Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: Exploring the place of women in the socioeconomic system formulated in the Mishnah, a book of legal rules with a spiritual basis compiled by Jewish sages in second-century Palestine, this study reveals a fundamental ambiguity in the role of women. Both the ... Details...

God of Abraham: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: This cogently argued and richly illustrated book rejects the dichotomy between the God of Abraham and the God of the philosophers to argue that the two are one. In God of Abraham, one of our leading philosophers of religion shows how human values can illumi... Details...

Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: This is a controversial and important new examination of the origins of Christian mission, set against the background of ancient Judaism and the pagan culture of the Roman Empire. The author invites a total reconsideration of the grounds for religious conve... Details...

Rabbinic Authority: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: This book examines the nature and sources of the unique authority accorded in Judaism to the Sages of the first five centuries C.E. These teachers--often referred to reverentially as Chazal, a Hebrew acronym for "our Sages of blessed memory"--occupy a centr... Details...

Recovering Judaism: (Augsburg Fortress Publishers) Publisher's Comments: Judaism today is too often thought to represent a religious backwater, a highly particularistic, religion with its own esoteric tales and traditions, practices and norms. First Christians, then Jews themselves, have succumbed to this characterization, resul... Details...

Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: The existence of suffering poses an obvious problem for the monotheistic religions. Why does an all-powerful, benevolent God allow humans to suffer? And given that God does, what is the appropriate human response? In modern times Jewish theologians in part... Details...

Ritual and Morality The Ritual Purity System and its Place in Judaism: (Cambridge University Press) TPublisher's Comments: The book explains clearly the ritual purity system of the Hebrew Bible. Maccoby focuses on the various human conditions (corpse impurity, menstruation, childbirth, sexual intercourse, and certain diseases), which are not sinful, but which disqualify Israel... Details...

Studies on the Testament of Job: (Cambridge University Press) Publisher's Comments: Bringing together as it does papers delivered at the 1986 and 1987 meetings of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas Pseudepigrapha Seminar, this collection takes as its theme the Testament of Job. For much of the modern period the Testament of Job has bee... Details...

The Antichrist Legend: A Chapter in Christian and Jewish Folklore: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920) was one of the pioneers in the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule or "History of Religions School," which established the scientific and comparative study of Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity a century ago. The Antichrist Le... Details...

The Early History of Heaven: (Oxford University Press) Publisher's Comments: When we think of "heaven," we generally conjure up positive, blissful images. Heaven is, after all, where God is and where good people go after death to receive their reward. But how and why did Western cultures come to imagine the heavenly realm in such te... Details...