Judaism Study

God's identity is beyond what we could ever fully express in human words. But Scripture uses one particular word to describe the distinctiveness of God's character: the Hebrew word hesed. Hesed is a concept so rich in meaning that it doesn't translate well into any single English word or phrase. Michael Card unpacks the many dimensions of hesed, often expressed as lovingkindness, covenant faithfulness, or steadfast love. He explores how hesed is used in the Old Testament to reveal God's character and how he relates to his people.

3 Enoch, also called The Third Book of Enoch, The Hebrew Book of Enoch, and The Book of the Palaces, purports to have been written in the second century A.D. by a Rabbi, who became a 'high priest' after he had visions of an ascension to Heaven, 90 AD - 135 A.D. The book is part of the Merkabah tradition, which are writings with the theme of ascension into heaven. The name is derived from a Hebrew word meaning chariot, referring to Ezekiel's vision beginning in Ezekiel 1:4.

The similarities the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) shares with the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), as well as many similarities with the Septuagint (LXX), challenge the longstanding view that the Samaritan Pentateuch is a later, borrowed, and altered form of the Masoretic Text (MT). The historical devaluation of the Samaritan Pentateuch requires reevaluation, based upon the contextual cohesiveness of the Samaritan Pentateuch, agreement with the most ancient texts of the DSS and LXX, and the uninterrupted and non-dispersed oral transmission of the Ancient Israelite Samaritans.

In How to Read the Bible, Harvard professor James Kugel leads the listener chapter by chapter through the "quiet revolution" of recent biblical scholarship, showing time and again how radically the interpretations of today''s researchers differ from what people have always thought.

While the Jewish mainstream still argues about homosexuality, transgender and gender-variant people have emerged as a distinct Jewish population and as a new chorus of voices. Inspired and nurtured by the successes of the feminist and LGBT movements in the Jewish world, Jews who identify with the “T” now sit in the congregation, marry under the chuppah, and create Jewish families. Balancing on the Mechitza offers a multifaceted portrait of this increasingly visible community.

The co-editors of Gnosis magazine explore the many esoteric traditions that Western culture has to offer. While terms from Eastern spiritual practices such as Zen, mantra, and karma have become part of our daily lexicon, the traditions of Western spirituality have been largely unexplored by people searching for non-mainstream routes to spiritual experience. But for those who identify with Western culture, Western religious traditions have their own wisdom teachings that are more suitable to their needs and expectations.

Autobiographies from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Talmud teaches that the ancient patriarchs were all prophets, and that each one of them left testaments for their descendants to read. These contain commands for their children, moral lessons, and prophecy. This legend is not only repeated among the Essene community, but fragments of 20 such records have been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls!

If Jews and Christians both believe in the same God, why is there such division? Why is history littered with deathly accounts of this division, from the early Jewish persecution of Christians to the Crusades' slaughtering of Jews? The Lion of Judah unpacks the roots of this division, showing how jealousy, theology, the law, and the integration of Gentile believers into what was once a predominantly Jewish early church contributed to the schism. It then goes on to reveal how Jesus magnificently fulfilled every word in the Bible.

Distinguished philosopher Hilary Putnam, who is also a practicing Jew, questions the thought of three major Jewish philosophers of the 20th century - Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas -- to help him reconcile the philosophical and religious sides of his life. An additional presence in the book is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, although not a practicing Jew, thought about religion in ways that Putnam juxtaposes to the views of Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for History. This book discusses the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography.

For centuries translations of the Bible have obscured our understanding and appreciation of the original text. Now And God Said provides listeners with an authoritative account of significant mistranslations and shows how new translation methods can give listeners their first glimpse into what the Bible really means.

Perhaps no other Biblical tale penetrates so deeply into the everyday travails of the common person as The Book of Job. It tells the story of a righteous man beset by torment and misfortune through no fault of his own. This parable of bad things happening to a good person addresses the eternal question of why we are here, and why we suffer. This translation is by Stephen Mitchell.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.

In Egypt to Canaan, John Ritchie traces the epic journey of the Israelites from their redemption by blood all the way to the promised land. These incidents in Israel's history are illustrative pictures, or "types" (in the book of Hebrews they are called patterns, figures, and shadows), from which God will teach us important spiritual lessons if we are willing to learn them.

This book attempts to explore the military lives of Moses, the Buddha, and Muhammad, and the role their war experiences played in their religious lives.

El estudio de los evangelios apócrifos - relatos de la vida o dichos de Jesús que no entraron al Nuevo Testamento - es una disciplina popular entre los académicos que llena ya varios estantes de cualquier biblioteca respetable.

In 2007, two Israeli news publications, Israel Today and News First Class, reported that the most famous rabbi in Israel's modern history, 108-year-old Yitzhak Kaduri, had left a cryptic death note revealing the name of the long-awaited Messiah. Within a year after the rabbi's death, the note was reported to have been verified as authentic by some of Kaduri's closest followers and then placed on Kaduri's own website (Kaduri.net).

The first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential intellects in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. Recalling such bestsellers as David McCullough's John Adams and Walter Isaacson's Einstein, Maimonides is a biography on a grand scale, brilliantly explicating one man's life against the background of his time.

Throughout the New Testament, the apostles draw on the book of Exodus as a book of types concerning the believers' corporate experience of God's salvation. Paul speaks of "our Passover, Christ" (1 Cor. 5:7). He says that Israel was "baptized...in the sea", that Israel ate the "same spiritual food", and that Israel "drank of a spiritual rock which followed them", which rock "was Christ" (1 Cor. 5:7; 10:2-4). The Lord Jesus similarly says that He is "the living bread which came down out of heaven", the fulfillment of the manna in the wilderness (John 6:51).

America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans, and torn apart by the Civil War.