-moving blood infection, Brady heard the typical platitudes about accepting God's will and knew that quiet acceptance was not the only godly way to grieve. With deep faith, knowledge of Scripture, and the wisdom that comes only from experience, Brady guides readers grieving losses and setbacks of all kinds in voicing their lament to God, reflecting on the nature of human existence, and persevering in hope. Brady finds that rather than an image of God managing every event and action in our lives, the biblical account describes the very real world in which we all live, a world full of hardship and calamity that often comes unbidden and unmerited. Yet, it also is a world into which God lovingly intrudes to bring comfort, peace, and grace.

The emergence of the Jewish Bible commentary in the tenth century marks a turning point in Jewish intellectual history, namely, the transition from ancient rabbinic culture to the Arabized Judaism of the medieval period. This book explores a formative moment in this cultural reorientation by analyzing one of the earliest Jewish Bible commentaries. Written in Arabic in tenth-century Jerusalem, Salmon ben Yeruhim's commentary on Lamentations reveals a nuanced negotiation between the rabbinic tradition and the intellectual resources of the Islamic world. Salmon was a prominent figure among the Karaites, a Jewish movement defined by its commitments to biblical scholarship and penitential practices. For him, Lamentations is "instruction for Israel"--spiritual guidance for the Jewish community in exile--and his task is to communicate that instruction. Jewish Piety in Islamic Jerusalem explores the medieval Arabic dimensions of Salmon's project, tracing his engagement with the nascent fields of Arabic literary theory, historiography, and homiletics. The central argument of the book is that Salmon articulates a Jewish pietistic message through emergent Arabic-Islamic genres, transforming them to reflect his own religious and exegetical commitments. In this way, Salmon applies Arabic learning to the Bible at the same time that his understanding of the biblical text expands the Arabic intellectual tradition. The book advances these claims through six analytical chapters and an annotated English translation of the homilies and excursuses of Salmon's commentary.

This remarkable survey introduces critical knowledge and insights that have emerged over the past forty years, including targum manuscripts discovered this century and targums known in Aramaic but only recently translated into English. Prolific scholars Flesher and Chilton guide readers in understanding the development of the targums; their relationship to the Hebrew Bible; their dates, language, and place in the history of Christianity and Judaism; and their theologies and methods of interpretation.

Updated ed. of: Targum and Testament. 1972.

"Rabbinic Tales of Destruction examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem from the perspective of the wounded body and the scarred land. Amidst stories saturated with sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, the book argues that rabbinic narrative wrestles with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial domination. It brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud's longest account of the destruction of the Second Temple, the book reveals the distinctive sex and gender politics of Bavli Gittin. While Palestinian tales frequently castigate the "wayward woman" for sexual transgressions that imperil the nation, Bavli Gittin's stories resist portraying women's sexuality as a cause of catastrophe. Rather than castigate women's beauty as the cause of sexual sin, Bavli Gittin's tales express a strikingly egalitarian discourse that laments the vulnerability of both male and female bodies before the conqueror. Bavli Gittin's body politics align with a significant theological reorientation. Bavli Gittin does not explain catastrophe as divine chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect of Jewish suffering, it evokes God's empathy with the subjugated Jewish body and forges a sharp critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to pierce the power politics of Roman conquest, to protest the brutality of imperial dominance, and to make plain the scar that Roman violence leaves upon Jewish flesh"--