Jacob Neusner has published more than 1000 books and articles, scholarly and academic, popular and journalistic, and is one of the most published humanities scholars in the world. Over a period of fifty years he has made significant, insightful and challenging contributions to the study of Rabbinic Judaism, particularly in the disciplines covered in the three volumes which make up Neusner on Judaism: the study of history (volume 1), literature (volume 2), and religion and theology (volume 3). These unique volumes of selective writings by Jacob Neusner, with new introductions by the author, offer scholars an invaluable resource in the field of Judaic Studies.

"The Theology of the Oral Torah demonstrates the cogency and inner rationality of the classical statement of Judaism in the Oral Torah, bringing a theological assessment to bear on the whole of rabbinic literature. Jacob Neusner shows how the proposition that God is One and all-powerful but also merciful and just defines the system and structure of rabbinic Judaism ; He argues that in working this proposition out in rich detail the classical texts generate the central rabbinic problem: how can the conflicting traits inherent in the proposition be resolved?"--Jacket

Jacob Neusner, a noted scholar and prolific author on Jewish literature, history, and religion, believes that Jews and Christians do well to seek in their encounter with the teachings of the living God, the wisdom, imagination, and insight of the ages. "In this book," he writes in the Preface, "I want to contribute some modest measure of my own faith, Judaism, as that faith may add to the faith of our Christian neighbors, for all of us now dwell together in the new catacomb, the darkness of disdain for our common faith in one God, creator of heaven and earth, judge of all humankind. This is a book of religious faith."

While the rabbinic literature is often seen as a collection of miscellaneous responses to questions arising from study of the Hebrew Bible and its application to contemporary life, Neusner sees a system behind and embodied in the various writings. He discusses the ways in which the divine thought, and the human thinking that sought faithfully to interpret it, actually came to expression and treats what he calls the grammar of the divine self-expression in order to help us see the theological structure that it implies. Then he shows how this implicit system is expressed in the rules for the life of the people that God has chosen as his own. --from publisher description.

Laws, or Halakhah, and narratives, or Aggadah, comprise the Torah. Halakhah, normative law, makes the same statement in terms of behavior that Aggadah, in its systematic and abstract mode, makes in terms of beliefs. The Halakhic theology focuses on the interior existence of Israelite. In this sourcebook, author Jacob Neusner derives from details of legal expositions some of the Halakhah's theological propositions, in order to show how normative laws of conduct express the narrative monotheism of the Torah. An introductory overview of the Halakhic theological program, seen through topical expositions of law, briefly compares Halakhic texts with Aggadic theological programs.